Order in the middle of Chaos

Order in the middle of Chaos
To Doc the Noble School Administrator

fiction
edward w pritchard

The battle of Bordino raged around the Doctor and his patient. The patient was an 11 year old Russian peasant boy who had been near the French position at dawn and one of the canons had mysteriously exploded into itself for no known reason and the boy who was nearby was blinded by the flash. The French Doctor was one of three personal physicians of his highness Napoleon the Emperor of the French army and the Doctor who was a skilled surgeon had chanced to be very near the explosion site and he immediately began to tend to the boy and continued to do so attempting to save the boy's eyes during the den and slaughter of the massacre at Bordino in Russia on September 12, 1812.

The injured boy was an 11 year old Russian civilian youth who had somehow got in the line of battle between the French troops of Napoleon's advancing army and the Retreating Russian troops desperately trying to defend Moscow. The Russian's were fighting to the death to defend Mother Russian and Napoleon's loyal troops to a man sensed that if they were successful today their long march into Russia would end in victory, however each French soldier also sensed that to a man if they were unsuccessful today carnage and capture would be the fate of the French Army. The battle was fierce and canons brutally pounded all positions on both sides; however the real danger was from a random strike from the hundreds of canons relentlessly firing on each side maiming and annihilating friend and foe. The canons represented disorder for although they were manned by soldiers, they had no soul. Throughout the day The Canons continued to fire, and their payload would hiss through the air and a leg would be lost, or a face would would torn open or the life would jar out of a man's body; and relentlessly the canons continued to fire from dawn when the battle started with the fire of one canon and continued for ten solid hours.
Whatever the troops on each side did or planned to do or whether or not the men were brave, or afraid, or thirsty, or wounded, the canons continued to fire and disorder and chaos were everywhere; and no one from the lowest private to the highest General or Emperor was immune from the canons if on the field of battle.

The Doctor should have left the boy hours ago and been far away from here on the shifting front lines and been instead two miles back from the front near the side of the emperor who was safely but anxiously surveying the battle. The Doctor refused to leave however, for despite the deaths of tens of thousands of his own friends, fellow officers, and comrades in arms, and the fate of the faceless tens of thousands of Russian soldiers who would be severely injured or die today; the Doctor focused his entire attention and being on trying to save the boy's eye sight. The Doctor had ordered his assistants to paint a cross on a bed sheet and it was hung on the top of a small coach that the Doctor now operated on the unconscious boy in. The coach stuck out on the battlefield because it was a gentleman's coach, not an ambulance wagon pulled by mules; but the expensive property of a nobleman and both armies knew something usual was happening in that coach. As the soldiers of both sides went about the brutal business of killing each other mysteriously they became aware of what the Doctor was doing and both sides left him to his work.

The coach that Doctor and the boy were in was rocked by cannons early in the day but later that day only a random canon strike would come near the coach. The line of battle had shifted over a dozen times over the last ten hours since the battle started at dawn and often the Doctor would be interrupted in his work by Russian troops telling him he was now a prisoner of war, but still the Doctor would not stop his labors to save the boy's eyesight. Like wise the French troops were upset that the high ranking Doctor would waste so much time on one Russian boy when in all likely hood 50,000 or more good soldiers would die today. Still the Doctor refused to fall back or leave the coach. In time the gunners on both sides somehow became aware of what the Doctor was doing and ceased to fire into that segment of the line for unconsciously they knew the Doctor represented order in the chaos of this battle, and order in the campaign of Napoleon to conquer Russia. Each canon regiment and each soldier in each regiment although they went relentlessly about their duties of firing and killing elsewhere along the line, began to hope and pray for the success of that one French Doctor.

At about 6:00 the battle of Bordino began to subside and the area along the lines that the Doctor and the boy were in was now in French control. The operation on the boy's eyes was finished and the boy was sleeping inside of coach with his eye's firmly and securely bandaged. Only time would tell if the boy would ever see again. Traveling toward the Russian lines with the Christian cross painted on the top of the coach, the Doctor and his assistant were able to take the boy back to the Russian troops and leave the boy in their care. The Doctor who had worked all day in surgery on the boy's eyes never did hear what happened to the boy and as he returned unmolested by the Russian troops to his own army the doctor knew he would have to leave the fate of the boy in God's hands.

Despite the slaughter and brutality of the battle of Bordino where over 70,000 men died and thousands and thousands were wounded, and the wounded usually died of infection soon after injury in 1812; one nameless Russian boy, was cared for, to the best of human ability, in the midst of disorder and chaos by one Doctor who refused to view the battle from far behind the lines but rolled up his sleeves and set to work to do what he could to help despite the fact that his best would just relieve a drop of suffering in the sea of human misery.