I am conversant with four different languages. I speak and
write them with equal fluency; yet in all four I do not find words
enough to express the horror I experienced during those two months, or
what I still feel when memory reverts to the scene. Suicide would have
been a relief, a happiness, a godsend! Many a time I had the muzzle of
my pistol in my mouth and my finger on the trigger, but the faces of my
helpless, dependent wife and child would rise up before me, and my hand
would fall powerless. I was not the cause of my misfortunes, and God
Almighty had provided only this one horrible way for me to subsist."
Did you boil the flesh?
"Yes! But to go into details - to relate the minutiae - is too
agonizing! I can not do it! Imagination can supply these. The necessary
mutilation of the bodies of those who had been my friends, rendered the
ghastliness of my situation more frightful. When I could crawl about and
my lame foot was partially recovered, I was chopping some wood one day
and the ax glanced and cut off my heel. The piece of flesh grew back in
time, but not in its former position, and my foot is maimed to this day.
"A man, before he judges me, should be placed in a similar situation;
but if he were, it is a thousand to one he would perish. A constitution
of steel alone could endure the deprivation and misery.
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