The horror, the horror...
“Mistah Kurtz-he dead.”
_____________________
...For a long time she undressed, washed and dressed the more superficial of the wounds. Then came the order she was dreading.
“I want you to go and dress Private Latimer’s face.”
She had already tried to feed him earlier with a teaspoon in what remained of his mouth, trying to spare him the humiliation of dribbling. He had pushed her hand away. Swallowing was excruciating. Half his face had been shot away. What she dreaded, more than the removal of the dressing, was the look of reproach in his large brown eyes. What have you done to me? His form of communication was a soft aah sound from the back of his throat, a little moan of disappointment.
"We’ll soon have you fixed,” she had kept on repeating, and could think of nothing else.
And now, approaching his bed with her materials, she said cheerily, “Hello, Private Latimer. It’s me again.”
He looked at her without recognition. She said as she unpinned the bandage that was secured at the top of his head, “It’s going to be all right. You’ll walk out of here in a week or two, you’ll see. And that’s more than we can say to a lot of them in here.”
That was one comfort. There was always someone worse. Half an hour earlier they had carried out a multiple amputation on a captain from the East Surreys-the regiment the boys in the village had joined. And then there were the dying.
Using a pair of surgical tongs, she began carefully pulling away the sodden, congealed lengths of ribbon gauze from the cavity in the side of his face. When the last was out, the resemblance to the cutaway model they used in anatomy classes was only faint. This was all ruin, crimson and raw. She could see through his missing cheek to his upper and lower molars, and the tongue glistening, and hideously long. Further up, where she hardly dared look, were the exposed muscles around his eye socket. So intimate, and never intended to be seen. Private Latimer had become a monster, and he must have guessed this was so. Did a girl love him before? Could she continue to?
--From Ian McEwan's Atonement