She'll break her heart when they carry me to her, stiff as a trout, for I'm the only son she has got." This was too much for the wounded men even.

They forgot their sufferings in the comic aspect of the case, familiar as they all were with the open enmity existing between Mother Garth and her son, it being common talk that the last act of affection displayed toward him had been the throwing of a pot of boiling water at his head.
The laugh lightened the rest of the way, but they were a doleful-looking, ragged, and blood-stained set, who bore one of their number upon a litter formed of pike-staves up the zigzag to the men's quarters at day-break; and Ralph felt as if he had hardly strength enough to climb back to his window and go to bed, after seeing his roughly-bandaged men safely in.
But he made the essay, and when half-way up dropped back again into the garden, just as a thrush began to pipe loudly its welcome to the coming day; and the blackbirds were uttering their chinking calls low down in the moist gloom amongst the bushes on the cliff slope.
"Can't leave the poor fellows like that," he muttered.

"Oh dear, how stiff I am! Father said he always felt it his duty, when he was a soldier, to look well after his wounded men." He stood thinking for a few moments, and then began to tramp down the steep path to where the shadows were still dark, and a mist hung over the rippling stream.

Then taking to the track beside it, he trudged on, with the warm glow in the east growing richer of tint, the birds breaking out into joyous song, and minute by minute the vale, with its wreaths of mist, growing so exquisitely beautiful that the black horrors of the past night began to seem more distant, and the cloud of shadow resting above his aching head less terrible and oppressive.
And as the sun approached its rising, so did the beauties around the lad increase; and he tramped on with a sensation of wonder coming upon him, that with all so glorious at early morn in this world of ours, it should be the work of the highest order of creatures upon it to mar and destroy, and contrive the horrors which disfigure it from time to time.
"And I've been one of the worst," he said to himself bitterly.

"No: it was to stop others from doing these things," he cried quickly.