by John Jakes
The butcher’s bill from the Wilderness had been staggering. Now Lee had entrenched at or near Spotsylvania, and presumably the Union Army was shifting that way to engage. Without being told, George knew why the major portion of the Orange & Alexandria had been abandoned on the very morning Grant started his war machine across the Rapidan and why the Construction Corps had been transferred eastward to this duty. These tracks would soon carry dead and wounded.
George saw one of his best workers, a huge brown youngster named Scow, stumble suddenly. This forced the men behind him to halt. A lantern on a pole reflected in Scow’s eyes as he swung to stare at his commander.
“’M gonna drop.”
George slipped in behind him and took the rail on his own shoulder. “Rest for ten minutes. Then come back. After we finish this fourteen miles of track, there’s the Potomac Creek bridge to repair.”
“You keep givin’ ever’ one of these niggers ten minutes, you gonna run out of minutes an’ fall over yourself.”
“You let me worry about that. Get going.”
Scow rubbed his mouth, admiration and suspicion mingled on his face. “You’re some damn boss,” he said, and walked off, leaving George in doubt about which way to take that. With a grim amusement, he wondered what Scow would say if he knew his commander controlled and ran a huge ironworks and a thriving bank.
He took Scow’s place in the rail-carrying team. Dizzy and growing sick to his stomach, he strove to hide it. “Come on,” he yelled to the other men. He knew they felt as bad as he did, hurt in every muscle as he did. But together they ran the next rail forward, placed it, jumped down off the roadbed as the first mauls arched over and struck, and dashed back for the next one.
On the Brock Road, Billy fell to his knees and crawled into a ditch as a shell whistled in and burst, tossing up a cloud of dirt and stones. Sharp rock fragments rained on his bare neck as he lay in the weeds, the wind and what little strength he possessed knocked out of him.
From the west, the north, the east, he heard the multitudinous sounds of battle. They seemed loudest to the east. He had worked his way through the smoke-filled streets of Spotsylvania Court House and out this far without detection or interference. But as he began to breathe regularly again, and with effort regained the road, staggering from tiredness and hunger and lingering pain, a captain on horseback—from one of Jubal Early’s commands, he presumed—loomed through the smoke deepening the gray of the morning.
The bearded officer galloped past Billy before he really took notice of him. He reined in, dismounted swiftly, and wrenched his sword from his sheath. “No straggling,” he shouted, hitting Billy’s back with the flat of his sword. “The lines are that way.”
He pointed eastward with the blade. The ends of a strip of black silk tied around his right sleeve fluttered in the breeze. Mumbling to disguise his voice, Billy said, “Sir, I lost my musket—”
“You won’t find another cowering back here.” A second stab east. “Move, soldier.”
Billy blinked, thinking, I’ll have to try to cross some place. Guess it might as well be here.
“You and your kind disgust me,” the captain said gratuitously. “We lose a great man, and your tribute to his memory is a display of cowardice.”
Billy didn’t want to speak again but felt he must. “Don’t know what you mean, sir.” He didn’t. “Who’s been lost?”
“General Stuart, you damn fool. Sheridan’s horse went around our flank to Richmond. They killed the general at Yellow Tavern day before yesterday. Now get moving or you’re under arrest.”
Billy turned, staggered down the road shoulder, and moved in ungainly fashion through high weeds toward distantly seen entrenchments. A shell burst over him, a black flower. He covered his head and stumbled on, hurting more at every step.
At Potomac Creek, the gap from bluff to bluff was four hundred feet. A deck bridge eighty feet above the water spanned it, but the Confederates had destroyed the bridge. Haupt had rebuilt it; Burnside had destroyed it a second time so the enemy couldn’t use it. Now the Construction Corps was building it again.
At the bottom of the chasm, George and his men cut and laid logs for the crib foundation. Haupt was gone, but not his plans and methods. In forty hours, a duplicate of the trestle Mr. Lincoln had wryly referred to as a mighty structure of beanpoles and cornstalks was complete.
They had to rush the work, sacrificing sleep, because men returning from the battle joined around Spotsylvania Court House said the Union and Confederate casualties were piling up like cordwood in the autumn. The temporary hospitals could hold only the worst cases. During the frantic rebuilding of the trestle, eight men fell off from various places. Four died. Their funeral rites consisted of quick concealment beneath tarpaulins.
Now the rails were laid, the huge hawsers rigged across the bridge, the locomotive brought up.
“Pull,” the black men and their white officers chanted together, thick ropes running through their hands and over their shoulders and across the trestle to the locomotive spouting steam on the far side. “Pull—and—pull.”
As Haupt’s Wisconsin and Indiana volunteers had done once before, they pulled the empty locomotive across the trestle while a lurid green twilight came down, presaging storm. Lightning flickered and ran around the horizon. The sky seemed to complain, and so did the bridge. It swayed. It creaked.
But it stood.
Now. Now. Now.
He had been saying that to himself for ten minutes to strengthen his nerve because his body was still so weak. Finally he knew he had to obey the silent command. One hand tight on the Confederate musket they had given him, Billy clawed a hold on the top of the earthwork and labored over while the torrential rain soaked him.
“Hey, Missouri, don’t be crazy. You go any closer, you’ll get kilt sure.”
That was some reb noncom shouting from the earthworks he had just left. He lurched to his feet and limped through long, slippery grass, rapidly using up the small reserve of strength left to him. His kepi did little to shield his face from the hard rain.
He stumbled, sprawled, gagged when he slid into a dead Union vidette gazing at a lightning flash without seeing it. When the glare faded and darkness returned, he dropped his musket and flung off the kepi. The next flash caught him struggling to remove his gray jacket, his mouth opening and closing, silent gasps of pain. He was spotted by the same rebs who had earlier accepted his arrival without much question since the heavy fighting had shattered and mixed different commands all along the Confederate line. The noncom’s voice reached him again.
“That dirty scum ain’t attackin’ nobody. He’s runnin’ to the other side. Shoot the bastard.”
“Running—oh, damn right,” Billy panted, trying to beat back fear with mockery. Guns cracked behind him. Lungs hurting, he kept moving, away from them. One shoulder rose and fell in rhythm with his hobbling gait. Thunder rolled in the wake of the last lightning, then in a new burst silhouetted fresh-budded trees and lit a Union bayonet like white-hot metal.
The picket with the bayonet, one of Burnside’s men facing the rebel position, spied the filthy figure. Behind the picket, other shoulder weapons started crackling as loudly as those of the rebs. “Don’t shoot,” Billy yelled in the crossfire, hands raised. “Don’t shoot. I’m a Union officer escaped from—”
He tripped on a half-buried stone and twisted, falling. He flapped his arms, losing all sense of direction. So he never knew who fired the shot that hit him and flung him on his face with a muffled cry.
George learned more about the spring offensive from Washington papers than he did from anyone in the war theater. Everyone called it Grant’s campaign and praised Grant’s brave men, although the actual commander of the Army of the Potomac was Major General Meade. Grant, however, was a general of the armies who took the field. Meade was relegated to a role something like that of a corps commander. It became Grant’s war and Grant’s plan. Ignore Richmond. Destroy Lee’s army. Then the card house would fall.
But the papers also used one more phrase accusingly and often: Grant’s casualties. The dispatches took on a sameness as the decimated army refilled its ranks and marched by night in pursuit of the retreating Lee. The repetitious headlines fell like a slow drum cadence: IMMENSE REBEL LOSSES AND OUR LOSS TWELVE THOUSAND and HEAVY LOSS ON BOTH SIDES.
George and the youngster named Scow watched one of the death trains traveling north from Falmouth on the reopened Aquia Creek & Fredericksburg. They could always identify the trains of the dead from Falmouth because they traveled noticeably faster than those carrying wounded or prisoners. Hundreds of firefly sparks swarmed above and behind the locomotive, which rapidly vanished. The line of cars was so long that despite its speed it seemed to take forever to pass.
“Twenty, twenty-one—twenty-two,” Scow said, watching the last go by. “That’s a mighty lot of coffins.”
“The general’s killing a mighty lot of men, but he’ll kill more.”
Scow said “Um” in a way that denoted sadness. Then asked, “How many you figure?”
Depressed, George swatted at a floating spark. He missed, and it stung his cheek. “As many as it takes to win.” He was proud of the work he and the black men, so diverse in appearance and personality and yet so united in purpose, had accomplished. But he hated the reason for the work.
He clapped Scow on the shoulder in a friendly way that wasn’t suitable for an officer, but he didn’t give a hang, because the corps was an odd outfit. Odd and proud. “Let’s find some food.”
Presently George sat cross-legged next to Scow at a campfire built of pieces of broken crossties. He was spooning beans from his tin plate when a whistle signaled the approach of another Falmouth train. He and Scow peered through a maze of stumps toward the track a quarter of a mile away. Northern Virginia was a land of stumps; few uncut trees remained.
George watched the white beam of the headlight sweep around a bend, stabbing above the stumps and bleaching Scow light tan for a few moments.
“Wounded,” George said, having judged the speed. He went back to his beans as the car carrying his brother rattled by.
104
IN A THUNDERSTORM, VIRGILIA and eight other nurses rode the cars from Aquia Creek to Falmouth. There a temporary field hospital had been established to augment the deserted Fredericksburg churches, stables, and private homes used for the same purpose. Casualties were pouring in from the contested ground around Spotsylvania. The worst cases, the ones who couldn’t survive even a short rail trip, were treated at Falmouth.
The car in which the nurses traveled had been gutted, the passenger seats replaced by bunks exuding the familiar smells of dirt and wounds. The windows were boarded over, except for one at each end left for ventilation. From these the glass had long ago been smashed. Rain blew in as the train rolled south. A lantern hung by the rear door, but flashes of lightning washed out its glow and lent a corpselike look to the cloaked women attempting to sit decorously on the bunks.
The nurse in charge was Mrs. Neal, from whom Virgilia had three times tried to escape. Each time, Miss Dix had answered her transfer request in the same terse language. Miss Hazard was considered too valuable. Miss Hazard was an asset to her present hospital. Miss Hazard could not be spared for duty elsewhere.
Virgilia suspected Mrs. Neal had a hand in the refusals. The older woman recognized Virgilia’s ability but took pleasure in frustrating her. Virgilia, in turn, continued to despise her supervisor, yet could not bring herself to resign. The work was still deeply satisfying. She brought comfort and recovery to scores of men in pain. The sight of the maimed and dying kept her hatred of Southerners at full strength. And when she lost a patient, she was philosophic, remembering Coriolanus again. Volumnia saying, “I had rather eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.”
“—they say the Spotsylvania fighting has been fearful.” That was a buxom spinster named Thomasina Kisco. The edge of her black travel bonnet cast a sharp shadow across her face. “And the number of casualties enormous.”
“That will assure Mr. Lincoln’s removal in November,” Mrs. Neal said. “He refuses to end the butchery, so the electorate must.” She seldom stopped electioneering for McClellan and the Peace Democrats.
“Is it true they’re bringing Confederate wounded to this hospital?” Virgilia asked.
“Yes.” Mrs. Neal’s tone was as cold as her stare. Virgilia was accustomed to both. She shivered. She was chilly because her cloak was damp, but at least the odor of wet wool helped mask those of the car. She considered the supervisor’s answer and decided she had to speak.
“I will not treat enemy soldiers, Mrs. Neal.”
“You will do whatever you are told to do, Miss Hazard.” Her anger drew sympathetic looks from the others—all for Virgilia. Mrs. Neal retreated. “Really, my dear—you’re an excellent nurse, but you seem unable to accept the discipline of the service. Why do you continue?”
Because, you illiterate cow, in my own way I’m a soldier, too. Instead of saying that, however, Virgilia merely shifted her gaze elsewhere. Prig and martinet were only two of the terms she applied to Mrs. Neal in the silence of her thoughts.
The past year had been difficult and unhappy because of the supervisor. Many times Virgilia was ready to do exactly what Mrs. Neal wanted—resign. She hung on not only because she drew satisfaction from the work but also because she had become good at it, knowing more than many of the contract hacks who posed as distinguished surgeons. Whenever the need to quit overwhelmed her, she fought it by remembering that Grady had died unavenged—and that Lee, then still a Union officer, had led the detachment that put an end to John Brown’s brave struggle. After that, the work always won out.
It did so now. The car swayed, the wind howled, the rain blew in through the shattered windows. Miss Kisco cast an apprehensive eye on the ceiling.
“That thunder is extremely loud.”
“Those are the guns at Spotsylvania,” Virgilia said.
The storm continued, battering the canvas pavilions of the field hospital. The pavilions were located near the Falmouth station, so that in addition to the outcries of the patients and the swearing of the surgeons and the shouts of the ambulance drivers there was a constant background noise of shunting cars, ringing bells, screeching whistles—war’s bedlam.
Virgilia and Miss Kisco were assigned to a pavilion that received men who, though seriously wounded, didn’t require immediate surgery. The slicing and sawing went on in the next pavilion, where Mrs. Neal took charge. She inspected Virgilia’s about once an hour.
“Over here next, Miss Hazard,” said the chief surgeon of the pavilion. A paunchy, wheezy-voiced man, he fairly jerked her along to a cot where orderlies had placed a slim lieutenant with silky brown hair. The young man was unconscious. Though his cot occupied the pavilion’s darkest corner, Virgilia clearly saw the color of his uniform.
“This man’s a rebel.”
“So I assumed from the gray coat,” the surgeon said crossly. “He also happens to be shot.” He pointed to the right thigh. “Remove that dressing, please.”
The surgeon stepped to the left side of the cot, where a large scrap of paper was pinned to the blanket. He ripped it loose to read it. “Bullet lodged near the femoral artery. Vessel torn but not clamped. He’s a Mississippi boy. General Nat Harris’s brigade. Captured in front of the rifle pits at the Mule Shoe Salient. Can’t quite decipher his name—”
He tilted the scrap toward the nearest lantern some yards away. Virgilia, meantime, forced herself to remove the dressing from the torn trouser leg. In the next aisle, a boy gagged and wept. From the operating pavilion, she heard the rasp of saws in bone. So much suffering—and here she was tending one of those who had caused it. Her rage intensified like fire in a dry woods.
The reb’s wound had been decently cleaned and dressed by the ambulance orderlies. The bare, pale leg felt slightly cool when she touched it. That explained the lack of blee
ding; it had stopped when his temperature dropped.
“O’Grady.”
Virgilia’s head jerked up. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said,” the doctor growled, “his name appears to be O’Grady. Thomas Aloysius O’Grady. Didn’t know there were any potato-eaters down in Mississippi. Let me have a look.”
The weary doctor waddled around the end of the cot. Virgilia remained where she was, her eyes fixed, unblinking.
“Will you please stand aside?”
Mumbling an apology, she obeyed. Her head hit the sloping canvas; she bent forward to avoid it. O’Grady. She hated the silky-haired boy twice as much for bearing that name. She clutched her apron and began to twist it, gently at first, then with increasing violence.
“Miss Hazard, are you ill?”
His wheezing question wrenched her back from her private anguish. “I’m sorry, Doctor—what did you say?”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking about, but kindly pay attention to this patient. We must clamp off that artery and try to remove the—”
“Doctor,” Miss Kisco called from the other side of the pavilion. “Over here, please—emergency.”
Hurrying away, the surgeon said, “I’ll tend to him as soon as I can. Put on a new dressing and watch him carefully.”
Virgilia withdrew gauze pads from the lacquered box in the center of the pavilion and returned to the cot of Lieutenant O’Grady. How many Union soldiers had the Mississippi boy killed, she wondered. She knew one thing: he wouldn’t kill any more. How fitting that his name was so close to that of her dead lover.
She noticed Mrs. Neal at the pavilion entrance, conferring with another of the surgeons. The supervisor, in turn, watched Virgilia for a few seconds. She was always trying to catch her in a mistake, but never could. When Mrs. Neal returned her attention to the doctor, Virgilia carefully and gently rebandaged the wounded thigh.
Without the slightest movement or expression to betray her excitement, she pulled up the wool blanket so it covered the young lieutenant. She found a second blanket and couldn’t suppress a little smile as she laid it on top of the first. Softly, soothingly, she stroked the boy’s cool forehead, then glided away.