by John Jakes
Later the same day—it was Friday, December eleventh—Billy lay in a field hospital at Falmouth. There he learned that the engineers had worked all morning under constant fire and had finished two of five planned bridges across the Rappahannock by noon.
Too weak to return to duty, he spent the hours of Saturday listening to cannonading. On Sunday, Lije came poking among the cots, found his friend, and sat down on a box beside a pole where a lantern hung. He asked Billy how he felt.
“Ashamed, Lije. Ashamed of what I said and how I said it.”
“Well, sir,” returned the older man a bit formally, “I do confess I took it hard for some length of time.”
“You saved me from a wound anyway.”
“None of us is a perfect vessel, and the heart of the Master’s ministry was forgiveness. You were ill, we were all exhausted, and the situation was perilous. What man can be blamed for a rash word in such circumstances?”
His prophet’s face gentled. “You want the news, no doubt. I am afraid the foreboding expressed by you and many others was justified in full. Even my own faith stretches exceeding thin after events of yesterday.”
Amid the rows of sick, wounded, and dying, Lije told his friend how the federals had crossed the river and what had befallen them.
61
THAT SAME SUNDAY NIGHT, three men kept a vigil in Secretary Stanton’s office.
Potomac mist drifted outside the windows. The gas hissed, and there were soft clickings from an unseen source. Stanley wished the vigil would end so he could go home. He wanted to examine the latest statements from Lashbrook’s, which had doubled its already enormous business thanks to the covert contract arranged by Butler. He tried to conceal his impatience, though unintentionally he shifted farther and farther forward to the edge of the chair. His left foot moved up and down, silently tapping.
Major Albert Johnson, the arrogant young man formerly Stanton’s law clerk and now his most trusted aide, strode from the main door to that of the adjoining cipher room, where he about-faced, crossed the office, and began the circuit again.
The President lay on the couch he had occupied most of the day. His unfashionable dark suit had wrinkled. His eyes, focused somewhere far below the carpet, suited a mourner. His color was that of a man poisoned with jaundice.
Lincoln had angrily told them that a Mr. Villard, a correspondent for Greeley’s Tribune, had returned from the front on Saturday and had been brought to the Executive Mansion at 10:00 P.M. There he had reported what he knew and protested the refusal of the military censor to clear his dispatches about Burnside’s futile assaults on Fredericksburg. “I offered him my apology and said I hoped the news was not as bad as he perceived.”
None of them knew for certain. The secretary controlled what was published—the military censors reported to him—and he also controlled the telegraph from the front. He had removed the receiving instruments from McClellan’s headquarters and installed them in the library upstairs soon after he took office. He had even pirated McClellan’s chief telegraph officer, Captain Eckert. Stanley admired the secretary’s audacious seizure of the information lines; nothing of substance came into Washington or went out of it without Stanton knowing it first. Stanton used the telegraph like an umbilical cord to tie his department more securely to the Executive Mansion and Lincoln himself. The President continued to profess great trust in Stanton as well as a magnanimous personal admiration for the man who had once snubbed him professionally when both were lawyers. Stanton now termed Lincoln his dear friend, though he had manipulated the relationship so that the President was the dependent, not the dominant, partner.
Stanley, however, continued to regard Abraham Lincoln as a pathetic clod. At the moment, the President was resting on his side on the couch, reminding Stanley of a cadaver or some piece of sculpture by a talentless beginner. Lincoln’s secretaries had secret nicknames for various people. Some, such as Hellcat for Mary Lincoln, couldn’t be more appropriate. But how could they refer to their chief as the Tycoon unless in mockery? The man would never be reelected, not even if the war reached a swift and successful conclusion, which looked unlikely.
The door of the cipher room opened. Johnson halted. Stanley jumped up. Stanton emerged with several of the flimsy yellow sheets on which decoded dispatches from the front were copied. The secretary smelled of cologne and strong soap, which told Stanley he had been at some large function late in the day. Stanton always scrubbed and anointed himself after contact with the public.
“What is the news?” Lincoln asked.
Reflected gaslight turned the lenses of Stanton’s glasses to shimmering mirrors. “Not good.”
“I asked for the news, not a description of it.” The President’s voice rasped with weariness. He shifted higher on his left elbow, his loosened cravat falling over the edge of the couch.
Stanton folded down corners on the first two flimsies. “I regret that it appears young Villard was right. There were repeated assaults within the town.”
“What was the objective?”
“Marye’s Heights. A position all but impregnable.” Lincoln stared with that bereaved face. “Are we defeated?”
Stanton did not look away. “Yes, Mr. President.”
Slowly, as if suffering arthritic pain, Lincoln sat up. Stanley heard a knee joint creak. Stanton gave him the flimsies, continuing quietly, “A dispatch presently being copied indicates General Burnside wished to assault the rebel positions again this morning, perhaps in hopes of compensating for yesterday. His senior officers dissuaded him from that rash course.”
Momentary doubts about the worth of the telegraph struck Stanley. Certainly the device was changing warfare in a revolutionary way. Orders could be transmitted to commanding officers at a speed never thought possible. On the other hand, bad news could be returned just as fast, and that had all sorts of ramifications in the stock and gold markets, which tended to fluctuate wildly in response to the war news. Of course, if one had a way to get an early look at key dispatches, then telegraphed appropriate buy or sell orders before the news became known, huge killings could be made. He was delighted with himself for having thought of that. The telegraph was a remarkable creation.
Lincoln leafed through the flimsies, then flung them on the couch. “First I had a general who employed the Army of the Potomac as his bodyguard. Now I have one who celebrates a rout by suggesting another.” Shaking his head, he strode to the window and peered into the mist, as if seeking answers there.
Stanton cleared his throat. After a strained silence, Lincoln swung around. His face was a study in aggrieved fury. “I presume the steamers will be bringing us more wounded soon.”
“They already are, Mr. President. The first ones from Aquia Creek docked last night. Those flimsies contain the information.”
“I didn’t read them closely. I can’t bear to—instead of numbers, I see faces. I presume the numbers are large and the casualties heavy?”
“Yes, sir, so the first reports would indicate.”
Looking paler than ever, the President once more turned to confront the night. “Stanton, I’ve said it before. If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it.”
“We share that feeling, Mr. President. To a man.”
Stanley made sure he maintained an appropriately sorrowful expression.
Distant cries woke Virgilia on Tuesday morning. She turned her head toward the small window. Black. Not yet daylight.
The window was unbroken, a rarity in the ancient Union Hotel. New-style hospitals—pavilions on the Nightingale plan—were under construction to supply fifteen thousand beds and promote healing rather than impede it. Construction funds had been appropriated a year ago July. Until the work was finished, however, all sorts of unsuitable structures, from public buildings and churches to warehouses and private homes, had to be used—especially in this bleak December when Burnside’s bungling had cost over twelve thousand casualties.
The cries kept on. Virgilia sat up hurri
edly. Something fell to the floor from her hard, narrow bed. She groped and retrieved the small book, slipping it under a thin pillow. She reread certain passages in Coriolanus frequently because they seemed to have relevance to her situation. Ironically, the lines she loved most, from the third scene of the first act, were delivered not by her namesake, the insipid wife of Caius Marcius, but by his mother, Volumnia, the Roman matron whose temperament Virgilia shared.
She reached for the lamp on the floor. She had gone to sleep in her plain gray dress and long white apron with the tabard top. She hadn’t known when she would be needed because no one had said whether casualties destined for the Union Hotel Hospital would arrive in Washington by rail or by steamer.
She knew how they were arriving in Georgetown. “Those infernal two-wheelers,” she muttered as she lit the lamp. The outcries, characterized by abruptness as well as anguish, told her the wounded were coming in the ambulances that were the curse of the medical service. Some of the patients she had attended since joining Miss Dix’s corps said that after riding in one of the tilting, bouncing conveyances, they found themselves wishing they had remained where they had fallen. Better four-wheel models were being tested, but getting them took money and time.
The shimmery lamp revealed the room’s tawdry furnishings, warped flooring, peeling paper. The entire hotel was like that, a ruin. But it was where she had been sent. Ironically, she was less than half a mile from the house of George and Constance. She didn’t know if her brother knew she was a nurse in Washington, but she had no plans to call and inform him.
She did remain grudgingly grateful to Constance and even to Billy’s wife for helping her improve her appearance and showing her a better course. Beyond that, if she never saw any of them again, it wouldn’t trouble her.
Virgilia straightened her hairnet, left her room, and strode downstairs with the lamp. A neat, full-bosomed figure, with an aura of authority, she smelled of the brown soap with which she was careful to wash frequently. Already she had been put in charge of Ward One. Virgilia accepted the customary salary of twelve dollars a month, which some of the volunteers did not take. For her it was a necessity, a hedge against some future misfortune.
The hotel was astir. She smelled coffee and beef soup from the kitchen. Soldier nurses, men still convalescing, were rising from none too clean pallets and cots in the halls and ground-floor parlors. Her wardmaster, a youthful Illinois artilleryman named Bob Pip, yawned and squinted at her as she approached.
“Morning, matron.”
“Up, Bob, up—they’re here.”
To confirm it, she stopped at a broken window. A little light showed in the bleak sky, revealing a long line of the two-wheeled horrors snaking through the narrow street to the main entrance. Surveying the hall again, she saw no surgeons. They were customarily the last to arrive, something to do with dramatizing their importance, she had decided.
Despite her dislike of the doctors, she realized that all who worked at the hospital had a common cause—succoring and healing men injured in battle with a detestable enemy. Those crying out from the ambulances had fought in behalf of poor dead Grady, against the vicious army of aristocrats and mudsills Virgilia hated more than anything except slavery itself. That was why she worked so hard to replace dirt with cleanliness, pain with ease, despair with contentment.
She had taken to the work. It was honorable. Favorite lines from the Shakespeare play set five centuries before Christ reinforced her view. Every day or so, she silently repeated Volumnia’s scornful speech to Virgilia about the shedding of blood. It more becomes a man than gilt his trophy. The breasts of Hecuba, when she did suckle Hector, looked not lovelier than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood.
Virgilia had the stomach for nursing. Many of the well-meaning volunteers didn’t and quickly returned home. She had a person like that in her ward now. In Washington only three days, the young woman was clearly revolted by her duties. Still, Virgilia liked her.
She knocked loudly at the door of a parlor converted to a dormitory for the female nurses; the matrons had small separate rooms, no great blessing.
“Ladies? Get up, please. They’ve come. Hurry, you’re needed immediately.”
She heard bustling, soft talk in the parlor. She pivoted with a precision that was unconsciously military and marched toward the flung-back doors of her ward. On one of them a sorry brass sign hung from a nail in its corner. Reading downward at a forty-five-degree angle, the engraved script said BALL ROOM.
The ward consisted of forty beds and a central stove into which Bob Pip was tossing kindling while another soldier nurse lit the mantles. Virgilia marched down the aisles, inspecting to the right and to the left, and when necessary straightening coverlets or the beds themselves. Miss Dix’s experiment of employing women had been an unexpected success because the original plan—to place the soldier nurses in charge of the wards—had two flaws: convalescing men tired quickly, and they could not easily and naturally provide the one thing a battle-weary veteran wanted almost as much as he wanted to be well and free of pain—tenderness. Virgilia spent as much time sitting at bedsides, holding hands and listening, as she did changing dressings and assisting surgeons.
As she completed the inspection, her female assistant came in. She was a husky, plain woman, about thirty, with a pleasant face and a great amount of brown hair done up in braids and held by her hairnet. She had told Virgilia she had ambitions as a writer and had already published some articles and verse when patriotic fervor lured her to the volunteer nurses.
“Good morning, Miss Alcott. Please come along and help me bring in our wounded.”
“Certainly, Miss Hazard.”
With clear command, Virgilia gestured and called out, “Bob—Lloyd—Casey—to the lobby, please.”
She marched at the head of her group. A bilious look spread over the face of Louisa Alcott. The lobby was not yet in sight, but they could smell its strong odors—familiar odors that had made Virgilia ill the first time she was exposed to them.
She did hope Miss Alcott would last; something told her the woman had the makings of a fine nurse. She came of a famous family. Her father, Bronson, the Concord educator and transcendentalist, conducted experiments with model schools and communal living. But pedigree wouldn’t help her here. Virgilia was dismayed when Miss Alcott gulped and said, “Oh, dear heaven,” as the group from Ward One entered the lobby.
Similar groups were arriving from other wards to claim their charges. And there they were, walking unaided or on crutches or being carried, the young, brave boys from Fredericksburg, some so encrusted with mud and bloody bandages it was hard to see their uniforms. She heard Louisa Alcott choke and quickly said, “From now on carry a handkerchief soaked in ammonia or cologne, whichever you prefer. You’ll soon find you don’t need it.”
“You mean you’ve gotten used to—?”
But Virgilia was off among the litter-bearers, pointing. “Take forty that way, to the ballroom.”
Her heart broke as she watched them go. A youth with his right hand sawed off and the stump bandaged. A man about her age, wounded in the foot, struggling with his crutch and staring with eyes like panes of glass. A soldier on a litter, thrashing back and forth, tears trickling into his mud-caked beard while he repeated, “Mother. Mother.” Virgilia picked up his hand and walked along beside the litter. He quieted; the anguished lines vanished from his face. She held his hand till they reached the ballroom entrance.
The soap and disinfectant sloshed everywhere last night might have been saved for all the good it did now. Very quickly, the wounded generated a reeking miasma of dirt, festering wounds, feces, vomit. As always, the stench had a strange effect on Virgilia. Rather than disgusting her, it sharpened her sense of being needed and her conviction that the struggle would and must end just one way—with the South reduced to a mudhole, as Congressman Stevens put it so splendidly.
The efficient Bob Pip set out towels, sponges, and blocks of brown soap. A bla
ck man brought a kettle from the kitchen and poured steaming water into basins. The ambulance drivers helped their charges to beds, then left. Virgilia saw one sleazy brute eying her. She feigned annoyance and turned her back. Men often noticed her, though it wasn’t beauty to which they were responding, merely size. She didn’t mind. Once, no one had noticed anything.
“What ’n the divil is this goddamn place?” The booming voice had an Irish lilt. Behind the stove, now radiating heat, Virgilia saw a broad-shouldered soldier in his twenties, red-haired and red-bearded, thrashing about on his cot. “Don’t look like Erie, Pennsylvania—nor the old sod neither—”
Pip told the soldier he was in the Union Hotel Hospital. The man started to climb out of bed. Pip restrained him. The soldier cursed and made a second effort. We will begin with him, Virgilia thought. Others were watching, and establishing authority in the ward was important.
She strode to the Irishman’s cot. “Stop that foul talk. We’re here to help you.”
The bearded soldier squinted at her. “Skip the help, woman, an’ give me something to eat. Ain’t had a thing but hardtack since Burny sent me up that damn hill to die.” He wiggled his left foot, wrapped in stained bandages. “Feels like all I did was surrender me toes, or a bit more.”
The movement had pained him; that caused anger. “Jasus, woman, don’t stand there. I want food.”
“You will get nothing until we remove those filthy clothes and wash you down. That is standard hospital procedure.”
“An’ who the fu—Who’s gonna do the washing, might I ask?” The Irishman rolled his eyes around the room, clearly telling her he saw no one capable by sex or training.
“One of my nurses will do it. Miss Alcott.”
“A woman bathe me? I should say to God not!”
Above his beard, his cheeks were red. Pip set a bowl of water beside the cot, then handed Miss Alcott two towels, sponge, and brown soap. The soldier attempted to roll away from the women. Virgilia gestured.