by John Jakes
“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 bleeding; 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.
Sudden cannon fire shook the pavilion. All the lanterns swayed. Two more ambulances arrived outside, the horses snorting, the wheels slopping in mud. The rain had diminished to a drizzle. Virgilia decided it must be close to dawn—they had gone to work immediately upon leaving the car—but she felt energetic, renewed. She could hardly keep from glancing at the unconscious reb while she helped with the new cases coming in.
During the next twenty minutes, the chief surgeon didn’t have time to return to Lieutenant O’Grady. But Virgilia found time, walking to the cot with fresh gauzes draped over her arm.
Carefully, she raised the blankets. Bright red arterial blood stained the gauzes applied earlier. The soldier’s breathing was louder, labored—as expected. She laid the dressings on the cot and felt for his pulse. Stronger, faster—also as expected. The blankets had raised his temperature, and secondary hemorrhaging had begun. As expected.
Drawing the blankets down, she laid two new dressings on top of the first. It would take some time for the pumping blood to soak through all those layers. Should someone raise the blanket, it was doubtful that a problem would be apparent. Once more Virgilia brought the blanket up and tucked it neatly beneath the boy’s chin. She felt not the slightest prick of conscience. This was the enemy. She was a soldier. Grady had long cried out to be avenged.
“Miss Hazard!”
The shout of the chief surgeon drew her back to the center of the pavilion. A captain with a serious chest wound was rushed in on a litter. The only vacant cot was that next to O’Grady, back in the poorly lit corner.
Heart racing, she maneuvered herself into the space between O’Grady’s bed and that of the new patient, partially blocking the surgeon’s view of the reb. Pressed with so many urgent cases, the surgeon did nothing except nod toward O’Grady and ask, “How’s that one?”
“Satisfactory the last time I checked, sir.”
“Seems to be breathing hard. Have a look.”
“Yes, sir.” Terrified, she started to turn.
“I mean after you help me here.”
Virgilia’s tension melted. They worked over the captain for six minutes, until the exhausted surgeon staggered off to answer another appeal from Miss Kisco, who was receiving a new ambulance-load at the entrance. Virgilia snatched fresh gauzes from the storage box and rushed back to O’Grady. She lifted the blanket and saw the small, bright red stars—just two—on the field of white. Her smile was almost sensual.
She applied an additional dressing and once more drew up the blankets. He was bleeding to death unnoticed. Unmourned. Her best estimate was that he would be gone within a half hour. She returned the other dressings to the box and went about her work with a sense of warmth and happiness.
In three-quarters of an hour, carrying a waste pail, she went back to the corner and disposed of the thoroughly soaked dressings, replacing them with a new one, the last that would be needed. She replaced the blankets on the body, put the pail among others with similar contents, and resumed her other work. Despite the clamor and foulness of the pavilion, she floated in a near-euphoric state for twenty minutes. Then she got a jolt.
Unnoticed by Virgilia, Mrs. Neal had returned to inspect various patients. It was her sharp outcry that drew Virgilia’s attention. She saw the supervisor back in the dim corner, her squat body silhouetted against the canvas brightened by the light of the new day.
With her right hand, Mrs. Neal held up the blankets that had covered Lieutenant O’Grady. The startled O of her mouth broke.
“Doctor—Do
ctor! This boy is dead. Who was charged with watching him?”
105
“NAME AND RANK OF the prisoner?”
“Private Stephen McNaughton.”
“Caught where?”
“Approximately three miles north of here, sir. He was identified by those.” The frog-voiced three-striper hooked his thumb at the prisoner’s soiled tartan pantaloons.
The hanging lantern glared in the eyes of the regimental adjutant, a major half the prisoner’s age, slight and sandy-haired, with ginger-colored Dundreary whiskers. “Step forward,” he ordered, rolling the r slightly. Cap in hand, Salem Jones advanced two paces to the field desk.
“Scum of the streets—that’s all we get anymore.” The major’s complaint drew a nod from one of the two corporals who, together with the sergeant, had brought Jones to regimental headquarters. “Such a depraved, vice-hardened, desperate set of human beings never before fouled any army on the face of God’s earth.”
Worried as he was, Jones had no fundamental disagreement with the major’s opinion. When he had signed on as a replacement in his last regiment, a Pennsylvania reserve unit, he had been held in a Philadelphia stockade for three and a half days, constantly watched by armed guards. The other recruits similarly confined terrified him; they were clearly criminals, men who would have knifed or strangled him and looted his pockets if he hadn’t already lost his bounty in a high-stakes poker game.
“What was your original occupation, Private McNaughton? Cardsharp? Thief? Murderer?” The major’s next words sounded like pistol shots. “Never mind, I know the real answers. Opportunist. Coward. You’re a disgrace to this regiment, the United States Army, the state of New York, America, and your ancestral homeland.”
Pious little prick, Jones thought, envisioning several painful ways he would murder the major, given the chance. Ah, but he mustn’t waste time on fantasies. He had to concentrate on saving himself. His was the misfortune of having chosen a Scottish alias, and the adjutant was a Scot. Jones had the feeling this officer wouldn’t let him off so lightly as others had.