by Noah Gordon
Ordway told him he’d been there the better part of two days, and told him where the 131st was bivouacked. And Rob J. allowed Mine Good Comrade and Mine Terrible Enemy to lead him away into a safe and untenanted storage room where a soft bed of clean hay could be prepared, and he lay down and he slept.
It was late the next afternoon when he was awakened by the groaning and screams of the wounded they had placed all around him on the storeroom floor. Other surgeons were at the tables, doing fine without him. There was no point in trying to use the church’s latrine, which long since had been overtaxed. He went outside into a hard, driving rain, and in the healing wet he emptied his bladder behind some lilac bushes that the Union owned again.
The Union owned all of Gettysburg again. Rob J. walked through the rain, taking in the sights. He forgot where Ordway had said the 131st was camped, and he asked everyone he met. Finally he found them spread out over several farm fields south of the town, hunkered inside their tents.
Wilcox and Ordway greeted him with warmth that moved him. They had eggs! While Lanning Ordway crushed hardtack and fried the crumbs and the eggs in pork grease for the doctor’s breakfast, they filled him in on what had happened, the bad first. The band’s best bass horn player, Thad Bushman, had been killed. “One tiny little hole in his chest, Doc,” Wilcox said. “Must of hit just the right spot.”
Of the litter-bearers, Lew Robinson was the first to get shot. “He got hit in the foot right after you left us,” Ordway said. “Oscar Lawrence got near cut in two by artillery yesterday.”
Ordway finished scrambling the eggs and set the pan before Rob J., who was thinking with genuine sorrow about the clumsy young drummer. But to his shame he couldn’t resist the food, wolfing it down.
“Oscar was too young. He should of been home with his momma,” Wilcox said bitterly.
Rob J. burned his mouth on the black coffee, which was terrible but tasted fine. “We all should have been home with our mommas,” he said, and belched. He finished the rest of the eggs slowly and had another cup of coffee while they told him what had happened while he was in the church cellar.
“That first day, they pushed us back to the high ground north of the town,” Ordway said. “That was the luckiest thing could of happened to us.
“The next day we was on Cemetery Ridge in a long skirmish line that run between two pairs of hills, Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill on the north, closest to the town, and Round Top and Little Round Top a couple of miles to the south. The fightin was terrible, terrible. A lot was killed. We kept busy haulin the wounded.”
“We did all right, too,” Wilcox said. “Just like you showed us.”
“I bet you did.”
“Next day the 131st was moved out onto Cemetery Ridge, to reinforce Howard’s Corps. Around noon we took a hell of a beatin from the Confederate cannon,” Ordway said. “Our forward pickets could see that while they was shellin us, a whole lot of Confederate troops was movin well below us, into the woods other side of the Emmitsburg Road. We could see metal, shiny here and there among the trees. They kept up the shellin for a hour or more, and they scored a good many hits too, but all the time we was gettin ready, because we knew they was goin to attack.
“Midafternoon, their cannon stopped, and so did ours. And then somebody yelled, ‘They’re comin!’ and fifteen thousand rebel bastards in gray uniforms stepped outta those woods. Those boys of Lee’s moved toward us shoulder to shoulder, line after line. Their bayonets was like a long curvin fence of steel pickets above their heads, with the sun bright and hard on it. They didn’t yell, didn’t say a word, just come toward us at a fast, steady walk.
“I tell you, Doc,” Ordway said, “Robert E. Lee whipped our arse lots of times and I know he’s a mean, smart sonofabitch, but he wasn’t smart here in Gettysburg. We couldn’t believe it, watchin them rebels come at us like that across open fields, with us on high, protected ground. We knew they was dead men, and they must of knew it too. We watched them come most a mile. Colonel Symonds and other officers up and down the line was yellin, ‘Hold your fire! Let em get close. Hold your fire!’ They must of been able to hear that too.
“When they was close enough for us to make out their faces, our artillery from Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge opened up, and a lot of them just disappeared. Those that was left came at us through the smoke, and Symonds finally yelled ‘Fire!’ and everybody shot hisself a rebel. Somebody yelled, ‘Fredericksburg!’ and then everybody was yellin it. ‘Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!’ and shootin and reloadin, and shootin and reloadin, and shootin …
“They reached the stone wall at the bottom of our ridge only at one place. Them that did fought like doomed men, but they was all killed or captured,” Ordway said, and Rob J. nodded. That, he knew, was when he had heard the cheering.
Wilcox and Ordway had worked all night carrying wounded, and now they were going back. Rob J. went with them, through the downpour. As they approached the place of the battle, he saw the rain was a blessing, because it kept down the smell of death, which already was terrible nonetheless. Swelling bodies lay everywhere. Amid the wreckage and carnage of war, rescuers searched to glean the living.
For the rest of the morning Rob J. worked in the rain, dressing wounds and carrying one corner of a litter. When he brought the wounded to the hospitals, he saw why his boys had had eggs. Wagons were being unloaded everywhere. There was plenty of medicine and anesthesia, plenty of dressings, plenty of food. Surgeons were three deep at every operating table. A grateful United States had heard that at last they had a victory, paid for at a terrible price, and they had determined nothing should be spared those who had survived.
Near the railroad depot he was approached by a civilian man about his own age, who asked him politely if he knew where it might be possible to get a soldier embalmed, as if asking him for the time of day or the directions to the town building. The man said he was Winfield S. Walker, Jr., a farmer from Havre de Grace, Maryland. When he’d heard of the battle, something had told him to come and see his son Peter, and he had found him among the dead. “Now I would like to have the body embalmed so I can take him home, don’t you know.”
Rob J. did. “I’ve heard they are embalming at the Washington House Hotel, sir.”
“Yessir. But they told me there they have an exceedingly long list, many before me. I thought to look elsewhere.” His son’s body was at the Harold farm, a farmhouse-hospital off the Emmitsburg Road.
“I’m a physician. I can do it for you,” Rob J. said.
He had the necessary items in the medical pannier back at the 131st, and he went and collected them and then met Mr. Walker at the farmhouse. Rob J. had to tell him as delicately as possible to go get an army coffin that was zinc-lined, because there would be leakage. While the father was off on that sorry errand, he tended to the son, in a bedroom where six other dead men were stored. Peter Walker was a beautiful young man, perhaps twenty years old, with his father’s chiseled features and thick dark hair. He was unmarked save that a shell had torn off his left leg at the thigh. He had bled to death, and his body had the whiteness of a marble statue.
Rob J. mixed an ounce of chloride of zinc salts into two quarts of alcohol and water. He tied off the artery in the severed leg so the fluid would be retained, then slit the femoral artery of the uninjured leg and injected the embalming fluid into it with a syringe.
Mr. Walker had no trouble getting a casket from the army. He tried to pay for the embalming, but Rob J. shook his head. “One father helping another,” he said.
The rain continued. It was a beastly rain. In the first savage downpour, it had brought some small streams over their banks and drowned some of the severely wounded. Now it fell more gently, and he went back to the battlefield and looked for wounded until dusk. He stopped then, because younger and stronger men had appeared with lamps and torches to search the battlefield, and because he was bone tired.
The Sanitary Commission had set up a kitchen in a warehouse near th
e center of Gettysburg, and Rob J. went there and had soup containing the first beef he had had in months. He had three bowls, and six slices of white bread.
After he had eaten, he went into the Presbyterian church and went along the pews, stopping at each improvised bed to try to do some homely thing that might help—give water, wipe a sweaty face. Whenever the patient was a Confederate, he always asked the same question. “Son, have you ever run across, in your army, a twenty-three-year-old yellow-haired man from Holden’s Crossing, Illinois, name of Alexander Cole?”
But nobody he talked to ever had.
54
SKIRMISHING
As rain fell again in sheets, General Robert E. Lee picked up his bloodied army and limped slowly back into Maryland. Meade didn’t have to let him get away. The Army of the Potomac was hurt badly too, with more than twenty-three thousand casualties, including some eight thousand dead or missing, but the Northerners were flushed with victory and far stronger than Lee’s men, who were slowed and hampered by a wagon train of wounded stretching behind them fully seventeen miles. But just as Hooker had failed to act in Virginia, now Meade failed to act in Pennsylvania, and there was no pursuit.
“Where does Mr. Lincoln find his generals?” Symonds muttered to Rob J. in disgust. But if the delay frustrated colonels, the enlisted men were content to rest and recover, and perhaps write home the extraordinary news that they were still alive.
Ordway found Lewis Robinson in one of the farmhouse hospitals. His right foot had been amputated four inches above the ankle. He was thin and pale but otherwise appeared in good health. Rob J. examined the stump and told Robinson it was healing well and that the man who had cut off his foot had known his job. Clearly Robinson was happy to be out of the war; there was a sense of relief in his eyes that was so profound it was almost palpable. Rob J. felt that Robinson had been bound to be hit, because he had feared the possibility so. He brought Robinson his sopranino cornet and some pencils and paper and knew he would be all right, because you didn’t need two feet to compose music or play the horn.
Both Ordway and Wilcox were promoted to sergeant. A number of the men had been promoted, Symonds filling the regimental table of organization with the survivors, handing out the ratings and ranks that had belonged to the fallen. The 131st Indiana had received eighteen percent casualties, which was light compared to many regiments. A regiment from Minnesota had lost eighty-six percent of its men. That regiment and several others were wiped out, in effect. Symonds and his staff officers spent several days recruiting survivors of the ruined regiments, with success, bringing the 131st’s strength up to 771 men. With some embarrassment, the colonel told Rob J. he’d found a regimental surgeon. Dr. Gardner Coppersmith had been with one of the disbanded Pennsylvania units as a captain, and Symonds had lured him with promotion. A graduate of a Philadelphia medical school, he’d had two years of combat experience. “I’d make you regimental surgeon in a minute if you weren’t a civilian, Doc Cole,” Symonds said. “But the slot calls for an officer. You understand that Major Coppersmith will be your superior, that he’ll run things?”
Rob J. assured him that he understood.
For Rob J. it was a complicated war, fought by a complicated nation. In the newspaper he read that there had been a race riot in New York because of resentment over the first drawing of names for the military draft. A mob of fifty thousand, most of them Irish Catholic workingmen, set fire to the draft office, the offices of the New York Tribune, and a Negro orphanage, fortunately empty of children at the time. Apparently blaming Negroes for the war, they swarmed through the streets, beating and robbing every black person they could find, murdering and lynching Negroes for several days before the riot was put down by federal troops freshly returned from fighting Southerners at Gettysburg.
The story wounded Rob J.’s spirit. Native-born Protestants loathed and oppressed Catholics and immigrants, and Catholics and immigrants scorned and murdered Negroes, as if each group fed off its hate, needing the nourishment provided by the bone marrow of someone weaker.
When Rob J. had prepared for citizenship he’d studied the United States Constitution and marveled at its provisions. Now he saw that the genius of those who had written the Constitution was that it foresaw man’s weakness of character and the continuing presence of evil in the world, and sought to make individual freedom the legal reality to which the country had to return again and again.
He was fascinated by what made men hate one another, and studied Lanning Ordway as if the lame sergeant were a bug under his microscope. If Ordway didn’t spew hatred every now and then, like a kettle running over, and if Rob J. didn’t know that a terrible unpunished crime had been committed a decade before in his own Illinois woods, he would have found Ordway among the more likable young men in the regiment. Now he was watching the litter-bearer grow and blossom, probably because the experiences Ordway had had in the army represented more success than he had ever before achieved.
There was a spirit of success in the entire regiment. The Indiana 131st Regimental Band showed dash and elan as it went from hospital to hospital, giving concerts for the wounded. The new tuba player wasn’t as good as Thad Bushman had been, but the musicians played with pride, because they’d shown they were valuable during battle.
“We been through the worst together,” Wilcox announced solemnly one night when he had had too much to drink, fixing Rob J. with his ferocious walleyed squint. “We strolled in and out of the jaws of death, sashayed on through the Valley of the Shadow. We stared right into the damned eyes of the terrible critter. We heered the rebel yell and hollered back.”
The men treated one another with great tenderness. Sergeant Ordway and Sergeant Wilcox and even sloppy Corporal Perry were honored because they’d led their fellow musicians to pluck up wounded soldiers and carry them back under fire. The story of Rob J.’s two-day marathon with the scalpel was repeated in all the tents, and the men knew he was responsible for the ambulance service in their regiment. They smiled warmly to see him now, and nobody mentioned latrines.
His new popularity pleased him inordinately. One of the soldiers of B Company, Second Brigade, a man named Lyon, even brought him a horse. “Just found him walking riderless by the side of the road. I thunk of you right away, Doc,” Lyon said, handing him the reins.
Rob J. was embarrassed but elated by this evidence of affection. True, the mud-colored horse wasn’t much, a skinny and swaybacked gelding. Probably he’d belonged to a slain or wounded rebel soldier, because both the animal and the bloodstained saddle bore the CSA brand. The horse’s head and his tail drooped, his eyes were dull, and his mane and tail were full of burrs. He looked like a horse that had worms. But, “Why, soldier, he’s beautiful!” Rob J. said. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I figger forty-two dollars would be fair,” Lyon said.
Rob J. laughed, more tickled by his own foolish yearning for love than by the situation. When the dickering was over, the horse was his in exchange for $4.85 and the promise that he wouldn’t bring Lyon up on charges as a battlefield looter.
He gave the animal a good feed, patiently picked the burrs from his mane and tail, washed the blood off the saddle and rubbed oil on the horse where the leather had chafed, and brushed the gelding’s coat. When all that was done, it was still an extremely sorry-looking horse, so Rob J. named him Pretty Boy, on the outside chance that perhaps such a name would give the ugly animal a modicum of pleasure and self-respect.
He was riding the horse when the Indiana 131st marched out of Pennsylvania on August 17. Pretty Boy’s head and tail still drooped, but he moved along with the loose, steady gait of a beast that was accustomed to the long ride. If anybody in the regiment didn’t know for certain which direction they were heading, all doubt disappeared when Bandmaster Warren Fitts blew his whistle, lifted his chin and his baton, and the band began to play “Maryland, My Maryland.”
The 131st recrossed the Potomac six weeks after Lee’s troops and a
full month after the first units of their own army. They followed the late summer south, and the mild and seductive autumn didn’t catch up with them until they were well into Virginia. They were veterans, chigger-wise and battle-tested, but most of the action of the war at that moment was in the western theater, and for the 131st Indiana, things were quiet. Lee’s army moved along the Shenandoah Valley, where Union scouts spied on it and said it was in good condition except for an obvious shortage of supplies, especially decent shoes.
The Virginia skies were dark with fall rains when they came to the Rappahannock and found evidence that the Confederates had camped there in the not-distant past. Over Rob J.’s objections, they raised their tents right on the former Rebel campsite. Major Coppersmith was a well-educated and competent doctor, but he didn’t hold with worrying about a little shit, and he never bothered anybody about digging latrines. He wasn’t subtle about informing Rob J. that the time was over when an acting assistant surgeon could make medical policy for the regiment. The major liked to run his own sick call, unassisted, except on days when he might be feeling poorly, which wasn’t often. And he said that unless an engagement turned into another Gettysburg, he thought that he and one enlisted man were enough to apply dressings at a medical station.
Rob smiled at him. “What does that leave for me?”
Major Coppersmith frowned and smoothed his mustaches with a forefinger. “Well, I’d like you to handle the litter-bearers, Dr. Cole,” he said.
So Rob J. found himself caught by the monster he had created, trapped in the web of his own spinning. He had no desire to join the litter men, but once they became his main task, it seemed foolish to think that he would simply send the teams out and watch to see what happened to them. He recruited his own team: two musicians—the new bass horn player, name of Alan Johnson, and a fifer named Lucius Wagner—and for the fourth man, he drafted Corporal Amasa Decker, the regimental postmaster. The litter teams took turns going out. He told the new men, as he had told the first five litter-bearers (one now dead and one now an amputee), that going after wounded involved no more danger than anything else connected with war. He assured himself that everything would be all right, and he placed his litter team in the rotation schedule.