How odd it is, that people can bear a calamity better if they know its victims are numerous. The wrath of the mourners subsided and they began gathering up their dead to depart. Jonathan Gifford urged Kemble to go down to the house. He shook his head. He was determined to drink the cup to its dregs.
Richard Talbot and his oldest son arrived in a wagon to take Billy home. Mr. Talbot burst into tears when he saw Billy. Jonathan Gifford and Kemble had to endure a tongue-lashing from his neutralist point of view. “Now you see where all this brave talk about independence and war leads - Will independence give me back my son? I say damn you and your Congress and your committees. We were a peaceful people until you started your yapping.”
Tenderly the Talbots placed Billy’s body in their wagon and they too departed. They were the last. Kemble and his father stood alone in the tavern yard. “Come in and have a drink, Kemble,” Jonathan Gifford said.
He started to put his, arm around his shoulders. Kemble twisted away from him. “Haven’t I told you,” he said, “haven’t I told you I don’t want your goddamn consolation?”
THE FOLLOWING DAY an extremely handsome man of about forty strolled into Liberty Tavern. He was wearing enough lace on his shirt to finance a country wedding. His red silk suit and blue satin waistcoat seemed immune to the dust of the road and the heat of the day.
“Are you Gifford?” he asked Barney McGovern. Directed to the Captain, he introduced himself as Dr. William Shippen, Jr., Director of American Hospitals. “The army is marching north to cooperate with the French fleet in an attack on New York,” he said. “We have a good three hundred wounded from the fight yesterday at Monmouth Court House. General Washington thought you would know of some houses in the neighborhood that might be converted into hospitals. Confiscated Tory property perhaps.”
Jonathan Gifford knew Dr. Shippen was one of Philadelphia’s most distinguished physicians. “The few places that haven’t been sold are pretty badly smashed up,” Jonathan Gifford said. “But I have a house - you may know it. Kemble Manor.”
Dr. Shippen had been speaking to Jonathan Gifford in his most condescending Philadelphia aristocrat’s style. He suddenly became almost cordial.
“Of course. I visited Charles Skinner there before the war. You are the new owner?”
Jonathan Gifford nodded. “Mrs. Skinner is still living there. But I have no doubt she will agree to it. She is as strong for the Cause as any man in New Jersey.”
“We will begin moving the men in tomorrow,” Dr. Shippen said. “Do you have some pipes of wine and perhaps a cask or two of brandy we might buy for them? I would like to husband our present supply for the push on New York. We fear it will be bloody.”
“You can have my whole cellar if you need it,” Jonathan Gifford said.
“The doctor in charge will negotiate a price with you,” Dr. Shippen said, and departed.
Caroline instantly agreed to convert the manor house into a hospital. But she surprised Jonathan Gifford by refusing to move to a room in Liberty Tavern or to his brookside house.
“In the first place, I am needed here to supervise the farm. I also have some skills as a nurse. I cared for my father through his last illness.”
“But a military hospital - it’s not a healthy place. These men may be only wounded now. But they bring with them smallpox, putrid fever, God knows what.”
“I have been inoculated against smallpox. No one knows how we catch fevers. But I seem immune to them.”
Jonathan Gifford started to object all over again, his concern mingling with masculine habit to make him determined to have his own way. Caroline stopped him short with a flash of Kemble temper.
“I have been wondering when we would have a quarrel. I want to do this, Jonathan, and I will not be told I can’t. Loving you does not make you my lord and master.”
His feelings not a little bruised, Captain Gifford reheated to Liberty Tavern, to meditate on the female temperament. At dinner Kate noted his gloomy silence and asked him what was the matter.
“I am worried about your aunt - Caroline,” he said. He told her of his offer of the manor as a hospital and Caroline’s decision to remain there.
“She can’t stay there alone, Father. I will join her.”
“You will not. I have no authority over Caro - your aunt. But I hope I still have some over you. A military hospital is the most dangerous place in the world. It is worse than a battlefield.”
The same determination that had furrowed Caroline’s brow now added wrinkles to Kate’s forehead. “Father, you are talking to me as if I were a child.”
“I am doing no such thing. I am trying to protect you - ”
“But I don’t want to be protected. That is one of the things that must change. You must stop thinking about. women as creatures to be protected.”
“Kate - I have no objection to your ideas - or your aunt’s ideas - about education, a woman’s rights. But when they start to endanger your life - ”
“I agree completely with Captain Gifford,” said Lieutenant Rawdon. “I would not let any female relation of mine into a military hospital.”
“It is a good thing I am not your relation - and am not likely to be,” Kate said.
Leaving him thoroughly demolished, she turned to Jonathan Gifford. “I want to go, Father, and I will go, tomorrow.”
The following day, while Lieutenant Rawdon and Jonathan Gifford watched dolefully, Kate went, her trunk beside her on the chaise. At the manor, she found chaos. There were thirteen Jersey wagons in the oval at the head of the drive, loaded with wounded men. Those who could walk or stagger, had gotten out of the wagons and sprawled beneath the shade trees on the lawn. A half-dozen orderlies were lugging hay from the barns to spread on the parquet floors. It was murderously hot. Caroline and Sukey were going from wagon to wagon with buckets of water from the well. The wagon drivers sat behind their teams, watching them and the orderlies.
“Where are the doctors?” Kate asked.
“They rode up to the tavern for breakfast.”
“What about these men? Have they had breakfast?”
“They have eaten nothing for two days, some of them. The only food they brought with them is in that first wagon. Take a look at it.”
Kate climbed into the wagon and opened a barrel marked salt beef. She gasped with disgust. It was swarming with maggots. Other barrels contained corn meal that was covered with green mold. A barrel of potatoes was as wormy as the beef. The condition of the men was not much better than their provisions. Most had not even had their wounds dressed. Only two with legs amputated showed any evidence of medical attention. They had all been lying in the wagons on thinly scattered straw for twenty-four hours. The stench and filth were nauseating.
“Can’t we get them out on the lawn?” Kate asked the wagon men.
“Not our job; miss. Go ask the orderlies.”
The Sergeant in command of the orderlies, a fat little man from Virginia, by his accent absolutely rejected the idea. He only had six men and they were half dead from the heat already. They would be lucky to get all the hay for bedding into the house before sundown.
Kate joined Caroline and Sukey in wielding a water bucket while the orderlies plodded from the house to the barn and back again. About noon they stopped. The wagon men got down from their seats and began building a fire to cook their dinners. The orderlies joined them. No one offered a bite to the wounded. They lay in their straw with a resigned silence that Kate found unbearable.
By this time the doctors had returned from Liberty Tavern. Caroline introduced Kate to them. Dr. Benjamin Ladd was in his twenties. His thin frame seemed hunched by disappointment and his pinched face wore an expression halfway between anger and sadness. He was from western Pennsylvania. Dr. Ephraim Lummes was in his forties. He was a comfortably built man with a wide complacent face featuring a large red nose. He was from Rhode Island.
“Are many badly wounded?”
“Hard to say,” Dr. Ladd said forlornl
y. “It doesn’t make much difference as far as I can see. We have about two hundred and eighty here. If half that number live, it will be a miracle. I will be content with fifty.”
“Now, now,” said Dr. Lummes, “you are too impressed by our troubles of last year.”
He explained that Dr. Ladd had worked in the main army hospital at Lancaster during the winter of 1777. The mortality had been exceptionally heavy. “God works in mysterious ways. He chastised us severely there. I don’t know why,” Dr. Lummes said.
“I keep thinking of that Virginia regiment,” Dr. Ladd said. “They brought in three hundred of them with light fevers. Only forty came out alive.”
“Can we begin bringing some of them into the house, so we can wash them?” Kate asked.
Dr. Lummes stared at her. “Why in the world, miss?”
“To reduce the chances of infection.”
“Why, I didn’t know we had a medical scholar on our hands, Dr. Ladd,” said Lummes. “What is your theory of infection, miss?”
“I have none,” Kate said. “But I’ve been trained as a nurse by a doctor who studied at Edinburgh.”
“No doubt he has theories coming out of his nose,” said Dr. Lummes. “But I have more faith in practice. A good purge and an open vein is a better cure for infection than all the theories in the world.”
Kate saw that Dr. Lummes was an ignoramus. She and Caroline were encountering the American army’s medical department. It killed three times as many men as British gunfire in the Revolution. Ignorance was only part of the problem. Pride, greed, and politics often competed with incompetence for the soldiers’ lives.
Trying to be diplomatic, Kate asked Dr. Lummes if he objected to washing the men before they were put to bed. “Cold water,” Dr. Lummes said, “even warm water can shock the system of a wounded man. I am afraid I must object, miss. If you wish to assist us in this hospital, you must remember that I am in charge.”
By the time they got the wounded men into the house, it was dark. Sukey and Caroline had baked some bread for them. Most of the seriously wounded were too weak to eat it. But this was a minor worry compared to their accommodations. Kemble Manor was a spacious house. But two hundred and eighty soldiers crowded it dismayingly. The men were shoved and in some cases dropped onto their beds of straw, thirty and forty to a room. Dr. Ladd and Dr. Lummes made no attempt to examine them. They rode off to Liberty Tavern for the night, leaving the Sergeant and his orderlies in charge.
Kate asked them if they had any hospital clothes for the men. The temperature continued to hover in the nineties. Light linen clothing, shirts or pantaloons or both, was what they needed. The orderlies said they did not know what she was talking about. After supper they wandered down the road to Leary’s groggery, leaving Caroline and Kate in charge of the house.
By this time, Kate was so furious she could barely speak. Her temper did not improve when the orderlies returned about midnight, mostly drunk, and began capering around the lawn roaring out liberty songs. Kate seized a candle and went out on the front steps to give them a lecture. They were not impressed. They had heard all about her down at Leary’s, they said. She was a Tory bitch. While they insulted her, the Sergeant circled around in the darkness beyond her candle’s feeble glow, leaped up on the steps, and threw her into the hands of his confederates.
“Let’s see what’s under that dress, boys,” he yelled.
Something hard and cold was suddenly jammed into the Sergeant’s back. “Let her go,” Caroline said, “or I will shoot you dead.”
“Let her go, boys, the lady’s got a gun,” squawked the Sergeant.
Under the. muzzle of Caroline’s musket the orderlies were marched into the house and forced to distribute water to the wounded. Two of them spent the rest of the night on duty, under Caroline’s command, performing other necessary nursing chores. They did these with the worst possible grace, cursing every man who asked for help with a call of nature, muttering threats to anyone who asked for a second drink of water. The orderlies were the scum of the army. It appalled Caroline that the lives of the wounded were in such hands.
In the morning she had a conference with Kate. Caroline was not sure how far they could go in disobeying or evading Dr. Lummes’ authority. “Let’s see how much we can get away with,” Kate said. “I will go back to Liberty Tavern and get a real doctor down here to argue for us.”
She arrived at Liberty Tavern as Dr. Lummes and her father were concluding a very tense conversation. “You can put down whatever you please in your account book, sir,” Jonathan Gifford said, “but in mine it will he exactly what you pay me.”
“Damn you, sir, haven’t I explained the system to you?”
“I am not sure I like the system. I wonder what the Congress thinks about it.”
“The Congress knows a man must live.”
“Add another hundred dollars and you could have two pipes of wine for that price.”
“Goddamn you, I will let Dr. Shippen know the part you are playing. You will never do a speck of business with our department.”
“I’m not sure if I want to do any business with your department. I intend to find out from General Washington himself what he thinks of it.”
Dr. Lummes stormed out of the tavern, muttering curses. “What was that about? Kate asked.
“He wanted me to charge him five hundred dollars for a pipe of wine - when it would only cost him three hundred. He and Dr. Shippen keep the difference, I gather.”
“That is all I need to turn me into a Tory again,” Kate said.
She summoned Dr. Davie from his morning drink at the bar and gave him and her father a vivid description of conditions at Kemble Manor hospital.
“Six orderlies for three hundred men,” Jonathan Gifford said. “In the British army every company of invalids - every thirty-six men - has that many.”
“They sleep on straw, you say?” Dr. Davie asked, unbelievingly. “No hammocks? Forty to a room?”
“The food is the first thing we must do something about,” Kate said. “Can Kemble take one of our wagons and ask the people in the neighborhood to donate something?”
“I will see. He is in such a gloom - ”
“And you, Dr. Davie, you must come down and help us.”
“I don’t see how I can,” said Dr. Davie. “I have no authority.” “Damn authority,” Kate said. “If Dr. Lummes complains, we will run him down to Shoal Harbor and throw him in the bay.
“Where is Lieutenant Rawdon?”
“I believe he’s in the rose garden.”
Kate found Rawdon rereading - for the hundredth time - The Sorrows of Young Werther. “I wish you would throw that damn German lamentation into the brook,” she said.
“Every time I read it, I find it more moving than the last time.”
“And I find it more boring.”
“I don’t understand you, Miss Stapleton. Why do you treat me this way? I don’t deserve this hostile tone.”
“I am not hostile, Thomas. Just impatient. I haven’t the time to fuss over you now.” She told him what was happening at Kemble Manor. “You know more medicine than those two fools who are running that hospital put together. Come down and help us.”
“It would be a violation of my parole.”
“Damn your parole. Who’s going to know it? You can borrow a suit from Kemble and we will give you a different name. There are men dying down there, Thomas. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“There are men dying in New York, in London, and there’s probably a man or two dying down the road. We are all dying, for that matter.”
“That is the most miserable sophistry I have ever heard in my life.”
“What would my father say if he heard I was working in an American hospital? He would disinherit me on the spot.”
“So? You’ve talked about resigning your commission and going home to tell the British people the truth about this war. Have you done it? You will sit here in this rose garden, spinning ou
t this idea and that idea and doing nothing about any of them. All the time thinking, because you can hold my hand and steal a kiss now and then, that you are living. Well, let me tell you something, Thomas. I saved you from dying. Now I begin to think it was a waste of my time and strength.”
“Kate, it was your love - the hope of it - that made the difference between my living and dying. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“It did at first. But now I am sickened by it. I don’t want a man who lives off my flesh like a vampire. I want a man who has roots of his own in life.”
She strode down to the edge of the brook, only a few yards away, and uprooted from the marshy bank one of the pink, five-petaled rose mallows that were just beginning to bloom there. “Look at yourself,” she said, and threw it at his feet.
Back in Liberty Tavern Jonathan Gifford reported that Kemble had eliminated himself as the man to raise food for the wounded men. “He thinks he’s obnoxious to the whole countryside,” Jonathan Gifford said sadly. “He may be right for the time being. But don’t worry. I will find someone - or do it myself.”
Dr. Davie agreed to return to Kemble Manor with Kate. “We are going to save those men. Save every one of them,” she said.
“Be realistic, Kate,” her father said.
“All right. Nine out of ten. Instead of killing nine out of ten.”
Down at the manor they found Dr. Lummes had departed for the main army. Perhaps he had become uneasy about Jonathan Gifford’s reference to General Washington and had decided it would be safer to sever his connection with the hospital and leave Dr. Ladd to deal with any future charges of corruption. Before the year was out, a major scandal shook the army’s medical department, involving Shippen, Lummes, and numerous other doctors who were defrauding the government and lining their pockets with money stolen from the medical budget.
Dr. Ladd was easy for Kate to handle. She introduced Dr. Davie to him as one of the great geniuses of Edinburgh. This was far from the truth, but Davie did know how to run a military hospital, thanks to his twenty years in the British army. He was appalled by what he saw on a brief tour of Kimble Manor. The sun was rising high in the summer sky and the crowded rooms increased the heat to oven temperature. The air was foul with the sweat of unwashed bodies and other even less pleasant odors.
The Heart of Liberty Page 40