Living Hell
Page 13
Cadavers quickly swelled to twice their normal size. Gases distended stomachs that then burst, emitting foul and, to Victorians, deadly odors. The sickly sweet, heavily cloying smell of death hung over the killing fields. At Shiloh the stench reputedly overpowered the scent of spring blossoms. The dead took on a nightmarish appearance as their faces disintegrated. Strother, again, described the lack of distinguishing features among the dead at Cedar Mountain, where fierce August heat had obliterated any human form. “The eyes had bulged through their apertures in the flesh, distended to the size of eggs, and their hair lay long, tangled and matted with blood, over a forehead blue and yellow by exposure and hastening corruption.”41
According to Sergeant Thomas Meyer, 148th Pennsylvania, on grave duty after Gettysburg, in the next stage of decomposition faces became “black as charcoal and bloated out of all human semblance; eyes, cheeks, forehead and nose all one general level of putrid swelling, twice the normal size, with here and there great blisters of putrid water, some the size of a man’s fist on face, neck and wrists.” The shining fetid mass crawled with maggots as corpses began to fall apart, the rotting pieces joining the body parts already scattered by missile fire. Disposal of this human detritus assumed monumental proportions. Sherman Norris, 7th Ohio, burying the dead after Gettysburg, said, “I shall remember that day and its ghastly dead. We took them from perfect lines of battle as they had fallen; we dragged them out from behind rocks; we found them behind logs or lying over them, with eyes and mouths distended, and faces blackened by mortification.” In just one half acre before the Union lines at Vicksburg, thirty decomposing bodies of Rebel attackers were counted.42
The refusal of opposing commanders to cooperate in retrieval delayed the cleanup and made it more oppressive for the workers. When possible, Union commanders delegated the gruesome task of interment to black soldiers and contrabands employed for this kind of unsavory chore. Slaves fulfilled a similar function in the Confederate service. However, when necessary, generals pressed whites on both sides into the work. As an example, after New Market in the Shenandoah, May 17, 1864, Confederate commander John C. Breckinridge unsuccessfully petitioned his opposite number, General Franz Siegel, to help Rebel details bury Yankee dead.43
Usually, officers instructed soldiers to bury friendly dead first in individual graves, marking the name and unit of the occupant clearly on a piece of wood, rock, or other impromptu headpiece. This could not always be accomplished, as missiles disfigured bodies and the elements decayed features, making identification impossible. Fallen officers stood the best chance of being recovered, their bodies often retrieved while the fighting raged. They, along with the dead from prosperous families, might be sent home in charcoal-lined zinc coffins. Shipping services, such as Adams Express in the North, made the service available to those who could pay. In one unusual instance, some men in the 5th Corps, Army of the Potomac, clubbed together to send home comrades’ body parts in cracker boxes so that the remains might lie in familiar soil.44
Whatever the efforts made, most common soldiers ended up in anonymous mass graves. Workers shoveled remains into handy rifle pits, hastily dug trenches or convenient folds in the ground. William Martin, a Union veteran, confessed that, after the fighting at Ezra Church outside Atlanta in 1864, Rebel dead received no respect—“laid three or four deep and we covered them like cabbage.” Another old soldier recalled: “The common soldier that fell in battle was thrown into a trench with no winding sheet but his blood-stained garments, and no covering but the cold clods thrown over him by unsympathizing strangers.”45
Because of the sheer numbers to be interred, the soil chucked over the common grave might be only eight to ten inches deep. What amounted to dumping bodies like garbage concerned many soldiers in a period when death was supposed to be a highly ritualized, dignified departure from life, normally attended by grieving family and cherished friends. Punning on the word shooting (a common term both for discharging weapons and for disposing of waste), cynical Union veteran Ambrose Bierce wrote in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911) that a regimental standard might be taken as a sign advertising that rubbish might be shot here.
Soldiers tried to improvise techniques for shifting the dead to help make the labor more palatable. Pennsylvania army chaplain A. M. Stewart commented on what happened after Spotsylvania in May 1864. In the heat, “The hair and skin had fallen from the head, and the flesh from the bones—all alive with disgusting maggots.” To cope, burial details stuffed their nostrils with young green leaves, blocking the stench. They fashioned hooks from bent socket bayonets and stuck these on poles to drag the corpses to prepared pits, keeping the operation at arm’s length. Even then, said Samuel Compton, 12th Ohio, “The bodies had become so offensive that men could only endure it by being staggering drunk.”46
In the end, despite misgivings and later feelings of guilt, burial details resorted to desperate and devious devices to finish their obnoxious assignment. They chucked bodies down wells, stacked them in icehouses and other outbuildings, stuffed remains under porches, and shoveled the decayed matter into compost piles. Dick Simpson, 3rd South Carolina, admitted that the corpses they were responsible for at Vienna, Virginia, in August 1861, stank so badly that “some were covered up with brush with their head and feet left out, and very often the latter were eaten off by the hogs.” Inevitably, shallow layers of soil and brush covering common graves eroded, washing away under the pressure of rain or the busy efforts of scavenging creatures.47
This exposure of badly decayed flesh filled the air once again with foul smells. Sergeant Berry Benson, 1st South Carolina, wrote that, when his regiment marched back over the old Seven Days field, erosion of burial sites meant “we endured at times almost agony from the horrible stench that in one locality or another pervaded the air.” A young Louisiana officer, R. A. Pierson, acknowledged that, months after Fredericksburg, the Confederate army had not yet fully buried the Union dead; half-exposed corpses were still evident: “our troops were so worn down with fatigue from the three days fight, that they took but little pains in burying them; they are still exposed to view in many places, some with their heads and arms sticking out, while others’ heads are projecting and present the most hideous features; their teeth glistening as though grinning at the passers by.”48
On the Union side, Rice Bull, 123rd New York, revisiting Spotsylvania in spring 1865, counted one hundred Rebel skeletons, given scant burial, now visible in a two-hundred-foot area. When orders made troops camp on sites proximate to the communal graves dug after previous encounters, they found that, in the words of Private Alfred Bellard, 5th New Jersey, “it was our morning’s work to clean the ground of worms, that had been washed from the graves during the night by the rains. Our well, that was merely a barrell sunk in the ground had to undergo a general skimming before we could get water for coffee.”49
Eventually, the troops left. But many civilians remained in the area devastated by battle, unless driven off by soldiers or frightened away from the district, fleeing as refugees. Some of them failed to evacuate before the fighting because they had nowhere to go; others felt uneasy about trusting themselves and their children to the open road, where they would be vulnerable to robbery and worse without the protection of menfolk away in uniform. Some simply refused to desert their homes as the fighting approached, somehow hoping to protect and preserve their property. Whatever the case, these civilians caught in a battle zone experienced all the devastation of battle and then the task of sorting out the wreckage left by the armies.
The fighting proved profoundly traumatic for noncombatants. Little in their previous experience or imaginative lives, neither pictures nor literature, including soldiers’ letters from the front, could prepare them for the terrifying reality of combat. Soldiers frequently remarked on the number of civilians in combat zones who had gone mad, at least temporarily, through overwhelming fear. During the fighting at Fredericksburg, Union soldiers dragged a woman from her cellar bomb shelter
, demanding that she show them where they might find a well for water. Robbed of cover, she seemed to lose her senses. Thomas Galwey, 8th Ohio, recognized her later, sitting among corpses, hair disheveled and staring vacantly into space. He supposed that, suddenly plunged into hell, she “must have gone mad with fear.”50
During the 1862 Maryland campaign, Colonel Elisha Rhodes, 2nd Rhode Island, observed a woman in the town of Burkettsville wandering among the bodies of dead soldiers, apparently bereft of reason. Captain William Willis Blackford, 1st Virginia Cavalry, witnessed women and children in Sharpsburg, driven from the shelter of a stone house by shell fire, consumed by hysterics, “like a flock of birds … hair streaming in the wind and children of all ages stretched out behind.”51
In small towns like Gettysburg, Sharpsburg, and Franklin, quartering officers commandeered intact buildings as medical stations, whole communities becoming one vast hospital zone, the wounded laid out in barns, houses, stores, and churches. Soldiers requisitioned blankets, bedsheets, petticoats, food, water, anything that could help the casualties. The ratio of the mutilated to the normal population must astound us. In one day at Franklin, a community of 2,500 inhabitants, 10,000 casualties piled up. At Gettysburg, with a population of 2,400, the number of wounded to be accommodated reached 20,000. Sometimes a town visited by fighting more than once virtually ceased to exist save as one huge medical center. Such happened to Fredericksburg, Virginia, which civilians did not reoccupy until the war ended.52
Colonel W. D. Gale, a Confederate staff officer at the Battle of Franklin, described the seizure of Mrs. Carrie McGavock’s large two-story house for placement of the wounded. “This was taken as a hospital, and the wounded, in hundreds, were brought to it during the battle, and all the night after. Every room was filled, every bed had two poor, bleeding fellows, every spare space, niche, and corner under the stairs, in the hall, everywhere—but one room for her own family.” At Shiloh, newspaper correspondent Charles Coffin peeked into the home of a middle-aged lady with three young children: “On Monday night one hundred wounded were brought to her house. Her two horses had been seized, her corn eaten, and no equivalent returned.” Already, seven mounds in her garden indicated the burial places of patients who failed to survive surgery.53
The numbers and condition of the wounded shattered the composure of civilians who previously had no conceivable idea of the potential magnitude of carnage. Sally Putnam wrote vividly of Richmond becoming a universe of suffering during the 1862 Peninsula fighting: “We lived in one immense hospital, and breathed the vapors of the charnel house.… Every family received the bodies of the wounded or dead of their friends, and every house was a house of mourning or a private hospital.… Sickening odors filled the atmosphere and soldiers’ funerals were passing at every moment.…” A veritable abattoir engulfed everyone caught in the aftermath of combat. Fannie Beers, setting off to tend soldiers wounded close by in the 1864 Georgia campaign, came first upon a vast number of mangled, living beasts. “The plaintive cries and awful struggles of the horses first impressed me. They were shot in every conceivable manner, showing shattered heads, broken and bleeding limbs, and protruding entrails.” Many “struggled half-way to their feet, uttering cries of pain, while their distorted eyes seemed to reveal their suffering and implore relief.”54
Residents spent months rebuilding their communities, cutting up shattered trees, clearing and plowing ruined fields, razing shattered buildings. Acres of debris exhibited broken weapons, torn knapsacks, ruined canteens, pieces of uniform and equipment, smashed wheels, gun limbers and carriages, ration cans, blankets, shrapnel, and, of course, bodies. As we have seen, military burial details inadequately disposed of corpses. In a Yorktown house on the Virginia Peninsula, a sniper killed during the 1862 Peninsula fighting had “tumbled down the flue in a doubled up position and stuck thus in the fireplace,” making a dreadful spectacle, “shot between the eyes and the back of his skull was all blown out.” Even when the building burned, the sharpshooter’s charred corpse stayed as a grotesque monument, a Gothic horror rivaling Ambrose Bierce’s tortured creations.55
Deserted buildings became bizarre mausoleums. After Bristoe Station, August 28, 1862, two Rebel corpses remained uncollected in an old stone house. On the first floor a soldier killed by a bullet through the forehead while in the act of loading still sat on a bed with his rifle across his knees; the second body lay sprawled in blood on the upper story. After being officially evacuated, structures used as field hospitals might still contain blood-soaked rags, amputated limbs, even dead patients. Contamination of the water supply added to the health hazards facing civilians. On examination, one well at Sharpsburg disgorged the bodies of fifty-eight Rebels unceremoniously dropped down the shaft.56
Although souvenir hunters desecrated the dead, civilians usually tried to inter remains properly. Elizabeth Hook and her family took a young Rebel’s body into their home to preserve it for burial, fearing the hogs would eat it. She became haunted by memory of “the continual drip, drip of the blood from his wounds.” Bodies discovered too close to homes, found in hastily made graves under porches and in gardens, had to be exhumed and reburied properly. A farmer at Cross Keys dug up and relocated one hundred soldiers planted too near his house. A soldier of the 34th New York, revisiting Fredericksburg after the armies had moved elsewhere, reported that “every doorstep was a tombstone,” awaiting attention at the end of hostilities when civilians might reclaim their community.57
A woman returning to Manassas after the August 1862 fighting confronted acres of debris and bodies in a ditch hastily covered over: “their hands and feet were visible from many. And one poor fellow lay unburied, just as he had fallen with his horse across him, and both skeletons.” The stench from unsealed pits lingered for whole seasons. One hired hand on a Sharpsburg farm remembered with horror the pall hanging over the countryside. “We couldn’t eat a good meal and we had to shut the house up just as tight as we could of a night to keep out that odor.”58
Sometimes, the traumatic events visited on civilians shaped the remainder of their lives. One of them, Carrie McGavock, whose house had been taken as a field hospital at Franklin, dedicated her life to re-interring, in a proper cemetery with individual headstones, the 1,500 Confederates buried on her land. She wandered her hallowed ground continually, rarely missing a day of stewardship in the cemetery, continually checking her book of the dead, still haunted by one fateful day in November 1864.59
For the soldiers, repeated exposure to the terrible sights, sounds, and smells of battle could overpower their emotional resolution. The road down which they marched to war progressively darkened, shadowed by awful memories of the unimaginable. Victorians lacked a clinical diagnostic language to describe what happened to the psyche of mentally wounded fighting men. They called it simply but vividly “shook over hell” because that is what it looked like.
— CHAPTER FIVE —
THE EDGE OF SANITY
×
OFTEN, WE SEEM TO THINK THAT COMBAT’S EMOTIONAL damage largely began with the shocking trauma of trench fighting in the Great War, World War I. We tend to conceive of Civil War soldiers as hard-bitten and unlikely to break down under adverse conditions. Actually, every description of psychiatric wound identified since 1914 had precedent in the 1860s. In this chapter, we shall look at the Civil War’s emotional battle damage, which drove men to the edge of sanity and beyond. We may fail to appreciate the widespread extent of these psychological wounds because the field of psychiatry did not become fully fledged until the 1890s and only burgeoned in the first years of the new century. Consequently, no psychiatrists appeared at the fighting front before the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. Thereafter, they became an intrinsic element of military medical services, and the diagnosis of mental wounds took a giant leap forward.
One-seventh of British Great War casualties, often recorded as shell-shock cases, had psychiatric issues and constituted 20 percent of disability discharges. Although U.S. forces
engaged in heavy fighting for less than a year, they officially sustained 106,000 emotional casualties. By World War II, the number of identified mentally disturbed U.S. patients rose to one million, usually labeled combat fatigued. During initial stages of the Korean War, psychiatric wounds reached 240 per 1,000. Many suffered posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a complaint that grew in frequency through the Vietnam War to Iraq and Afghanistan. In one key manifestation of the condition, patients suffer the nightmare reliving of profoundly disturbing episodes. Psychological damage may produce extremes of character, including unreasonable anger, violence, alcohol addiction, and loss of concentration.1
The prepsychiatric era had no clinical terms to describe what physicians were seeing, so that doctors misdiagnosed mental wounds as cowardice, character loss, or lack of patriotism, whereas today we might discern a profile of damage inflicted by war. In the Napoleonic age, for instance, we can, from a modern perspective, detect cases of chronic combat exhaustion. British General Sir John Colborne, commanding a brigade on the Spanish Peninsular, 1809, retired from the field, feeling “fit for nothing.” He confessed, “I was so nervous that I used to be obliged to say, ‘Give me a glass of wine, I am going to cry.’ ” General Sir Thomas Picton begged the Duke of Wellington not to include him in the 1815 Waterloo campaign, pleading, “My Lord, I must give up. I am grown so nervous, that when any service is to be done it works upon my mind so that it is impossible for me to sleep at nights.” The Iron Duke insisted he needed Picton, and his subordinate general died leading his division into action.2
In examining the Civil War, medical historians frequently cannot characterize behavior precisely because both observers and victims, with limited understanding and lack of a clinical vocabulary, leave us inadequate clues. In late 1864, Captain J. McEntire, a U.S. provost marshal, wrote of Private William Leeds, an Army of the Potomac deserter in his charge, that “he has been strolling about in the woods … mourning for the loss of his character.” This seems a moral more than a medical judgment. Consider as a further instance the plight of General James Longstreet, wounded in the Wilderness in May 1864. At home recuperating, the general appeared “very feeble and nervous and suffers much from his wound.” He “sheds tears on the slightest provocation,” a humiliating experience. “He says he does not see why a bullet going through a man’s shoulder should make a baby of him.” Longstreet could not diagnose his symptoms as those of combat fatigue that reached a crisis when he was wounded.3