Slaves of Obsession

by Anne Perry

  “Post a watch,” Hester said simply. “Idealism has its place, and morale, but common sense is what will keep us going. We will need all our strength tomorrow, believe me. We will have to be working long after the battle itself is won or lost. For us that is only the beginning. Even the longest battle is very short, compared with the aftermath.”

  The woman hesitated.

  Merrit came into the room, her face white, her hair straggling out of its pins; she had tied it back with a torn kerchief. She looked dizzy with exhaustion.

  “We need rest,” Hester said. “Tired people make mistakes, and our errors could cost soldiers their lives. What’s your name?”

  “Emma.”

  “There’s nothing more we can do now. We have lint, adhesive plasters, bandages, brandy, canteens of water, and instruments to hand. Now we need the strength to use them, and a steady hand.”

  Emma conceded, and in weary gratitude they ate a little, drank from the water canteens, and settled in for what was left of the short night. Hester lay next to Merrit, and knew that she was not asleep. After a little while she heard her crying quietly. She did not touch her. Merrit needed to weep, and privacy was best. Hester hoped if anyone else were awake and heard her they would take it for fear and leave her to conquer it without the embarrassment of being noticed.

  Monk and Trace also heard word that battle was bound to commence on Sunday, the twenty-first of July, and that the last of the volunteers and supplies had gone out to Centreville and the other tiny settlements near Manassas Junction, ready to do all they could to help.

  They were in the street just outside the Willard Hotel. People were shouting. A man ran out of the foyer, waving his hat in the air. Two women clung to each other, sobbing.

  “Damnation!” Trace said vehemently. “Now there’s no chance of getting Breeland before the fighting. It’ll be the devil’s own job to find him. He could be wounded and taken back to one of the field hospitals, or even evacuated back here.”

  “There was never any chance of getting him before the battle,” Monk said realistically. “Chaos is our friend, not our enemy. And if he’s injured we’ll just have to leave him behind. If he’s killed, it hardly matters. Except it will be harder to blacken the name of a man who died fighting for his beliefs, whatever they were.”

  Trace stared at him. “You’re a pragmatic devil, aren’t you. Our nation is about to tear itself apart, and you can be as cold as one of your English summers.”

  Monk smiled at him, a wry baring of the teeth.

  “Better than this suffocation!” he retorted. “I’ll recover from a cold in the head faster than from malaria.”

  Trace sighed and smiled back, but his expression was shaky, too close to weeping.

  A man careered by on horseback, shouting something unintelligible, sending up a cloud of dust.

  Monk stiffened. “Our best chance of getting Breeland is if we can find him in the battlefield and take him by force, as if we were Confederates capturing a Union officer. No one will think anything odd of it, and from the fancy dress party of uniforms you’ve got, no one will know who anybody else is anyway! You could probably be joined by ancient Greeks and Romans without causing a stir, from what I’ve seen. You’ve already got Scots with kilts, French Zouaves in every color of the rainbow, not to mention sashes around the waist and everything on their heads from a turban to a fez!”

  “They were supposed to be in gray,” Trace said with a shake of his head. “And the Union in blue. God! What a mess! We’ll be shooting friends and foes alike.”

  Monk wished desperately that he could offer any comfort. If it had been England fighting its own he would not know how to bear it. There was nothing good or hopeful to say, nothing to ease the terrible truth. To try would be to show that he did not understand—or worse, that he did not care.

  They took horses—there were no more carts or carriages to be hired—and rode through the night towards Manassas, stopping only for a short while to rest. The knowledge of what lay ahead prevented anything but the most fitful sleep.

  By early Sunday morning just before dawn they passed columns of troops marching at double speed, others at a full run. Monk was horrified to see their sweating bodies stumbling along, some with haggard faces, gasping for breath in air already hot and clinging in the throat, thick with tiny flies.

  Some men even threw away their blankets and haversacks, and the roadside was strewn with dropped equipment. Later, as the sky paled in the east and they got closer to the little river known as Bull Run, there were exhausted men tripped or fallen and simply lying, trying to regather some strength before they should be called upon to load their weapons and charge the enemy. Many of them had taken off their boots and socks, and their feet were rubbed raw and bleeding. Monk had heard at least one officer trying to get the men to slow down, but they were constantly pressed forward by those behind and had no choice but to keep moving. He could see disaster closing in on them as inevitably as the heat of the coming day.

  Monk started as he heard the sharp report of a thirty-pounder gun firing three rounds, and he judged it to be on the side of the river he was on and aimed across to the other, close to a beautiful double-arched stone bridge which took the main turnpike over the Bull Run. It was the signal for the battle to begin.

  He looked at Trace beside him, sitting half slumped in the saddle, his legs covered with dust, his horse’s flanks sweating. This would be the first pitched battle between the Union and the Confederacy; the die was cast forever, no more skirmishes—this was war irrevocable.

  Monk searched Trace’s features and saw no anger, no hatred, no excitement, only an inner exhaustion of the emotions and a sense that somehow he had failed to grasp the vital thing which could have prevented this, and now it was too late.

  Again Monk tried to imagine how he would feel if this were England, if these rolling hills and valleys dotted with copses of trees and small settlements were the older, greener hillsides he was familiar with. It was Northumberland he saw in his mind, the sweep of the high, bare moors, heather-covered in late summer, the wind-driven clouds, the farms huddled in the lea, stone walls dividing the fields, stone bridges like the one crossing the creek below them, the long line of the coast and the bright water beyond.

  If it were his own land at war with itself it would wound him so the pain would never heal.

  Behind them more men were drawing up and being mustered into formation, ready to attack. There were carts and wagons rigged up as ambulances. They had passed pointed-roofed tents that would serve as field hospitals, and seen men and women, white-faced, trying to think of anything more they could do to be ready for the wounded. To Monk it had an air of farce about it. Could these tens of thousands of men really be waiting to slaughter each other, men who were of the same blood and the same language, who had created a country out of the wilderness, founded on the same ideals?

  The tension was gathering. Men were on the move, as they had been since reveille had been sounded at two in the morning, but in the dark few had been able to gather themselves, their weapons and equipment, and form into any sort of order.

  Hester waited in an agony of suspense as she heard the gunfire in the distance. Merrit kept glancing towards the door of the church where they were waiting for the first wounded. Nine o’clock passed. A few men were brought in, half carried, half supported. The military surgeon took out a ball from one man’s shoulder, another’s leg. Now and then word came of the fighting.

  “Can’t take the Stone Bridge!” one wounded man gasped, his hand clutching his other arm, blood streaming through his fingers. “Rebels have got a hell of a force there.” Hester judged him to be about twenty, his face gray with exhaustion, eyes wide and fixed. The surgeon was busy with someone else.

  “Come and we’ll bind that up for you,” she said gently, taking him by the other arm and guiding him to a chair where she could reach him easily. “Get me water,” she said over her shoulder to Merrit. “And some for hi
m to drink too.”

  “There’s thousands of them!” the man went on, staring at Hester. “Our boys are dying … all over the ground, they are. You can smell blood in the air. I stood on … someone’s …” He could not finish.

  Hester knew what he meant. She had walked on battlefields where dismembered bodies lay frozen in a last horror, human beings torn or blown apart. She had wanted never to see it again, never to allow it back into her mind. She turned away from his face, and found her hands shaking as she cut his sleeve off and exposed the flesh of the wound. It was mangled and bleeding heavily, but as far as she could judge the bone was untouched, and it was certainly not arterial bleeding, or he would not still be alive, let alone able to have staggered to the church. The main thing was to keep the wound clean and remove the shot. She had seen gangrene too often. The smell was one she could never forget. It was worse than death, a living necrosis.

  “It’ll be all right.” She meant to say it strongly, reassuringly, soothe away his fear, but her voice was wobbly, as if she herself were terrified. Her hands worked automatically. They had done it so many times before, probing delicately with tweezers, trying not to hurt and knowing that it was agony, searching to find the little piece of metal that had caused such damage to living tissue, trying to be certain she had it all. Some of them fragmented, leaving behind poisonous shards. She had to work quickly, for pain, or shock which could kill, and before too much blood was lost. But equally she had to be sure.

  And while she was working her mind was caught in a web of nightmare memory until she could hear the rats’ feet as if they were around her again, scuttering on the floor, their fat bodies plopping off the walls, their squeaking to each other. She could smell the human waste, feel its texture under her feet on the boards overrun with it, from men too weak to move, bodies emaciated from starvation and dysentery or cholera. She could see their faces, hollow-eyed, knowing they were dying, hear their voices as they spoke of what they loved, tried to tell each other it was worth it, joked about the tomorrows they knew would never come, denied the rage they had so much cause, so much right, to feel at their betrayal by ignorance and stupidity.

  She could remember some of them individually: a fair-haired lieutenant who had lost a leg and died of gangrene, a Welsh boy who had loved his home and his dog, and talked of them until others told him to be quiet and teased him about it. He had died of cholera.

  There were others, countless men who had perished one way or another. Most of them had been brave, hiding their horror and their fear. Some had been shamed into silence; to others it came naturally. She had felt for all of them.

  She had thought that the present, her love for Monk, all the causes and the issues there were to fight now, the puzzles, the people who filled her life, had healed the past over in forgetting.

  But the dust, the blood, the smell of canvas and wine and vinegar, the knowledge of pain, had brought it back again with a vividness that left her shaking, bewildered, more drenched with horror than those new to it, like Merrit, who had barely guessed at what was to come. The sweat was running down Hester’s body inside her clothes and turning cold, even in the suffocating, airless heat.

  She was terrified. She could not cope, not again. She had done her share of this, seen too much already!

  She found the shot and drew it out; it came followed by a gush of blood. For an instant she froze. She could not bear to watch one more person die! This was not her war. It was all monumentally stupid, a terrible madness risen from the darkness of hell. It must be stopped. She should rush outside, now, and scream at them until they put away the guns and saw the humanity in all their faces, every one, the sameness, not the difference, saw their own reflections in the enemy’s eyes and knew themselves in it all!

  But as her mind was racing, her fingers were stitching the wound, reaching for bandages, pads, binding it up, testing that the dressing was not too tight, calling for a little wine to mix with the water. She heard herself comforting the man, telling him what to do now, how to look after the wound, and to get it dressed again when he reached Alexandria, or wherever he would be shipped.

  She heard his voice replying, steadier than before, stronger. She watched him climb to his feet and stagger away, supported by an orderly, turning to smile before he left the tent.

  More wounded were brought in. She helped fetch, roll bandages, hold instruments and bottles, carry things, lift people, speak to them, ease their fear or their pain.

  News came in of the battle. Much of it meant little to Hester or to Merrit, neither of whom knew the area, but whether it was good or ill was easily read on the faces of those who did.

  Some time after eleven the surgeon came in, white-faced, his uniform blouse covered with blood. He stopped abruptly when he saw Hester.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, his voice sliding up close to hysteria.

  She stood up from the man whose wound she had just finished binding. She turned towards the surgeon and saw the fear in his eyes. He was not more than thirty and she knew that nothing in his life had prepared him for this.

  “I’m a nurse,” she said steadily. “I’ve seen war before.”

  “Gunshot … wounds?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “More Rebel troops have arrived on Matthews Hill,” he said, watching her. “There are a lot more wounded coming in. We’ve got to get them out of here.”

  She nodded.

  He did not know what to say. He was foundering in circumstances beyond his skill or imagination. He was grateful for any help at all, even from a woman. He did not question it.

  An hour later a man with a badly shattered arm told them with a smile through his agony that Sherman had crossed the Bull Run River and the Rebels were pulling back to Henry Hill. There was a cheer, mostly through gritted teeth, from the other wounded men.

  Hester glanced across at Merrit, the front of her dress wrinkled and smeared with blood, and saw her smile. The girl’s eyes brightened for a moment, and then she turned back to pass more bandages to the surgeon, who had barely taken time to look up at the news.

  During the next hour the wounded grew fewer. The surgeon relaxed a trifle and sat down for a few moments, taking time for a drink of water and wiping his hand across his brow. He smiled ruefully at Merrit, who had been working most closely with him.

  “Looks like we’re doing well,” he said with a lift in his voice. “We’ll drive them back. They’ll know they’ve had a battle. Maybe they’ll think better of it, eh?”

  Merrit pushed her hair off her brow and repositioned a few of her pins.

  “It’s a hard price to pay though, isn’t it!”

  Hester could still hear the gunfire, cannon and rifles in the distance. She felt a sickness creeping through her. She wanted to escape, to find some way of refusing to believe, to feel anymore, to be involved in it at all. She understood very clearly why people go mad. Sometimes it is the only way to survive the unbearable when all other flight has been cut off. When the body cannot remove itself, and emotions cannot be deadened, then the mind simply refuses to accept reality.

  She walked away a moment before speaking. If she waited too long she might not do it at all.

  “What?” The surgeon turned to her, his voice incredulous.

  She heard her answer hollowly, as if it were someone else speaking, disembodied. “They are still fighting. Can’t you hear the gunfire?”

  “Yes … it seems farther away … I think,” he replied. “Our boys are doing well … hardly any wounded, and those are slight.”

  “It means the wounded haven’t been brought,” she corrected him. “Or there are too many dead. The fighting is too heavy for anyone to leave and care for them.” She saw the denial in his face. “We must go and do what we can.”

  It was definitely fear she saw in his eyes, perhaps not of injury or death to himself, more probably of other people’s pain and of his own inability to help. She knew exactly what it was like; it churned
in her own stomach and made her feel sick and weak. The only thing that would be worse was the hell of living with failure afterwards. She had seen it in men who believed themselves cowards, truly or falsely.

  She turned towards the door. “We need to take water, bandages, instruments, all we can carry.” She did not try to persuade him. It was not a time for many words. She was going. He could follow or not.

  Outside she met a soldier who was climbing into a blood-spattered ambulance.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Sudley Church,” he replied. “It’s about eight miles away … nearer where the fighting is now.”

  “Wait!” Hester ordered. “We’re coming!” And she ran back inside to get Merrit. The surgeon was still busy trying to evacuate the last of the wounded.

  Merrit came with her, carrying as many canteens as she could manage. They scrambled up into the ambulance and set out the eight miles to Sudley.

  The heat was like a furnace; the glare of the sun hurt the eyes. Clouds of dust and gunpowder marked easily where the fighting was densest, on a rise beyond the river, whose course was well marked by the trees along the banks.

  It took them over an hour, and Hester got off at least a mile before the hospital, carrying half a dozen canteens and setting out to reach the men still lying where they had fallen.

  She passed broken carts and wagons, a few wounded horses, but there was very little cavalry. There were shattered weapons lying in the grass. She saw one which had obviously exploded; its owner was dead a couple of yards away, his face blackened, the ground dark with blood. Beside him others lay wounded.

  She swore blindly at the ignorance and incompetence which had sent young men into battle with guns that were so old and ill-made they slaughtered the users. The irony brought tears of helplessness to her eyes. Was she really sure it would be better if they fired properly, and killed whoever was in their sights instead? Guns were created to kill, to maim, cripple, disfigure, cause pain and fear. It was their purpose.