Wedded to War

by Jocelyn Green

  “You will take your leave, sir!”

  Phineas looked up, chest heaving with anger, to find a man in uniform standing before him.

  With a hand still pressed to her burning cheek, Charlotte watched in fascination as the two men sparred.

  “You will not lay another finger on her.” The calmness in her brother-in-law’s tone belied the glint of warning in his eyes. His were hands raised, palms out, as if he were approaching a wild animal. Charlotte’s skin crawled at the resemblance.

  “And who do you think you are?” A feral smile curved Phineas’s lips, but he backed away.

  “I am Colonel Jacob Carlisle,” Alice’s husband announced, “and I am this woman’s protector. You will leave now.”

  When Phineas hesitated, Jacob took another step forward, sending her former suitor scurrying toward the door.

  “And you will not come back. If you appear on this street again, I’ll have you arrested.” His tone was even, and his face composed. Yet he commanded more respect from his carriage and character than Phineas could ever hope to force with his demands and fits of fury.

  As Phineas stormed out of the brownstone, Charlotte breathed a prayer of thanks that she had escaped a life with him. She didn’t need to be bound to such a lowlife. She needed a real man, like Jacob.

  No, she corrected herself. Like Caleb.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  New York City

  Saturday, August 30, 1862

  The long summer day finally tucked itself away, and Charlotte climbed into a bed that smelled of lilac water. Not brandy or lemon juice or beef tea. Lilac water.

  Almost two months had passed since Charlotte had come home on the, Daniel Webster. Or rather, since I came back to New York. For her spirit had yet to come home. Though she relished being with her family again, the easy, gentle life she had been raised in and bred for no longer fit her as it once had. It chafed against her skin and pulled tightly in all the wrong places. Like the shoddy uniforms from Brooks Brothers. Sure to fall to pieces in the rain.

  Charlotte felt as though she were a guest here—but she hadn’t even been able to play that role very well. She couldn’t stand to let Ruby serve her afternoon tea or lemonade when she was used to serving beef tea to thousands of soldiers. The soft bed that she had once craved now gave her nightmares, visions of what she had left behind. She wore the hoop skirts again out of modesty and deference to her mother’s sense of propriety, but she desperately missed the freedom of movement she had enjoyed without them for more than a year. She had dutifully attended ladies teas, brunches, and knitting circles for the soldiers, but she loathed their idle chatter.

  Lord, I don’t fit in anywhere anymore, she prayed. What am I good for now?

  Slumber finally quieted her questions, but didn’t last long.

  The shriek of newsboys invaded Charlotte’s dreams, taking her back to the Ebbitt House on the end of Newspaper Row. “The Battle of Bull Run” was on their lips as they hawked the Evening Star. It had been such a terrible battle. Charlotte willed herself to wake up before the nightmare became vivid and haunting like all the others.

  But with her eyes wide open, and her bare feet on the cool hardwood floor, the shrieking did not stop. She flung open the window and listened carefully.

  “Second Battle of Bull Run!” a small boy shouted below her window.

  Charlotte gasped. Not again! No, no, she had lived this reality once before. She had woken up from the nightmare; this wasn’t happening. “The Bulk of the Rebel Army Engaged! The Great Struggle Still Proceeding!”

  By the time she heard, “Arrangements for the Care of the Wounded!” she had already tied a flannel wrapper around herself and was running down the stairs, flying out the front door, still barefoot. She wanted to snatch the words out of the newsboy’s mouth and shake him. She wanted to tell him he was wrong, he had to be wrong.

  Instead, she pressed a coin into his hand and snatched only the paper.

  Ruby was waiting for her just inside the house, her hair in a braid down her back, her face illuminated by the kerosene lamp in her hand.

  “Well?” she said, gently bouncing Aiden in her arms.

  Charlotte unfolded the paper on the dining room table and read it out loud. The first line:

  The Battle of Bull Run substantially began the war—has been the common remark on the streets this afternoon—and the new Battle of Bull Run is now ending it.

  “They thought the war would be over after the First Bull Run, too,” Charlotte muttered. She scanned quickly, hungrily, until she came to the call for volunteers to care for the wounded. It was madness. The War Department “made request for volunteer nurses to proceed immediately to the battlefield.”

  “What!” Charlotte’s voice rose. “Just anyone? They must be desperate. If there are so many wounded that they are asking for civilian volunteers, we are definitely not winning the war with this battle!”

  Her heart pumped warning through her veins as she read the official request. Each volunteer will provide himself with a bucket and tin cup, to supply water, and also a bottle of brandy.

  “And just how many soldiers do they think one bottle of brandy will serve?” Ruby said, patting Aiden’s back.

  … Transportation will be furnished for all as rapidly as possible at the rendezvous by Capt. DANAS, corner of Twenty-second and G streets. Those who can, should provide their own transportation.

  “Their own transportation?” Charlotte laughed. “The wounded will need coffins, not nurses, by the time wagons can make their way on those torn-up Virginia roads.” She continued reading.

  Shortly after these regulations were issued, the government began impressing the hacks and all other means of conveyance. The Street Railroad Company tendered their omnibuses, recently bought from the late omnibus line, and a large number were accepted. Large numbers of citizens began preparing to go down. Many of them have gone already, and many more start out at daybreak.

  Trains are running out to Manassas again, and telegraph communication is restored.

  Charlotte closed her eyes and groaned. “How shameful! The army needs its own working ambulance system. This, my dear Ruby, is what goes wrong when an army doesn’t prepare to take their wounded from the field.”

  “Won’t the volunteers do any good?” Ruby asked.

  “No! They will bring chaos, not help. They will be terrified and run, causing more confusion, taking up precious time, not to mention space on the railroad cars that should be used to evacuate the wounded.”

  The newspaper between them, the women read each other’s faces.

  “You’re going, aren’t you?” asked Ruby.

  Charlotte smiled even as urgency consumed her. “They asked for volunteers, didn’t they?”

  Washington City

  Tuesday, September 2, 1862

  If Frederick Law Olmsted had been surprised to see Charlotte suddenly before him again in her nursing uniform, he did not take the time to show it.

  “You must be on your way.” His first words to her. “Forty-three wagonloads of supplies were sent forward by the Surgeon General and they were all captured by the enemy when Pope’s men retreated. They have nothing but what we supply.” He cupped her elbow and escorted her out of the Treasury Building. “We’ve sent fourteen wagons with supplies already, and the last two are on their way out to Centreville right now. You can ride on one of them.”

  The streets were eerily vacant since the army had commandeered nearly every vehicle on wheels to act as ambulances already. Energy coursed through Charlotte as Olmsted helped her into the last supply wagon on its way out of the city.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Waverly,” he said, still holding her hand.

  “Whatever for?” She was afraid to hear the answer.

  “You’ll understand when you arrive. I’m sorry. I wish I could protect you from what you are about to experience—”

  “I do not wish to be protected.” She hoped she sounded brave.

  “W
e need you more than we ever have before.”

  “I’m just a nurse, not a surgeon. But I will do what I can.”

  “I’m afraid you will do more than that.” The intensity in his eyes almost frightened her. “The inspectors I sent with the supplies, and the relief agents, including Frederick Knapp, they haven’t come back yet. They’ve been dressing wounds.”

  Charlotte stifled the urge to call them unqualified for the task. Hadn’t the War Department invited the general public to come help? At least the Commission men wouldn’t be drinking all the brandy on the way to the battlefield.

  “It’s quite bad, then, isn’t it?” A sick apprehension settled over her.

  “The worst of the war, so far.”

  The driver cracked the reins on the horses’ backs, and the wagon began its twenty-five-mile journey to Centreville.

  Night had already descended by the time their wagon arrived at the train station, and the thin coating of sweat on Charlotte’s body now chilled her in the night wind. With her flasks already filled and pots of jelly in her apron pockets, she left the driver to unload the boxes and set off for the perimeter of darkness surrounding the railroad platform.

  Wind rushed through the pine trees above her with the roar of an ocean tide. She lit her candle and held it high. A sea of broken bodies stretched out before her as far as she could see. She felt a tugging on her skirt, and imagined she was being pulled beneath the surface of this gruesome ocean, that she would surely drown in its current before she escaped.

  “Water?”

  “Better,” she said, gathering her training about her. “Have some brandy.” She knelt and held the flask to his lips, scanning his body with the candlelight as he choked down the liquid. His legs were broken, bones thrust up through his trousers like jagged branches of driftwood rising up out of the beach. She focused again on his face, on relieving his thirst with stimulants. It was all she was asked to do. She would not be in a position to make the same mistake she had with Marty.

  She moved to the next man, and the next, dribbling brandy into their mouths until her flasks ran dry, and scooping jelly into their mouths with her fingers. She had not moved ten feet beyond the platform before she returned to the station for more. Over and over, she repeated the process until her thighs burned from squatting near the soldiers, her back ached from hunching over their forms. Her own throat grew parched and scratchy in the night air, but she barely noticed. Sobs of relief broke from the men and boys at her feet. Some called her an angel, but she was all too aware that she was only human.

  Slowly, dawn chased the darkness away, exposing miles of broken bodies. Emaciated, blackened with gunpowder, shattered, suffering.

  “We will die here on this field before we ever reach a hospital,” one man told her. “Our ambulances and wagons—we left them on the Peninsula.”

  “It’s not so bad.” She tried to smile. “You’ll be on the train soon.”

  But the trains were doing nothing. Maybe one, maybe two, had come and gone, while the bodies multiplied on the steaming ground as the sun rose higher in the sky.

  Charlotte swatted at the flies now nestling in the edges of the wounds. Standing, she straightened her back and squinted into the distance, but she could find no end to this mass of human suffering.

  Some distance away, another man crouched low and spoke calmly to a soldier as he wrapped a tourniquet about his leg. He was thin, but moved with determination from soldier to soldier, his voice a comforting wordless drone to her ears. A gold medical insignia brightened his armband. This was no drunk civilian nurse.

  He stood stiffly to stretch, and spotted her. He waved her over to him, his hand bloody from another man’s wound, and she picked her way between the bodies, watching every footstep carefully until she was close enough to speak to him.

  “I need you—” they had both begun at once.

  The hint of a smile lifted her lips, and she raised her face to his for the first time.

  It was Caleb.

  For a single moment, their eyes locked in recognition. Unasked questions stuck in Charlotte’s throat. But this was not the place for personal pain, when the country lay bleeding at their feet.

  “I need you.” It was Caleb who broke the spell.

  “I’ve been trying,” she said. “But there are so many. I can’t get to them all, and brandy and jellies are not enough!”

  “We’ll never save them all,” he said. It was not the answer she wanted. “So we must save the ones we can.”

  “What? How?” Exhaustion clouded her brain. She could not understand what he was trying to say.

  “There is limited room on the trains. We need to make sure the people we put on them don’t die on the way to the hospitals. Do you understand?” He paused. “We can only send back people who have a good chance of living. The others—God have mercy on their souls—we will load onto the trains later.”

  The fog in her mind slowly cleared and panic began to settle in. “As cargo? You mean, not as passengers?”

  “I need you to choose,” he said, and she shook her head.

  “You want me to choose who will live and who will die?” Dread filled her mouth like an unclean paste.

  “No. Only God can do that. I need you to think. Look at the wounds around you. Who will have the best chance at a hospital? Get them out first. Even the slightly wounded will die of starvation if left here long enough. Save the ones we can. Organize them into groups. I need your help, Charlie!”

  “I can’t do it!” She took a step backward and thunder rolled in the distance. “I can’t! You don’t understand—you didn’t get my letter—”

  Caleb grabbed her by the shoulders. “I got your letter,” he said, pinning her down with his eyes. “Right now, I need you to obey my order, as a doctor to a nurse. Help me. I know you can do it. I order you to do it.”

  Charlotte was paralyzed. I can’t. I’ll make mistakes. I don’t want this responsibility.

  “Hang it all, Charlie!” He shouted at her, chest heaving, as if he could read her mind. The voice she’d always remembered as warm and comforting was now white-hot with conviction. “This isn’t about us, about how we feel, about the nightmares it will give us! It’s about them. Them!” He spread his arms wide above the fallen soldiers. “There are people here we can actually help, but they are mixed in with the lost causes. Find the ones we can help! Sort them out from the rest so they have a chance at a hospital! You have a brain, and I want you to use it! Will you do that?”

  Cool drops of rain splattered on their bodies like drops of water sizzling in frying pan. They faced off, both of them pulsing with emotion, both of them aware that as they argued, more men died. There was no time for this, and Charlotte knew it. Lord, give me strength and courage! she prayed desperately. Give me discernment!

  Armory Square Hospital, Washington City

  Saturday, September 6, 1862

  Charlotte’s footsteps sounded distant to her as she trod the halls of Armory Square Hospital. It was an amazing place, constructed according to Sanitary Commission recommendations: one thousand beds in twelve pavilions. She had barely slept since arriving back in Washington.

  After four days of loading the wounded onto the trains, they were finally all off the field, except for the ones now at rest in shallow graves within a stone’s throw of the railroad station. They would have died anyway, Caleb had said. We got all the rest home. Anywhere not on the battlefield was home enough for the wounded, at least for now.

  But of course, the work didn’t stop here. Charlotte’s hands hadn’t stopped bathing and feeding patients, changing dressings, and soaking bandages since they arrived here with the last load of wounded. And Caleb’s hands hadn’t stopped cutting off arms and legs.

  The pile of limbs outside the surgery window grew ever higher as it baked in the sun. The nauseating stench drew hordes of buzzing flies that scattered only to make room for another deposit dropped out the window.

  On her way to replenish
her tray of bandages, Charlotte paused outside the surgery room to catch a glimpse of Caleb. His arms were stained with blood up to his elbows, his face haggard beneath a week’s worth of stubble. He had been standing at that surgery table for almost forty-eight hours, refusing a break until his knees refused to support him anymore. She watched helplessly as he collapsed from exhaustion.

  Charlotte stepped away from the door as two men hauled him out and lowered him onto a cot to sleep. When they had shut themselves back into the operating room, Charlotte studied Caleb’s face in his near-catatonic sleep, wishing she could offer him some words of comfort and receive some in return.

  Instead, she fetched a basin of water, a sponge, and a bristle brush, and sat by his side, washing his arms and hands. Every stroke of the sponge on his arms came away red—not from his own blood but from the carving away of men from their limbs. She scrubbed blood from his fingernails, just as he had once done for her after her father had died. Tears fell from her burning eyes, rippling the scarlet water in the basin, her heart aching for what this war required of Caleb. Of all of them. Some wounds are invisible.

  No wonder he had not responded to her letter. He was married to his work, for the sake of the country. It was as it should be. She would not distract him from it.

  The setting was perfect.

  They may be able to keep me from their house of snobs on Sixteenth Street, thought Phineas as he watched Charlotte from a safe distance, but no one will look for me here.

  Learning her whereabouts had proven easy enough from the rumors circulating about Charlotte Waverly’s latest exploits. Following the trail that led to her had been his driving force ever since that cretin, Jacob Carlisle, had driven him out of the Waverly brownstone. Humiliating! The idea that Phineas had played the coward had writhed in his belly ever since. It would not happen again. Next time he met any opposition, he’d be prepared.