by Murray Pura
Lyndel clenched her fists. “But I am not contrite. I have not sinned.”
He stared at her. “Of course you have sinned. The Amish beat their swords into plowshares centuries ago. You are Amish. You took those vows of peace when you were baptized. Now you have broken them.”
“I have never lifted a weapon, Father.”
“You have aided hundreds who do. Men you have nursed have returned to the fields of war to kill other men.”
“I have not broken Amish laws. I have not broken God’s laws. He commands me to love my neighbor as myself. That is what I do on the battlefield. So do others. We do not kill, Father. It’s life we wish to restore to the young men. Suppose it was Levi lying wounded in the mud? Would you rather people stood by and did nothing for him? That they let him die because they didn’t wish to soil their hands in warfare?”
“There are others who can do this work, daughter. It is not for us. We are called to be Amish. That is our ministry to America and to the world. It is for us to live out the Sermon on the Mount, not discuss it as they do at Harvard and Yale. We must exemplify forgiveness and mercy. In our bodies we must live like Jesus Christ, who gave his life for others.”
“I am giving my life for others. So is Levi. So is Joshua. So is Nathaniel. So did Corinth.”
“Always you will use slavery as an excuse.”
“An excuse?” Lyndel’s eyes widened. “I saw Charlie Preston, Father. Before I ran to you for help I tried to lift his body and take the pressure of the rope off his neck. I thought he might still be alive.” Tears cut across her face. “I saw the wounds on his back. Do you think I didn’t notice how they had whipped him to the bone? Do you think covering him with Nathaniel’s shirt meant I would forget what I had seen?”
“I am sorry, my child—”
“How many men like Charlie have been murdered since this nation began? How many have been scourged like Jesus and worked to death? Do you feel ashamed at their blood? Do you cry out for their broken bodies like you do for the broken bodies at Antietam Creek and Manassas Junction?”
Her father extended his hands and came toward her. “Lyndy.”
She stepped away from him. “I do not want anyone’s blood shed. But it may be that blood for blood is what it will take to make this nation whole again. I do not wish it, but I cannot say what is required. I only know I’m called to be Amish and a follower of Jesus and because of that, I’m obliged to be on the battleground binding up wounds. Just as Levi and Nathaniel feel obliged to bear arms to put an end to wickedness. Yes, Father, in the same manner in which Jesus shall come a second time to right wrongs and establish justice on the earth, mounted on a charger, sweeping away evil with the sword.”
Bishop Keim dropped his arms to his side. “How you have changed.” He went to the doorway. “I’m going to get my case. I did not travel with very much and I am ready to leave. If you wish to join me, we can walk to the station together.”
“You know I can’t, Father. I am…where I believe God wants me to be.”
“You understand it will be impossible to receive any more letters from you, although we have thanked the Lord for them?”
“Ja.”
“That there will be no more parcels from your mother with the wild ginger?”
“I’m sorry to hear that. The plants help us to cure the wounded.”
He lifted his hands. “From the moment my train leaves Washington you are cut off from us. You and your brother and the others. There is nothing I can do. And you have made it clear there is nothing more I can say.”
“The priest went on his way. And the Levite. But the Samaritan stopped and had compassion.”
Her father’s face filled with blood. “Do not quote the Scriptures to me.”
She stood in the hall as he picked up his case from his room, along with a heavy coat he threw over his shoulders, and began to walk down the staircase.
“I love you, Papa,” she said quietly.
It looked as if he was going to carry on without stopping but at the foot of the stairs he hesitated and glanced up. “I love you as well, my daughter. May Christ be with you.”
The front door opened and shut. She went to her window and looked out. His tall slender figure moved along the street, one hand gripping his case, a wind stirring dark autumn leaves, a fine mist softening the night and blurring the glass of the windowpane. He vanished in the shadows but she remained at the window a long time, finally leaning her head against it, unwilling to sit down or take to her bed. She prayed, she slept for a few minutes, she woke, she prayed again, her head still resting on the windowpane. Then she heard the train’s whistle crying over the city and the war and taking her father back to a world of crops and harvest and draft horses and hymns. She went to the chair he had been sitting in when she entered the room and remained there throughout the night.
16
Lyndel didn’t see Nathaniel again for more than a month. A quick visit to Armory Square gave evidence of the great need for nurses to tend the wounded brought in from Antietam Creek, so she went to work. One day became two and three and then thirty. She slept four or five hours a night and returned to the hospital each morning well before dawn.
Letters arrived from Nathaniel imploring her to return to the regiment and she sent back hastily written messages expressing her love and promising she would rejoin the ambulance corps and surgeons’ wagons as soon as she could. She didn’t tell him she had no intention of making her way back to the Army of the Potomac until there was a reason for her to be with the troops other than to hold Nathaniel in her arms. It was crucial that she work. The visit with her father had filled her with a darkness that could only be kept at bay by saving as many wounded as possible.
There was a bright moment when she discovered Nip in one of her wards. He had been shunted from field hospital to field hospital and had never been strong enough to pen a note or get word to his platoon. An infection had almost ended his life but further removal of shell fragments and constant cleansing of his wound, followed by quiet recovery at Armory Square, had him ready to return to his regiment by late November.
“You tell the boys how much I miss them,” she instructed Nip the morning he headed out.
“Anyone special?” he teased.
“I’m sure you’re bright enough to figure that out. If you have the courage you can give him one of these.” And then she kissed him on the forehead.
He smiled his small smile. “I might summon up the courage, Miss Keim. But I’m not sure that Nathaniel won’t belt me, even if I say the kiss is from you.”
“Not Nathaniel. Remember, at heart, he’s an Amish boy, even after all this.”
“Even so, I’ve pulled out of this last scrape by the skin of my teeth. I don’t want to push my luck or God’s favor.”
Morganne sent a telegram the second week of December warning her that the army seemed to be preparing for an assault. Lyndel repacked her case and took a train as far forward as she could and then talked her way onto an ambulance drawn by four black horses. She arrived just as the army crossed the Rappahannock River on pontoon bridges and began to occupy Fredericksburg.
Stunned, she watched as Union troops ransacked the town, smashing windows, stealing clothing and furniture, and setting buildings on fire. The town hadn’t surrendered, she was told, and this was its punishment. She made her way, with a military escort, to Nathaniel’s platoon, an anger gathering inside her as she stepped through streets full of broken glass, bayoneted couches, and scorched rugs. The Iron Brigade was not committing any of the depredations—in fact Nathaniel and other sergeants and officers were trying to quell the looters, but all Lyndel could think of was what her father would say about armies and wars and the sin the troops were committing.
“How can we tell the world we’re fighting for a better America when we’re treating fellow Americans like this?” she blurted out in her anger.
“Can’t you see I am trying to stop it?” he said in defense. “I do
n’t like it any better than you do!”
She stormed away with her military escort and eventually found where Morganne and Hiram and the medical units were located. They were a half-mile from Fredericksburg on the other side of the Rappahannock at a place called Stafford Heights. She agonized all night that Nathaniel could be killed in the morning’s attack and they had parted in the middle of an argument.
Led by General Burnside now, not McClellan, Union forces crossed a canal on three narrow bridges the next day once the fog had burned off and attacked a high ridge known as Marye’s Heights. After the first assault was thrown back by entrenched Rebel forces Lyndel was too busy with casualties that came to them to fret over Nathaniel and the rough words she had hurled at him.
Smoke billowed over Fredericksburg as if the fog had settled back down over houses and churches again. Gunfire rolled and roared from the ridge, where the slopes were increasingly covered in the blue uniforms of the wounded. After the fourth assault was repulsed Morganne told her they were asking for nurses in Fredericksburg and just below Marye’s Heights.
“Clara is already in the town,” she said. “Hiram is over by Marye’s Heights and sent me a note. He said the wounded are in desperate straits.”
“Then we should go,” Lyndel replied. “Our surgeons here can get plenty of help from others.”
“We’ll have to cross the Rappahannock into Fredericksburg and then cross the canal to the battleground.”
Lyndel’s eyes became steel-gray. “If Lee wants to shoot us he can shoot us.”
Slipping across the Rappahannock on the pontoon bridges the Union army had placed, they hurried through town. Wounded were being carried by stretcher bearers into houses and buildings. After a short prayer the two began to approach one of the slender bridges over the canal. Hundreds of decks of playing cards were scattered on the ground in front of them.
“What’s this?” Lyndel was looking down at a queen of hearts.
“The devil’s instruments,” said Morganne. “No soldier would wish to risk facing his Maker with those in his pocket.”
They began to cross even as shells crashed into the water and balls sent up splashes all around them. Before their very eyes, soldiers in front of and behind them were killed and toppled into the canal.
Shocked and angry, Lyndel’s eyes lit as if by a white phosphorus match. She stopped in the middle of the bridge and stared defiantly up at the gray troops she could see crouched behind a stone wall on the heights.
“What are you doing?” demanded Morganne. “Keep moving!”
“Let us see what sort of men war has turned these Southerners into!” Lyndel snapped. “Let us find out if they will stoop to firing on unarmed women!”
She and Morganne stood still for a full minute while the battle shattered the sky above them. Gradually the splashes from bullets became less and less until they ceased.
“Are the Confederates firing on us?” asked Morganne, looking upward anxiously.
Lyndel shielded her eyes with her hand and peered through a haze of black powder smoke and sunlight. “No. I thank God.”
They finished crossing the canal. Hiram rushed up to them from a spot where a number of war correspondents were hugging the ground.
“What are you two doing here? Have you lost your minds? Burnside will be sending up a fifth assault any minute.”
A bullet plucked his derby from his head and the three of them crouched low.
“You told us the wounded needed help,” Morganne reminded him.
“Yes, yes, but to come here when the air is thick with lead—”
Lyndel seized Hiram’s hand. “Tell me what’s happening with Nathaniel and his men.”
“They haven’t been engaged. Except for the 24th Michigan, who put up a stiff fight, the Iron Brigade hasn’t been used at all.”
“I thank God. But why have they been spared?”
“Ask Burnside. And while you’re at it, ask him why he didn’t send troops upstream and downstream and come at the Rebels from the sides and back as well as the front. All he’s doing is slaughtering our young men.”
“Where are the wounded being assembled?”
Hiram pointed, his hatless red hair blowing about in a sudden breeze. “See the field hospital over there by the water? Then the stretcher bearers get them across the canal into Fredericksburg or all the way across the Rappahannock back to Stafford Heights.”
“Do you think you’ll see Nathaniel and Levi?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you do, please tell Nathaniel how much I love him. And tell them both—and Joshua—that I’m praying for them.”
Hiram nodded. “All right.”
“Lyndel.” Morganne’s pale blue eyes were locked onto her friend. “They need us.”
“Then let’s go to them.”
Morganne kissed Hiram quickly on the cheek. “I’ll be fine.”
“I’m going back across the canal to send a telegram. Then I’ll join you and try to help out.” Hiram held her hand a moment. “I don’t believe a Rebel sniper would target you intentionally. But there are ricochets. And cannon fire is just as indiscriminate. You shouldn’t be here.”
She smiled and touched her lips gently to his. “Yes. I should.”
The two nurses crouched and ran to where surgeons were working on the most severe injuries. They began to clean and dress the wounds of those who were to be carried back across the canal into Fredericksburg.
Soon their hands and faces were streaked with blood. At one point, as Morganne rose to get water from the canal, a bullet passed through the hem of her dress, tugging so sharply she thought she had been snagged by a thorn. An hour later, as another attack was being launched against Marye’s Heights and the stone wall, a ball laid open Lyndel’s cheek and knocked her to the ground. Blood trickled down her face and smeared her neck.
“You must get back into Fredericksburg,” a surgeon commanded when she came for bandages. “We can’t care for you. There are too many who have been shot.”
“I’m not here for your help,” she replied. “Only to get supplies for the wounded.”
“You can’t work like that.”
“Yes, I can. The blood will clot soon enough.”
“Miss Keim. I could order you.”
She stared at the doctor. “You could, sir. But I can’t hear you very well. The musket fire is deafening.”
The assaults ended with the quick coming of the December night. Morganne found Union coats full of bullet holes that had been thrown to one side and the two women wore them as they nursed in the cold dark until three or four in the morning. There were no more attacks the next day, December 14th, but the cries of the wounded that had pained Lyndel all night continued into the morning. Splashing icy water on her face she went back to cleaning and binding wounds and examining tourniquets she had fastened earlier.
Early in the afternoon she and Morganne watched in silence while a Rebel sergeant crisscrossed the ground in front of the stone wall, canteens dangling from his body, eventually giving hundreds of injured Union soldiers water. No Northern soldier targeted him. Both armies faced each other, guns leveled, a few hundred yards separating them, as his gray form moved from one blue-uniformed soldier to another. It went on for hours as he handed out blankets and coats as well. Then Burnside asked for a truce so that he could bring the wounded down from Marye’s Heights. Lee granted the truce and the nurses joined the stretcher bearers as they climbed the slopes to reach the thousands of Union casualties. The two nurses treated as many as they could before the men were carried off the ridge.
Lyndel briefly came near a Rebel sergeant who was standing by the wall watching her. She knew who he must be from all the canteens still slung from his body. Approaching him she extended her hand. Surprised, he took it and held it a few seconds and then removed his hat.
“May I have the pleasure of your name, sir?” she asked.
“Kirkland, ma’am. Richard Kirkland. From Flat Rock in S
outh Carolina. Kershaw County.”
“Sergeant Kirkland, I am Miss Lyndel Keim from Elizabethtown, Lancaster County, in Pennsylvania. God bless you for what you have done today. The water you brought to the wounded saved scores of lives.”
He looked away. “I had to do it.”
“But they are your enemy.”
His eyes returned to her. “We’re in a fight all right. But I don’t think of them as such.”
“Nor do I think of you as such. Thank you again, Richard Kirkland. I will remember you. I will pray for you. You are a man close to God’s heart.”
He smiled. “I am grateful for your words, Miss.”
Lyndel returned to bandaging the wounded and stanching blood flow with tourniquets. Soon Hiram was working alongside Morganne, his good Philadelphia suit and shirt stained with blood and dirt. Lyndel asked about the 19th Indiana. They were stationed on the army’s left flank, he told her. No, he hadn’t seen Nathaniel or Levi but the regiment had never seen action. If Burnside decided to renew the assaults that would probably change.
They worked into the night. Lyndel found the constant activity prevented the winter cold from getting into her bones. A sudden display of the aurora borealis sent white whirls and silver streaks across the sky. She often paused to look up at them as they twisted and turned and shone onto the battlefield.
“I’d say it’s likely most of those Southern boys have never seen them,” Hiram told her and Morganne. “Even this is pretty far south for a display. They’ll probably think it’s a sign from heaven to honor their victory.”
Lyndel wiped loose hair from her eyes as she stared at the loops and spirals of white against black. “We call them Northern Lights in Pennsylvania. They could just as easily be taken as a sign by the Union not to despair, that in the end Northern forces will overcome.” She glanced at Hiram. “Do you think this fight is over?”