The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  So the colonel came to his doctor ready to be reasonable, and Rob J. signed the contract for another three months of employment with no hesitation. He could tell when he was in a good position.

  What they had to do now, he told Symonds, was set up an ambulance to serve the regiment in battle.

  The civilian Sanitary Commission had lobbied the secretary of war until finally ambulances and stretcher-bearers were part of the Army of the Potomac, but the reform movement had stopped there, without providing similar care for the wounded of the units in the Western sector. “We’re going to have to take care of ourselves,” Rob J. said.

  He and Symonds sat cozily in front of the dispensary tent and smoked cigars, the smoke drifting into the warming spring air as he told the colonel of his trip to Cincinnati on the War Hawk. “I talked to men who just lay there on the battlefield for two days after they were hit. It was a mercy it rained because they were without water. One man told me that during the night, pigs came close to where he lay and began to eat the bodies. Some of them weren’t dead yet.”

  Symonds nodded. He was familiar with all the terrible details. “What do you need?”

  “Four men from each company.”

  “You want an entire platoon to carry stretchers,” Symonds said, shocked. “This regiment is markedly under strength. To win battles I need fighters, not stretcher-bearers.” He considered the tip of his cigar. “Too many still are old and disabled, shouldn’t have been enlisted. Take some of those.”

  “No. We need men strong enough to get to others under fire and bring them to safety. It isn’t a job that can be done by sickly old men.” Rob J. studied the troubled face of this young man he’d come to admire and pity. Symonds loved his troops and wanted to protect them, yet the colonel owned the unenviable job of having to expend human lives as if they were bullets or rations or chunks of firewood. “Suppose I use men from the regimental band,” Rob J. said. “They can tootle most of the time, and after a fight they can carry stretchers.”

  Colonel Symonds nodded, relieved. “Very good. See if the bandmaster can give you some men.”

  Bandmaster Warren Fitts had been a shoemaker for sixteen years when he was recruited in Fort Wayne. He had had rigorous musical training and as a young man had tried for several years to establish a music school in South Bend. When he left that town owing money, he’d turned with bitter relief to shoemaking, his father’s trade. His father had taught him well, and he was a good shoemaker. He’d earned a modest but comfortable living, and on the side gave music lessons, teaching both piano and the brass instruments. The war had refurbished dreams for him that he had thought worn out and discarded. At the age of forty he had been given a chance to recruit a military band and mold it as he wished. He had had to scour the musical talent of the Fort Wayne area to find enough musicians for the band, and now he listened with astonishment as the surgeon proposed to take some of his men for stretcher-bearers.

  “Never!”

  “They’d only have to be with me part of the time,” Rob J. said. “The rest of the time they would be with you.”

  Fitts tried to hide his contempt. “Each musician has to give the band his undivided attention. When he’s not playing, he must practice and rehearse.”

  From his own experience with the viola da gamba, Rob J. knew this was true. “Are there instruments in the band for which you have extra players?” he asked patiently.

  The question struck a responsive chord in Fitts. His position as bandmaster was the closest he would ever come to being a conductor, and he was careful to see that his own appearance, and that of the band, was worthy of their roles as artists. Fitts had a full head of graying hair. His face was cleanshaven save for mustaches that he kept clipped; he dressed the ends with wax and twirled them into points. His uniform was carefully maintained, and the musicians knew they had to keep their brasses polished, their uniforms clean, and their boots blacked and buffed. And they had to march smartly, because when the bandmaster strutted out, wielding his baton, he wanted to be followed by a band that reflected his standards. But there were a few who marred this image …

  “Wilcox, Abner,” he said. “Bugler.” Wilcox was decidedly walleyed. Fitts liked musicians to have physical beauty as well as talent. He couldn’t bear to see any sort of defect spoiling the crisp perfection of his ensemble, and he had assigned Wilcox to spare duties as a regimental bugler.

  “Lawrence, Oscar. A drummer.” A clumsy sixteen-year-old boy whose lack of coordination not only made him a poor drummer but too often caused him to lose step when the band marched, so that his head sometimes bobbed out of rhythm with the heads of the other marchers.

  “Ordway, Lanning,” Fitts said, and the surgeon gave a funny little nod. “E-flat bass cornet.” A mediocre musician and driver of one of the band’s wagons, who sometimes worked as a laborer. Adequate to play bass horn when they were providing music for the troops on Wednesday evenings or when they were practicing while seated in chairs on the drill field, but his limp made it impossible for him to march without destroying the military effect.

  “Perry, Addison. Piccolo and fife.” A bad musician, and slovenly of person and dress. Fitts was happy to get rid of such dead wood.

  “Robinson, Lewis. E-flat sopranino cornet.” A capable musician, Fitts had to admit to himself. But a source of extreme irritation, a smartass with aspirations. On several occasions Robinson had shown Fitts pieces he had said were original compositions, and had asked if perhaps the band could play them. He claimed to have had experience conducting a community philharmonic in Columbus, Ohio. Fitts didn’t need anyone looking over his shoulder or breathing down his neck.

  “… And?” the surgeon asked him.

  “And nobody else,” the bandmaster said with satisfaction.

  All through the winter, Rob J. had watched Ordway from afar. He was nervous, because although Ordway’s enlistment had a long way to run, it wasn’t hard for a man to desert and disappear. But whatever kept the majority of them in the army also worked on Ordway, and he was one of the five privates who reported to Rob J., not an unpleasant-looking man for a suspected murderer, except for watery, anxious eyes.

  None of the five was pleased to hear of his new assignment. Lewis Robinson reacted with panic. “I must play my music! I’m a musician, not a doctor.”

  Rob J. corrected him. “Stretcher-bearer. For the time being, you’re a stretcher-bearer,” he said, and the others knew he was speaking to each of them.

  He made the best of a bad bargain by asking the bandmaster to give up any demands on their time, and won that concession with suspicious ease. To train them, he began at the beginning, teaching them to roll bandages and form dressings, and then simulating various types of wounds and teaching them to apply the dressings needed. He taught them how to move and carry the wounded, and furnished each man with a small rucksack that contained dressings, bandages, a container of fresh water, and opium and morphine in powder and pills.

  Several splints came with the army’s medical pannier, but Rob J. didn’t like them, and he requisitioned lumber that allowed the stretcher-bearers to make their own splints under his fussy direction. Abner Wilcox turned out to be an adequate carpenter, and innovative. He fashioned a number of excellent lightweight litters by stretching canvas between two poles. The supply officer offered a two-wheeled trap to be designated as an ambulance, but Rob J. had had years of answering house calls over bad roads, and knew that for evacuating wounded men over rough terrain he needed the security of four wheels. He found a sound buckboard and Wilcox built sides and a roof to enclose it. They painted it black, and Ordway very cleverly duplicated the medical caduceus that was printed on the pannier, painting one in silver on each side of the ambulance. From the remount officer Rob J. wheedled a pair of ugly but strong workhorses, castoffs like the rest of the rescue corps.

  The five men were beginning to feel an unwilling group pride, but Robinson worried openly about the increased risks of their new assignment. �
�Of course there will be danger,” Rob J. said. “The infantry on the line faces danger too, and there’s danger in a cavalry charge, or there wouldn’t be need for litter-bearers.”

  He’d always known that war corrupted, but he saw now that it had corrupted him as much as everyone else. He’d arranged the lives of these five young men so that now they were expected to go after the wounded again and again, as if they could shed musket rounds and shake off artillery, and he was trying to avert their enraged awareness by pointing out to them that they were members of the death generation. His specious words and attitude sought to disclaim his responsibility, as he tried desperately to believe with them that they were no worse off now than when their lives were complicated only by Fitts’s foolish temperament, and by how much expression they achieved in the playing of their waltzes and schottisches and quickstep marches.

  He split them into litter teams: Perry and Lawrence. Wilcox and Robinson.

  “What about me?” Ordway said.

  “You will stick close to me,” Rob J. said.

  Corporal Amasa Decker, the mailman, had come to know Rob J. because he delivered a steady stream of mail from Sarah, who wrote long and passionate letters. The fact that his wife was so physical had always been one of her charms for Rob J., and sometimes he lay in his hut and read letter after letter, transported so by desire that he imagined he could smell her scent. Though there were females in abundance in Cairo, ranging from the hired to the patriotic, he had made no attempt to approach a woman. He was afflicted with the curse of faithfulness.

  He spent much of his free time writing tender, supportive letters as counterpoint to Sarah’s anguished heat. Sometimes he wrote to Shaman, and he wrote constantly in his journal. Other times he lay on his poncho and pondered how he could learn from Ordway what happened the day Makwa-ikwa was killed. He knew that somehow he had to gain Ordway’s confidence.

  He thought of the report Ferocious Miriam had given him on the Know Nothings and their Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. Whoever had written that report—he’d always fancied it had been a spying priest—had passed himself off as a Protestant anti-Catholic. Could the same tactic be successful again? The report was in Holden’s Crossing with the rest of his papers. But he had read it so often and so intently that he found he remembered the signs and signals, the code words and the passwords—an entire panoply of secret communication that could have been invented by a dramatic boy with an overactive imagination.

  Rob J. ran exercises with the stretcher-bearers, one of them playing wounded victim, and discovered that while two men could put a man into a litter and lift him into an ambulance, those same two men would quickly tire, and might collapse, if they had to carry the litter an appreciable distance. “We need a bearer on each corner,” Perry said, and Rob J. knew he was right. But that left him with only one manned litter, which clearly wasn’t adequate if the regiment ran into any sort of trouble at all.

  He took his problem to the colonel. “What do you want to do about it?” Symonds asked.

  “Use the entire band. Make my five trained stretcher-bearers corporals. Each of them can captain a litter in situations where we have lots of wounded, with three other musicians assigned to each corporal. If the soldiers have to choose between musicians who play wonderfully during a fight and musicians who will save their lives if they’re shot, I know how they’ll vote.”

  “They won’t vote,” Symonds said dryly. “I do all the voting around here.” But he voted correctly. The five bearers sewed stripes on their sleeves, and whenever Fitts happened to pass Rob J., the bandmaster didn’t say hello.

  In mid-May the weather turned hot. The encampment was located between the conjoining Ohio and Mississippi rivers, both befouled by runoff from the camp. But Rob J. issued half a bar of brown soap to each man in the regiment and the companies were marched, one at a time, to a clean place upstream on the Ohio, where the men were ordered to disrobe and bathe. At first they entered the water with curses and groans, but most of them were country-raised and couldn’t resist a swimming hole, and the bath deteriorated into splashing and horseplay. When they emerged they were inspected by their sergeants, with special emphasis on their heads and their feet, and to the jeers of their comrades, some were sent back for rewashing.

  Some of the uniforms were ragged and motley, woven of inferior cloth. But Colonel Symonds had acquired a number of new uniforms, and when they were distributed the men correctly assumed they were to ship out. Both of the Kansas regiments had been taken down the Mississippi by steamboat. The conventional wisdom was that they’d gone to help Grant’s army take Vicksburg, and that the Indiana 131st would follow.

  But on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of May, with Warren Fitts’s band making a number of discernible nervous errors but playing lustily, the regiment was marched to the railroad yard instead of to the river. The men and the animals were loaded into boxcars, and there was a two-hour wait while wagons were lashed to flatcars, and then at dusk the 31st said good-bye to Cairo, Illinois.

  The doctor and the stretcher-bearers rode in a hospital car. It was otherwise empty when they left Cairo, but within an hour a young private had fainted in one of the boxcars, and when he was brought to the hospital car, Rob J. found that he was burning with fever, and incoherent. He gave the boy alcohol sponge baths and made up his mind to offload him to a civilian hospital at the earliest opportunity.

  Rob J. admired the hospital car, which would have been invaluable if they had been returning from battle instead of riding toward it. On each side of the aisle a triple tier of litters ran the length of the car. Each litter was cleverly suspended by means of India-rubber loops connecting its four corners to hooks set in the walls and posts, so that the stretching and contracting of the rubber absorbed much of the train’s jostle and sway. In the absence of patients, the five new corporals each had chosen a litter and agreed they couldn’t ride in greater comfort if they were generals. Addison Perry, who had proved he could doze anywhere, day or night, already was asleep, and so was the youngster, Lawrence. Lewis Robinson had taken a litter apart from the others, under the lantern, and was making little black pencil marks on a piece of paper, composing music.

  They had no idea where they were going. When Rob J. walked to the end of the car and opened the door, the noise was loud and rackety, but he looked up between the swaying cars at the points of light in the sky and found the Big Dipper. He followed the two pointer stars at the end of the bowl, and there was the North Star.

  “We’re traveling east,” he said, back in the car.

  “Shit,” Abner Wilcox said. “They’re sending us to the Army of the Potomac.”

  Lew Robinson stopped making his little black marks. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Potomac Army ain’t done nothin good, ever. All it does is wait around. When it fights, once in a blue moon, those fartheads always manage to lose to the rebels. I wanted to go to Grant. That man’s a general.”

  “You don’t get killed waiting around,” Robinson said.

  “I hate to go east,” Ordway said. “Whole damn East is full of Irishers, Roman Catholic scum. Filthy buggers.”

  “Nobody performed better at Fredericksburg than the Irish Brigade. Most of them died,” Robinson said thinly.

  It didn’t require much thought on Rob J.’s part, just an instant decision. He placed his fingertip under his right eye and slid it slowly down the side of his nose, the signal from one member of the order to another that he was saying too much.

  Did it work, or was it coincidence? Lanning Ordway stared at him for a moment, then stopped talking and went to sleep.

  At three o’clock in the morning there was a long stop at Louisville, where an artillery battery joined the troop train. The night air was heavier than in Illinois, and softer. Those who were awake left the train to stretch their legs, and Rob J. arranged for the sick corporal to be taken to the local hospital. When he was finished, he walked down the track, past two pissing men. “No
time to dig sinks here, sir,” one of them said, and they both laughed. The civilian doctor was still a joke.

  He went to where the battery’s great ten-pound Parrotts and twelve-pound howitzers were being secured to flatcars with heavy chains. The cannon were being loaded in the yellow light of large calcium lamps that sputtered and flickered, throwing shadows that appeared to move with a life of their own.

  “Doctor,” someone said softly.

  The man stepped out of the darkness next to him and took his hand, making the signal of recognition. Too nervous even to feel absurd, Rob J. endeavored to perform the countersign as though he had done it many times before.

  Ordway looked at him. “Well,” he said.

  53

  THE LONG GRAY LINE

  They came to hate the troop train. It crept so slowly across the length of Kentucky and wound so tiredly between the hills, a snake-shaped, boring jail. When the train entered Virginia the news traveled from car to car. The soldiers peered from the windows, expecting at once to witness the face of the enemy, but all they saw was a country of mountains and woods. When they stopped for fuel and water in small towns, the people were as friendly as they’d been in Kentucky, because the western section of Virginia supported the Union. They could tell when they reached the other part of Virginia. There were no women at the stations with drinks of cool mountain water or lemonade, and the men had bland, blank faces and watchful, heavy-lidded eyes.