by Noah Gordon
The 131st Indiana detrained at a place called Winchester, an occupied town, blue uniforms everywhere. While the horses and equipment were unloaded, Colonel Symonds disappeared inside a headquarters building near the railroad station, and when he emerged the troops and the wagons were arrayed in marching order, and they set out southward.
When Rob J. had signed on, he’d been told he had to buy his own horse, but there had been no urgent need for him to have a horse in Cairo, because he didn’t wear a uniform or take part in parades. Besides, horses were scarce wherever the army was located, because the cavalry claimed every remount in sight, whether the animal ran races or pulled a plow. So now, horseless, he rode in the ambulance on the seat next to Corporal Ordway, who drove the team. Rob J. was still tense in Lanning Ordway’s presence, but Ordway’s only question had been to wonder warily why a member of the OSSB should “speak with a foreigner’s tongue,” referring to the trace of Scots burr that on occasion still crept into Rob J.’s speech. Rob had said he’d been born in Boston and taken to Edinburgh as a youth to be educated, and Ordway appeared satisfied. He was now cheerful and friendly, obviously pleased to be working for a man who had a political reason for taking good care of him.
They passed a marker on the dusty road that indicated it was the route to Fredericksburg. “God Almighty,” Ordway said. “I hope nobody’s got it in mind to send a second group of Yankees up against those rebel gunners on the heights at Fredericksburg.”
Rob J. could only agree.
Several hours before dusk the 131st came to the banks of the Rappahannock River, and Symonds halted them and ordered a camp. He called a meeting of all officers in front of his tent, and Rob J. stood on the fringes of the uniforms and listened.
“Gentlemen, for half a day we have been members of the Federal Army of the Potomac, under the command of General Joseph Hooker,” Symonds said.
He told them Hooker had gathered a force of about 122,000 men, spread out over a long perimeter. Robert E. Lee had about ninety thousand Confederates and was at Fredericksburg. Hooker’s cavalry had scouted Lee’s army for a long time and they were convinced Lee was getting ready to invade the North in an attempt to draw Union forces away from the siege at Vicksburg, but no one knew where or when the invasion would take place. “The people in Washington are understandably nervous, with the Confederate Army only a couple of hours away from the White House door. The 131st is traveling to join other units near Fredericksburg.”
The officers took the news soberly. They laid out several layers of pickets, far and near, and the camp settled down for the night. When Rob J. had eaten his pork and beans, he lay back and looked up at the fat summer stars of evening. It was too much for him to contemplate contending forces that were so enormous. About ninety thousand Confederate men! About 122,000 Union men! And all of them doing their best to kill one another.
A limpid night. The 614 soldiers of the Indiana 131st lay on the warm bare ground without bothering to raise tents. Most of them still had northern colds, and the sound of their coughing was enough to warn any nearby enemy of their existence. Rob J. had a brief doctor’s nightmare, wondering about the sound of 122,000 men all coughing at the same time. The acting assistant surgeon clasped his arms about his body, chilled. He knew that if two such giant armies were to meet and fight, it would take more than the men of the band to carry the wounded away.
It took them two and one-half days to march to Fredericksburg. On the way they almost succumbed to Virginia’s secret weapon, the chigger. The tiny red mite fell on them when they passed under overhanging trees and became attached to them as they walked through grass. If it clung to their clothing, it migrated until it reached bare skin, where it burrowed its entire body into human flesh to feed. Soon men had chigger rashes between their fingers and toes, in their buttocks and on their penises. The mite had a two-part body; if a soldier saw one working its way into his flesh and tried to pull it out, the chigger broke at its narrow waist, and the portion that was embedded did as much damage as a whole chigger would have. By the third day most of the soldiers were scratching and swearing, and some of the wounds already had begun to fester in the moist heat. Rob J. could do nothing more than sprinkle sulfur on the embedded insects, but a few of the men had had experience with chiggers, and they taught the rest that the only remedy was to hold the glowing end of a stick or a lighted cigar just off the skin until the chigger started to back up, drawn to the heat. Then it could be seized and pulled out slowly and carefully, so it wouldn’t break. All over the camp, men removed chiggers from one another, reminding Rob J. of the monkeys he used to watch grooming each other for lice in the Edinburgh Zoo.
Chigger misery didn’t eradicate terror. Their apprehension grew as they approached Fredericksburg, which had been the scene of such Yankee slaughter at the earlier battle. But when they arrived they saw only Union blue, because Robert E. Lee had adroitly and quietly pulled out his troops several nights earlier under cover of darkness, and his Army of Northern Virginia was heading north. The Union cavalry was scouting Lee’s progress but the Army of the Potomac wasn’t in pursuit, for reasons only General Hooker knew.
They camped at Fredericksburg for six days, resting, tending to blisters on their feet, removing chiggers, cleaning and oiling weapons. When they were off-duty, in small groups they climbed the ridge where only six months before almost thirteen thousand Union men had been killed or wounded. Looking down at the easy targets their comrades made struggling to climb after them, they were glad Lee had left before they got there.
When Symonds got new orders, they had to move north again. They were on the march along a dusty road when they heard the news that Winchester, where they had disembarked from their troop train, had been hit hard by Confederates under General Richard S. Ewell. It was another rebel victory—ninety-five Union men had been killed, 348 wounded, and more than four thousand were missing or taken prisoner.
Riding uncomfortably in the ambulance along that peaceful country lane, Rob J. didn’t allow himself to believe in combat, just as when he had been a young boy he hadn’t allowed himself to believe in death. Why should people die? It made no sense, since it was more pleasant to live. And why should people actually fight during a war? It was more pleasant to proceed sleepily down this curving, sun-baked road than to engage in the business of killing.
But just as Rob J.’s childhood disbelief in mortality had been ended by his father’s death, the reality of the present was brought home to him when they came to Fairfax Courthouse and he saw what the Bible meant when it described an enormous army as a host.
They camped on a farm in six fields amid artillery and cavalry and other infantry. Everywhere Rob J. looked there were Union soldiers. The army was in flux, troops coming and leaving. The day after the 131st arrived they learned that Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia already had invaded the North, crossing the Potomac River into Maryland. Once Lee had committed himself, so did Hooker, tardily sending the first units of his army north, trying to stay between Lee and Washington. It was forty more hours before the 131st fell in and resumed its northward march.
Each army was too large and diffuse to be relocated swiftly and completely. Part of Lee’s force still was in Virginia, moving to cross the river and join its commander. The two armies were shapeless, pulsating monsters, spreading and contracting, always on the move, sometimes alongside one another. When their edges happened to touch, there were skirmishes like bursts of sparks—at Upperville, at Haymarket, at Aldie, and a dozen other places. The Indiana 131st had no concrete evidence of the fighting except in the middle of one night when the outer line of pickets exchanged brief and ineffectual fire with horsemen who hurried away.
The men of the 131st crossed the Potomac in small boats at night, on the twenty-seventh of June. The next morning they resumed their march north, and Fitts’s band struck up “Maryland, My Maryland.” Sometimes when they came to people, somebody would wave, but the Maryland civilians they passed seemed unimpressed
, because for days they had been witnessing troops marching through. Rob J. and the soldiers soon grew heartily sick of the Maryland state anthem, but the band still was playing it on the morning when they made their way through good rolling farmland and into a neat central village.
“What part of Maryland is this?” Ordway asked Rob J.
“I don’t know.” They were passing a bench on which an old man sat and watched the military. “Mister,” Rob J. called, “what’s the name of this pretty community?”
The compliment seemed to disconcert the old man. “Our town? This town is Gettysburg.”
Although the men of the 131st Indiana didn’t know it, the day they passed into Pennsylvania they had had a new commanding general for twenty-four hours. General George Meade had been named to replace General Joe Hooker, who paid the price for his tardy pursuit of the Confederates.
They went through the little town and marched along the Taneytown Road. The Union Army was massed south of Gettysburg, and Symonds called a halt at an enormous rolling meadow where they could camp. The air was heavy and hot and full of moisture and fearful bravado. The men of the 131st talked about the rebel yell. They hadn’t heard it when they were in Tennessee, but they had heard a lot about it, and listened to a lot of imitations. They wondered if they were going to hear the real thing in the next few days.
Colonel Symonds knew work was the best thing for nerves, so he got up labor parties and had them dig shallow firing positions behind piles of boulders that could be used as sangars. That night they went to sleep to birdsong and katydid shrill, and next morning awoke to more hot and heavy air and the sound of frequent firing several miles to the northwest, toward the Chambersburg Pike.
About eleven A.M. Colonel Symonds received new orders, and the 131st was marched half a mile over a wooded ridge to a meadow on high ground east of the Emmitsburg Road. Evidence that the new position was closer to the enemy was the grim discovery of six Union soldiers who seemed to be sprawled asleep on the mowing. All the dead pickets were barefoot, the poorly shod Southerners having stolen their shoes.
Symonds ordered new breastworks dug, and he placed living pickets. At Rob J.’s request, a long narrow log framework like a grape arbor was put up at the edge of the woods and roofed over with leafy branches to provide shade for the wounded, and outside this shelter Rob J. placed his operating table.
They learned from dispatch riders that the first gunfire had been a clash between cavalry. As the day progressed, the sounds of battle grew to the north of the 131st, a steady, hoarse noise of rifled muskets like the barking of thousands of deadly dogs, and a great ragged, unending cannon thunder. Each slight movement of the heavy air seemed to smite their faces.
Early in the afternoon the 131st was moved a third time that day and marched toward the town and the sound of the fighting, toward the flash of cannon fire and clouds of white-gray smoke. Rob J. had come to know the soldiers and was aware that most of them yearned for a minor wound, no more than a scratch, but one that would leave a mark when it quickly healed, so the folks back home could see how they had suffered for a valorous victory. But now they were moving toward where men were dying. They marched through the town, and presently, as they climbed a hill, they were surrounded by the sounds they had earlier heard from afar. Several times artillery rounds whooshed overhead, and they passed dug-in infantry and four batteries of cannon being fired. At the top, where they were told to settle in, they found they’d been placed in the middle of a burial ground that gave the place its name, Cemetery Hill.
Rob J. was setting up his medical station behind an imposing mausoleum that offered both protection and a little shade, when a heavily perspiring colonel came up and asked for the medical officer. He identified himself as Colonel Martin Nichols of the Medical Department, and said he was the organizer of medical services. “Are you experienced at surgery?” he asked.
It didn’t seem the time for modesty. “Yes, I am. Quite experienced,” Rob J. said.
“Then I need you at a hospital where serious cases are being sent for surgery.”
“If you don’t mind, Colonel, I want to remain with this regiment.”
“I do mind, Doctor, I do. I have some good surgeons, but also some young and inexperienced physicians performing vital surgery and making a damn mess of it. They’re amputating limbs without leaving flaps, and several are making stumps that have several inches of exposed bone. They’re trying strange experimental operations that experienced surgeons wouldn’t—resection of the head of the humerus, disarticulation of the hip joint, disarticulation of the shoulder joint. Making unnecessary cripples and patients who are going to wake up crying with terrible pain every morning for the rest of their lives. You’ll relieve one of those so-called surgeons, and I’ll send him up here to slap dressings onto the wounded.”
Rob J. nodded. He told Ordway he was in charge of the medical station until another doctor got there, and he followed Colonel Nichols down the hill.
The hospital was in town, in the Catholic church, which he saw was named for Saint Francis; he would have to remember to tell that to Ferocious Miriam. There was an operating table placed in the entry, with the double doors wide open to give the surgeon maximum light. The pews had been covered with boards spread with straw and blankets to make beds for the wounded. In a small, damp room in the cellar, illuminated by lamps that gave off a yellow light, there were two more surgical tables, and Rob J. took over one of these. He removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves as far as they would go, while a corporal of the First Cavalry Division administered chloroform to a soldier whose hand had been carried off by a cannonball. As soon as the boy was anesthetized, Rob J. took the arm off above the wrist, leaving a good flap for the stump.
“Next!” he called. Another patient was carried in, and Rob J. gave himself up to the work.
The basement was about twenty by forty feet. There was another surgeon at a table across the room, but he and Rob seldom looked at one another and had little to say. In the course of the afternoon Rob J. noted that the other man did good work, and he received a similar appraisal, and each of them focused on his own table. Rob J. probed for bullets and metal, replaced eviscerated intestines and sewed up the wounds, and amputated. And amputated some more. The minié ball was a slow-moving projectile, especially damaging when it hit bone. When it carried away or destroyed bone in large pieces, the only thing the surgeons could do was take the limb. On the dirt floor between Rob J. and the other surgeon there rose a pile of arms and legs. From time to time, men came in and took the severed limbs away.
After four or five hours, another colonel, this one in a gray uniform, came into the basement room and told the two doctors they were prisoners. “We’re better soldiers than you folks, we’ve taken the whole town. Your troops have been pushed to the north, and we’ve captured four thousand of you.” There wasn’t much to say. The other surgeon looked at Rob J. and shrugged. Rob J. was operating and told the colonel he was in the way of the light.
Whenever there was a brief lull, he tried to doze for a few minutes, on his feet. But there were few lulls. The warring armies slept at night, but the doctors worked steadily, trying to save the men the armies had torn apart. There was no window in the basement room, and the lamps were kept turned up. Soon Rob J. lost all comprehension of the time of day.
“Next,” he called.
Next! Next! Next!
It was the equivalent of having to clean out the Augean stable, because as soon as he finished with one patient, they carried in another. Some wore bloodstained and ragged gray uniforms and some wore bloodstained and ragged blue, but he soon understood they were available in inexhaustible supply.
Other things weren’t inexhaustible. The church hospital soon ran out of dressings; they had no food. The colonel who had told him the South had better soldiers, now told him the South had neither chloroform nor ether.
“You can’t put shoes on their feet or give them anesthesia for their pain. That’s why y
ou’ll lose in the end,” Rob J. said without satisfaction, and asked the officer to round up a supply of liquor. The colonel went away, but sent someone with whiskey for the patients and hot pigeon soup for the doctors, which Rob J. drank down without tasting.
Without anesthesia, he got several strong men to hold the patients and he operated the way he had when he was younger, cutting, sawing, sewing, fast and expertly, the way William Fergusson had taught him. His victims screamed and thrashed. He didn’t yawn, and although he blinked a lot, his eyes stayed open. He was aware that his feet and ankles were becoming painfully swollen, and sometimes as they carried out one patient and carried in another, he stood and rubbed his right hand with his left. Every case was different, but there are only so many ways to destroy human beings and soon they were all the same, all duplicates, even the ones with their mouths destroyed, or their genitals shot off, or their eyes shot out.
The hours passed, one by one.
He came to feel he had spent most of his life in the small damp room cutting up human beings, and that he was damned to be there forever. But eventually there was change in the noises that reached them. The people in the church had grown accustomed to groans and cries, the cannon and musket sounds, the crumping of the mortars, and even the shuddering concussion of near-hits. But the firing and bombardment reached a new crescendo, a sustained frenzy of bursting sound that lasted for several hours, and then there was a relative silence in which those in the church suddenly could hear what they said to one another. Then there came a new sound, a roar that lifted and went on and on like the ocean, and when Rob J. sent a Confederate orderly to find out what it was, the man came back and muttered brokenly that it was the goddamn mizzable fuckin Yankees cheerin, that’s what it was.