Part 35 (1/2)
”I do.”
”Then it is all well with you, and you can rest in Him who giveth his beloved sleep.”
There was no time for long prayers, and I must go to another sufferer.
A kind, strong man, from the Michigan Aid Society, came and worked two days among my men, and said:
”If I only had them in a tent, on the ground; but this floor is dreadful!”
Up stairs were some wounds I must dress, while a corpse lay close beside one of the men, so that I must kneel touching it, while I worked. It lay twelve hours before I could get it taken to its shallow, coffinless grave; and while I knelt there, the man whose wound I was dressing, said:
”Never mind; we'll make you up a good purse for this!”
He had no sooner spoken than a murmur of contemptuous disapproval came from the other men, and one said:
”A purse for her! She's got more money than all of us, I bet!”
Another called out: ”No, we won't! Won't do anything of the kind!
We're your boys; ain't we, mother? You're not working for money!”
”Why,” persisted the generous man, ”we made up a purse of eighty dollars for a woman t' other time I was hurt, and she hadn't done half as much for us!”
”Eighty dollars!” called out the man who thought me rich; ”eighty dollars for her! why I tell you she could give every one of us eighty dollars, and would not miss it!”
Another said:
”She isn't one of the sort that are 'round after purses!”
Why any of them should have thought me rich I cannot imagine except for the respect with which officers treated me. To veil the iron hand I held over my nurses, I made a jest of my authority, pinned a bit of bandage on my shoulder, and played commander-in-chief. Officers and guards would salute when we pa.s.sed, as an innocent joke, but the men came to regard me as a person of rank.
Citizens of Fredericksburg, who at first insulted me on the street, as they did other Yankee nurses, heard that I was a person of great influence, and began to solicit my good offices on behalf of friends arrested by order of Secretary Stanton, and held as hostages, for our sixty wounded who were made prisoners while trying to pa.s.s through the city, before we took possession.
So I was decked in plumes of fict.i.tious greatness, and might have played princess in disguise if I had had time; but I had only two deaths in the old theater--this man up stairs, and the man without clothes, who lay alone in that back room, and after the amputation of his thigh, had no covering until government gave him one of Virginia clay.
CHAPTER LXXII.
MORE VICTIMS AND A CHANGE OF BASE.
One day at noon, the air thrilled with martial music and the earth shook under the tramp of men as seven thousand splendid troops marched up Princess Ann street on their way to reinforce our army, whose rear was about eight miles from us. They were in superb order, and the forts around Was.h.i.+ngton had been stripped of their garrisons, and most of their guns, to furnish them; but the generals.h.i.+p which cut our army off from its base of supplies, and blundered into the battle of the Wilderness, like a blind horse into a briar patch, without sh.e.l.ling or burning the dry chapperal in which our dead and wounded were consumed together, after the battle, had made no arrangements for the safe arrival of its reinforcements. So they were ambushed soon after pa.s.sing through Fredericksburg; and that night, before ten o'clock, all the places I had succeeded in making vacant were filled with the wounded from this reinforcement. How many of them were brought to Fredericksburg I do not know; but it must have been a good many, when some were sent to my den of horrors.
One evening, after dark, I went to the dispensary, and found a surgeon just in from the front for supplies. While they were being put up, he told us of the horrible carnage at Spottsylvania that day, when the troops had been hurled, again and again, against impregnable fortifications, under a rain of rifle b.a.l.l.s, which cut down a solid white oak tree, eighteen inches in diameter.
The battle had ceased for the night, and it was not known whether it would be renewed in the morning.
”But if it is,” said the speaker, ”it will be the bloodiest day of the war, and we must be whipped, routed. The Rebels are behind breastworks which cannot be carried. Any man but Grant would have known that this morning, but he is to fight it out on this line, and it is generally thought he will try it again in the morning. If he does, it will be a worse rout than Bull Run.”
No one was present but the surgeon in charge of the church, the dispensary clerk, and myself; so he was no alarmist, for when he had done speaking, he took his package, mounted his horse and left. People had said, through the day, that the roar of guns was heard in the higher portions of the city, but no news of the battle seemed to have reached it during all the next day.