The Better Angels of Our Nature (23 page)

“Maybe he was drunk. I often get dizzy and fall over when I’m drunk.” Jesse’s expression said this wasn’t funny. “Loss of blood, that’s all, if he’d done the sensible thing and got the wound dressed he wouldn’t be lying here right now. Most wounds like this just go through the scalp. The skull is protected by a dense layer of tissue, called the
galea aponeurotica.
” Even now, he was giving her a medical lesson. “Scalp always bleeds a lot. Easy to control with a pressure dressing. You should know that by now, unless this calf love has wiped out everything you’ve learned in the past few weeks? Put him in one of the recovery tents. If the wound starts bleeding again you might need to suture it and use a bulky dressing to keep more pressure on the wound.” He laughed. “He’ll have one hell of a headache when he wakes up. Give him some morphine. Keep the wound moist.” He stared at the girl’s face as she stared at the unconscious colonel, and a lump of anger, like a sudden ball of dyspepsia, rose so high in his throat he thought he would choke. “Look, for chrissake, you know all this, or you should, he didn’t need a surgeon. You wasted my time.” His anger was all out of proportion. Jesse stood on tiptoe and to his utter astonishment pressed a kiss to his bristled cheek. He looked around the cabin, but everyone had more important matters on their mind. Which reminded him, “And for chrissake, show a little tact, he’s a man and you’re a
boy.
Get my drift?”

Ten minutes later, after making the Vermonter comfortable in one of the recovery tents, Jesse found an apron and got to work, but where in God’s name to begin? Those outside and conscious, awaiting the surgeon, heard the screams of those about to go under the knife, not yet fully anesthetized, and in most cases it scared them more than their own wounds.

She watched Jacob working along the opposite row, his large fleshy features animated with anguish and dedication, as he moved from one soldier to another. He was dressing wounds, giving water to fight the dehydration, whiskey to combat shock, administering morphine, and often, almost as important, a few words of comfort. General McPherson had been right, so intermingled had the companies, regiments, and brigades become in battle that these injured soldiers represented every division in the Tennessee Army. Would any surgeon today dare to refuse help to a soldier not from his own regiment or brigade?

She went down the line with her haversack.

Private Lawrie of the Eleventh Iowa had next of kin written on a piece of bloody paper pinned to his blouse. He’d lost his right leg, blown off at the knee. Although unconscious, his eyes were half-open, the eyelids flickering disconcertingly. His breathing was loud and labored. Jesse felt for his pulse, it was racing. She opened his collar and settled him into a more comfortable position that did not restrict his airways. She poured water over the dried, soiled rags that had been placed around the stump by a litter bearer to make them easier to remove, then carefully put on a fresh dressing. In a few seconds, it was soaked with bright red arterial blood. Secondary hemorrhaging had begun. She applied the tourniquet, and called an orderly from across the way, telling him with authority, “This soldier must go immediately into surgery.” He and another of the bandsmen carried him off to the cabin.

Corporal Cooper of the Forty-eighth Illinois had his right hand blown clean off. She gave him some morphine for the pain, which had turned him the color of candle wax and appeared to have robbed him of his power of speech. He sat quietly, staring blankly ahead of him. Private Owen Davidson, Fourteenth Missouri, had taken two balls in the shoulder blade and one in the right leg. He wanted only water and to be left alone with his misery.

Private Kuhn, Twenty-fifth Indiana, hit twice, thanked her profusely for her attentions as she examined the wound in his cheek where a minié ball had passed clean through, exiting behind his left ear. He said he wasn’t in pain, but more likely, Jesse reflected, he was in deep shock. She got him to swallow a morphine pill for the moment when the shock wore off.

Private Alonzo Miller of the Seventy-seventh Ohio, who continually yelled to keep up the charge, until his lower jaw was shattered by a minié ball and left hanging by a strip of skin. Somehow, he had been placed in line to see the surgeon, instead of at the far corner with the dead and dying, the hopeless cases. She put a padded dressing of dampened muslin to the gaping hole in his lower face and moved on to the next man.

Private Rogers was also Seventy-seventh Ohio. He’d taken shrapnel in both eyes and was miraculously conscious. She made him more comfortable on the hay-filled pillow slip. There was very little else she could do for him or the brave Private Miller.

“I ketched ma foot in a gall darn ditch,” Corporal Sylvester Braddock told her when she removed his brogan. “T’aint much but gall darn bad luck.” His sock was soaked with caked blood. The end of the tibia was sticking out of the skin. “We got separated from the rest a the brigade and had to pick our way through the woods north a the Purdy-Hamburg Road. We come across a large reggiement headin’ toward us. Old Col’nal Cockerill he reckoned they weren’t our boys, even though they’s wearin’ blue jest like us, he says he dudn’t quite know jest how they could be our boys, but he daren’t open fire. Jest then the wind shifted and out that flag a their’s was a flyin’, jest like God was givin’ us a sign. They were Louisiani boys a flyin’ their state flag. Old Col’nal Cockerill he gets us to unleash a volley and we scattered that whole damn reggiement. I reckon they’re still runnin’ and we was runnin’ after ’em, that’s how I snagged ma ankle thataways. I had me such awful damn luck. I wanted real bad to ketch me a Louisiani boy.”

Corporal Frank Haynes had a minié ball in his thigh. There had been an early loss of blood judging by the makeshift dressing of the corporal’s army-issue woolen sock, which, once gray, was now a mauve-red, as though it had been dyed in a vat of claret. But it had stopped now. He talked fast and did not stop from the moment Jesse knelt beside him to the second she passed him the canteen, mainly to shut him up. Shock affected men in many different ways. Some became silent and lethargic, others, like Corporals Haynes and Braddock, could not still their tongues long enough even to slake their thirst, but must tell their stories, all different, all unique—and yet all the same. This soldier wanted to know too about a young man across the way coughing up blood and sputum as Jacob tried to comfort him. The rules had already broken down long before the Dutchman had placed the young colonel on the table. Bandsmen and overworked orderlies deposited their burdens wherever they could find space, before rushing back to fetch another from the wagons.

“The barrels of the weapons got hot from constant firing—little pellets of melted lead fell out of the muzzles after each shot.” Private Jack Taggart told her, “You ever seen that, Corporal, little pellets of melted lead just falling at your feet?”

Before she could answer, a young infantry officer, perhaps no more than seventeen, with a tumble of yellow hair and soft blond mustaches, got unsteadily to his feet, blinked away the blood that was gushing from a head wound, and staggered forward, stiff-legged, waving an imaginary saber in the air. “Forward Company C, give ’em hell, boys, give ’em hell!” he yelled and in a few moments his lower lip had begun to tremble, he swung around, stared sightlessly at the wounded laid out on the blood-soaked pallets, then became very rigid, and finally collapsed. The boy with the shrapnel in his eyes sat up and began to yell deliriously for “Lizzie,” thrashing about blindly, trying to tear off the bloody rags that covered the top half of his face. Jacob went to him, as he screamed repeatedly, “Come get me, Lizzie—come get me, Lizzie—oh, come get me, Lizzie—oh, I wish you’d come get me, Lizzie—” His plea like a lament.

Another soldier, his shirt pulled up and left, perhaps by his own restless hands, had exposed a nasty abdominal wound from which a loop of small bowel was poking out. Jesse saw one of the little drummer boys approach him tentatively with a canteen. As he got close, the soldier went into a coughing fit, the small gut protruding farther and farther from the wound. The drummer boy, his face gaunt and streaked with tear-stained sweat and mud, seemed to steel himself bravely as he bent down and held the canteen to the man’s mouth. No sooner had the man drunk the water than it ran out through a second large wound on the side of his chest. The expression of naked horror on the wounded man’s face was matched and exceeded only by the look of disbelief on the grimy face of the drummer boy. For another orderly, clutching precariously to one end of a blanket stretcher, this was too much. He let go and the unfortunate on the blanket rolled off onto the wet ground and lay there groaning pitifully, the stumps of both arms held up for all to see, while the stretcher boy vomited. Jesse ran to the soldier with the wounds in his chest and tried to poke the small gut back into the abdominal cavity with her fingers, while the drummer boy looked on open-mouthed. It was useless, for every time the man coughed, out would pop the intestine.

Hastily she and Jacob, working in perfect unison, as though they were two pairs of hands on the same body, applied bandages over this mortal wound and secured them with strips of adhesive plaster. The man was quickly littered to what the orderlies called the “dead area,” the isolated section across the yard, where the wounded gasped out their last mortal seconds.

The stretcher bearer wiped the vomit from around his mouth, and with eyes streaming tears, he confronted Jacob bitterly. “I seen you read that Barble Dutchman, so you must know all the answers. I used ter believe in God Almighty, but he ain’t lookin’ out fer us this day, no sir, he ain’t givin’ us a gall darn thought, else he wouldna let this happen, no sir, never would a let this happen, not in a million years—not in a million years—” He walked away muttering to himself. The wounds were not all physical.

“Oh Lord—I been shot,” said the sergeant far down the line, who was big and strong as an artillery horse, and had hair and heavy beard the color of a carrot. “I been shot and I’m bleedin’ like a stuck pig!” Jesse rushed to his litter. “It won’t stop bleedin’,” he told her, weeping hysterically.

She moved the filthy rag he was holding to the knee and would have needed a magnifying glass to locate the scratch.

“I been shot,” he said, using the rag to mop at his wet eyes. “Lord, I gonna die.”

“It’s nothing, sir.” She gave him a piece of lint soaked in alcohol to place over the “wound,” just to keep him quiet, but it didn’t work.

“Damn you, boy, what good’s this, I been shot, I tell you. I been shot. I really been shot. I been shot. This ain’t gonna help me, boy—not when I been shot—I need help—God—help me—”

Beside him sat a boy with a man’s fortitude, patiently, silently holding a filthy blood-soaked handkerchief to a facial wound, as he waited his turn on the operating table. Blood was running through his fingers and down his youthful stoic features. Jesse knelt beside him, gently lifted the bloody rags. His left eye was gone. In its place was a bloody, mush-filled mess. He looked at her with his right eye and said softly, “It’s God’s will. He wants me to come home. He says to me, Peter, it’s your time.”

“I been shot!” shouted the sergeant, grabbing ahold of Jesse’s shoulder and yanking her backward off her feet as she crouched there. “Oh God—I’m gonna die—I’m really gonna die.” He shook her until her head looked as if it would work loose and then started tearing at his chest, tearing at his shirt, and screaming hysterically. “I gonna die—!” Then he passed out.

Not a moment too soon, for Jacob was lumbering toward them, his fists already clenched. He helped Jesse to her feet, inspected her most solicitously for harm and glared at the sergeant laid out in a dead faint. Jesse smiled up at him. It was the first time she had ever seen the Dutchman display the slightest anger.

Dead company officers were laid out on the end of the line, side by side. As Jesse stood there, two bandsmen arrived and rolled a body off a litter onto the ground. They left him face down in the mud. No time. No time. She turned him gently over onto his back. In a so-called civilized society, they cover the faces of the dead. Why? As a mark of respect? More likely the living are afraid to look upon the faces of the dead. In a war there’s no place for such delicacies. These dead were exposed. There were not enough blankets to cover them—
so to hell with the dead—or to heaven.
But there was little to be afraid of here. There was little blood. These dead looked as though they were asleep, but for the small round holes in the lieutenant’s brow, chest, and left shoulder, the two neat matching holes in the chests and throats of the two captains, and the single hole in the major’s chest right about where his heart had once beat, and the two strangely close together in his left shoulder. You might think they were asleep.

Ambulance wagons rolled from side to side across the uneven road, jolting along, before depositing their suffering load on the grass, now soaked with all that man is made of, and then starting once more for the battlefields. Blood dripped steadily from the bottom of these wagons. It seeped through the wooden slates as the dejected-looking horses trudged through the blood-soaked grass. The teamsters looked like death.

Leaning against a tree were a matching pair of what were laughingly called “medical orderlies,” chewing leisurely on some tobacco, and watching with dispassionate interest as Jesse tended a man horribly burned when he was caught between the company tents, set on fire by a bursting shell. At that moment, Cartwright came out of the cabin, a lantern held aloft.

“Ah, you men taking a rest?” he inquired with a deceptively friendly smile. The men grinned. Just then, an orderly was leaving the cabin with a pail of bloodied water. Cartwright grabbed the pail and threw the contents over both men. It happened so quickly that Jesse could only stare as a snatch of hysterical laughter sprang from her throat. The two boys stood there soaked to the skin, smelling like slaughtered animals, and raising a howl.