The Better Angels of Our Nature (5 page)

The boy followed him to the small folding table, upon which the flame of the candle flickered precariously in the slight draft and said earnestly with emotion, “I belong with you, sir. Please let me stay here. I’ll black your boots and fetch you hot coffee in the mornings when it’s so cold the breath freezes on your lips and I’ll clean your horse’s bridle until you can see your face in the brass. You could, sir, imagine me your plebe and use me as such. I would be your most obedient servant and there will come a time, sir, when you will ask yourself how you ever managed without me.”

“If you are not the most audacious—I don’t
need
anyone to black my boots or fetch my coffee. I am surrounded by orderlies enough to sink the
Merrimack,
and if I was so inclined I could have more nigger servants than the biggest chief in all Africa.”

“None would be more loyal and dedicated than I, sir, I swear it.”

“I told you last night, do your duty in battle. That will be sufficient loyalty and dedication for any commander. Now get out of here. I have more letters to write.”

“You always have letters to write. You write too much by the dim light of the candle and smoke too many cigars. That is the reason for your headaches, sir.”

“Why, you are outrageous—how dare you talk to me in such intimate terms? Damn your impudence—if I did not truly believe you were slow-witted, I would have you arrested. Now get out of here and stop pestering me. What are you doing now?”

“You advised me to find somewhere warm to sleep, sir. In a corner of your tent is very warm.”

The commander’s red-bearded jaw fell open.

“If you need anything in the night, a light for your cigar, or a drink from your canteen, I would fetch it immediately.”

Sherman jammed the cigar into the corner of his mouth. Then with both hands free, he grabbed hold of the young soldier by the collar of his coat and the seat of his pants and propelled him toward the exit, that hoarse voice issuing a dire warning as he did so. “If I find you hiding in here again, soldier, I’ll have you put in front of a firing squad. Do you understand?”

“Sir—” The boy struggled as he was evicted from the tent. “I could not help but notice, you have so many books. Would you loan me one that I might improve my slow wits and make myself more worthy to serve you?”

3

Dare to do our duty

As the day declined into afternoon, and the air, which had been at intervals clear enough to allow the French coast to be seen, became again charged with mist and vapour, Mr. Lorry’s thoughts seemed to cloud too. When it was dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire…

“What’s a coffee room, Jess?” the soldier asked with a frown.

The boy laid down the book he had been reading to a small group of patients well enough to leave their cots and said, “I imagine it’s a special room where wealthy men like Mr. Lorry can drink their coffee and warm themselves at the fire.”

“I reckon yer can have a room to do almost everythin’ if’in yer rich,” said a young sergeant with his arm in a sling.

“I reckon,” agreed Jesse, only half-listening.

Across the ward, Dr. Cartwright and Dr. Fitzjohn were engaged in yet another heated argument. “Take a look at the boy’s leg,” the younger man was saying as they stood beside a cot. The sheet was pulled back to reveal a large ulcer, slightly purulent at the base, but clearly showing pink healthy tissue around the edges.

“I have already looked, three times, Doctor.” Fitzjohn spoke quietly, in a grave monotone, like a man in a funeral parlor stiffly comforting the bereaved. “The leg is gangrenous, sir.”

“No, no, no.” Cartwright made a sweeping motion with his hand. “That’s just it, you looked
last week,
last week you might have seen
a hint
of gangrene, but not now, now the wound is healing. In a couple of weeks this soldier will be walking around as good as you or me, maybe better,” he added with his twisted smile. “Take a look now, not for my sake, to hell with what you think of me, but for the boy, will you do that, Fitzjohn?”

“Dr. Cartwright, I would appreciate it, sir, if you were to calm down and take a grip on yourself.”

“And if I don’t, what will you do, have me court-martialed?”

“No, sir, but I will make a formal request of the chief medical officer that you be examined for traces of insanity.” Fitzjohn spoke like a man who had been considering this option for some time. He turned on his heel and walked away.

“Maybe I am insane, maybe we’re all goddamn insane!” Cartwright shouted, following him down the aisle. “Look around you, Fitzjohn, does any of this look like the work of a sane people?
You’re
crazy, I’m crazy,
Old Abe
is crazy.
Jeff Davis
is crazy! But I’m not gonna let you cut off that leg, do you hear me, Fitzjohn? You’re a damn fool—and one of these days so help me God I’ll put you out of your misery—” His voice tapered off as he suddenly became aware of his cheering audience—the patients whose well-being he was so energetically defending. “—And when they lock me up I’ll say I did it because you killed more of our boys than the Rebels ever did.” He concluded in a more subdued voice, removing his spectacles.

A soldier in a nearby cot who heard him called out, “Hey, Doc, wanna lend ma pistol so yer can shoot that old coot?”

“What?”
Cartwright blinked at him.

This soldier produced a rusted navy Colt from under his pillow, which he stroked lovingly. “Took it from the same lousy stinkin’ Reb who done this to ma leg. I kept it close by when I hear’ed you an that old buzzard debatin’ whether I was gonna lose this’an.” He tapped the leg with the pistol.

“Give me that gun.” Cartwright walked toward him, his hand outstretched. “No damn guns in here. No damn guns in my hospital, you understand?”

“Ah, Doc, don’t yer know’ed ah’m on yer side.” The soldier held the gun to his chest.

“I said
give me the gun, goddamn it!
”

Reluctantly the soldier handed it over. Cartwright slipped it into the pocket of his apron.

“Yer know sumpin’, Doc, yer got one hell of a mean disposition for a sawbones,” said the soldier who’d just lost his prized possession, laughing heartily.

“I’d have me a special room to keep ma hound dogs.”

Jesse brought his eyes back to Davy Hubble, who was fully dressed, lying on his cot staring up at the canvas ceiling and grinning. “I wouldn’t have no coffee room. I’d have me a room special fer ma old hound dawgs and then Ma wouldna keep gettin’ at me so when they shite on her newscrubbed floor.”

“Read some more, Jess,” said the sergeant with the sling in the next cot.

Jesse lifted the book and continued to read, “‘…When it was dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire, awaiting his dinner as he had awaited his breakfast—’”

“That fella ain’t got nuthin’ t’do but wait on his vittles from morn’ ’til night.” This observation came from a corporal of artillery recovering from a bout of dysentery.

“Hey, Doc—”

Cartwright had joined their small reading group.

“Doc, I ate ma breakfast.” Davy showed the surgeon the empty bowl that had contained rice pudding. “Jess here fed me, jest like ma old ma used to do when we were young’uns.”

“That’s the spirit, soldier,” he said in a tired voice, his mouth making the shape of a brief smile. It was barely midday; he had been on duty all night but had no inclination to leave. He wouldn’t sleep anyhow, he would dream of the gothic Fitzjohn hovering overhead with an amputating saw between his teeth. “What you doing in here?” he asked Jesse. “Ain’t you supposed to be drilling or marching?”

“You said Davy needed encouragement to eat, sir.”

“Did I? I don’t remember saying that. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I would say, leastways not when I’m sober. Go on reading, don’t let me interrupt you. You read very well.”

“Thank you, sir. ‘A bottle of good claret after dinner—’”

“Yessiree.” Cornelius’s shrill high-pitched giggle drowned out the next words as he came limping down the aisle. A broken leg at fourteen had left him with a permanent disability, which got more, or less, pronounced with his mood. “That thar Mr. Lahrey don’t think ’bout nuthin’ else but eatin’ and drinkin’. I wish ter hell I was that Mr. Lahrey and no mistake.”

Cartwright gave a snort of laughter. “Somehow it always comes down to their stomachs in the end. What’s the book?”

“
A Tale of Two Cities,
by the English novelist Mr. Dickens.”

“Gen’al Sherman borrowed it to him,” Davy informed the surgeon. “Jess here is a close personal friend a the gen’al. Ain’t that so, Jess?”

“Not exactly.” The boy got to his feet. “I’ll come around at suppertime, Davy.”

“Hey, Jess, if’in yer gonna read to me some more will yer ask the gen’al if he’s got one a them dime novels with cowboys and Indians and a whole heap a outlaws?”

“I’ll try,” the boy said, “but I don’t think General Sherman will have—” He saw the purposely skeptical look on Cartwright’s face as the surgeon stood there, his arms crossed over his blood-and-pus-stained apron, his dark brows raised over his eyeglasses. “I’ll ask him, Davy.” He left the surgeon by Davy’s bed and crossed to the other side of the tent, where he hoped he might find a more appreciative audience for Mr. Dickens’s inimitable prose.

This morning the consumptive corporal Franz Gerhard, between spitting gobs of blood into a filthy rag and staring bleakly at a photo of his brother, told Jesse, “You haff for me plenty paper? I got lot to say, ja?” She had promised to write a letter for him.

Jesse brought out three sheets and waited, pencil poised expectantly.

“Brother dear mine, I am through the greatest adventure of my life living. I therefore ain’t got time to you to write. Gerhard your brother affectionately.”

From a few feet away Jesse heard Cartwright laugh. He said, “That’ll stir up the folks back home.”

Jesse fared no better at the cot of Private Alonzo Pickands, who dictated his letter: “Today they drilled. They drilled yesterday and well probably drill tomorrow. They drill alla time in this here army. I guess drillins’ better ’en fighten’ ’cos yer kaint die from drillin’ lest yer drill so much yer coll-apse. I kaint do neither I got me a in-flammed foot. But when the foot ain’t in-flammed no more I guess I gotta drill and fight too.”

“Innocents ripe for the slaughter,” the surgeon muttered as he passed.

“Wouldn’t you like to say something about the scenery and the weather, Alonzo?” the boy coaxed.

“Sure, that’s a good idea. We got plenty of scenery here, all of it preetty and plenty of weather, all of it warm.”

Jesse took the liberty of adding,

The trees are all in bloom, pink petals cover the branches of the peach trees, and the people living around here say it’s one of the hottest springs they can recall. At night the temperature drops, so we still need to light camp fires.

“Nice touch.” The surgeon stopped to read over the boy’s shoulder. “I’ll have to get you to write my letters. What do you charge?”

“Charge?”

“Your rates. You mean you do all this letter writing gratis?” The surgeon laughed suddenly. “No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. No one does
anything
for nothing. You ask, say five cents per letter and when you’ve earned enough you use it to buy the assistant surgeon a bottle of whiskey. That’s how it works.”

Five minutes later Cartwright stood watching as the boy poured some water on a piece of cloth and placed it to the parched lips of Sergeant Drum, so sick with dysentery that the once-hulking teamster was now a fleshless skeleton lying beneath the soiled bedsheet. Then from across the tent came the sounds of a patient shouting in agony. But the boy did not flinch, did not even lift his head from his task, but continued to bathe the unconscious sergeant’s feverish cheeks, his clammy brow, and his throat, where the Adam’s apple now stuck out like a growth.

“Where did you learn that?” the surgeon finally asked. The boy intrigued him.

“From Sergeant De Groot, sir.”

Cartwright nodded, then said, “Why are you hanging around in here anyway? No one hangs around in here unless they have to. This is an army, you know, you can’t go anyplace you please or do what you please, at least that’s what they tell me.”

“Sir, will that soldier keep his leg?”

“Damn right. In a few days His Satanic Majesty will find someone else to torment—he just likes to put me firmly back in my place every now and again, lest I get the inflated notion that I’m a
real
doctor.” He peeled off the boy’s kepi from where it was perched precariously on the shock of red curls, stared at his freckled face, and demanded suddenly, “Just how old
are
you?”

“Sir?”

“It’s a simple question, Private, I asked your age.”

The boy seemed to be thinking for a moment and then he answered, “Well, sir, it’s not really that simple,” and smiled in that way he had, kind of rueful and apologetic.

“Fetch me the bedpan, boy,” called out the soldier in the next cot, poking him hard in the back with his crutch, “and be right quick about it if you don’t want no accident.”

Cartwright moved aside for the boy to pass. Suddenly there came a short high-pitched squeaking sound from Sergeant Drum. The soldier had stopped breathing and was turning blue.

In a second, the surgeon was bending over the prostrate man and forcing his finger down his throat. “Who the
hell
fed this man salted pork?” he shouted as he brought an undigested lump of hard meat from the struggling soldier. Drum was fighting to catch his breath, choking to death. “Get my surgical kit—there—off the table—now!” he ordered Jesse, flinging his arm toward the table by the entrance. As soon as the boy returned, Cartwright went to work. He took up a blunt rubber tube and briskly snipped off the end with a dressing scissors. Then he used a scalpel to make a slender incision in the man’s throat through which he carefully inserted the rubber tube.

The boy, standing there, gasped in amazement as he heard the soldier breathing
through
the tube. “Come on, Sergeant, that’s it, breathe for me, you’re all right now, you’re going to be fine, but you have to breathe. Come on, you’ll be home in a couple of weeks, and all this will seem like some terrible nightmare, come on, Sergeant—you’ve got to try, damn it—”

Jesse watched the surgeon rub the man’s hands, stroke his brow, massage the once-strong shoulders where the muscles had atrophied, leaving the gray flesh to hang limply from the bone. In a matter of seconds the sergeant had responded, surely as much to the doctor’s encouraging words as to his unorthodox medical procedure. He was no longer struggling for breath, but beginning to breathe more easily, his color returning to normal, or what was normal for the man’s pitiful condition. His eyes had flickered open and he was holding tight to Cartwright’s hand.

Unbid, the boy placed a padding of lint against the bleeding wound. The surgeon looked at the boy’s awed, intelligent face. It was a hell of a long time since he had encountered a private soldier who cared more for a dying man’s comfort than the size of his boots, so he took the trouble to explain. “It’s a urinary catheter, very versatile, can be utilized as a tracheotomy tube if one isn’t available—” He seemed about to say more, but then spotted someone over the boy’s shoulder. “Make him comfortable, I’ll be back in a minute.”