The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (153 page)

After the first few meals, Rob J. could see the reason for so many stomach problems. He sought out the commissary officer, a harried second lieutenant
named Zearing, and learned that the army gave the regiment eighteen cents a day to feed each man. The result was a daily ration of twelve ounces of fat salt pork, two and one-half ounces of navy beans or peas, and either eighteen ounces of flour or twelve ounces of hardtack. The meat was liable to be black on the outside and yellow with putrefaction when cut, and the soldiers called the hardtack “worm castles” because the large thick crackers, often moldy, were frequently tenanted by maggots or weevils.

Each soldier received his ration uncooked and prepared it himself over the flame of a small campfire, usually boiling the beans and frying both the meat and the crumbled hardtack—even frying flour—in pork fat. Combined with disease, the diet spelled disaster for thousands of stomachs, and there were no latrines. The men defecated anywhere they chose, usually behind their tents, although many with loose bowels made it only as far as the space between their tent and their neighbors’. About the camp was an effluvia reminiscent of the
War Hawk
, and Rob J. decided the entire army stank of feces.

He realized he could do nothing about the diet, at least at once, but he was determined to improve conditions. Next afternoon, after sick call, he walked to where a sergeant from Company C, First Battalion, was drilling half a dozen men in the use of the bayonet. “Sergeant, do you know where there are some shovels?”

“Shovels? Why, yes, I do,” the sergeant said warily.

“Well, I want you to get one for each of these men, and I want them to dig a ditch,” Rob J. said.

“A ditch, sir?” The sergeant stared at the curious figure in the baggy black suit, the wrinkled shirt, the string tie, and the wide-brimmed black civilian hat.

“Yes, a ditch,” Rob J. said. “Right over here. Ten feet long, three feet wide, six feet deep.”

This civilian doctor was a large man. He appeared very determined. And the sergeant knew he had simulated rank of first lieutenant.

The six men were digging industriously a short time later, while Rob J. and the sergeant watched, when Colonel Hilton and Captain Irvine of Company C, First Battalion, came down the company street.

“What the hell is this?” Colonel Hilton said to the sergeant, who opened his mouth and looked at Rob J.

“They’re digging a sink, Colonel,” Rob J. said.

“A
sink?”

“Yes, sir, a latrine.”

“I know what a sink is. Their time is better spent at bayonet practice. Very soon these men will be in battle. We’re showing them how to kill rebels. This regiment is going to shoot Confederates, and bayonet them, and stab them, and if it’s necessary, we will shit and piss them to death. But we will not dig latrines.”

From one of the men with shovels came a guffaw. The sergeant was grinning, watching Rob J.

“Is that clearly understood, Acting Assistant Surgeon?”

Rob J. did not smile. “Yes, Colonel.”

That was on his fourth day with the 106th. After that, there were eighty-six more days, and they passed very slowly and were counted very carefully.

50

A SON’S LETTER

Cincinnati, Ohio

January 12, 1863

Dear Pa,

Well, I claim Rob J.’s scalpel!

Colonel Peter Brandon, a principal aide to Surgeon General William A. Hammond, delivered the commencement address. There were those who said it was a fine talk, but I was disappointed. Dr. Brandon told us that doctors have tended to the medical needs of their armies all through history. He gave a lot of examples, the Hebrews of the Bible, the Greeks, the Romans, etc., etc. Then he told all about the splendid opportunities the wartime United States Army offers a doctor, the salaries, the gratification one receives when serving his country. We yearned to be reminded of the healing glories of our new profession—Plato and Galen, Hippocrates and Andreas Vesalius—and he gave us a recruitment speech. Moreover, it was unnecessary. Seventeen of my class of thirty-six new physicians already had arranged to enter the Medical Department of the Army.

I know you will understand when I write that although I would dearly have loved to see Ma, I was relieved by her decision not to attempt the trip
to Cincinnati. Trains, hotels, etc., are so crowded and dirty nowadays that a woman traveling alone would have to suffer discomfort, or worse. I especially missed your presence, which gives me another reason to hate the war. Paul Cooke’s father, who sells feed and grain in Xenia, came to commencement and afterward took the two of us for a grand feed, with wine toasts and nice compliments. Paul is one of those going directly into the army. He’s deceptive because he’s so full of fun, but he was the brightest in our class and was awarded his degree
summa cum laude
. I was of help to him in the laboratory work, and he helped me earn
magna cum laude
, because whenever we finished a reading assignment he asked me questions that were a lot fiercer than any our professors ever asked.

After dinner, he and his father went to Pike’s Opera House to hear Adelina Patti in concert, and I went back to the Polyclinic. I knew precisely what I wanted to do. There is a brick-lined tunnel that runs under Ninth Street between the medical school and the main hospital building. It is for the use of physicians only. In order that it is clear during emergencies, it is off-limits to medical students, who must cross the street aboveground, no matter how inclement the weather. I went into the basement of the medical school, very much still the student, and entered the lamplit tunnel. Somehow, when I walked through on the other side into the hospital, for the first time I felt like a doctor!

Pa, I’ve accepted a two-year appointment as a house officer of the Southwestern Ohio Hospital. It pays only three hundred dollars per annum, but Dr. Berwyn said it will lead to a good income as a surgeon. “Never downplay the importance of income,” he told me. “You must remember that the person who complains bitterly about a doctor’s earnings usually is not a doctor.”

Embarrassingly, and to my wonderful fortune, both Berwyn and McGowan squabble about which of them shall take me under his wing. The other day, Barney McGowan outlined this plan for my future: I shall work with him for a few years as a junior associate, then he will arrange an appointment for me as associate professor of anatomy. Thus, he said, when he retires, I’ll be ready to take over the mantle as professor of pathology.

It was too much, they both set my head to spinning, because my own dream always has been simply to become a doctor. In the end, they worked out a program that is advantageous to me. Just as I did during my summer employment, I’ll spend mornings in the operating theater with Berwyn and afternoons on pathology with McGowan, only instead of doing dirty work as a student, I’ll function as a doctor. Despite their kindness, I don’t know
whether I’ll ever want to settle in Cincinnati. I miss living in a small place where I know the people.

Cincinnati is more Southern in feeling and sentiment than Holden’s Crossing. Billy Henried confided to a few trusted friends that he would join the Confederate Army as a surgeon after graduation. Two nights ago I went to a farewell dinner with Henried and Cooke. It was strange and sad, each of them aware of where the other was going.

News that President Lincoln has signed a proclamation granting liberty to the slaves has caused lots of anger. I know you don’t care for the president because of his part in destroying the Sauks, but I admire him for freeing the slaves, whatever his political reasons. Northerners hereabouts seem able to make any sacrifice when they tell themselves it is to save the Union, but they don’t want the goal of the war to become the abolition of slavery. Most seem unprepared to pay this terrible blood-price if the purpose of the fighting is to free the Negroes. The losses have been terrifying at battles like Second Bull Run and Antietam. Now there is news of slaughter at Fredericksburg, where almost thirteen thousand Union soldiers were mowed down while trying to take high ground from the South. It has produced despair in many of the people with whom I have talked.

I worry constantly about you and Alex. It may irk you to know I’ve begun to pray, although I don’t know to whom or what, and I ask regularly only that both of you will come home.

Please do your best to care for your own health as well as that of others, and remember that there are those who anchor their lives on your strength and goodness.

Your loving son,
Shaman
(Dr.! Robert Jefferson Cole)

51

THE HORN PLAYER

It wasn’t as hard as Rob J. had feared to live in a tent, to sleep on the ground again. What was more difficult was dealing with questions that haunted him:
why in the world he was there, and what the outcome of this terrible civil war would be. Events continued to go badly for the cause of the North. “We can’t seem to win for losing,” Major G. H. Woffenden observed in one of his less-drunken moments.

Most of the troops Rob J. lived among drank hard when off-duty, especially following payday. They drank to forget, to remember, to celebrate, to commiserate with one another. The dirty and often drunken young men were like pit dogs on a leash, apparently oblivious of impending mortality, straining to get at their natural enemy, other Americans who doubtless were just as dirty and just as often drunken.

Why were they so eager to kill Confederates? Very few of them really knew. Rob J. saw that the war had taken on substance and meaning for them that went far beyond reasons and causes. They thirsted to fight because the war existed, and because it had been officially declared admirable and patriotic to kill. That was enough.

He wanted to howl and scream at them, to lock the generals and politicians in a dark room like errant, foolish children, to take them by the scruff of their collective necks and shake them and demand: What is the matter with you?
What is the matter with you?

But instead, he went to sick call every day and doled out the ipecac and the quinine and the paregoric, and he was careful to look at the ground wherever he walked, like a man who made his home in a giant kennel.

On his final day with the 106th Kansas, Rob J. sought out the paymaster and collected his eighty dollars and then went to the conical tent and slung his
Mee-shome
over his shoulder and picked up his suitcase. Major G. H. Woffenden, curled up in his rubber poncho, didn’t open his eyes or mutter good-bye.

Five days before, the men of the 176th Pennsylvania had marched raggedly onto steamboats and were carried southward toward combat in Mississippi, according to rumor. Now other boats had disgorged the 131st Indiana, which was raising its tents where the Pennsylvanians lately had lived. When Rob J. sought out the commanding officer, he found a baby-faced colonel still in his twenties, Alonzo Symonds. Colonel Symonds said he had his eye out for a doctor. His surgeon had concluded a three-month enlistment and had gone back to Indiana, and he never had had an assistant surgeon. He questioned Dr. Cole closely and seemed impressed by what he learned, but when Rob J. began to indicate that certain conditions had to be met before he could sign on, Colonel Symonds’ face showed doubt.

Rob J. had kept careful records of his sick calls for the 106th. “On almost any given day, thirty-six percent of the men were on their backs or in my sick line. Some days the percentage was higher. How does that compare with your daily sick list?”

“We’ve had a lot of them sick,” Symonds conceded.

“I can give you more healthy men, Colonel, if you will help me.”

Symonds had been a colonel only four months. His family owned a factory in Fort Wayne where glass lamp chimneys were made, and he knew how ruinous sick workers could be. The 131st Indiana had been formed four months before, raw troops, and within days had been thrown into picket duty in Tennessee. He considered himself fortunate that they’d had only two skirmishes serious enough to be called contact with the enemy. He had lost two killed and one wounded, but on any given day he had had so many down with fever that the Confederates could have waltzed through his regiment without trouble, had they known.