The President's Daughter (58 page)

As expected, Emily and I were assigned by the Sanitary Commission to the field hospital they established near the site of the anticipated battle. I left Maria in Anamacora, chose a saddle horse named Virginius, packed my bags, and set off to Emily's place to fetch her. We could reach the Commission's advance pavilion at Taneytown, about thirteen miles from Gettysburg, in a day's ride. I took only a few things with me: white gloves and extra underclothes, Thance's telescope, Thor's pistol, a compass, a watch, and the photograph we had all had taken on January 1, and a Bible. There was no one to spare either at Anamacora or the Gluck's farm to ride with us, so Emily and I escorted each other, armed and on our own swift horses.

Near Gettysburg we passed a white rectangular stone-and-stucco building sitting on a small ridge surrounded by vineyards and peach orchards. It was
St. Joseph's Convent, and surrounding it we could see stacks of arms and wisps of smoke from the fires of the army camp. The square belfry rose like a Tuscan tower over the soft hills, and one had a bird's-eye view of the entire valley with its rivers and woods, a small cemetery, and the village itself. It seemed the safest place in the world.

Many of the nurses at Taneytown came from honored families, some bearing the names of universities and hospitals, factories and mills. I was Mrs. Wellington to everyone I encountered, and that was the name I would carry into this battle. But secretly I bore another name as famous and illustrious as any. I had carved
H.H.J.
on my leather nursing kit to remind me I was also the President's daughter. I had come here not only to nurse, but to bear witness. Before long, I was sure, I'd be reunited with Thor, who was on his way from Camp Rapidan, and Madison and James, who were somewhere on the road to this place. It had taken them three weeks and me forty years to arrive at this rendezvous.

Emily, Dorothea Dix, and I spent the rest of the evening taking inventory of the supply tents: jelly pots and bottles of syrup, blackberry and blackcurrant; shirts, drawers, dusting gowns, socks, slippers. Rags and bandages were folded in their crates. Barrels of coffee, tea, and soft crackers. Tamarinds, piled in sacks. I personally went through all the medical supplies of alcohol, creosote, nitric acid, bromide, iodine, permanganate of potassium, morphine, codeine, camphor, laudanum, syringes, tin cups, wood splints and crutches, buckets, stretchers, bed sacks, and blankets. There were earthenware containers stamped
WELLINGTON
, as well as our barrels of chloroform and ether.

On July first, the accidents of time and place were established for all. It was then that we began to hear the dull booming of the guns, as the empty surgery room stared out at us in mute expectation.

“There's a rumor,” said Emily, “that Lincoln has replaced Hooker with Meade. Pray God it is so.”

The Third, First, and Second Divisions of the Army of the Potomac were all massed near the southeastern base of Round Top on the Taneytown road —nearly one hundred thousand Union men facing the same number of Rebels. The two armies had finally found one another.

Matron Dix recognized Generals Meade and Gibbson as they rode by. We checked and rechecked our supplies and inventory. The rows upon rows of empty hospital beds seemed a white scream in the deepening darkness, floating, diaphanous exclamation points of death and disfigurement.

We hardly spoke. The surgeons and doctors arrived. The ambulance carts drove up in the moonlight and lined up. The black work gangs dug and spaded through the night, in silence. It would be expected, I supposed, on the
eve of such an event, that one would have peculiar feelings, something extraordinary, some great arousing and exciting of the faculties commensurate with the event itself; this would be very poetical and transcending, but there was nothing of the kind at the Sanitary Pavilion. The Army of the Potomac were old soldiers who had suffered many defeats and too much death and destruction in their ranks to lose any sleep over it now. No, I believe the army slept soundly that night.

In the moonlight, I sat down on a railroad tie with the thought of writing Thor, knowing my letter would never reach him on the road, but I found that my hand shook uncontrollably.

On the morning of the second, the weather was thick and sultry; the sky was overcast, with low, vapory clouds and drizzle. I took out Thance's telescope and observed all the movement on the crest near the cemetery I had passed yesterday. Men looked like giants there in the mist, and the guns of the frowning batteries appeared so big that I was relieved to know they were ours.

“Matron Dix has asked me to take a supply of morphine over to the nurses at the convent,” I told Emily as I saddled my horse. “I'm taking my telescope. I'll be able to climb to the top of the bell tower to see what I can see from there.”

As I rode away from the depot, the first rumblings of cannon and what seemed like the roar of the sea, but must have been the marching of thousands upon thousands of soldiers' feet, rose, like a faint echo from the earth. When I arrived at the convent, I tethered Virginius and reported to the mother superior. I left the supplies with her and entered the bell tower, climbing to the very top, hoping to see what I had just heard.

As I lifted the telescope, I could see that the troops had been drawn up into ranks in the form of the letter U, the troops facing outward, and the cemetery within the sharpest curvature of the line, due south of the town of Gettysburg, which lay deceptively peaceful under the July haze. Three roads converged on the town, forming a sixty-degree angle. The easterly one was the Baltimore Pike, which passed by the cemetery; the farthest west was the Emmettsburg road; between these, the Taneytown Road ran north and south and united with the Emmettsburg road between the cemetery and the town. The high ground between them was known as Seminary Ridge, and spread out upon it were eighty thousand blue-clad soldiers and their guns, and upon their flanks was the cavalry. This was the battle formation of the Army of the Potomac.

But I could see nothing of the Confederates at first, so cleverly were they concealed in the woods north of the town. At last they began to reveal themselves to the west and northwest of the town, as they moved in masses of gray through the woods of Seminary Ridge. I lowered the telescope, my whole body trembling. I had to get back to Emily and the hospital. Suddenly the entire landscape before me turned into a great, heaving, blue ship of state; the vaulted clouds above had blown themselves into the shapes of sails, the earth moved as if it were a rolling sea. Before my eyes, thousands of blue-clad men and some squadrons of cavalry began moving down the slope and across the narrow valley that divided North from South. This was the first wave of the battle formation of the Army of the Potomac.

I might have heard the rattle of ten thousand ramrods as they drove home ten thousand cones of lead. The earth moved sickeningly, the bell tower trembled, and a deafening roar like the end of the earth rolled over the universe. To my surprise, I found myself sitting on the floor as if I had been knocked down by the sound. I got to my feet, but instead of fleeing down the bell-tower steps, I lifted the glass for another look as specks of Rebel gray flowed out of the woods to meet the blue wave.

Then there began to appear countless flashes and the long, fiery shouts of the muskets, the rattle of volleys mingled with the thunder of the guns. The long gray lines swept down upon the blue and mixed with them and the battle smoke, and now the same color emerged from the bushes and orchards on the right. Oh, the din and the roar and—suddenly, for the first time, I heard in the distance the rebel yell, thirty thousand strong. The hair on my head and the back of my neck lifted, and I squinted against the sky, now darkening with smoke. I was all alone in this world, watching this spectacle. I would die here, I thought. There was no escape.

Mesmerized, I watched the world become one sheet of fire. From Round Top to the cemetery stretched an uninterrupted field of battle. To watch the fight in the valley below me was terrible, but what must it be like when one was in it? All my senses were dead, except that of sight. The roar of cannon and the yells of the Rebels all passed me unheeded, for my soul was all eyes and saw all things that the smoke did not hide.

To say it was like a summer storm with the crash of thunder, the glare of lightning, the shriek of wind, and the whistle of hailstones would have beggared the symphony of sound of two hundred and fifty cannon spitting upon the smoke-darkened sky: incessant, pervasive, heating the air above my head, shaking the ground, remote, nearer, deafening, earsplitting, astounding. One could not compare it to a storm, which is an act of God. This was a human procession of hurrying, falling, crawling, running, crouching men.
The guns, however, were not of this earth, nor interested in humans. These guns were great, infuriate demons whose mouths blazed with smoky tongues of living fire and whose sullied breath milled around the miniature figures and along the ground like the sulfur-laden smoke of hell. Those pitiful, tiny, grimy men, rushing, shouting, their souls in frenzy, plying the dusky globes and igniting sparks, were in league with these demons of war and obeyed them like willing, happy slaves.

I found myself shouting, then whispering, as the Rebels hurtled forward and the long, blue-coated lines of infantry delivered their fire down the slope. Men were dropping on all sides, by scores and by hundreds: poor, mutilated creatures, some with an arm dangling, some with a leg broken by a bullet, were limping and crawling toward the rear. They seemed to make no sound. It was now the Union men whose growls and yells overturned those of the Rebels as they advanced. A blue wave rolled up upon the gray rock and smashed them. I began to shout as the Rebel line broke and began to flow backward like tears.

Covered with smoke and soot, I groped my way down the bell-tower steps, tripping, my drawers wet with urine, my face black. At the bottom I stumbled out among the first wave of wounded. They were lying in lines and heaps outside the chapel door, and had begun to pile up against the sides of the belfry. Many had made it back from the front walking or dragging themselves and, now exhausted, could not go any farther. Some were tearing at their clothes, trying to see their wounds, for they knew that a stomach or chest wound was mortal. A long, pathetic row of semiconscious men lay on the ground moaning and twitching fitfully, completely unattended—men who had been shot through the head or whose wounds, upon hasty inspection, had been pronounced hopeless and who had been put aside to die as quickly as they might. Not far away, outside one of the hospital tents, there was a long table where doctors were amputating arms and legs, with an army wagon standing by to carry off the severed limbs and return for a new load. A new world had been born while I was in the belfry.

In the chapel, planks had been laid across the tops of the pews so that the entire auditorium was one vast, hard bed jammed with wounded men lying elbow to elbow and head to foot. There I stood, aghast and awestruck, chest-high in an endless, undulating sea of suffering anguish.

I started up the center aisle, fording the two breast-high banks of wounded men who cried out for me, reached for me. Blood had seeped through the spaces between the planks, and my skirts dragged in it, mixed with water that swirled in the trough made by the chapel's broken pavement. The white-coifed heads and shoulders of the nuns floated by, disembodied, as I struggled
toward the crucifix, which hovered over the assembly of hurt men from its altar. I reached it finally and then, in a stupor, not knowing what to do next, turned back.

Like a sleepwalker, I moved through this infernal slaughterhouse, chest-high among the rough planks, my skirts trailing in indescribable muck, through the putrid slave hole where a candle would not burn.

There was no time to pray. There was no time to think. A surgeon grabbed me by the arm and turned me toward the hospital tent outside. “No! Don't stay here. You're needed outside.” My eyes met those of the surgeon, and I allowed him to lead me out of the chapel and into the sunlight toward the surgery and a pile of arms and legs and waiting, wounded men, standing as if they were in a ticket line.

Hours later I found Virginius, unleashed and calmly grazing just outside the bell tower. I collapsed against his vibrant, warm flank, sobbing. When I had enough strength, I slowly pulled myself up onto his back and made my way back to the Sanitary Commission depot.

My mount shied away from the corpses, unwilling to tread on dead men or beasts; the animals appealed with an almost human gaze, and the humans stared back like beasts surprised in death. They were all so quiet, lying beside each other; South and North, Virginia and Massachusetts, some with composed upturned faces, some in tormented positions of pain and fear, but as darkness dimmed the carnage, they all seemed only wrapped in sleep.

The doctors and medical corpsmen were working with torches now, trying to separate the dead from the living. Many who still lived would have to wait until daylight for attention. I could no longer see. Then, in the lurid crepuscule, I did see something—a gray shadow, a raised arm, a prone Union soldier who cried out an appeal. Was the shadow trying to rob him or kill him? I was the only witness. Around me slept only dead men. The circling torches were far, far away. Before I realized it, a flash of light had pierced the twilight. I heard a shot ring out, and the scent of exploded gunpowder burned my throat. The Union boy who had lifted his arms in supplication was safe. The Rebel deserter fell dead beside him at my feet. I had killed a man. The ache from the recoil of Thance's pistol made me lower my arm.

The wounded boy half-crawled and I half-dragged him to Virginius. With our last strength, I hoisted him onto the horse's rump. There was no way my exhausted mount could carry us both, so I walked him back to the hospital. When I got there, the boy in blue had died. I looked for someplace to cry and, finding none, pulled Virginius's blanket over my head and cried once again into his flank.