Wedded to War (38 page)

“She will write,” said Jane. “She would have sent a letter before leaving, to you, mum, or to Mr. Hastings. A letter will come soon, and then you’ll know. You must be patient.”

But Phineas had been patient for more than a year. He was running out of patience.

Night fell over Cheeseman’s Creek like a heavy curtain, but sleep was far off yet. Rocked by the rippling creek below, Charlotte carefully tipped a dipper of brandy down a sun-baked soldier’s throat, while humming mosquitoes swarmed them both in the yellow gleam of lantern light.

The first batch of patients had just arrived on the hospital transport, plucked from the spongy shore at Ship Point by the tugboat
Wilson Small
, and slung on stretchers through the hatches of the
Daniel Webster.
They were found covered in vermin, sweltering in their wool uniforms, and ripe with typhoid fever.

It was not a surprise. It was why the
Daniel Webster
had come.

“Won’t you have a little more?” Charlotte coaxed. “If you can handle this, we have oranges for you to suck on, too. How long has it been since you’ve had an orange, soldier?”

The soldier mumbled, staring straight ahead with glassy, unseeing eyes, and the water dribbled down his chin in an unsteady track through his stubble.

“Come now, we can do better than this.” She tried another spoonful, but he clumsily bumped her arm away and picked at his uniform with feeble fingers. “We’ll get you into some clean clothes in no time,” said Charlotte. “Just as soon as everyone is settled in and has a little something in their bellies, all right?”

He shook his head. “Tell, tell …” he muttered, still scratching at his collar. Charlotte loosened his collar then, and her fingers caught on a small leather pouch hanging around his neck against his clammy skin.

“Is this what you want?” Charlotte opened it and pulled out a curled, cracked photograph of a beautiful woman and five small children. “Your family?” She swallowed. “They are beautiful, soldier; you must be proud of them. And I’m sure they are proud of you.”

He nodded listlessly, and said again, “Tell them.” Then he was gone—not yet dead, but no longer responsive.

Footsteps grew louder in Charlotte’s ears until Dr. Robert Ware was standing beside her. As he listened to the soldier’s heartbeat with the stethoscope, Charlotte asked, “Will he live?”

“No, not likely.”

“Is there no hope?”

“Without a miracle, I’m afraid not.”

Charlotte stared into the solemn faces of the woman and children in the photo cupped in her hand. Tears slipped from her eyes and traced a clean path through the film of sweat on her face.

“No, my dear girl, you must not do that.” Dr. Ware’s voice was quiet, but edged with warning. “You cannot cry.”

Charlotte wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands, embarrassed. She knew better than to let emotion show. In fact, she had gotten quite good at suppressing her natural sympathies in order to get her tasks done. But for some reason, this picture of the family now without its leader tugged at her heartstrings.

“It’s impossible not to care at all.” Another tear slipped down her face.

Dr. Ware handed her his handkerchief “Care by doing, not by feeling. There will be time for emotion later—we will be feeling these days for the rest of our lives, perhaps—but right now is our one moment to do. To act. To save all we can without allowing any sentiment to slow us down.”

“My mind knows all of that, but right now my heart just isn’t listening.”

“Then kill it. You must.”

“Pardon me?” Charlotte looked up sharply.

“It is the only way. Deny your heart, if that’s what slows you down, and let your mind, your eyes, your hands take over.”

Kill my heart?
Sorrow gave way to indignation. It was one thing to maintain self-control on duty—that she could agree with. But deny her heart completely was simply too extreme.

“I disagree.” Her face now dry, she handed the handkerchief back. “Compassion—a function of my
heart
—makes me a
better
nurse. Compassion motivates me to give my all for these men. It makes me tune in more to their needs, and the moment I stop feeling for them, I’m sure I would not have the energy to work hard as I do.”

Dr. Ware sighed wearily as he tucked the handkerchief back in his pocket. “This is why nurses have always been men. Women aren’t made to handle the casualties of war.” His voice was not unkind. “It’s too hard on you. If you would like to disembark, you have only to say the word, and it shall be arranged.”

Dr. Ware studied her face, and she returned the even gaze. He was a young man, younger even than she was by a few years. Short brown hair curled at his temples and a trim beard and mustache covered a lean, almost gaunt face. But his eyes were troubled waters, framed by lines of unspoken anxiety. Like Caleb’s, the last time she had seen him.

“It is not too hard on me.” Charlotte lifted her chin. “I will stay.”

“All right. But consider that right now we have just thirty-five patients on board. You want to weep over one of them. What will you do when we have hundreds? You will never see them recover, you realize. We catch them at their worst, care for them only for a matter of days, and send them on to other hospitals for their convalescence. We will be surrounded by pain and suffering without the satisfaction of seeing them healed. You’ll not be able to escape it on this ship. This is what you want?”

It would be difficult, Charlotte knew, but that was not reason enough to avoid it. “I want to help.” Her tone was steeled with resolve.

Dr. Ware rubbed the back of his neck. “Then follow this advice: think of these soldiers not as men, but as patients only. You will go mad if you do otherwise.” He waved over half a dozen medical students. “Stay if you like, and learn something.”

As the students approached, Dr. Ware told them to change the patient out of his uniform and into a clean hospital gown while Charlotte turned her back. As they did so, they peppered the doctor with questions—not about the soldier’s name, or his family, but about the disease he had succumbed to.

“He is near the end.” Dr. Ware timed his pulse for a moment. “One hundred forty beats per minute. The cerebral disturbances have just given way into a stupor or coma. Look at this.” Charlotte held her lantern closer as Dr. Ware lifted the soldier’s lips with a tongue depressor, revealing dark crusts on the gums and teeth. “Sordes,” Dr. Ware called them, then lowered the patient’s jaw with his thumb and extracted his tongue. It was brown and dry, cracked with deep gashes.

“Does every typhoid fever patient’s tongue look like that?” one student asked.

“No, this is an advanced stage,” replied Dr. Ware. “In the early stage, it looks quite different. In many cases, the tongue is large, indented on the edges by the teeth, flabby and pale. The surface is smooth, the papillae hardly noticeable, and covered with a white fur thickest on the edges. This is especially true for scorbutic cases.”

Dr. Ware’s entourage followed him to the bedside of another patient, who obligingly showed them his furry tongue.

“Is it the first sign of fever?” asked a student.

Dr. Ware shook his head. “No. Ironically, the first sign is a chill. A headache. Then comes the hot skin, the loss of appetite. Notice the icteroid hue—that yellow tint of the skin, almost like he has jaundice. It’s often accompanied by nausea, vomiting, gastric tenderness, delirium, or at least cerebral confusion.”

“Madness?”

“Yes, eventually. You see those fellows muttering over there. One
wants to know where his Sunday clothes are. Another has been screaming out ‘Johnny Miller,’ but we don’t know whether that is his name, or if he is calling for a friend. That one—” he pointed to a man being fed by Alice, “that one wants to find his wedding ring, which he is convinced is on the bottom of the river. We’ve got to keep an eye on him. The mental haze can clear away if the patient recovers. It’s only temporary, unless …” He turned to the patient again, who appeared to be listening. “Well. It can get better. Now my good fellow, would you be so good as to lie back for me? That’s a good man.” He pressed gently near the right hipbone, and a distinctive gurgling sound escaped. “Hear that?”

The students nodded, scribbling in their notebooks again, and Charlotte fished in the pocket of her apron for pencil and paper to do the same.

“What’s that?” cried the patient. “Blasted rebel shells, get down! Under the water!” Lunging forward, he gripped Charlotte by the arm and yelled, “What are you doing here?” and knocked her off her feet, sending her tumbling into a bulkhead before she hit the deck. “Stay down!” he shouted at her. “This ain’t no place for a lady!”

Dr. Ware dropped his notebook and pressed the patient back into his bed, but arms and legs thrashed wildly, kicking and punching Dr. Ware.

“You’re not in the swamp anymore, soldier,” she said, pushing herself back to her feet.

“You’re hit, you’re hit!” he cried frantically. Charlotte touched her fingers to the side of her face, and they came away slick with blood.

“You must have snagged a nail head.” Dr. Ware examined the wound. “It’s not deep—head wounds just bleed a lot. Go ahead and get yourself cleaned up.”

The soldier huffed. “I told you this ain’t no place for a lady.”

H
eavy rain drummed fiercely upon the tugboat
Wilson Small
as it threaded its way through the York River, bobbing in the wakes of three hundred army fleet steamboats. Moonlight wrinkled on the water. Ruby was resting in a cramped cabin, but Charlotte watched from the bow of the
Small
in wonder as heavy steamers swept past her, each with a tow a quarter mile long, on their way to Fort Monroe. Alice watched with her as the floating lights from the rigging grew dark in the distance, and the bands and bugle calls faded away.

Mr. Olmsted had sent the
Daniel Webster
north when its human cargo reached nearly two hundred patients at Ship Point, Virginia, and the Sanitary Commission had been given an empty boat at Yorktown that they would soon transform into another much-needed hospital transport.

“There it is.” Mr. Olmsted pointed through the rain at a dirty boat labeled
Ocean Queen
in cracked and peeling paint. He leaned forward
and squinted at two small sternwheel steamboats alongside the
Queen
, one on each side. “No, no, no,” he muttered. “This isn’t good.”

As soon as they were next to the sternwheel boats, Mr. Olmsted boarded them in the downpour, Charlotte and Alice close on his heels.

“What’s this all about?” he asked an officer in charge.

“What does it look like?” was the response. “I’ve got two boats full of sick men I’ve been ordered to deliver to the
Ocean Queen
.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Olmsted. “We aren’t ready! The boat is a mere hulk. We have no beds or bedding, no food even for the crew, not a surgeon on board—we haven’t even begun to prepare for its use! Give us a few hours, at the very least.”

“Orders are orders. Look, little man, these men were left behind when their regiments were ordered forward last night.” The roar of artillery rose above the beating of the rain. “Do you hear that?” That’s their regiments, at this very moment engaged in the battle of Williamsburg. I’ve got to unload my charges and get over there to do my part,” the officer told them.

Mr. Olmsted held his lantern high and peered at the men in tattered uniforms covering the floor all around him. Hollow eyes set deep in yellow faces stared vacantly back at him. They were soaked with storm and fever sweat.

“These men have been for twenty-four hours without nourishment of any kind,” the officer in charge went on. “The racking of the ambulances over eighteen miles of corduroy roads—log bridges over the swamps—has sent many into a delirium that will claim their lives if they do not receive stimulants, warmth, medical care.”

“None of which can be had on the
Ocean Queen
!” Mr. Olmsted’s voice was sharp. “I tell you we have nothing for them.”

“I tell you they will die.”

Charlotte had watched Mr. Olmsted work long enough to imagine the invisible battle taking place in his mind. Of course he wanted to help. This was why the Sanitary Commission had invented hospital transports in the first place. But without proper preparation, chaos
would reign, and nothing would be accomplished.

Olmsted rubbed a hand wearily over his rain-washed face. “Let me go back to shore and find a doctor,” he said at last. “Place an officer at each gangway, and let no one board the
Ocean Queen
, except these ladies—Miss Waverly, Mrs. Carlisle, would you go aboard and begin unpacking whatever you find?” The women nodded, instantly alert despite an already full day of work. “No one goes aboard until we are ready!” Mr. Olmsted threw over his shoulder as he limped away. “Use force if necessary, gentlemen. Lives are saved by order and system, not by a mad rush of panic.” And he disappeared into the rain once more.