The Better Angels of Our Nature (26 page)

The Dutchman brought the wagon to a halt and sat motionless on the hard wooden seat, the reins held loosely in his enormous hands. This was their fourth trip. Jacob fought with all his considerable strength to steady the mules and the ambulance while Jesse tried in vain to ease the suffering of the men who lay on the rude wooden boards. She bathed clammy brows, stanched blood, dressed mangled limbs, quietened frenzied souls, whispered prayers.

Beside him other wagons had stopped, their drivers, like Jacob, taken aback by the sight that met their weary eyes. Jesse poked her red head through the opening, a hand on the steward’s shoulder to steady herself. She recognized the small body of water, not far from where she had seen Colonel Ransom fall in Jones Field. To this place, swollen with rainwater, wounded men in blue and gray had dragged their broken bodies, bathed their wounds, and quenched their thirst. Some exhausted and in shock collapsed as they drank. In a while so many men had died there, their life’s blood running into the water, turning it red, that the place became known as “Bloody Pond.” They lay there now, their bodies swollen and turning black.

They had already lost one man. A Rebel lieutenant, his body bearing four wounds, had breathed his last even as Jacob was easing him into the wagon. With a sigh that could have rocked the universe off its axis, the Dutchman had laid him gently back on the ground. They must save space in the wagon for the living.

The roads and fields were impassable in some places, littered with foliage and branches and abandoned equipment, and by the walking wounded, hobbling some, on makeshift crutches, a musket, or tree branch, as they made their slow, exhausted way to the field hospitals, and everywhere mud. Mud, sucking at and clinging to brawny arms and sinewy necks, manly chests and iron-clad muscles that had once held the reins of a steaming horse, sighted a trusty musket, wielded the saber or rammed home the cannon’s deadly load, all still now.

No more rank and file, no more coward nor hero, no more Rebel or Yankee, officer and enlisted man, no more meaningless distinctions. In death, all are simply men, without pretensions to fame or glory.

As she knelt beside a wounded soldier in her old stamping ground near the Widow Howell’s cabin, Jesse watched a macabre scene being played out in the moonlit darkness among the once beautiful, wooded oaks. A Rebel color bearer was crawling away on a bloody stump, dragging with him the blood-spattered pelican flag of Louisiana. Suddenly, like carrion, two Yankee soldiers swept down out of the branches of a tree and faced him off.

“Git the flag!” cried one, jabbing a hand in that direction. Whereupon the second Yankee tried to drag the flag from the Rebel, who was more dead than alive, yet his grip upon the flag was stronger than ever. “Git the goddamn flag, why don’t yer!” shouted the first soldier, himself now trying to pry the Rebel’s fingers from the flag, while the other soldier was to make off with it.

“Ah’m tryin’, goddamn it. Kain’t yer see ah’m tryin’? He ain’t ’bout to let go.”

It was to be a life and death struggle. This was, apparently, not how they had rehearsed it from their perch in the tree, but the second soldier was correct, the Rebel was not about to let go. He was lying down now, close to exhaustion, the torn and bloody flag wrapped around his torso, what was left of his leg bleeding onto the precious colors. The young blue-clad soldiers stood there, uncertain, where before they had been cocky and filled with confidence, and stared down at the Reb color sergeant in his agonizing death throes.

“Git it, ah say,” said the first soldier finally, with another jerk of his hand.

“Goddamn it, okay…okay…” said the second the soldier, “…why don’t you git it?”

Neither moved. Then all of a sudden, the Rebel stopped twitching, and lay very still, his eyes wide open to heaven, his fingers wound so tightly around the flag that they would have had to use their bayonets or their pocketknives to cut it loose. The two Yankee soldiers stood there and stared at the older Rebel, who was just as determined in death as in life to hold onto his regimental colors.

“Help me move his body,” said the first soldier. “Help me git his body off the flag, why don’t yer?” He was crying. Jesse could clearly hear him sobbing as he spoke.

“Let him keep the goddamn thing, why don’t yer—” said the second soldier. “He’s dead anyhow. Let him keep the goddamn thing. It’s tattered anyways. Let him keep the goddamn thing—he wonts it so bad—let him have the goddamn thing—ah say—”

“Damn you
and him,
” said the first soldier, sobbing loudly, but he didn’t touch the flag or the dead Rebel. “It wess yer goddamn i-dear all along. Ah didn’t wont the goddamn flag—”

The second soldier bent down and drew what was left of the flag over the Rebel soldier’s face, then he walked away.

“Damn you
and him,
” called out the first soldier hysterically, throwing his kepi on to the ground and stomping on it. “Ah dint wont the goddamn flag anyways, it was yer i-dear.”

Bluish-white smoke of burned powder still hung over the trees in the Peach Orchard. It was acrid in her nostrils. Jesse raised her lantern to shoulder height. There were no more blossoms on the Widow Howell’s trees; they had been cut down by musketry and artillery fire, like the dead who lay beneath, covered by the pink and white blossoms. Nature’s own wreath laid over the corpse-strewn ground.

By the yellow light of one single lantern tied to a pole and driven into the earth, two aged and bent gray-bearded civilians in coats that hung from their thin bodies like shrouds were doggedly digging a trench; beside them on the ground was what looked like bundles of rags. Jesse blinked. It was a scene from the vale of tears.

Jacob met her as she came shakily out of the clearing; put an arm about her shoulders. “Stay close by me, child,” he counseled. “These are sights that a soul should not witness alone.”

“Eerie, ain’t it?” asked a soldier staying real close beside the Dutchman. The moonlight was bright enough to reveal ghostlike human forms on the ground, illuminated by the sudden flashes of lightning. It was raining again. “Hey, what’s that sound?” A strange sound, snuffling, or was it crying? “What kinda creature cries thata way?” Horrible shrieks—a strange sound, yes, neither human nor animal.

“Jakob,” Jesse said softly. “What
is
that sound?”

“Hogs. Hogs are after the bodies. They don’t care if they dead or half-dead.”

Another sudden lightning flash illuminated the hellish scene.

Coming on a group of wounded Rebels by a creek Jesse knelt down with her haversack.

“I just want to look at your leg,” she said gently, trying to get the nervous soldier to lie back on the litter. These men had already had their wounds dressed but blood was seeping through the bandage on this soldier’s thigh.

“Thank yer, kindly—” said the boy.

Stretched out beside him, his arms under his bandaged head, was another gray-clad soldier, whose begrimed, bloodied condition had only increased his sense of grievance against the “enemy.”

“Why you thankin’ that nigger lover?” he wanted to know of his comrade. “Bet that lille shit is a nigger lover. All Yankees is shit-assed nigger lovers. There ain’t a one a ’em who wouldn’t let hiss sister go with a nigger for a plug nickel, ain’t that right, Lincoln mud-sill-nigger-lover?”

Suddenly Jacob loomed over him, one enormous, mud-encrusted boot planted on either side of his prostrate body, a giant oak looming over an insignificant little acorn, threatening to block out the sunlight,
forever.

The angry Rebel soldier swallowed hard. “Kant yer take no joshin’?” he asked Jesse reasonably. “Hell, I dudn’t mean nuthin’, I
like
niggers, it’s damn Yankees I can’t stomach.” He burst into laughter.

As Jacob lifted him up by the lapels, the soldier’s legs dangling uselessly, his laughter turned to screams of sheer terror. Now it was Jesse’s turn to laugh as the giant dropped him in the creek.

“We leave you where we found you,” he said. “Until you learn your manners.”

“Damn Yankee nigger-loving—” Jacob turned back and the Rebel stopped. “Never did take no joshin’, that’s a trouble with you damn Yankees,” he concluded as Jacob finally walked away.

This was by far the lightest moment of a bleak and ghastly day.

At the field hospital, Jesse sat by his cot and cooled Thomas Ransom with the fan Jacob had fashioned out of interlaced leaves in a wooden frame, fastened with hospital sutures. The young colonel was restless in his sleep, murmuring, about “Will,” his father, and in between issuing feverish orders to his regiment. She bathed his face, caressed his sideburns, quietening him in the flickering light of the candle beside his cot.

Beyond the tent flaps cook fires had been started, despite advice from those who should know not to start fires, lest the Rebels find the range with their artillery. Nevertheless, some had been lit anyway, so that a little hot food could be given the wounded. Coffee was brewing and soup steamed in a large rusty container. “Stick it all in, boys,” the cook had instructed, “all you can find, rice, vegetables, meat, apple peel, hardtack and salt horse, we need it good and thick, boys, good and thick.” Trembling hands came with tin plates, bowls, and cups, anything that would hold the hot broth, even their kepis. The food was ladled and color returned to blanched cheeks. The cook grinned around his “jawin’” tobacco. It was the bag of pepper that got dropped in the pot, he declared, that and Sam Grant’s socks, but he was proud to be of help to his suffering comrades instead of boiling new-laid eggs for some pampered officer.

Under her caressing hands the colonel’s brow was warm. She turned the sheet down to his slender waist, opened his nightshirt, squeezed the surplus water from the cloth, and laid it across his chest and shoulders, to soothe him, to reduce the fever, as Jacob had taught her.

His skin was very white, on his chest a few stray blond hairs, his body slender and youthful. The flesh on his shoulders where he’d taken Rebel balls at Missouri and Donelson was puckered and scarred, the left shoulder wound hadn’t totally healed. She touched it tenderly with her fingertips, massaged some of the doctor’s salve into the skin. She moistened the dressing on his scalp, bathed his closed eyes at the corners, along the pale lashes, and touched a little water to his sculptured lips with her fingers. Spoke to him softly. His eyes opened, their wavering attention drawn to where the lights from a hundred lanterns were ranged along the bluff to guide the ambulance wagons to the field hospital. They swayed and dazzled on their poles driven into the soft clay, the yellow light drawing an ephemeral arc in the darkness as men passed wearily by, carrying litters, many themselves bearing the bloody, bandaged result of that day’s madness.

His drowsy gaze moved back to the dim interior, to an orderly moving silently between the cots, his apron dyed red. Another orderly across the aisle drew a blanket over a face on a pillow. The distressing sounds of men in mortal pain, groaning in their semiconsciousness, a sighing last breath, a sudden shriek, a poignant cry, carrying a woman’s name. Someone calling urgently for a surgeon, and the man in the white apron turns from the cot, now being emptied in seemingly undue haste by two orderlies. A youthful voice cries out for a beloved mother, a family pet, a priest. The murmuring continues, and the unmistakable fetid stale and nauseating smells that permeate the warm-damp night air drifts in, over fever-racked bodies, tossing and turning beneath soiled blankets inside the euphemistically called “recovery” tent.

At the entrance a few soldiers are gathered, whispering, one very young, red-eyed and openly weeping, the rest are older, uneasy, perhaps ashamed that they still have legs to walk on and hands to fill a pipe, eyes to gaze upon a loved one. They are searching for a wounded comrade, brought in here, they think, earlier in the day, after going under the surgeon’s knife. Yes, brought in here and swallowed up. The living go in and the dead come out and not even the most stalwart of them dares to ask what goes on in between. They look and look away, a prayer uttered perhaps in desperation to a God whose existence they seriously doubt after today, yet can they do less than thank him for delivering
them
from such terrors. Still there is always tomorrow. How can civilized man come to this?

The young Vermonter’s intense stare was on his nurse’s face, her curling red hair, her striking blue-glass eyes, her full mouth, smiling reassuringly, then finally to her hand holding tightly to his on the sheet and his expression was wondering, confused, and not merely because he could not recognize his surroundings. The girl blotted the perspiration from his glistening face.

“Hello,” she said with a smile. “How fine to see you awake. Can you take a little nourishment?” she asked encouragingly and was already lifting his head to put the tin cup to his lips. She wiped his chin where the pale white liquid ran down. “Condensed milk.” She had saved the can for him.

He gave her a tiny smile of gratitude. “It’s wonderful—may I have a little more?” Then after he had swallowed a second mouthful, “Where…where is this place?”