The Deserter (33 page)

I asked if any one would like to have his wounds dressed? Some one replied, “There is a man on the floor who cannot help himself, you had better see to him.” Stooping over him, I asked for his wound, and he pointed to his leg. Such a horrible sight I had never seen and hope never to see again. His leg was all covered with worms.… I am being more used to sights of misery. We do not know until tried what we are capable of
.

—S
ARAH
B
ROADHEAD

Gettysburg, 7 July, 1863

… There in the room as I wake from sleep this vision presses upon me;

… All the scenes at the batteries rise in detail before me again
,

The crashing and smoking, the pride of the men in their pieces
,

The chief-gunner ranges and sights his piece and selects a fuse of the right time
,

After firing I see him lean aside and look eagerly off to note the effect …

And ever the sound of the cannon far or near, (rousing even in dreams a devilish exultation and all the old mad joy in the depths of my soul.)

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN

I told him of the woman in the cracker bonnet at the depot at Charlotte who signaled to her husband as they dragged him off, “Take it easy, Jake—you desert agin, quick as you kin—come back to your wife and children.” And she continued to yell, “Desert, Jake! desert again,Jake
!”

—M
ARY
C
HESNUT
,

South Carolina diarist

Regiment marched at ten about two miles toward new Baltimore where Jewett, 5th Maine, was shot for desertion.… The division formed three sides of a square.… The prisoner was finally brought out sitting on his coffin in an open army wagon drawn by four horses.… He was then taken out and shot in the open side of the square.… The body was lying on its face, the balls had come through the back of his head.… I came back with a terrible headache
.

—E
DMUND
H
ALSEY

Lieutenant, 15th New Jersey, Sixth Corps,

Army of the Potomac

If at any one time of my life, more than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of my stay with Mr. Covey.… It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, snow, or hail too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more than the order of the day than of the night. The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights were too long for him. I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there: but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul and spirit … the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute
!

—F
REDERICK
D
OUGLASS

Stupidity, that's all it was, four years of stupidity
.

—M
RS.
A
UGUSTA
M
ORGAN

The battle of Franklin, Tennessee, November 30, 1864—

Hood's whole army was routed and in full retreat. Nearly every man in the entire army had thrown away his guns and accoutrements. More than ten thousand had stopped and allowed themselves to be captured, while many, dreading the horrors of a Northern prison, kept on, and I saw many … even thousands, broken down from sheer exhaustion, with despair and pity written on their features.… Broken down and jaded horses and mules refused to pull.… Wagon wheels, interlocking each other, soon clogged the road.… My boot was full of blood, and my clothing saturated with it. I was at General Hood's headquarters. He was as much agitated and affected, pulling his hair with his one hand (he had but one) and crying like his heart would break.…

—S
AM
W
ATKINS,
“C
OMPANY
A
YTCH,
” F
IRST
T
ENNESSEE

Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether
.”

—A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN

Second Inaugural, March 4, 1865

AFTERWORD

A
n afterword is a clumsy appendage to a work of fiction, but once again truth must be sorted out from invention.

Which soldiers are which? Seven are real. Guided by archivist Brian Sullivan, I found their faces in the picture collection of the Harvard University Archives—Charles Redington Mudge, Thomas Rodman Robeson, Henry Ropes, Henry Weld Farrar, Henry Lawrence Eustis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The regimental histories of all seven are listed in Francis Brown's
Roll of Harvard Students Who Served in the Army or Navy of the United States During the War of the Rebellion
. Memoirs of the three who died at Gettysburg appear in the two volumes of
Harvard Memorial Biographies
.

The fictional characters—soldiers, family members, a surgeon, a nurse, an unhappy farmer and a landlady—turned up among the
cartes de visile
bought from collector Henry Deeks in his antiquarian bookshop in Maynard, Massachusetts. Roaming among hundreds of faces, I bought a small population of unidentified men, women and children.

The photographs of Ida Morgan, Augusta Morgan and top-hatted Otis Pike were found in histories of nineteenth-century fashion. Eben Flint's hospital picture is one of many photographic studies of wounded soldiers in
The Civil War, an Illustrated History
, by Geoffrey C. Ward, with Ric Burns and Ken Burns. The likeness of chubby charmer Lily LeBeau is really a photograph of dancer Laura Le Claire found in
Mr. Lincoln's Cameraman
, a collection of Mathew Brady photographs edited by Roy Meredith.

The three stereographs are from several sources. The one of dead men on the field at Gettysburg is attributed to Alexander Gardner. A copy of the Patent Office stereograph comes from the Patent Office Historical Collection of Judy, Diane and Jim Davis. (It has been slightly doctored.) A famous photograph of a doctor performing an amputation was shamelessly scissored to look like a stereograph.

The “Reference Service Slip” is a real one from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, supplied by archivist Michael Musick.

Annette Fern of the Harvard Theatre Collection unearthed several prompt books for
The Marble Heart
, as well as the Hasty Pudding playbill, to which a few fictional names have been added. In Mary Kelly's scrapbook all but two of the listed names are of real men, with the actual parts they played in Hasty Pudding and their later regimental histories.

The melancholy photograph of the armless soldier was found in Bell I. Wiley's
Common Soldier of the Civil War
, identified only as a private in the 147th New York. He might have been at Gettysburg, since his regiment was there. But there was another private who did indeed lose both arms in that battle. In the fighting for Culp's Hill by the Twelfth Corps on the morning of July 3, 1863, a shell from a Union battery
exploded prematurely above the 20th Connecticut, its shards mangling both arms of Private George W. Warner. Carried to the rear, Warner did not learn until he was treated at a hospital that he had lost both limbs
—
not just the right arm, as he had thought when wounded
. (Jeffry D
Wert, Gettysburg, Day Three.)

Although Mr. Tossit is fictional, his grievance is like that of farmer William Bliss, whose barn was destroyed on the Gettysburg battlefield, and whose request for financial restitution was at last denied.

Although several episodes involving actual soldiers Mudge, Robeson, Fox, Ropes, Farrar and Eustis are fictional, the words of Colonel Mudge, “It's murder, but it's an order,” have gone down in the history books.

There are undoubtedly many unconscious historical mistakes in this narrative, but I confess to one of which I am fully aware. By the time I learned that the hospital in the Patent Office had been closed before the battle of Gettysburg, I was too infatuated to give it up.

The tablets in Harvard's Memorial Hall are of course real, although I have added two fictional names to one of them. I can't help lamenting the fact that after so many years there are still no memorials to the many Harvard men who died for the Confederacy.

Ida's experiences in the town of Gettysburg borrow graphic detail from a remarkable history of the three-day battle as it appeared to the citizens of the town—
Firestorm at Gettysburg, Civilian Voices
, by Jim Slade and John Alexander, and from
A Vast Sea of Misery
, an exhaustive study by Gregory A. Coco of the nearly 160 hospitals that were hastily set up in tents, houses and public buildings to care for the 21,000 men from both armies who were wounded in the battle of Gettysburg.