Down the Great Unknown (14 page)

Some soldiers chose not to speak of the battle at all, in the belief that only an eyewitness could grasp what had gone on, while others struggled to find words for events that were beyond description. “There's been a lot written about the gallant charges and the flags fluttering and all that kind of stuff,” says Stacy Allen, the Shiloh historian, “but there is an unwritten war, and the unwritten war is the most terrible thing imaginable, and the most severe thing imaginable, and the most tragic thing imaginable.”

Shiloh opened the nation's eyes and forced it to confront sights it had never imagined. At the time the largest battle ever fought on American soil, Shiloh was not a duel writ large but a collision of two immense, relentless, man-devouring machines.
In two spring days
, some twenty thousand men were killed, wounded, or reported missing. Nothing on that scale had ever been seen on the American continent.

There was worse to come. The Civil War was unfathomably bloody.
With a death toll
of well over half a million, it remains America's deadliest war by far, claiming more American lives than World War I, World War II, and Korea combined. The figures are startling enough when considered as raw numbers; they loom even larger when we remember how small the population of the United States was in the 1860s. If a war today claimed 2 percent of the population, as did the Civil War, well over five million Americans would lie dead.

Powell's wound did not kill him, though it came close. But his ordeal had only begun. Soldiers who had nerved themselves to stand their ground while men fell all around them quailed when they ventured too near a hospital tent. A surgeon from one's own side was as feared as an enemy's cannon. “The sorriest sights . . . are in those dreadful field hospitals,” one Southern officer wrote, for the ear was assailed with “the screams and groans of the poor fellows undergoing amputation” and the eye was confronted with “the sight of arms and legs surrounding these places [and] . . . thrown into great piles.”

Surgeons were quick to amputate; three out of four operations in the Civil War were amputations. It is not by chance that nearly every Civil War memoir contains a reference to the grim stacks of arms and legs. With the number of wounded men at a battle like Shiloh surpassing fifteen thousand, and with only a comparative handful of surgeons to tend to them all, assembly-line treatment was inevitable. A battlefield surgeon stayed on his feet as long as he could keep his eyes open, perhaps twenty-four hours at a stretch, operating on one maimed man after another. A surgeon could remove a limb in six minutes.

Even so, there were not enough surgeons. The man who amputated Powell's arm, William H. Medcalfe, had been a druggist before the war, and such cases were common. Medcalfe was in over his head, but almost no one was prepared for the demands of wartime surgery. Few civilian surgeons had much experience with gunshot wounds, and even those few were daunted by the horrendous injuries inflicted by the newfangled minié balls.

But a lack of surgical know-how was not the heart of the problem. Many surgeons
did
wield saw and scalpel with dexterity. The Civil War was a medical catastrophe not because of surgical misadventures but because of rampant and uncontrollable infections. A nearly certain follow-up to surgery, infection was the central fact, and the unsolved mystery, of Civil War medicine. Infection rates were so high that Confederate surgeons suspected that Northern soldiers had somehow poisoned their bullets.

Amputation was a desperate attempt to solve the problem by lopping off infected tissue before it could spread its poisons. “Hospital gangrene,” for example, began as a dime-shaped black spot. In days, it could transform a healthy arm or leg into a seeping, putrid hunk of dying flesh. No one knew where it came from or how it could be stopped.

Poignantly, the great advance that could have revolutionized the care of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers wounded in the Civil War—the insight that germs cause disease—came a few years after the war's end. That revolution in medicine was the work of Lister in England, Pasteur in France, and Koch in Germany, among others. It is worth noting that there are no American names on that list. The mid-nineteenth century was a low point in the history of American medicine. In medicine and science, Europe led the way and the United States trailed far behind. It was 1868 before Harvard Medical School acquired its first stethoscope, for example, 1869 before it obtained its first microscope. Even if there had been no war, the 1860s were not a good time to look for medical care in America. But war did come, at the worst time, and with it came hundreds of thousands of sick and wounded men clamoring for help.

The Civil War still holds us in its grip, in part because the soldiers who fought in it seem so close to us. From the newly somber young man who wrote home, after Shiloh, that “we were playing Soldiers but now we know what it is to Soldier” to plainspoken, rumpled, cigar-smoking Ulysses S. Grant, who became a general only after failing as a farmer, failing as a debt collector, failing as a clerk in his father's business, these are people we can imagine knowing. But, in crucial ways, they lived in a world that is utterly foreign to us. In its medical aspect, above all, a battlefield in the 1860s presented scenes of almost medieval grimness.

From the instant a man entered the army, he was in trouble. In North and South alike, a soldier was twice as likely to die from disease as from a battlefield injury. Many men had been sick even before they arrived—physical examinations of new recruits were so cursory that
four hundred
women passed as men and went on to fight in the war—and sick soldiers infected others. Crowded into huge and filthy camps where a single latrine might serve for hundreds and garbage lay strewn everywhere and the water supply was almost certainly contaminated, men fell ill in droves. Poor nutrition made matters worse. A soldier's diet consisted largely of beans, bacon, and the rock-hard crackers called hardtack. Meal after meal, complained one Union soldier at Shiloh, was “mouldy crackers and sowbelly with hair on it.”

Measles, mumps, and smallpox struck the camps first. Country boys fell harder than city dwellers, who were more likely to have been exposed to such childhood illnesses before. Then came a second wave of illness, headed by typhoid, malaria, and dysentery. It was common for a regiment to lose half its men to death and disease before it ever saw battle. “A man risked his life simply by being in the army,” Bruce Catton observed, “even if he never got near a battlefield.”

For those who did see combat, the casualty rate at Shiloh and other major battles was about one in five. Worse still, as we have seen, the wounded were largely left to their own devices, especially at early battles like Shiloh. (In theory, a regiment's musicians were responsible for carrying its wounded men safely away from the line of fire, but they performed this nonmusical mission with about the degree of enthusiasm and skill one might expect.) Injured men found someone to drag them off the field, or dragged themselves, or lay where they had fallen. At Fort Donelson, in February 1862, two months before Shiloh, one wounded man lay on the ground for two days before help arrived. He had to be chopped free from the frozen ground before he could be put on a stretcher.

Nurses and orderlies were in short supply. At Shiloh, a few volunteer nurses roamed the edges of the battlefield, doing their best to help the wounded men by tearing strips from their dresses to make bandages. The Union army had established some primitive field hospitals, and surgeons treated the living while surrounded by dead men no one had yet had time to bury. “You may imagine the scene,” one exhausted and overworked surgeon wrote, “of from two to three thousand wounded men at one point calling to have their wounds dressed.”

Once the wounded arrived in a hospital, further dangers lurked. “There stood the surgeons,” wrote a Union officer at Gettysburg, “their sleeves rolled up to the elbows, their bare arms as well as their linen aprons smeared with blood, their knives not seldom held between their teeth, while they were helping a patient on or off the table or had their hands otherwise occupied.”

Knowing nothing of bacteria, surgeons of the day believed that a finger was the ideal tool for probing wounds. They poked inside the torn flesh of arms and legs with unwashed, ungloved hands. (A man who had been shot in the gut, in contrast, was virtually beyond help. Photographs of Civil War battlefields often show dead men with their clothing ripped apart, as if some thief in a great hurry had ransacked their bodies. In fact, the men had clawed their clothes open themselves, frantic to see whether or not they had taken a bullet in the belly.)

To the harm done by the bullet itself was added the risk of bone infection and blood poisoning caused by the surgeon's attempts at treatment. Time after time, surgeons noted that an operation had gone well and the patient seemed to be recovering, only to find a few days later that he had sickened and died. “However bad the wound may be,” cynics observed, “art can make it worse.”

For the operation itself, the patient was given chloroform or ether. Despite Hollywood images to the contrary, the era of “biting the bullet” predated the Civil War. “The surgeon snatched his knife from between his teeth . . . ,” the officer at Gettysburg continued, “wiped it rapidly once or twice across his bloodstained apron, and the cutting began. The operation accomplished, the surgeon would look around with a deep sigh, and then—‘Next!' ”

A single sponge and a single unspeakable basin of water might be used to wash every wound in a ward. Looking back on his Civil War experience in his old age, the eminent surgeon W. W. Keen could hardly believe what he had participated in. “We operated in old blood-stained and often pus-stained coats, the veterans of a hundred fights,” he recalled. “We operated with clean hands in the social sense, but they were undisinfected hands. . . . We used undisinfected instruments from undisinfected plush-lined cases, and still worse used marine sponges which had been used in prior pus cases and had been only washed in tap water. If a sponge or an instrument fell on the floor it was washed and squeezed in a basin of tap water and used as if it were clean.”

Powell had been shot late in the afternoon of April 6 and brought to a hospital that evening. Emma nursed him through the next day while Medcalfe, the druggist turned surgeon, occasionally checked the wound. On April 8, Medcalfe decided to operate. The surgery was quick but not especially skillful—Powell's stump of an arm would torment him throughout his life, and he would eventually undergo two more operations in the hope of easing the pain—but the true danger still lay ahead.

Powell came to after the operation long enough to acknowledge Emma but then fell into a feverish, drugged sleep. At this point a surgeon had no cards left to play. The patient, newly transported from the battlefield, himself became a battlefield in a vast but silent war between disease-producing microorganisms and the body's natural defenses. Powell slept a great deal in the next several days, and recovered enough to ask for news of the battle and of his men, and fell back into a feverish sleep, and complained of mysterious, phantom pains in the forearm he no longer had. Lean and hard at the best of times, Powell grew positively scrawny as the fever hammered at him. But he lived.

On June 30, he rejoined the men of Battery F, by now in occupied Corinth. They gave him three rousing cheers—Powell had to wipe the tears away—and then he shook hands, left-handed, with each man in turn. The reunion was brief. Powell was far from fit, and he was assigned to a desk job for six months.

He had decided, though, that even with only one arm he would return to active duty. His sole condition, quickly granted, was that Emma receive a “perpetual pass” entitling her to visit him wherever the war might bring him. Over the next three years, notably at Vicksburg and at Nashville, Powell returned to his place with the men of Battery F.

In the summer of 1864, he endured a second operation intended to ease the pain in his arm. It failed. Finally, in 1865, with peace imminent, Powell resigned from the army. It was time to decide what to do next. Powell was thirty years old, with a wife and responsibilities and a homemade education and no particular prospects. “Wes, you are a maimed man,” his father advised him. “Settle down at teaching. It is a noble profession. Get this nonsense of science and adventure out of your mind.”

 

CHAPTER NINE

HELL'S HALF MILE

 

We have seen already how well Powell heeded his father's advice. Powell was not one for second thoughts—indeed, he had such faith in his spur-of-the-moment decisions that sometimes he neglected first thoughts as well—but at Disaster Falls, on the evening of June 9, 1869, we can imagine that he found himself mulling over his father's words. He had bet his life on “science and adventure,” and at Disaster Falls it had begun to look as if the bet had gone bad.

Disaster Falls had been a near miss. Everyone had made it through alive, but the expedition had lost a boat and more than a ton of supplies. Now the exhausted and jumpy men needed to regroup. Bradley managed to spare a thought for the scenery, which was “sublime” but hardly soothing. “The red sand-stone rises on either side more than 2000 ft.,” Bradley wrote, “shutting out the sun for much of the day while at our feet the river, lashed to foam, rushes on with indescribable fury. O how great is He who holds it in the hollow of His hand, and what pygmies we who strive against it.”

Religious sentiments came easily to Bradley, who was the most devout of the party, but this was more than boilerplate. The scale of the canyons seemed designed to make
any
human being feel puny and insignificant, regardless of his creed. Worn-out and disheartened after their first truly life-threatening adventure, the men were perhaps more vulnerable than usual to such discouraging thoughts. Where Bradley turned to thoughts of divine providence, Sumner sought more practical consolation. “After taking a good drink of whisky all around,” he wrote, “we concluded to spend the rest of the day as best suited.”