Fire by Night (37 page)

“No,” she said. But she was a little afraid …of both.

He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it. “You don’t have much time to pack, Mrs. Hoffman. The ship I’m taking to Aquia Landing leaves Alexandria tomorrow morning at five o’clock.”

“I’ll be there,” she said.

Fredericksburg, Virginia
December 1862

Julia and James were among the dozens of doctors and nurses who boarded the
Mary Jane
the next morning to sail forty miles down the Potomac to Aquia Landing. From there it was a much shorter trip by train to Falmouth on the north bank of the Rappahannock. Across the river lay the city of Fredericksburg. Julia saw the city in the fading light that first evening, a sleepy cluster of houses and brick buildings with graceful church steeples pointing to the sky. Stone piers on each bank of the river and one in its center marked the place where a railroad bridge had once stood. Before dawn, Julia was told, army engineers would begin constructing pontoon bridges across the water so the assault could begin.

Julia and the other nurses spent a cold night sleeping on empty pews in one of Falmouth’s churches. Tomorrow it would become a hospital. She had spent several hours that evening helping James arrange everything the way he wanted it.

The distant boom of a cannon awakened her the next morning. As the sun burned away the mist that hovered over the river, she could see the partially completed pontoon bridges. She also saw puffs of smoke from the Confederate side and heard the crack of rifles as Rebel sharpshooters opened fire on the laborers and engineers. Wounded bridge workers began arriving at the field hospital a short time later. Julia’s job had begun.

She assisted James with wound dressings until early afternoon, when the army decided that too many of their workmen were being injured. They halted construction and brought in one hundred artillery pieces, aiming them at Fredericksburg. Bombarding the city would annihilate Rebel resistance so that the bridges could be completed safely.

The horrific cannon fire lasted for two hours. Even with cotton stuffed in her ears, Julia thought she would go deaf from the noise. She sat on one of the church pews and prayed for the town’s citizens— especially the innocent women and children who might be trapped in the holocaust. Long after the violence ended, Julia’s knees continued to shake.

When the smoke cleared, the town stood in ruins. Julia didn’t see how anyone could have survived such an onslaught. But as soon as the engineers resumed work on the bridges, the Rebel sharpshooters quickly put the hospital back in business.

“All we did was give the Confederates some nice piles of rubble to hide behind,” she heard James say as he bent to examine one of the newest shooting victims.

“We wasted our cannonballs for nothing,” the soldier breathed.

“We wasted an entire town for nothing,” James said.

More wounded men poured into the hospital after the army finally sent squadrons of soldiers across the river in pontoon boats to clear the Rebels out. The skirmishing and the incoming casualties lasted all afternoon. By nightfall the bridges were complete, and most of the men who had been wounded that day were on their way to the evacuation ships. The doctors needed to make room in the hospitals for more casualties tomorrow.

Her work finished for the day, Julia put on her coat and went outside to stand in the smoke-filled air, gazing at the destruction across the river. Flames from the still-burning town lit the night sky, interspersed with bright flashes of Confederate artillery hidden in the hills above it. It was a nightmarish scene, yet she couldn’t look away.

A few minutes later the church door opened and James came outside to stand alongside her. They listened to the rumble of distant cannon and watched the flames lick the night sky for several minutes without speaking.

“Why do you suppose something this horrifying is so fascinating?” he finally asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, shivering. “I’ve been wondering how I would feel if that were my city—if Confederate guns turned Philadelphia into rubble and flames.”

The lights of distant campfires flickered in the night. The evening breeze carried shouts and laughter and the whinnies of horses from far away.

“Do you think anyone who experiences this can ever be the same?” James asked. His voice was very soft. “Will you be the same, Julia? Will you be able to return to your dinner parties and charity balls and forget this ever happened?”

She tried to imagine herself in a ball gown, whirling in Nathaniel Greene’s arms—and couldn’t. “Right now I can’t imagine that this war will ever end. Or that anyone will be alive when it does,” she said.

They fell silent again. Somewhere in the distance a military band played “Hail Columbia.” James reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out his silver flask. Flames reflected off its shiny surface as he unscrewed the cap and tilted it to his lips to drink.

“Don’t,” Julia whispered.

“Pardon me?”

She’d seen him sick on enough mornings to know that if he got drunk tonight he would wake up feeling miserable tomorrow. Aside from acting rude and ill-tempered, he wouldn’t be able to concentrate and his hands would shake—he’d be of little use as a physician.

She had gained so much respect for him after watching him with his patients and working alongside him in the field hospital all day, and she didn’t want him to degrade himself by getting drunk. She longed to stop him from destroying the better part of himself.

“I don’t think getting drunk is the answer,” she said.

“Oh, really?” he said acidly. “The answer to what?” When she didn’t reply he held up the flask. “I suppose you know why I carry this around?”

She wanted to say,
Yes, it’s because of what happened in New Haven
. But she remembered his reaction at the farmhouse in Sharpsburg, the deep pain she’d seen in his eyes. She wouldn’t mention the murder again.

“You’re a gifted doctor,” she said. “It’s a mystery to everyone back at Fairfield Hospital why you cause yourself such misery by getting drunk so often.”

“Have you ever tried it, Mrs. Hoffman? Would you like a little taste?” He held the flask out to her.

“No, thank you.”

“Go ahead, take a drink. I insist. Maybe you’ll be the first to unlock the mystery of why I drink.” He shoved it in front of her face. “Take a sip.”

The metal felt cold as he shoved it roughly against her lips. He tipped it up. She opened her mouth to prevent him from pouring the liquor down her chin—and because she was afraid of angering him. She swallowed, expecting the bitter taste, the burning fire of strong drink. Instead, she tasted nothing at all.

“It’s water,” she said in surprise.

“Ah! Very good. Now you’ve solved the mystery of why James McGrath drinks.”

She looked up at him.

“Because I’m thirsty, Mrs. Hoffman.”

“But …it’s not always water. I’ve seen you with a hangover on plenty of mornings. You come to work all rumpled, as if you’ve slept in your clothes, and you sit in your office with the curtains drawn, telling us not to shout. Everyone knows it’s because you got drunk the night before.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“But I’ve seen you with a hangover.”

“No. You haven’t. You’ve seen me with a migraine headache.”

“You have a tumbler on your desk with—”

“Willow bark tea. It seems to help my migraines.”

She stared at him in disbelief, struggling to fit what he was telling her with what she’d seen.

“Have you ever had a migraine, Mrs. Hoffman?” he asked. “The pain is incapacitating. It begins behind your eyes, and it feels as though a bright light is shining in your face, even when your eyes are closed. Sometimes the light begins to sparkle, adding to the pain. As the headache builds, the slightest sound, the slightest movement, intensifies the pain tenfold, until you’re nauseated with it. You can’t help vomiting. All you want to do is curl into a ball in a dark, quiet place and plead with God to make it stop. But of course you can’t do that when there’s work to be done. Laudanum helps deaden the pain, but I’m no good to anyone drugged, am I?”

“Are you telling me you don’t drink?”

“I used to. Perhaps too much at times.”

His eyes looked tired and sad as he gazed into the distance. She wondered what he was remembering. According to Hiram Stone, James had killed a man when he was drunk.

“But I don’t drink anymore,” he said, lifting the flask. “Just water.”

“You must know about all the rumors,” Julia said. “Everyone at the hospital thinks you’re an alcoholic.”

He shrugged. “So what?”

“Why do you let them think that? Why don’t you tell them the truth?”

“Because I really don’t care what everyone thinks.” He took another long drink and wiped his mouth with his fist. “Considering the way you’ve disregarded the opinions and expectations of your own social class, I would think that you, of all people, should understand that.”

“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t understand it at all.” Julia shook her head, as if to shake away the familiar image of him of as a drunkard and replace it with this new one. The pale, pain-pinched face and trembling hands she’d seen on so many mornings were not the result of his drunkenness but of an affliction that was totally beyond his control. She stared at him, his face lit by the flames of the burning town, and saw a completely different man.

“Well,” he said abruptly, “I’m going to bed. Tomorrow will be a very long day for all of us.”

Julia watched him disappear into the house and felt like an utter fool.

The next day Union troops crossed the river into Fredericksburg. When they discovered that the Rebels had moved to the heights outside the city, Yankee soldiers went on a rampage through the town, breaking into deserted homes and stores, smashing and destroying and looting.

Later that afternoon, when Julia crossed the river in an ambulance to help set up a field hospital in town, the sight of the ravaged city sickened her. Household goods—feather beds and rocking chairs and smashed teacups—lay trampled and discarded in the streets, while soldiers roamed freely through the ruined homes, stuff-ing valuables into their pockets and knapsacks. The commanding officers were doing nothing at all to stop the looting. She quickly turned away, disgusted with mankind, and set about her own work.

The doctors selected a large brick warehouse near one of the pontoon bridges for a temporary hospital and operating room. Julia helped James stock it with food and water and medical supplies, preparing for the battle that would begin the next day. She recrossed the river that night to sleep in the church in Falmouth once again.

At eight-thirty the next morning, Union troops began advancing toward the Rebel lines under the cover of fog. When it lifted, the assault began. Julia returned to the warehouse, where she could clearly hear the battle raging all day in the hills behind the city. As thousands of wounded men poured into the hospital, she learned from her patients what was happening.

“The Rebels hold the high ground,” one exhausted man told her, “yet our generals keep hurling men at them in wave after wave.”

“We’re out in the open,” another soldier added, “and the Rebels are protected by a stone wall. They’re just mowing us down like wheat as we come up the hill.”

It seemed like insanity to her. The terrible slaughter lasted all day, with nothing to show for it in the end except casualties. As night fell and the temperature dropped, the men who still streamed into the hospital told Julia that thousands more injured men lay pinned down on the hillside, freezing. They were forced to huddle beneath the dead bodies of their friends for protection, not daring to move—or they’d be shot at.

Julia had labored all day in the hope that General Burnside would be victorious, that this would be the last battle any of them would have to endure. As her strength began to give out, it no longer looked as if victory was possible. She was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. She couldn’t help wondering how James was holding up—if the stress had caused one of his migraine headaches to strike at the worst possible time. When she had a free moment, she decided to check on him.