Never Look Back (100 page)

It was a grey, damp November day, but she was so eager, so excited to be in Washington at last, that she leaned out of the window as the train chugged into the station. The billowing smoke and steam obscured the view for a minute or two, but even over the noise of grating wheels on rails, she could hear hundreds of voices.

As the smoke cleared, she saw a sea of blue-uniformed men on stretchers, on crutches, many of them with missing limbs, patches over a missing eye, slings and bandages, every pale face turned towards the train. Her legs turned to jelly and a cold, tingling sensation crept up and down her spine, for if these men were well enough to be transported somewhere, what would the ones back at the hospital be like? She pulled her cape tighter round her, jammed her plain bonnet more firmly on her head, and taking a deep breath, picked up the one small bag she’d brought with her and stepped down from the train.

The scene was far worse on a level with the men. She could see blood staining bandages, livid, unhealed scars on faces, and empty sockets where an eye should be. One young boy on a stretcher held out his hand to her, perhaps in his pain he thought she was his mother.

It was so frightening and overwhelming. Reading about casualties in the newspapers hadn’t prepared her for seeing so many of them in the flesh. But then Tabitha called out her name and came dodging through the men to greet her, and it was too late to back away.

‘Oh Matty,’ Tabitha exclaimed, before enveloping her in the tightest, warmest hug. ‘I can’t tell you how proud I was of you when I got the telegraph saying you were on your way. I’d been on tenterhooks for so long, sure you’d refuse.’

The terror inside Matilda abated as Tabitha held her. She told herself that if she could drive a wagon over 2,000 miles, nurse her own child dying of cholera, and run a saloon, she could dress wounds and soothe the dying.

‘When could I ever refuse you anything?’ she managed to say. All at once she knew she must try to match Tabitha’s courage and enter into nursing wholeheartedly.

Somehow the stark horror of the injured all around them highlighted what she felt for Tabitha. She had loved her from a tiny child; some of the happiest hours in her entire life, and some of the most traumatic ones, had been spent with her. And by being with her now she felt she could draw on the strengths of both Lily and Giles, which Tabitha had in abundance.

Tabitha didn’t seem the least fazed by the men all around her, she could have just been standing in a busy market. ‘I’ve got us lodgings,’ she said, picking up Matilda’s bag with one hand and
tucking the other through her arm. ‘They aren’t very nice I’m afraid, but folk around here aren’t very kind to those who work at the hospital. I suppose they think we’ll bring infections back with us.’

She said so much in those first few minutes that much of it was a jumble to Matilda. All she really took in was that they were to be on A1, the ward where the most seriously wounded men were taken, Tabitha because of her medical knowledge and Matilda because of her maturity.

It was only once they were away from the crowds that Matilda stopped Tabitha. ‘I want to get a good look at you before we go any further.’

Tabitha giggled. ‘I don’t look any different to when you last saw me in Ohio.’

‘That’s for me to decide,’ Matilda said. ‘I’ve missed so many years of you growing into a young woman, I’m entitled to study you carefully now.’

She was taller than Matilda by a couple of inches, and thinner than she had been back in Ohio. Her plain brown unhooped dress, the regulations Miss Dix insisted on for her nurses, made her skin look sallow, and her severe hair-style, parted in the middle and plaited into two coils over her ears did nothing to flatter her. Yet those mournful dark eyes which even as a small child had always dominated her face were so expressive and beautiful.

‘What you see outwardly isn’t important,’ Tabitha replied with a touch of indignation. ‘I hope you hadn’t expected me to turn into a beauty, I’ll never be that.’

‘Tabby, my love,’ Matilda laughed, ‘you will always be beautiful to me. Just that you are here and wanted to nurse wounded men so badly is enough for me to know I was a good nursemaid. But I’m not so sure I’ll be a good nurse.’

As Matilda walked out of the ward she saw Tabitha at the last bed, bent over, washing the stump of an amputated leg. Such sights no longer distressed either of them, they were ordinary duties they performed day after day. But seven months ago, on that first terrifying day on the wards of The Lodge hospital, such a sight made them avert their eyes and clamp their hands over their mouths in nausea.

Matilda still had the sights, smells and sounds of that day firmly locked in her mind, the disgusting stench of putrefying flesh, blood in pools on the floor, the screams of men in agony. That day alone there had been over twenty deaths. Suddenly she was seeing the real face of war, brave young men crying for their mothers as the surgeon hacked off their leg or arm with a saw. Men with their guts spilling out beneath dirty bandages, pools of blood and vomit, pus, and wounds so putrid they almost defied cleaning.

She remembered how on their first night together in their lodgings Tabitha had raged about a doctor who had dropped a surgical instrument on the filthy floor, wiped it on his already blood-soaked gown, then delved into the patient again. She couldn’t believe from what she’d learnt so far in her medical studies, that all the wounded got here before major surgery was a few drops of ether to calm them. She kept saying it was as barbaric as the Middle Ages, and they had to do something to make people realize how bad it was here.

But in the weeks that followed they came to see that the nurses and doctors did the best they could for their patients, despite grave shortages of medicine, bandages and linen. They learned too that it was the brutal field hospitals to which the men were taken first which were responsible for the worst of the horror. There men bled to death for lack of a tourniquet, they were left for so long on the ground that flies laid eggs in undressed wounds, and limbs were often cut off rather than precious time being spent on removing bullets. They heard how some soldiers kept a gun beneath their pillow, to warn off butcher doctors intent on amputation.

There were sixteen hospitals in Washington, but only a few had been purpose-built, the rest, like The Lodge, were just ageing, empty buildings pressed into service. The tin roof at The Lodge leaked, many of the broken windows were boarded over, the old floors were bare planks and impossible to keep clean, in the cold weather it couldn’t be heated adequately. Even sixteen hospitals weren’t enough, some casualties were cared for in the Senate House and chambers, even in Georgetown jail.

They got used to the long hours, the hard work, the smells, the screams of pain, and the ravings of the delirious. They learned to eat the disgusting hospital food and put up with their cramped,
cheerless room, but it was the feeling of helplessness that affected them and all the other nurses the most. Even the most tender care couldn’t save many of their patients, all they could do was make their last hours as comfortable as possible. But as fast as one man died, and his corpse was removed, so another man was moved into the bed. Sometimes they lived for such a short time the nurses never even got a chance to speak to them, let alone soothe them in their last moments.

Sometimes when Matilda and Tabitha left the hospital in the early evening, they had to stop and sit down somewhere, just to breathe in some fresh air and take a rest before they had the strength to walk home after a twelve-hour shift. It was only when they were in bed together, in the tiny airless room of the house they boarded at, that they talked. They would reminisce about Tabitha’s childhood, Primrose Hill, the voyage to America, the times in New York and Missouri. It was the happy times they reflected on most, funnier aspects of the trail to Oregon and the good times with Cissie and John at the cabin.

In time Matilda came to tell Tabitha the things she’d hid from her as a young girl. Why she led her to believe she was running a restaurant, who Zandra really was, why she felt compelled to help prostitutes and how she came to have a love affair with James and that she didn’t care if they could never be married, just as long as she could spend the rest of her life with him.

Just a couple of years ago Matilda couldn’t ever have imagined herself talking about such things to Tabitha, for there had always been a clear demarcation line between woman and child. But Tabitha was a woman herself now. She might have been protected from the hardships Matilda had endured, never had a passionate love affair, but she had great sensitivity and intelligence, and her father’s gift of being able to put herself in others’ shoes.

‘When you were my age you’d already done so much,’ Tabitha said one night as they lay in bed. ‘I don’t seem to have done anything.’

‘You call going to medical college nothing!’ Matilda exclaimed. ‘I think that amounts to far more than anything I’ve done.’

‘But even when I’ve got the degree, I won’t be able to practise medicine,’ Tabitha said in a forlorn voice. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll get to deliver babies, and maybe treat the poor in a big city. But women doctors just aren’t acceptable to most folk.’

‘That will change,’ Matilda said stoutly. ‘You wait and see! Maybe it won’t be for years yet, but I’m sure it will come. Most women would rather have a lady doctor, if they had a choice.’

‘I expected you to say “you’ll be married with children to look after in the few years,” that’s what most people think,’ Tabitha replied.

‘People used to say that to me too.’ Matilda laughed softly. ‘I know I’m getting old now because no one says it any more.’

‘Would you have liked that?’

‘Yes, I would more than anything,’ Matilda admitted. ‘But what about you?’

‘If a very special man came along,’ Tabitha said, the slight catch in her voice proving this was something she hoped for. ‘And if I could feel about him the way you did about Papa and do now about James. But I don’t attract men, Matty, special or otherwise. I guess I’m too smart and too plain.’

‘It’s not that,’ Matilda said quickly. She had noted the respectful way men reacted to Tabitha, and she knew its meaning. ‘It’s because they can tell the minute they meet you that you have something important to do.’

Tabitha was silent for a moment as if mulling that over in her mind. ‘You know what I like best about you, Matty?’

‘No, do tell me,’ Matilda whispered back.

‘How you always tell the truth. Mama said that about you one day, when we were in Missouri. She said, “If Matty tells you something, you should always believe it.” That day when we buried Cissie and the girls, do you remember the things you said to me afterwards?’

‘That I wanted you to stay in Oregon, is that what you mean?’

‘Not so much that, it was more what you said about always thinking of me as your daughter. I remembered what Mama had said then, and I knew I could believe you. I was sad I had to stay in Oregon. But I knew you weren’t casting me off. That gave me such comfort.’

‘That was a terrible time,’ Matilda sighed. ‘If I hadn’t had you and Peter to think about, I don’t know what I would have done.’

Tabitha put her arms right around her and cuddled her tightly. ‘I wish I could take away that hurt,’ she whispered. ‘I was too young then to really understand what it must have been like for you. But I do now.’

‘I wonder if we’ll get any letters today,’ Tabitha said thoughtfully on the morning of 1 July. It was half past five, and she was plaiting her hair in preparation for a day on the wards. ‘It seems so long since we heard anything from the boys.’

Letters tended to arrive in batches. Sometimes they were miraculously written only a couple of weeks earlier, but mostly they were months old. When they’d last heard from Sidney back in April, he was at Fort Henry in Tennessee. An injury to his foot had resulted in him getting a job in the stores, and, still firmly unpatriotic, he hoped he’d get to stay there. He voiced no concern about the war, win or lose, only for those he loved and getting through the weeks so they could all be together again.

James and Peter always seemed to be on the move, back towards Virginia, and said little about any fighting they had encountered on the long march, or even what lay ahead of them. Peter’s letters never had a serious note in them, and centred mainly on the men he’d met, mud, digging ditches, and army rations. He described the hardtack as so tough you could use it as armour. He said the only way to eat it was to soak it in coffee, then skim off the weevils which came out of it.

James’s letters immediately after Shiloh were cheerful, amusing ones too, but after the Union’s defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia, his own home town, a bitterness had crept in. Fortunately he and Peter had been spared being involved in that battle, the humiliating defeat and the loss of some 12,600 Union men, for they were still on the march to Virginia. But James was not only furious that ‘Poppycock Generals’ had ordered their men into a situation where they could only be massacred, he was also appalled that the town had been looted by Union men after the Confederates had urged the townspeople to leave their homes for safety. Six thousand civilians left the town, trudging through snow with nowhere to go. The victorious rebels finished what the Union had started after the battle, burning and ransacking till there was nothing left for the owners to return to. He said he could never understand such wickedness if he lived to be a hundred.

The letter he penned on New Year’s Day, after President Lincoln had announced the Emancipation Proclamation, was even more troubled. While delighted in principle that it was to end slavery, he pointed out the loopholes, that Lincoln hadn’t
set all slaves free, only those in Confederate States. The ones in the loyal states such as Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky were left out of it because Lincoln was too anxious to retain the goodwill of the slave owners there. He added that no decision had been reached about what to do with the thousands of Negroes who were flocking to the Union army for refuge either. He said Lincoln was weak, and unless he addressed the problems immediately there would be worse trouble in the future.