Never Look Back (101 page)

But while Matilda sympathized that James often found himself with an unsteady foot in both Yankee and Confederate camps, her primary concern was that he and Peter should stay unharmed. Infuriatingly, he didn’t say exactly where they were or which battles they were involved in, and each time a new batch of injured were brought to the hospital, both she and Tabitha were always quizzing the men to see what they knew, and worse still scanning the men’s faces in terror as they arrived, in dread that one day Peter or James might be among them.

Just as Matilda and Tabitha were leaving the ward to go home that day, word arrived that a battle had begun in Gettysburg. Matilda didn’t even know where this was, but while lingering outside the hospital to listen to the gossip, they heard it was just a little cross-roads town further upstate.

They heard that the battle had begun over boots. There was rumoured to be a large supply of them in this town, and both armies had made their way to it, and when they met, fighting had broken out.

To Matilda it sounded like just a mild skirmish, and she and Tabitha walked home laughing about men fighting over boots.

They heard nothing more about Gettysburg the next day, but the following morning as they arrived for duty, there was talk of nothing else. Apparently vast numbers of troops on both sides had all converged on the area, and at four on the previous afternoon battle had commenced. Some of the nurses volunteered to go and help in the field hospitals, but this idea was turned down as no one had any idea of casualties, and anyway, everyone was needed here at The Lodge.

As it was the Fourth of July the following day, some of the men in the convalescence ward had made bunting to hang up, and they came into A1 to hang some in there, and talk to the
badly injured men. Matilda thought as they made their way home that evening that it was one of the best days she’d known. Not one death, and no new arrivals. Yet she had a queasy feeling in her stomach that it was just the lull before the storm.

There was no celebration for the Fourth of July, for by mid-morning the storm Matilda had anticipated began with the first batch of wounded soldiers from Gettsyburg brought in. As the nurses worked at the jobs they’d become so familiar with, cutting uniforms from injured flesh and bathing wounds so the doctors could see the full damage, they heard from the men that this was the worst battle yet. These men were mostly from 20th Maine, and they seemed to want to speak of how they had advanced on the enemy with fixed bayonets and taken the Confederates by surprise. ‘Some of them dropped their weapons,’ one young private whispered to Matilda. ‘I thought we were home and dry, but then I got a bullet through my knee.’

He was one of the luckier ones, it turned out, as he had been put in a wagon and hauled away to the safety of the tents of the field hospital, then quickly despatched here to Washington before even a scalpel was put near his knee, let alone the surgeon’s saw.

Neither Matilda nor Tabitha left the ward till midnight. The story was circulating that there would be thousands of casualties in the next day or so. That was, if there were enough wagons to get the men to a hospital.

Hell was the only word Matilda felt was appropriate for what she saw in the next few days. A constant stream of wagons was coming into Washington, all heavily laden with wounded. Many of them had lain for two days in open fields in hot sunshine alongside the corpses of both their comrades and their foes, watching the bodies bloat and putrefy in the heat.

They didn’t only use the beds now, but the floor and corridors too. The less badly wounded were left outside on the ground until they could be seen. All the nurses worked sixteen-hour shifts, every pair of hands was needed. There was no time for writing to someone’s mother, no time to coax a man to drink if he didn’t do so willingly. Often they couldn’t even change the bloody sheets on the beds between patients.

They heard that 51,000 men had been killed, 23,000 of them Union men. The Confederates were limping back to Virginia,
taking their wounded with them in the wagon train seventeen miles long.

Then Peter was brought in.

It was his voice that Matilda recognized, not his face, for like most of the men he was so blackened with gunpowder that his features were blurred.

‘Aunt Matty!’ she heard as the stretcher was carried by her. ‘Is that really you, or am I dreaming?’

She was so startled she almost spilled the pitcher of water in her hands. The right leg of his pants was split right up his thigh and the dressing around the wound was soaked in blood.

‘Peter!’ she exclaimed, rushing up to his stretcher, hands instinctively reached to wipe his brow. ‘Oh my poor love, I never wanted to see you here.’

She immediately organized for him to be given the bed in the corner, it was the one they called lucky, as more men seemed to make it who’d been put there. Tabitha came rushing over, greeted Peter, and quickly stripped off the blood-soaked dressing which the field hospital had applied over the bullet wound in his thigh.

‘The bullet is still in there,’ she said as she probed into the wound. ‘But it looks reasonably clean compared with the other men’s. Matty will wash you, and I’ll get the doctor to come as quickly as possible. Were you lying outside for long?’

‘No, the Brigadier saved me,’ he said, wincing with the pain.

Both women wanted to know more, and to ask where James was, but Peter was in terrible pain, he’d lost a great deal of blood, the wound needed cleaning, and there were many other men needing even more urgent help.

Peter passed out with pain as Matilda washed the wound. Once she had it and the surrounding area of his thigh clean, she put a fresh dressing on it, then began undressing and washing him. She had done the same thing to hundreds of men before, but this time she was choked by emotion, remembering him as a baby and how he’d howled in that cellar while Cissie fed little Pearl. She remembered too her delight in seeing him every time she went to the Waifs’ and Strays’ Home in New Jersey. He’d been such a delightful, fat, bonny baby. But that was twenty years ago, he was a man now. No dimpled fat thighs that invited her to kiss them, just hard, taut muscle.

Yet as she washed his face, the boy she’d brought back to San
Francisco after the death of his mother came back, still only downy hair on his chin, the little scar he’d got on his right cheek when he’d fallen from a tree out at the cabin still there amongst the freckles. He came to again, light brown eyes looking at her in wonder.

‘It really is me, Peter,’ she whispered. ‘And I’m going to make you better. Just go back to sleep, you are safe now.’

She wasn’t going to let him die, she had promised Cissie she would care for him. If she had to bribe the doctor to get that bullet out, then she’d do it.

The bullet was removed at eight that evening. Matilda held his hands while the doctor dug it out, and she stitched the wound herself. He didn’t cry out, and his endurance reminded her so much of the way he had been when Cissie and the girls were dying.

‘You are a brave man,’ she said, as she and Tabitha lifted him from the stretcher, back into his bed. ‘I’ve never been prouder of you.’

Matilda sent Tabitha home to bed, but she remained on the ward. There were many men much more gravely wounded than Peter, few would last the night and they needed someone to comfort them, but it was Peter she stayed for.

He slept intermittently, yet each time he opened his eyes and saw her still there, he half smiled and closed his eyes again. At dawn his colour had improved slightly, and when she changed the dressing on his leg, she rejoiced to find no sign of infection.

‘Can you tell me about what happened now?’ she asked around six, knowing that soon a senior nurse would come to ask how he was, and perhaps move him to one of the other wards where the patients needed less attention than the men in here.

‘The rebels came up Cemetery Hill to us,’ he said in a whisper. ‘They were waving their flags, the sun was gleaming on their bayonets, it looked like a sloping forest of flashing steel. They came like they were one, silent and bold, it was the most beautiful, awesome sight. They looked invincible even though their uniforms were in rags and some had no boots. Then General Gibbon came down the line, cool and calm, and ordered us to hold our fire until they were real close.

‘He gave us a signal to fire when they were so close you could almost smell their breath. As we fired, so all the cannons went
off at once. You wouldn’t believe it, Matty! Arms, heads, caps and knapsacks were thrown up into the clear air above the smoke,’ He paused, wincing at the memory. ‘But still the rebels came on. It was hand to hand, face to face after that. Men cutting with sabres, thrusting with bayonets, guns fired right into faces. So terrible!’

He stopped, then gave a long-drawn-out sigh. ‘I got hit, but I kept on shooting and reloading because I knew if I fell I’d be bayoneted. Then out of nowhere James came roaring through on his horse. He was like an avenging angel, Matty, slashing out with his sabre. I didn’t think he’d even see me, but he’d come to get me, Matty, he grabbed hold of my arms and hauled me up on to his horse.’

Matilda covered her mouth with her hands, eyes wide with shock.

‘I guess I must have passed out, ’cos next thing he was dropping me down on the grass, away from it all. He said I’d got to go to the field hospital,’ he said in an emotional croak. ‘He saved my life.’

Matilda was reeling from the vivid and dramatic picture he’d painted for her.

‘Did he go back to the fighting?’ she asked weakly.

‘’Course he did, Matty,’ Peter retorted. ‘I saw him riding off swirling his sabre in one hand, shooting with his pistol from the other, clinging on to his horse with his knees, the way he said an Indian taught him.’

He stopped suddenly, his face clouding over. ‘But he got hurt real bad later, Matty.’

Matty felt as if her heart had just stopped. For a moment she could only stare at Peter in horror. ‘Are you sure?’ she whispered.

‘’Fraid so,’ he said, with pain in his eyes. ‘Captain Franklin, came to tell me. That’s why I got here so quick. Seems James gave instructions that I was to be brought right here, to this hospital, and you.’

Matilda had already discovered the previous night that most of the wounded were still up there at Gettysburg, taken into people’s houses, and she thought it was just luck that brought Peter here. But there was no luck in it, just James looking after her boy for her, as he’d always promised he’d do.

‘So where is James?’ she asked, panic overwhelming her.

‘I guess he’s been taken wherever the officers go,’ Peter replied. ‘That’s if –’ He stopped short, but he didn’t have to finish the sentence, he’d said enough.

‘Would you mind if I go and find him?’ she said hurriedly. ‘Tabby will be on duty very soon, she’ll look out for you.’

‘You go and find him,’ Peter said. ‘Tell him.’ Again he stopped short and tears filled his eyes.

‘Tell him you love him?’ she whispered.

He nodded, and swiped angrily at his tears. ‘And tell him he’s the bravest man I ever knew.’

It took Matilda only minutes to discover that officers were taken to the Federal Hospital, and she took off, running like a hare. It was going to be another very hot day, the sun was climbing rapidly into the sky, and the sound of wagon wheels bringing more wounded was all around her.

Only as she reached the doors of the Federal Hospital did she remember that her apron was stained with blood, and felt her hair coming loose under her cap, but it was too late to do anything about that now.

She was told by a starchy lady on a desk that Brigadier James Russell had indeed been brought in late last night, but that she couldn’t possibly see him now.

‘I insist,’ she said, looking at the woman as if she might knock her down if she refused again. ‘I am his wife.’

He was in a room at the end of a long corridor, with five other men, and as Matilda rushed in, a stout nurse tried to restrain her.

‘Let go of me,’ she said, pushing the woman to one side.

James was in the bed nearest the window, and recognizing her voice he turned his head towards her. ‘Matty!’ he whispered.

For a moment she thought whatever injuries he had were only minor ones, for his fair hair was gleaming in the early morning sun, his face was tanned, moustache trimmed, and his naked upper chest and arms rippled with muscle. He looked exactly the way he had three years ago, on the last night they spent together. But as she ran to him she saw it wasn’t a sheet pulled up over him, but a bandage around his middle, and his eyes had that dull, faraway look of approaching death she’d seen so often before.

She felt as if she’d been hit by a mortar shell, her mouth went
dry, her heart was thumping too loudly. Stomach wounds were always the worst. She’d never known one man survive them. It wasn’t fair, everything she’d planned and dreamed of was for him and with him, her life would be worth nothing without him.

Yet somehow she managed to smile and kiss him, to say she’d run all the way here as soon as she heard he had been wounded. She wondered why she wasn’t crying, or even berating him for not keeping back from the action the way senior officers were supposed to, but all she did was continue to smile, stroke his hair back from his face and whisper that she loved him.

‘Is Peter going to make it?’ he asked, gripping her hands. His voice was so husky and weak it made her feel weak too.

‘Yes, thanks to you, my darling, he told me what you did,’

‘He turned out to be a fine soldier,’ James said softly. ‘He does you credit, Matty,’

‘He told me to tell you he loves you,’ she said, close to him and stroking his face. ‘He said you were the bravest man he ever knew. But even if he recovers enough to be sent back into the war, I’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent it.’

James nodded in agreement. ‘Tell Tabitha she’s to go back to her studies after this, and nothing must stop her becoming a doctor, and tell Sidney I’m sorry I can’t be Elizabeth’s godfather, and to look after you for me.’

She wanted to say he would get better, and he’d see Elizabeth soon for himself, and James too, the new baby who had been named after him, but she’d had too much experience of death now to stop a man saying the things he needed to say before he went.