Never Look Back (99 page)

Cannon fired again, blasting trees and even rocks, and now the rebels were close enough to fire on. James galloped down the line, firing through the bushes as he went, galvanizing his men into action.

The rebels were falling thick and fast, but still more came from
up behind. His men were shooting well, holding their position, and James checked quickly to see where Peter was.

It was a relief to see he’d found a better spot than most, with a fallen tree in front of him for protection, and two regular soldiers either side of him. He was shooting like a seasoned professional, but as he turned on his side to reload, and saw James behind him, he grinned wickedly.

‘Keep your head down, Private,’ James ordered him, then levelled his pistol at some stragglers who were breaking through the bushes towards Peter and shot them in quick succession before riding on.

It was the worst and bloodiest battle James had ever been engaged in. Again and again as he rode along, he swiped out with his sabre as rebels who had made it through the lines tried to unhorse him. But more kept coming, relentlessly, like maddened demons, and the roar of cannon and dropping shells was so loud he couldn’t even hear his own shouted commands or the crack of his pistol.

He left his men later to go and reconnoitre what was going on in a peach orchard nearby where he could hear even heavier fighting. He saw Union men lying flat on their bellies, firing as the rebels came that way, a snow-storm of soft pink petals floating down on both the living and the dead.

Later he was to hear from another officer that many of the men under his command had fled in terror. James blanched, but pointed out that he’d seen Confederates running too.

Later that afternoon as James and his men still clung tenaciously to their fragile position, they heard that Johnston, the rebel leader, had been killed and command had passed to Beauregard. Yet James could take no pleasure in that, Johnston was a good man.

Darkness finally fell, but although James’s men and others along the sunken road on into a place they christened the Hornets’ Nest had held their position, the rest of the army had fallen back two miles. When morning came they would surely be defeated. Word got to them that some 5,000 of their men were cowering down by the bluff at the river’s edge, some had even tried to swim the river to safety.

Peter was unhurt, but badly shaken by the day’s events. When James last saw him that evening he was writing a letter for an
illiterate comrade, his hands trembling so badly he could barely hold his pencil. He gave James a tentative smile, then bent his head over the letter as if he feared James might see fear in his eyes and despise him.

James despised himself at that moment, wishing he’d never filled the lad’s head with tales of valour in battle. Perhaps then Peter would be safe in a university somewhere, forging a career for himself that was about life, not death. Just outside the camp, wounded men lay among the dead, calling out for help, but there was no system in place for gathering or caring for them in the field. He had never felt so impotent.

It began to rain later, and wounded men who had been crying out for water were suddenly silenced.

‘Reckon God heard their pleas,’ someone in the camp called out, and this was followed by a burst of embarrassed laughter. When lightning flashed later, James saw wild hogs feeding on the dead.

He lay down under a tree to try to get a couple of hours’ sleep, covered his ears to block out the screams of the wounded, and tried to imagine that he was riding along the beach at Santa Cruz with Matilda, and that the only sound he could hear was the sea. He thought he heard a bugle call in the distance, but told himself that was fantasy too.

But the bugle wasn’t imaginary, it was Buell’s Army of the Ohio arriving with 25,000 reinforcements.

‘We licked them after all, sir,’ Peter said, grinning up at James the following evening.

With the fresh troops they had attacked the rebels at dawn. During the day they had seen the rebels fall back twice, only to counter-attack, but finally in the late afternoon they had retreated to Corinth, firing as they went.

James looked down from his horse and smiled at Peter. He wanted to jump down and hug the lad, for his face was black with gunpowder, eyes shining with the light of victory. He had the singe of a bullet through the top of his cap, and mud up to his waist. Time and time again today James had seen Peter boldly standing alone, firing relentlessly with no thought to his personal safety. Another time he’d seen him walking backwards, dragging another wounded man to shelter, firing as he went. He had
proved himself to be a man today, but in James’s eyes he was still very much the child Matilda loved. But though another enlisted man could hug a comrade, as the boy’s captain he had to remain aloof in the sight of others.

‘Yes, we licked them,’ James agreed. ‘And you fought well and bravely, Private Duncan. I’m so very proud to have you under my command.’

‘What now, sir?’ Peter asked, reaching up to stroke James’s horse. ‘Do we go after them?’

James sighed. Peter was a true soldier, his blood was up and he wanted more. He’d been just the same once, yet now he’d gladly walk away from it.

‘We have the worst task ahead of us yet,’ he said gently. ‘The dead have to be buried. Not just our men either, but theirs too.’

The ground was littered with corpses. James had walked around the battle-grounds earlier and sometimes it was difficult to put his foot down on solid earth. The pond in the cherry orchard was red with the blood of the wounded who had crawled to drink there. There was the terrible job of searching through men’s pockets for trinkets and letters to be sent home to their loved ones. Then the burials.

Peter sighed. James knew why, he wanted more fighting.

For just one moment James was tempted to remind the boy that he had to keep safe for Matty because she surely couldn’t bear any further tragedy in her life. But just as he couldn’t hug the boy, so they couldn’t speak openly of the ties that bound them together.

‘They are going to call this the Battle of Shiloh,’ James said instead, reaching down and affectionately straightening the boy’s cap. ‘Did you see that little whitewashed church some of the men fought by?’

Peter nodded.

‘That’s what it is called, “Shiloh”. It’s a Hebrew word and it means a place of peace. Let’s hope all the men we have to bury here will find it.’

Chapter Twenty-five

1863

‘Water,’ Private Newton croaked out as Matilda passed his bed.

‘Of course,’ she said, going over to his side. This young soldier had a very bad head wound, and as she slid her hand gently under his neck to lift him enough so he could drink from the glass, she saw the bandage and pillow were soaked through with blood again.

‘Slowly,’ she warned him as he gulped at the water. ‘Not too much at one time,’

He was no more than seventeen at most, but so many boys had lied about their age to enlist. A pretty boy with soft brown eyes, framed by thick dark lashes, and what little hair showed beneath his bandages was blond and curly. But he had a deathly pallor and she knew he wasn’t going to last the day.

‘Would you like me to write to your mother for you?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got a moment now if you feel up to telling me what you want to say to her.’

The expression in his eyes was one of gratitude, but anxiety because he knew that by the time the letter reached home he would be dead.

‘Just tell her I did the best I could,’ he said weakly. ‘Say my brothers must take my place now, and be good to her.’

Matilda took out a pad of paper and pencil from her apron pocket and hurriedly wrote down his words. She would add her own message later, telling his mother what a fine soldier he had been and how bravely he died. Each time she wrote one of these letters for someone, she hoped and prayed that if James, Peter or Sidney was lying in a hospital bed somewhere, another nurse like her would take time to jot down their last messages.

‘Shall I tell her you love her?’ she whispered, squeezing the hand that had reached out for hers.

‘Yes,’ he whispered, a tear trickling down his cheek. ‘Say I’m not in any pain too, I don’t want her to fret.’

Matilda couldn’t count the number of men who had told their family back home that gallant lie. War was hideous in its destruction and cruelty, yet it threw up the best and bravest of emotions.

Matilda would never have thought of becoming a nurse but for Tabitha. She had arrived here at The Lodge hospital in Washington last November, seven months ago.

Almost as soon as the war got under way, London Lil’s became very quiet as the young men rushed off to enlist, and it also became much harder to find entertainers as they disappeared off to the busier Eastern cities. Matilda kept herself busy with the agency and her girls in Folsom Street, but after the Battle of Shiloh, James was promoted to brigadier, and Peter to corporal, and she knew that nothing short of serious injury was going to bring them back before the end of the war.

Then the draft came in, and Sidney, Albert and her other barmen all had to go, so Matilda shut London Lil’s down. Sidney and Mary’s baby, Elizabeth Rose, was a year old at that time, and as Mary was expecting a second child, Matilda got them to move into the upstairs apartment with her for the company and to save on expenses.

But Matilda was fidgety. The days were long enough, but the evenings without the saloon open seemed interminable. She felt cut off from the rest of the country, for apart from fund-raising rallies, and the sudden departure of so many young men because of the draft, San Francisco was scarcely touched by the war. She wanted something useful and interesting to do, but she didn’t know what.

Then out of the blue came the telegraph message from Tabitha begging her to join her in Washington to nurse.

Her first reaction was one of horror. She didn’t believe she had the stomach for that kind of war work. But once she sat down and thought about it, the idea began to develop some appeal. It would be wonderful to see Tabitha again, and she might even get to see James, Peter and Sidney too. In a moment of pure recklessness, she sent a return telegraph message and said she was on her way.

Once she’d sent it, doubts set in. Could she really nurse the wounded? Wasn’t she too old and set in her ways to start taking orders from others? But she was sure Tabitha must have had excellent reasons for asking her to go. Dolores would look after the girls, and Mary and her children, with Fern’s help. And she had a reliable and trustworthy woman already running the Jennings Bureau. She wasn’t needed here.

It wasn’t until she arrived in Washington that she discovered the reason behind Tabitha’s request. All Union hospitals were organized by the Federal Sanitary Commission, but Dorothea Dix, the woman in charge of all the nurses, who was greatly influenced by Florence Nightingale’s nursing out in the Crimea, would accept no women under thirty, for fear younger ones might be looking for romance.

Tabitha was frantic to use her medical knowledge to ease the suffering of the thousands of casualties, but knowing the Commission would turn her down when they saw her age was only twenty-two on her application, she went straight to Washington to see Miss Dix personally. Perhaps the indomitable woman who had claimed ‘all nurses should be plain looking’, found Tabitha plain enough, or maybe she was wise enough to recognize that a girl prepared to postpone her medical studies until the war was over was dedicated, for she didn’t dismiss her out of hand. She said she would be prepared to take Tabitha, if she could find another older woman to join her and act as her chaperone.

Once Matilda was on the stage-coach heading across the mountains, she felt exhilarated rather than fearful. She was looking forward to being back in the mainstream again, to talking to people who could give her more insight into how the war was progressing, and hearing their opinions on it, for she knew James and Peter held a great deal back in their letters.

But by the time she had alighted from the first of the trains which would take her across to the east coast, she was dismayed by the views of her fellow passengers. A few were fiercely patriotic, most showed great sympathy for the bereaved, but the vast majority, whether from the North or the South, proved themselves to be alarmingly against the abolition of slavery.

She spoke to avid supporters of the Union who were horrified
that freed and runaway slaves were flocking to the army and to the North to find shelter. When she asked what their solution to this problem was, they said they should stay on the plantations where they belonged. She spoke to a Southerner from Charleston who was furious that the Union were enlisting Negroes to fight his people. ‘It ain’t never right for a nigger to be given a gun to shoot fight white folk,’ was how he put it.

She heard too that the Indians were making the most of the absence of the army in the West by raiding trains, ambushing wagons of supplies and killing settlers. It was generally thought that they should be forcefully suppressed, then herded into reservations.

Matilda wondered how people who were themselves born in other countries had the cheek to wish to sweep their adopted country clear of its native people. They seemed to have entirely forgotten that but for Indians helping the first settlers to cross America, it would still be a wilderness.

But when a discussion came up about the draft amongst a group of wealthy people she found herself travelling with, she was incensed to hear them boast openly that they’d paid for their sons to be excused enlistment. She thought this was the most dishonourable thing she’d ever heard of and said so, loudly. She wondered how the country could get back on its feet when the war was over, when the brave and loyal had died for a cause few truly believed in, and the fate of its future was left to carpetbaggers, cowards and bigots.

Private Newton died a few minutes after she’d held the letter to his mother for him to sign it. She closed his eyes, folded his arms across his chest, and pinned the tips of his socks together, in the manner she’d been taught to lay out the dead. But she kissed his cheek too, not caring that Miss Dix would regard such an act as unprofessional. As she walked away to order a stretcher, her mind slipped back to the day she arrived in Washington.