The Union Quilters (17 page)

Night fell. The cheers faded behind them as onward they marched on unfamiliar roads, not knowing what lay ahead of them, what they would find when they reached the rest of the army.

Then it was the morning of July 2, then noon, and then early afternoon. They had marched through the night, and seventeen hours and thirty-seven miles after they had set out, they reached the outskirts of Gettysburg. The evidence of heavy fighting lay all about them, battles past and ongoing, the crashing of artillery fire in their ears, smoke rising over a distant battlefield. “Glory be, hallelujah,” Thomas heard a beleaguered corporal shout. “It’s Uncle John and the Sixth.”

Fatigued from the swift march through the night, Thomas nonetheless felt his blood surging, as he knew his fellows did. This was their land, their soil, and they would defend it. His heart pounded as the 1st Brigade, his brigade, was deployed. The rest of the corps would be held in reserve to the east of the city.

“Just our luck,” grumbled Rufus Barrows as they set out. “I could use a rest.”

“It could have been worse.” Thomas didn’t know why he bothered to reason with the older man, whose constant grumblings tried his patience. “We could have been among the first here, and in the thick of it.”

Rufus grunted a response, but there was no time for anything else, for they were in the midst of it then, pressing forward, acrid smoke stinging their nostrils, the sound and fury of battle all around them. Thomas acted almost without conscious thought, on instinct honed with practice, driving forward, responding to calls to rally, to dangers seen and anticipated, shutting off the part of his rational mind that cried out that all was madness, utter insanity, the part that recoiled in horror at the blood and gore and broken bodies of his friends and the men in butternut and gray falling dead or worse yet, fatally and agonizingly wounded because of him, because of shots he fired, because he had taken their lives—

And then a pause, a respite, as the company was ordered to occupy a granite knob, an outcropping on the smaller of two hills to the west of the town. The Rebels had been run off for now, and though the skirmishing continued into evening, there was time to collect his thoughts, to reflect upon the battle. Thomas wanted nothing less. Exhaustion washed over him in waves. He wanted only to fill his empty stomach with a good, hot meal and sink into dreamless sleep.

He took up a position behind a large rock, not as secure as breastworks, but the best he could find. As he dug into his haversack for his rations, he heard a low groan from somewhere behind him, but a glance over his shoulder revealed nothing. “Did you hear that?” he asked Abner, who shook his head, his gaze fixed on the distant enemy lines. Thomas gave his head a shake to clear his ringing ears, but it was a poor remedy. Returning his attention to his haversack, searching for a piece of hard bread he was sure he had saved for later, he heard the sound again, quickly muffled. This time he traced it to a copse of trees about ten yards distant, up a slight slope.

“Are we missing anyone?” he asked Abner.

“You mean aside from the fellows killed on the way across the field?” Abner shrugged. “None that I know of.”

Company L hadn’t lost anyone that day as far as Thomas knew, but that didn’t mean all were accounted for. Night was falling, and if anyone was lost and wounded, he might be impossible to find in the darkness. “I’ll be right back,” he told Abner, crouching as he crossed the granite outcropping and made his way to the trees, rifle in hand.

He heard raspy breathing from several paces away and stole forward quietly, raising his rifle when he glimpsed a mud-crusted boot extending out into a clearing from behind some low brush. “Who’s there?” he said, his senses sharply alert. When there was no answer, he drew closer cautiously, ears tuned to the warning sound of the tearing open of a cartridge, the slide of a ramrod. The raspy breaths diminished as if the hidden man wanted desperately not to be found. Rounding the corner, pushing aside the low branches with the end of his rifle, Thomas discovered a young man in butternut and gray lying sprawled on his back, his boots loosened, his coat torn open to reveal a bayonet wound in the shoulder. His gear and haversack were gone, but Thomas barely noticed anything more, his gaze immediately drawn to the Rebel’s face by tracks of blood down the front of his soiled shirt. Despite all Thomas had witnessed, one glance was enough to sicken him and force him to avert his gaze. A minié ball had struck the young man near the right temple and had emerged on the opposite side of his head. The left eye had been completely torn away, and blood and gore streamed from both sockets.

As Thomas came nearer, the youth dug his heels into the dusty earth and struggled to scramble backward. “Don’t take my boots,” he rasped. “Don’t take ’em.”

Thomas instinctively raised his palms, but the calming gesture was lost on the blinded youth. “I don’t want your boots.” The youth trembled, but Thomas sensed it was from shock and exhaustion, not fear. “Do you have water?”

“Yankees took all I carried.” Defiantly, the youth added, “But not my boots. They tried, and stuck me in the shoulder when I kicked ’em for it, but they didn’t get my boots.”

“They’re fine boots,” said Thomas, taking his canteen and kneeling beside him. He raised it to the youth’s lips and held it carefully while he drank deeply. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

He shook his head, and as if he feared the answer, asked, “Tell me. Is it night?”

Thomas hesitated. “No. Not quite yet.”

“I’d hoped it was night.” He strangled a sob. “I can’t see.”

“I know.”

“Is it bad? I mean, I know it’s bad, but does it look bad?”

Thomas swallowed hard, unwilling to lie. The shoulder wound seemed superficial and had stopped bleeding before Thomas’s arrival, but the head injury was something else again. “I’ve seen worse, but yes, I’m afraid it’s . . . quite serious.”

“I’ve got a girl back in Alabama,” he rasped, shivering. “Prettiest girl in Dallas County. She said she’d marry me when I come home, when the war’s over. But now . . .”

Thomas did not know what to say. “Rest easy.” He dug into his pack and took out the Dove in the Window quilt, dusty and worn from months on the road, but still warm. He wrapped it around the youth and sat back on his heels, unsure what to do next. The granite outcropping was quiet for the moment, more or less, but he couldn’t leave the boy there to be caught in the cross fire as the dueling armies advanced and retreated.

As he scanned the terrain, the popping of gunfire reminding him to keep low, the youth’s trembling gradually subsided. “Thank you,” he murmured, drawing the quilt up to his chin and slipping his arms beneath it. “I’m mighty grateful.”

“It’s all right.” There was no way around it; Thomas would have to carry the boy to safety. He had heard that the seminary on the ridge had been appropriated as a Union hospital, but it now lay behind enemy lines. If he could get the boy to an ambulance team, they would know where to deliver him. “I’ve got to get you out of here.”

“You taking me prisoner?”

“I’m taking you to a doctor,” Thomas replied. “Can you stand long enough to help me get you on my back?” The boy nodded, but when he tried to stand, he groaned in agony and slumped back against the ground. “Easy, now,” said Thomas. “It’s all right. I’ll lift you.”

“Wait,” the boy gasped as Thomas shifted his gear and knelt beside him. “In my coat. In the inside pocket. There’s a letter to my Malinda Jane—”

“You’re going to a hospital. I’m going back to my company,” Thomas reminded him. “You’re better off sending it yourself.”

“All right, then, but behind the letter, there’s a pouch. I want you to have it. For your kindness.”

Thomas refused, but the boy insisted, so reluctantly, he obliged and found a tan leather pouch stuffed full of tobacco. “I don’t smoke,” the boy confessed. “My uncle keeps sending me the stuff and I have no use for it except in trade. You take it.”

“I thank you,” said Thomas, tucking the pouch into his haversack. He hadn’t seen such fine tobacco nor such a generous portion of it in months. “Get set, now. This will hurt.”

The boy clenched his teeth and grunted as Thomas clasped the youth’s wrists together and hefted him onto his back, staggering forward until he regained his balance. He carried the boy along the granite outcropping and down the hill, praying soldiers on both sides would either not see them in the twilight or would recognize an act of mercy and hold their fire.

They reached level ground, the boy gasping in pain whenever Thomas lost his footing or started at the sound of a rifle shot or minié ball striking the ground nearby. In the shelter of a thicket, Thomas set the boy down for a few minutes’ rest.

“Bless you,” the boy mumbled after Thomas gave him the last of his water. “You’re a true Christian and a gentleman.”

Thomas let out a short, bitter laugh. If one excluded all the other men in butternut and gray he had shot instead of saved, perhaps he was. “It won’t be much farther now.”

“I changed my mind. Take my boots,” the boy urged as Thomas stooped to lift him again. “I want you to have them.”

“They aren’t my size,” Thomas said shortly, his voice straining as he shifted the boy’s weight on his back, although he hadn’t looked closely enough at the boots to be sure. He stumbled over something in the fading light and hoped it wasn’t a man.

“Then listen. You ever get down to Dallas County, Alabama, you find Archibald Hammock. You tell him William sent you. He’s kin to me, and I swear he’ll make you the finest pair of boots you ever wore, free of charge when he hears what you done for me. He’s with Captain Waddell’s company now, but after the war he’ll open up shop again, you wait and see.”

“All right,” said Thomas to quiet the boy so he would conserve the little strength remaining to him. He wondered if a day would ever come when he could travel peaceably to Alabama and seek out a boot maker without fearing he would be shot on sight as a hated enemy.

 

Jonathan would have preferred not to depart with the I Corps, but Dr. New outranked him and he could not refuse his superiorʹs urgent request. Nor could he deny that his services would be needed as soon as the fighting began, which it inevitably would, with Lee’s men in Pennsylvania poised to attack Baltimore or Washington, and Meade determined to defend the capital. The VI Corps would soon follow, and he could rejoin his regiment then. Hoping that someone, perhaps his assistant surgeon or an orderly, would think to pack his personal belongings and bring them along, he hastily scrawled a message informing his assistant of his unexpected and unwitting change in plans. Then he quickly joined the surgeons of the I Corps as they prepared to move.

The surgeons followed behind the infantry along with the ammunition wagons and ambulances, General Meade having ordered that the medical and supply trains remain behind at Westminster in order not to slow their advance. Medicine wagons accompanying each division’s ambulance trains carried a limited supply of medicines, dressings, and instruments, which Jonathan hoped would suffice.

The fighting was already well under way by the time he caught his first glimpse of Gettysburg, a pretty and prosperous town of brick and whitewashed homes with neat gardens, broad streets, thriving businesses and churches, and several colleges. But structures on the outskirts of town bore scars from the battle, and broken fences and trampled wheat fields gave evidence of the Confederate raiders.

“There,” said Dr. New, indicating a tall, stately building with a white cupola on top of a green ridge just west of the town, where the Chambersburg Pike met the Fairfield Road. “That will make a fine hospital.”

Jonathan hesitated. The brick, four-story building seemed strong and spacious enough, and the ample windows would allow sufficient light to conduct operations by and fresh air to disperse unhealthy miasmas, but field hospitals usually were established one or two miles back from the front lines, to reduce the likelihood that they would come under fire. This building—a seminary, or so he gathered from the talk of the citizens who had imprudently remained to view the spectacle—was directly alongside the fight. Indeed, various Union forces had established themselves on the ridge, and Jonathan was as near to the artillery fire as he had ever been. “We’ll be close,” he cautioned the chief surgeon. “Perhaps too close.”

“It will be all the easier for the wounded to reach us,” said Dr. New. “In fact, the seminary appears so welcoming I suspect some wounded from yesterday and this morning have sought shelter there already. We’ll hang a hospital flag from the cupola and we should fare well enough.”

Jonathan nodded. There was no time to waste. He winced as a shell exploded nearby, and quickly arranged for the rest of the medical personnel to regroup at the seminary. Dr. New’s prediction soon proved true; as they approached, they spotted victims of the first day’s fighting awaiting them on the porch and in the entryway. Women—civilians from Gettysburg, as far as Jonathan could tell at first glance, neither trained nurses nor Sanitary Commission volunteers—tended to the maimed and suffering as best they could. Their relief at the sight of the surgeons and orderlies was greater than their eagerness to relinquish their duties, and while some hurried off to seek shelter with their families, others asked to remain, to offer whatever assistance or comfort they could.

Jonathan was grateful for any willing hands and quickly set the women to work heating water, soaking sponges, and preparing hot beverages. With practiced speed, the medical staff set out instruments and supplies—knives, forceps, scalpels, scissors, chloroform, brandy, ammonia spirits, bandages, plasters, tourniquets, needles, silk thread. The stretcher-bearers set out to canvass the fields to find the wounded and carry them back to the hospital while the surgeons attended to those already present. Some men were beyond saving; others would have to wait until the more seriously injured were treated. Swiftly, Jonathan went from soldier to soldier, staunching the flow of blood from severed arteries with tourniquets, probing wounds with a finger to remove minié balls and debris, dressing open wounds, administering liquor or sometimes morphine to lessen the pain and shock. The wounded kept coming, and before long the seminary building as well as the adjacent professors’ homes and student dorms were occupied. Dr. New announced that he would ride into town and commandeer as many houses, barns, halls, or hotels that proved necessary. Jonathan barely had time to acknowledge his departure, barely had time to wipe the blood and pus from his scalpel on his apron between patients.