The Union Quilters (18 page)

Explosions rattled the windows; the injured and the dying coughed up blood and cried out in pain. When a few wounded soldiers exclaimed that some of the artillery fire raining down upon them came from Union cannons, Jonathan remembered Dr. New’s words as they had viewed the seminary from afar and shouted for someone to run upstairs and hang a hospital flag from the cupola. Preoccupied with a patient, he could only observe from the corner of his eye as an uninjured soldier dashed from the room carrying a coil of rope and something that for all the world resembled a woman’s red flannel petticoat. It would do, he thought grimly as he went about his work. It would surely attract notice. Indeed, the firing upon the building soon subsided, although the threat of stray shells remained.

The afternoon wore on, and from time to time, someone would hastily step outside to watch the battle and return with confident assurances that the Union lines were certain to hold. Jonathan fervently hoped so, but the impressions he had pieced together from remarks of the wounded and the ambulance crews were far less sanguine. Major General Reynolds had been killed soon after the I Corps arrived on the scene. The untested and inexperienced Pennsylvania Emergency Militia had been largely ineffective in defending the state, having been scattered or captured almost upon first contact with the battle-scarred soldiers of Lee’s army. In all that time, Jonathan treated no one from the 49th, or as far as he could determine even a single soldier from the entire VI Corps. Other field hospitals were scattered throughout Gettysburg and the surrounding countryside, so it was possible the men of the Elm Creek Valley were engaged in the fighting, their wounded directed elsewhere. But he did not know, and the not knowing troubled him.

Just then came an incredulous shout from the doorway that Stone’s brigade and the 151st Pennsylvania had pulled back from McPherson’s Ridge. Jonathan finished tying off a tourniquet and strode to the window, where the sight of what appeared to be entire blue-clad regiments making a strategic retreat to the seminary momentarily staggered him. It couldn’t be, but the longer he watched, the more the movement of the lines confirmed his first unbelievable reckoning.

He raced to locate Dr. New. “We’ve got to evacuate,” he said, describing what he had seen. “We’re no longer safe here.”

Frowning, Dr. New went to the window, peered outside, and quickly nodded. “Agreed. Any man stable enough to be moved must be moved now.”

Jonathan returned to his patients as Dr. New led the evacuation, barking orders to the ambulance drivers to deliver the patients to the Christ Lutheran Church on Chambersburg Street and other secure locations in town that he had prepared earlier. Swiftly the ambulance wagons were made ready; men who could walk made their way on foot, and stretcher-bearers carried others. By mid-afternoon the seminary had been emptied of all but the most seriously wounded, but new bloodied and broken soldiers kept arriving, on foot or carried by friends, and Jonathan despaired of attending to all of them in time to save them. Most of the medical personnel and all of the civilian volunteers had evacuated, leaving a skeleton crew to care for the wounded who braved the increasingly hazardous journey up the ridge to the seminary.

Suddenly, beyond the seminary walls, the furious sounds of artillery fire and rifle shots surged. Jonathan spared a quick glance out the window only to see Union infantrymen regrouping on either side of the building, lining up along Seminary Ridge for one last defensive stand. He went cold, his heart in his throat, and he knew no hospital flag waving from a high cupola would protect them.

Transfixed, he watched nearly two thousand Confederates fall into ranks as they prepared to assault Seminary Ridge. “Doctor,” someone shouted. He tore himself away from the window and raced to the side of a private from the Iron Brigade with a stomach wound so severe he surely would not survive the day; Jonathan administered morphine to ease his suffering, but there was nothing more he could do. Next he examined the mangled arm of a Wisconsin corporal who begged him not to amputate, but before Jonathan could reply, a terrible salvo burst from all sides of the seminary; the room dimmed as brown-gray smoke obscured the windows. Jonathan’s ears rang from the noise; he clenched his teeth and flinched with each explosion as the corporal grasped the arm of his chair with his good hand, his legs twitching as if he fought the instinct to seize his rifle and join the fray or to dive for cover.

“I believe your hand can be saved,” he shouted to the corporal just as the sounds of firing paused. He looked from the man’s wound to the window and back, picking out debris with forceps, waiting for the sounds to resume. Instead he heard shouts and distant screams of agony. Gradually the smoke began to clear outside the west windows. He motioned for an orderly, who hurried over with a basin of red-tinged water and a sponge. “Rinse the wound,” he instructed, drawn irresistibly to the window. As the smoke cleared, his stomach turned at the ghastly scene: The slopes of Seminary Ridge were thick and red with blood and the bodies of the dead and dying. The Union line had pinned down the few survivors a mere few hundred yards away in a shallow depression between the ridges, and as Jonathan watched, they concentrated the full force of their artillery fire upon them.

Yet even confronted by this massive assault, the Confederate troops pushed forward. Beside Jonathan, an Irishman from the 20th New York leaning on a makeshift crutch murmured a prayer and crossed himself. The Union breastworks erupted in the fire and smoke of gunfire, the seminary walls trembling with the thunder of artillery. “Look there,” said an assistant surgeon, his voice shaking. An orderly called to Jonathan, but he was riveted with shock and alarm. As he watched, a regiment in tattered butternut and gray shifted around the Union breastworks until they flanked the defenders. Then they opened fire.

“Lord help the First Corps,” the Irishman muttered. Someone grabbed Jonathan’s arm and pleaded with him to come. He had time enough to see the Union line collapse from left to right and the surviving defenders flee for Cemetery Hill before he allowed himself to be pulled away from the window and led to the bedside of another wounded soldier. Frantically he worked to attend one man and then another, and yet another. Dr. Heard, the medical director, called out that all medical personnel who wished to evacuate could wait no longer. A few hesitated before fleeing for the door, but Jonathan, in the midst of tying a tourniquet before a screaming boy of eighteen bled to death before his eyes, could not leave. And then there was another reason not to go, and another. Sparing one glance for the window as he hastened from one bedside to the next, he saw Confederate soldiers swarming the ridge. A minié ball shattered a window, showering a patient with glass.

It was late afternoon, and the last of the Union defenders had gone. A chill went down the back of Jonathan’s neck as the Rebels’ exultant yells filled the air—shrill, unearthly, and piercing, more animal than human. Beyond the window, a sea of butternut and gray swept past, and suddenly soldiers burst into the room, rifles leveled, shouting for them to surrender, to put their hands in the air. Jonathan instinctively complied, forgetting that he held a scalpel until a gaunt private screamed at him to put it down. He opened his hand, and the scalpel fell to the floor with a sharp metallic ping. He stumbled backward against a bed as more Rebels came into the room, shouting with triumphant glee as they discovered the wealth of medicine and morphine and instruments. Before Jonathan knew what was happening, they had swept the shelves clean of supplies and had carried them off, leaving nothing essential behind, not a bandage, not a bottle of laudanum, not even the scalpel Jonathan had dropped on the floor.

From shouts and footfalls and crashes coming from other rooms, Jonathan knew the same scene was unfolding elsewhere in the seminary. A Rebel sergeant appeared in the doorway and informed them in a drawl that they were all prisoners of the Army of Northern Virginia, patients and surgeons alike.

Dry-mouthed, ignoring the rifle pointed at his chest, Jonathan kept his arms raised and found his voice. “We have patients who need our attention.”

The sergeant glanced around the room, in its way more filled with blood and horror than the battlefield. “Well, get to it, then.”

“Your men have taken all our instruments.”

“Our surgeons have been deprived of instruments as well as medicines, thanks to your Yankee embargoes,” the sergeant replied in the same steady drawl, resting his rifle in the crook of his elbow. “Put some of that vaunted ingenuity to work and make due with what you got. That’s what we’ve been doing going on two years now.”

“We have Confederate wounded here too.” Catching sight of blood seeping through his patient’s trousers, Jonathan forgot himself and lowered his hands to part the shredded wool and expose the wound. Seizing a corner of the bedsheet, he tore off a long strip and packed it into the injury. “We’ve treated them throughout the battle. In addition to the international laws protecting medical personnel, laws of basic human decency oblige—”

The sergeant waved him to silence. “I’ll check with our medical director. In the meantime, make do.”

He strode off, and after a moment of stunned silence, the medical team sprang back into action, working frantically, helplessly, to save lives. They could perform no amputations, could relieve no pain. The Rebel sergeant did not return. Once Jonathan stepped outside, trembling from exhaustion, he sank down upon the wooden steps now riddled with bullet holes. He was a prisoner, powerless to help the men in his care. Repeated entreaties to any Confederate soldier who entered the hospital were ignored or met with empty promises. He rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. He had not eaten since suppertime the previous day; his apron and shirtsleeves were stiff and encrusted with dried blood.

Not far away, the battle continued on Cemetery Hill as the Union troops retreated in utter disarray. Confederate troops milled about the seminary, sparing Jonathan the occasional glance but otherwise leaving him to his exhaustion. Suddenly a stir went through the troops, and Jonathan looked up to see a white-bearded gentleman approaching on horseback. An aide-de-camp hastened to his side, and as they conferred, Jonathan overheard a few phrases not drowned out by artillery fire: The man on horseback wanted the hills occupied by the Union to be taken if practicable, but if not, the Confederates were to await the arrival of reinforcements. As the gentleman rode off, a debate broke out between two officers with different interpretations of the orders. Only then did Jonathan recognize the bearded gentleman as General Robert E. Lee himself.

At that moment, he spotted a Confederate ambulance wagon and staggered to his feet. “You there,” he called out, hurrying over before they could ride off. “This is a hospital. Your soldiers have taken our supplies. We cannot tend to our wounded.” He jumped as a stray minié ball struck a nearby tree, spraying him with splinters of bark.

The ambulance drivers exchanged a look, and the one holding the reins shook his head. “Our surgeons have only enough supplies for ourselves, and barely that. We’ll hang a hospital flag from your cupola, but more than that we can’t provide.”

Clenching his teeth in frustration, Jonathan nodded his thanks and returned inside, where the soldiers’ needs had only increased in his absence. Later he overheard that at some time during the early evening, a Rebel soldier had replaced the red flannel pantaloons with a yellow Confederate hospital flag. It was little comfort.

Night fell, and in the scant light provided by a lantern improvised from a jar of lard with a handkerchief wick, Jonathan tended his patients in vain, or so it seemed. Sometime before dawn, he stumbled, eyes half closed, down the hallway to a small office lined with bookshelves. Papers had been strewn about the floor amidst broken glass from the shot-out windows, and most of the leatherbound volumes had been knocked to the floor by Rebels searching for valuables. One shelf was bare except for a Bible, which had likely been cast down by one careless soldier and carefully replaced by a more reverent companion. Pushing aside the chair, curling up beneath the sturdy oak desk, Jonathan drifted off to sleep, often dragged back into wakefulness by the groans and coughs and cries of the wounded.

The first shafts of morning light woke him. He crawled out from beneath the desk, rubbed his face vigorously, and tried to ignore his growling stomach. As he made his way back to his patients, he passed two slightly injured soldiers removing the body of another from the foot of the stairs. Recovering from an amputation in an upstairs room, the man had cried out all night for water, but those who had heard his pleas had been in no condition to help him. Desperate, he had crawled from bed and made his way downstairs, where he had bled to death without satisfying his thirst.

Swallowing back his bile, Jonathan nodded and continued past. If he had not slept so soundly, if he had stayed in the room with his patients—but nothing could be done for the man now. All Jonathan could do was try to help those who yet lived.

But without supplies, without instruments, there was little he could offer them except water and encouragement. He thought of his black leather physician’s satchel, left behind with his personal belongings in Frederick, Maryland, with the VI Corps. It was just as well he had been unable to retrieve it before moving out with Dr. New and the I Corps, for it surely would have been confiscated too.

“I beg your pardon, Doctor,” a woman’s voice interrupted his reverie.

He looked up from a patient—an Indiana youth whose future was uncertain—to discover a dark-haired young woman standing just inside the doorway, trembling and pale, a basket on her arm. “Yes, miss?” He wondered what horrors she had witnessed on her way to the seminary from the town. He had a sudden vision of the Confederate forces moving on from Gettysburg to Harrisburg and into the Elm Creek Valley, and his own dear Charlotte recoiling tearfully from the sights and sounds and smells of a ruined battleground. He prayed she would never witness such grievous things.