Scores of volunteer physicians aided the regular army surgeons. Hundreds of volunteer nurses, many of them wives, sisters, and mothers, came from every walk of life to join in the work of mercy. Hands hardened with toil, and hands that leisure and luxury left white and soft, were bathing fevered brows, supporting wearied heads, washing repulsive wounds, combing matted and bloody locks.
Patient forms kept nightly vigils beside the couches; gentle tones dropped priceless words of sympathy; and, when all was over, tender hands closed the fixed eyes, and smoothed the hair upon the white foreheads. Thousands of poor fellows carried to their homes, both North and South, grateful memories of those heroic women; thousands of hearts, wrung with the tidings that loved ones were gone, found comfort in the knowledge that their last hours were soothed by those self-denying and blessed ministrations.
One man, who had received several bullets, lay undiscovered for eight days in a little thicket, with no nourishment except rain-water. After discovery he lived nearly two weeks. At some points the ground was so closely covered with mutilated bodies that it was difficult to step between them. One soldier, rigid in death, was found lying upon the back, holding in his fixed hand, and regarding with stony eyes, the daguerreotype of a woman and child. It was terribly suggestive of the desolate homes and bleeding hearts which almost force one to Cicero's conclusion, that any peace is better than the justest war.
[CHAPTER XXI.]
They are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.
Hamlet.
An Interview with General Sherman.
General Sherman was very violent toward the Press. Some newspapers had treated him unjustly early in the war. While he commanded in Kentucky, his eccentricities were very remarkable, and a journalist started the report that Sherman was crazy, which obtained wide credence. There was, at least, method in his madness; for his supposed insanity which declared that the Government required two hundred thousand troops in the West, though hooted at the time, proved wisdom and prophecy.