“If you can’t eat this you’ll have to do without; there is nothing else,” was the attendant’s discouraging response. On a dingy-looking wooden tray was a tin cup full of black, strong coffee; beside it was a leaden-looking tin platter, on which was a piece of fried fat bacon, swimming in its own grease, and a slice of bread. Could anything be more disgusting and injurious to fever-stricken and wounded patients?
And nearly every soldier in that hospital was prostrated by fever or severe wounds; yet this was the daily diet, with little variation. Typhoid fever and acute dysentery was the verdict of a conference of physicians that consulted in regard to my brother.
There was little hope of his recovery. An old, experienced physician said, “If he can have good care and nursing his recovery is possible, but not probable.” And the sad news was telegraphed to the dear old home. The surgeon removed him into a little inner room, and my fight with death began in earnest.
Oh! those dreadful days and nights of watching; no joys of earth can ever obliterate their memory.
The restless tossing of the fever-stricken ones in the adjoining room, the groans of the wounded, the drip, drip, drip, of the leaking vessels hung above the worst wounded ones to drop water on the bandages and keep them cool and moist, put every nerve on the rack, and pulsated through heart and brain till it seemed as though I should go wild. It was an inside view of the hospitals that made me hate war as I had never known how to hate it before.
The pitiful cry of helpless ones calling, “Nurse, nurse! water, water!” and the weary, sleepy nurses making no response—sitting, perhaps, fast asleep, yet willing to do their duty when I aroused them, still rings in my ears.
The surgeon in charge and all the attendants were kind and respectful, coming into our room on tiptoe lest their rude steps and ways might jostle a soul, hanging by a thread, out of life. Each day a telegram was sent to those who watched and prayed far away: “No better—sinking.”
But a new anxiety disturbed me. The acting medical director, who visited the hospital each day, coming in reeling drunk on the second day, ordered that I should only be admitted for an hour each day, in the afternoon.
No one in the hospital was ready to enforce such a brutal order.
Immediately the chief officers at Sedalia and St. Louis were advised of the state of affairs.