“It’s horrible that sick men must be placed under fire. Why don’t the authorities remove the sick and wounded to a safe distance?” I spoke with some spirit.
“You forget,” said the surgeon, “that General Johnson’s army is near, and that we are forced to draw in our lines. We would rather take the risk of a random shell than to risk being between two contending armies during a battle.”
That was quite another view of the matter, and now I was brought face to face with the facts of the situation. If I visited the hospitals I must do it under fire. I had been under fire before, but only for an hour. To go out day after day under a rain of lead was quite a different thing.
I went back to the Sanitary boat at the Yazoo Landing in a very thoughtful mood. The muddy, sluggish stream was well named Yazoo, meaning the River of Death.
That night was spent in prayer. The next morning I arose with a courage born of faith. I seemed immortal; not a bullet had been moulded that could hit me.
I went out to my work without a fear. My carriage was struck time and again, and bullets whizzed past me, but never a feeling of fear crept into my heart. I was “under the shadow of His wings, and he covered me with His feathers.”
Mrs. General Stone, whose husband commanded the right wing of the army, and who now lives at Mount Pleasant, Iowa, camped with her father out on the bluffs. She invited me to leave the sluggish river with its miasma, and come up and stay with her; and I accepted the invitation. She had a beautiful tent put up beside her own; and as the lizards were very abundant, the feet of our cots were put in jars of water, and we tucked up the covers about us so as to keep them off of our beds. We could hear their little feet scratching as they raced after each other over the tents.
The soldiers got used to them, but somehow we women shrank from contact with anything so nearly akin to the serpent family.
Night and day the battle went on. The shells with their burning fuses would sail up into mid-air like stars of the first magnitude, and burst into a shower of sparks and fragments, setting the heavens ablaze with their scintillation, and jarring the foundations of the earth with the thunder of their explosions.
We became so accustomed to the horrid sounds of war that the absence or abatement of it would awaken us out of our sleep.