(A.) I have just bought what is left of a small cargo of ice, probably sixty tons, at twelve dollars, sent here on speculation for sale to sutlers. We are now fairly well supplied at all points, I think.
(A.) We began taking sick on the Elm City this afternoon. I telegraphed you about the crowded state of the post hospital. We had fed this morning sixty men who had been turned away from it on the ground that there was no room. I wrote to the surgeon in charge about this, and B. called on him with my note. He merely said that he thought there could not have been as many as sixty turned away! These sixty men we heard of as lying upon the railroad, without food, and with no one to look after them. So some of the ladies got at once into the stern-wheeler Wissahickon, which is the Commission's carriage, and with provisions, basins, towels, soap, blankets, etc., went up to the railroad-bridge, cooking tea and spreading bread as they went. After twenty minutes' steaming, the men were found, put on freight-cars, and pushed down to the landing, fed, washed, and taken on the tug to the Elm City. Dr. Ware, in his hard-working on shore, had found fifteen other sick men, without food, and miserable; there being "no room" for them in the tent hospital. He had studied the neighborhood extensively for shanties, found one, and put his men into it. The floor of the one room up-stairs was six inches deep in beans, and made a good bed for them, and in the morning the same party ran up on the tug, cooking breakfast for them as they ran, scrambling eggs in a wash-basin over a spirit-lamp.
(A.) The army struck its tents one night last week, and silently stole away up the river. Bottom Bridge is ours, and no enemy met; the railroad is repaired at White House, and trains will be running to-morrow; barges, loaded with rolling stock and cannon, have been passing us on the river all day.
The sick brought on board the Elm City this afternoon had been lying in a puddle, which nearly covered them. The water stood several inches deep in some of the tents. These men were selected by Dr. Ware, as the worst cases out of sixteen hundred in the shore hospital. (Several died before they reached the mouth of the river.) Dr. Ware himself laid hold to put up tents to protect men before the storm, and said that he saw half a dozen tents yet remaining, not put up at nightfall, though men were constantly arriving, and were left out in the ambulances.
If an engagement occurs this side of Richmond, my opinion is that we shall have all the horrors of Pittsburg Landing in an aggravated form. I have tried in vain to awaken some of the Head-quarters officers to a sense of the danger; but while they admit all I say, they regard it as a part of war, and say, "After all, there never was a war in which the sick were as well taken care of. England does no better by her wounded; true, they will suffer a good deal for a time, but that is inevitable in war," &c.
What ought to be done? The Surgeon-General cannot at once do our sea-transport business as well as we. By recruiting deficiencies at each trip, we can for the present continue to employ the Webster and the Spaulding for this purpose advantageously. We can maintain the distribution of supplies. We want also a depot at this end for our sea-transports. For the rest, the Surgeon-General can at once have it done a great deal better than we, if he can place two steamboats under the Medical Director's orders, in addition to the Commodore and Vanderbilt, equip them, or take them equipped from us; put one good authoritative surgeon on board each, with two to four assistant surgeons, and six to ten dressers and stewards, and twenty to thirty privates for nurses, and require certain rules, to secure decent provision for the sick, to be maintained on them.
It is ludicrous to see the enthusiasm of some of the surgeons at the outset about details; the cleansing of patients, numbering, records of disease, pure water, &c., and their entire forgetfulness and inaptness to provide for more essential matters,—food, buckets, cups, vessels of any sort, and water of any sort. Doctors, nurses, and philosophers are much easier to be had, it seems, than men who would be able to keep an oyster-cellar or a barber-shop with credit.