Perhaps he was thinking of the kindly bullet or the friendly shell fragment that was to make an end of his perplexities. Who knows? Yet his exposure of himself was not reckless, but carefully calculated for the preservation of his men. It was only such as was common among the Confederate officers at Petersburg, where the percentage of officers to men among the killed and wounded was greater than was ever recorded in any war before or since.
By this exposure of his own person Kilgariff undoubtedly saved the lives of many of his men, all of whom were volunteers who had offered themselves to man a position so dangerous that the chief of artillery had refused to order mortars to occupy it, and had reluctantly consented to its occupation by Kilgariff and his desperately daring men as volunteers in an excessively perilous service. He might have reduced his losses still more if he had been willing to order his subordinates at the several groups of pits to expose themselves as he did in the interest of the men. But this he refused to do, on the ground that to order it would be to exact more than even a soldier’s duty requires of the bravest man.
One of his sergeants—a boy of fifteen, who had won promotion by gallantry—had indeed emulated his captain’s example in the hope of sparing his men. But the second time he did it, a Hotchkiss shell carried away his head and shoulders, and the world suffered loss.
The hospital service, under such conditions, was terribly overtaxed, and for relief the plantation houses were asked to receive and care for such of the wounded as could in any wise be removed to their hospitable shelter. Thus, presently, every half-starving family in the land was caring for and feeding as best it could from three to a dozen wounded men.
At Wyanoke Dorothy had met this emergency by establishing a regular hospital camp, in which she received and cared for not less than fifty wounded officers and men. With the wise foresight that was part of her mental make-up, and aided by Arthur’s advance perceptions of what this terrible campaign was likely to bring forth, Dorothy had begun early in the spring to prepare for the emergency. She had withdrawn a large proportion of the field hands from the cultivation of crops, and set them at work raising garden stuff instead. To the same end, she had diverted to her gardens a large part of the stable fertiliser which was ordinarily spread upon corn, wheat, or tobacco lands. She had said to Arthur:—
“There is nothing certain after this year except disaster. We must meet disaster as bravely as we can, and leave the future to take care of itself. I shall devote all our resources this year, outside the poppy fields, to the production of food stuffs—vegetables, fowls, and pigs—with which to feed the wounded who must presently come to us.”
Thus it came about that Dorothy was able to care for fifty wounded men at a time, when the mistresses of other plantations as great as Wyanoke and Pocahontas found themselves sorely taxed in taking ten. And as the wounded men were impatient to get back into the trenches as soon as their injuries were endurably half healed, the ministry of mercy at Wyanoke was brought to bear upon many hundreds of brave fellows during that most terrible of summers, and the fame of Dorothy Brent as an angel of mercy and kindness spread throughout the army, fairly rivalling that of her mother—unknown as such—Madame Le Sud. Madame Le Sud, defiant alike of weariness and danger, poured water down many parched throats on Cemetery Hill at Petersburg, until at last a Minié ball made an end of her ministry; and on that same day a dozen brave fellows fell while carving her name on a rude boulder which marked the place of her final sacrifice. The places of those who fell in this service were promptly taken by others equally intent, at whatever cost, upon marking for remembrance the spot on which that woman gave up her life who had ministered so heroically to human suffering.
All these things are only incidents illustrative of that heroism on the part of women which the poet, if we had a poet, would seize upon as the vital and essential story of the Confederate war. If that heroism could be properly celebrated, it would make a literature worthy to stand shoulder to shoulder with the hero-songs of old Homer himself. But that story of woman’s love and woman’s sacrifice has never been told and never will be, for the reason that there is none worthy to tell it among those of us who survive of those who saw it and knew the self-sacrificing absoluteness of its heroism.