"Eighty dollars!" called out the man who thought me rich; "eighty dollars for her! why I tell you she could give every one of us eighty dollars, and would not miss it!"
Another said:
"She isn't one of the sort that are 'round after purses!"
Why any of them should have thought me rich I cannot imagine except for the respect with which officers treated me. To veil the iron hand I held over my nurses, I made a jest of my authority, pinned a bit of bandage on my shoulder, and played commander-in-chief. Officers and guards would salute when we passed, as an innocent joke, but the men came to regard me as a person of rank.
Citizens of Fredericksburg, who at first insulted me on the street, as they did other Yankee nurses, heard that I was a person of great influence, and began to solicit my good offices on behalf of friends arrested by order of Secretary Stanton, and held as hostages, for our sixty wounded who were made prisoners while trying to pass through the city, before we took possession.
So I was decked in plumes of fictitious greatness, and might have played princess in disguise if I had had time; but I had only two deaths in the old theater—this man up stairs, and the man without clothes, who lay alone in that back room, and after the amputation of his thigh, had no covering until government gave him one of Virginia clay.
CHAPTER LXXII.
MORE VICTIMS AND A CHANGE OF BASE.
One day at noon, the air thrilled with martial music and the earth shook under the tramp of men as seven thousand splendid troops marched up Princess Ann street on their way to reinforce our army, whose rear was about eight miles from us. They were in superb order, and the forts around Washington had been stripped of their garrisons, and most of their guns, to furnish them; but the generalship which cut our army off from its base of supplies, and blundered into the battle of the Wilderness, like a blind horse into a briar patch, without shelling or burning the dry chapperal in which our dead and wounded were consumed together, after the battle, had made no arrangements for the safe arrival of its reinforcements. So they were ambushed soon after passing through Fredericksburg; and that night, before ten o'clock, all the places I had succeeded in making vacant were filled with the wounded from this reinforcement. How many of them were brought to Fredericksburg I do not know; but it must have been a good many, when some were sent to my den of horrors.
One evening, after dark, I went to the dispensary, and found a surgeon just in from the front for supplies. While they were being put up, he told us of the horrible carnage at Spottsylvania that day, when the troops had been hurled, again and again, against impregnable fortifications, under a rain of rifle balls, which cut down a solid white oak tree, eighteen inches in diameter.