Dear as the bloody grave;
No impious footsteps here shall tread
The herbage of your grave.
Nor shall your glory be forgot
While Fame her record keeps,
Or honor points the hallowed spot
Where valor proudly sleeps.”
There was one I cannot fail to mention. A noble Massachusetts soldier was mortally wounded, yet unconscious of his fate, until informed of it by a Christian surgeon, who advised him, if he had any accounts with eternity to settle, to attend to them at once. “What,” he quickly replied, “am I going to die?” He appeared greatly distressed, for the thought of death had not before entered his mind. Taking from under his pillow photographs of a beautiful-looking woman and sweet little girl—his wife and child—he looked at them a few moments with tear-dimmed eyes, and then exclaimed: “My God! Can I leave them? Shall I never see them again?” Oh, it was hard for him to die and leave them, but he never saw them more, for in a few days he was numbered with the “Boys in White.”
The 10th inst., having received a call from Surgeon Bonine—who was in charge of the third division Ninth Corps hospital, situated at the extreme front—for supplies, I sent an ambulance load of stores, consisting of canned fruits and meats, condensed milk, loaf-sugar, pickles, lemons, wine, brandy, etc., which I drew from the Sanitary and Christian Commissions, and to his care they were entrusted for distribution, as the appeal was for himself as well as those in his charge. Hear his words: “For God’s sake, Julia, send me something I can eat, or I shall die.”
Perhaps there are those who might think I did wrong in trusting to care of a “doctor” sanitary stores. Now while I would not, for a moment, excuse the course pursued by many army surgeons during the war, in appropriating for their own use articles designed only for the sick, yet there were times and places—especially during an active campaign—when a faithful surgeon, working night and day among scenes the most revolting, needed, and was justly entitled to, something more than “hard tack.” When far from the base of supplies, and not even a sutler in the army, money was of little account. Let one such as Dr. Bonine have fainted at his post of duty, and many lives would have been sacrificed in consequence. All honor to surgeons, as well as to other officers who are faithful in the discharge of duty.