No words can do justice to the uncomplaining nature of the Southern soldier. Whether it arose from resignation or merely passive submission, yet when shown in the aggregate in a hospital, it was sublime. Day after day, whether lying wasted by disease or burning up with fever, torn with wounds or sinking from debility, a groan was seldom heard. The wounded wards would be noisily gay with singing, laughing, fighting battles o’er and o’er again, and playfully chaffing each other by decrying the troops from different States, each man applauding his own. When listening to them one would suppose that the whole Southern army with the exception of a few companies from the speaker’s section of country, were cowards. The up-country soldiers, born in the same States as those they derided, went even further and decried “them fellows from the seaboard, who let us do all the fighting.” The Georgians would romance of how the South Carolinians laid down at such a battle, refusing to charge, and how they had to “charge right over them.” The Mississippians of the backwardness of the Tennessee troops, who “would never go into action unless led by their commanding general.” The Virginians told bitter stories of the rowdyism of the Maryland volunteers, who were “always spreeing it in the city, and dancing attendance on the women,” and the North Carolinians caught it on all sides, though their record is undoubtedly a most gallant one.
Tar-Heel Tastes.
Taken in the mass, the last were certainly most forlorn specimens, and their drawl was insufferable. Besides, they never under any circumstances would give me the satisfaction of hearing that they relished or even ate any food that was issued from my kitchen. “Say, can I have some sweet soup?” whined a voice from one bed, and “Look here, can I have some sour soup?” came from another. The sweet soup upon explanation proved to be stirred custard; the sour a mystery until the receipt was given. “You jist put a crock of buttermilk on the fire, and let it come to a bile; then mix up the yaller of an egg with some corn flour to make a paste; then punch off pieces of the dough, and bile them with the soup; with lots of pepper and salt.” The buttermilk when so tested by heat resolved itself into a sea of whey with a hard ball of curds in the center. I carried the saucepan to his bedside to show the results of his culinary directions; but he merely shook his head and remarked carelessly that “his mammy’s soup did not look like that.”
Babies even give up Milk.
Many would not eat unless furnished with food to which they had been accustomed at home, and as unreasoning as brutes resisted nutriment and thus became weaker day after day; and whatever was new to the eye or palate was received suspiciously. Liquids in the form of soups, tea or coffee they turned from with disgust, so that the ordinary diet of invalids was inefficient in their case. Buttermilk seemed especially created by nature for wounded patients; they craved it with a drunkard’s thirst, and great, strong men have turned away from all else and implored a drink of sweet milk. We had a very short supply of this towards the end of the war, and I remember a stalwart Kentuckian, one of Morgan’s men, insisting upon the rare luxury of one cupfull. He had been for many months on a raid far out of Confederate limits, and returning slightly wounded, had no idea of the scarcity of forage that made our cows so dry. His pleading became really affecting, till at last rallying, I told him: “Why man! the very babies of the Confederacy have given up drinking milk, and here are you, six feet two, crying for it.”
Our Little Romance.
Little poetical effusions were often thrust under my cabin door, and also notes of all kinds from my patients. Among them one day was a well-written and worded request from a young man who had been indisposed with that most hateful of all annoyances to soldiers—the itch; that shirt of Nessus, which when once attached to the person clings there pertinaciously. It begged me when at leisure to give him an interview, telling me his ward, name, and bed. He proved to be educated, and a gentleman from the upper part of Alabama, which had been colonized by the best class of South Carolinians; and he wished to enlist any influence I might possess in his favor, to endeavor to get him a furlough. His story was interesting. Engaged to a young girl, the preparations made, the ring even bought (he wore it next his heart), and the marriage day fixed, they heard the first rumors of war, and patriotism urging him to enlist, the parents of his sweetheart naturally refused to allow him to consummate the engagement until peace was restored. The desire to see her again became almost unbearable, and feeling sincere sympathy with him, and the hardship of the case, I tried but in vain to have him furloughed. The campaign of 1864 had opened and every man was needed in the field.
Loved and Lost.
The finale of my story is a sad one, as are almost all stories in time of war. He was killed while repelling with his brigade the attack on Petersburg, and the little history confided to me resolved itself into a romance one night, that found shape and form:
“ICH HABE GELEBT UND GELIEBT.”