“To-day I have witnessed more horrible scenes than ever before since I have been in the army. Hundreds of wounded had lain since the battle, among rebels, intermingled with heaps of slain—hungering, thirsting, and with wounds inflaming and festering. Many had died simply from want of care. Their last battle was fought! Almost every shattered limb required amputation, so putrid had the wounds become.
“I was angry (I think without sin) at your volunteer surgeons. Those of the army were too few, and almost exhausted. But squads of volunteers, as is usual, had come on without instruments, and without sense enough to set themselves at work in any way, and without any idea of dressing small wounds. They wanted to see amputation, and so, while hundreds were crying for help, I found five of these gentlemen sitting at their ease, with legs crossed, waiting for their expected reception by the medical director, who was, of course, up to his elbows in work with saw and amputating knife. I invited them to assist me in my labors among the suffering, but they had ‘not come to nurse’—they were ‘surgeons.’
“The disgusting details of the field I need not describe. Over miles of shattered forest and torn earth the dead lie, sometimes in heaps and winrows—I mean literally! friend and foe, black and white, with distorted features, among mangled and dead horses, trampled in mud, and thrown in all conceivable sorts of places. You can distinctly hear, over the whole field, the hum and hissing of decomposition. Of course you can imagine shattered muskets, bayonets, cartridge-boxes, caps, torn clothing, cannon-balls, fragments of shell, broken artillery, etc. I went over it all just before evening, and after a couple of hours turned away in sickening horror from the dreadful sight. I write in the midst of the dead, buried and unburied—in the midst of hospitals full of dying, suffering men, and weary, shattered regiments.”
This is a very mild illustration of some battle-fields, and yet it presents an awful picture.
O God! this land grows rich in loyal blood
Poured out upon it to its utmost length!
The incense of a people’s sacrifice—
The wrested offering of a people’s strength.
It is the costliest land beneath the sun!
’Tis purchaseless! and scarce a rood
But hath its title written clear, and signed
In some slain hero’s consecrated blood.
And not a flower that gems its mellowing soil
But thriveth well beneath the holy dew
Of tears, that ease a nation’s straining heart
When the Lord of Battles smites it through and through.
Now a word about female nurses who go from the North to take care of the soldiers in hospitals. I have said but little upon this point, but could say much, as I have had ample opportunity for observation.
Many of the noble women who have gone from the New England and other loyal States have done, and are still doing, a work which will engrave their names upon the hearts of the soldiers, as the name of Florence Nightingale is engraved upon the hearts of her countrymen.
It is a strange fact that the more highly cultivated and refined the ladies are, they make all the better nurses. They are sure to submit to inconvenience and privations with a much better grace than those of the lower classes.
It is true we have some sentimental young ladies, who go down there and expect to find everything in drawing-room style, with nothing to do but sit and fan handsome young mustached heroes in shoulder-straps, and read poetry, etc.; and on finding the real somewhat different from the ideal, which their ardent imaginations had created, they become homesick at once, and declare that they “cannot endure such work as washing private soldiers’ dirty faces and combing tangled, matted hair; and, what is more, won’t do it.” So after making considerable fuss, and trailing round in very long silk skirts for several days, until everybody becomes disgusted, they are politely invited by the surgeon in charge to migrate to some more congenial atmosphere.
But the patriotic, whole-souled, educated woman twists up her hair in a “cleared-for-action” sort of style, rolls up the sleeves of her plain cotton dress, and goes to work washing dirty faces, hands and feet, as if she knew just what to do and how to do it. And when she gets through with that part of the programme, she is just as willing to enter upon some new duty, whether it is writing letters for the boys or reading for them, administering medicine or helping to dress wounds. And everything is done so cheerfully that one would think it was really a pleasure instead of a disagreeable task.