It is of a Wisconsin soldier, who, taken prisoner, effected his escape from Richmond. Hiding by day, he forced his way at night through morass and forest, snatched such sleep as he dared on the damp and sodden earth, went without food whole days, reached our lines bruised, torn, shivering, starving, and his wounds, which had never been properly cared for, opened afresh. Let him tell the rest, straight from his heart.
"When I had my rubber blanket to wrap about me, I was comfortable, and, snug and warm in the cars, I thought myself happy; and when I heard them talk of the 'Cooper Shop,' I said to myself, 'A cooper's shop! that will be the very place of all the earth, for there I shall have a roof over me, and the shavings will be so warm and dry to lie upon!' but when they carried me in, and I opened my eyes and saw what was the Cooper Shop, and the long tables all loaded for the poor soldiers, and when they took me to the hospital up-stairs, and placed me in a bed, and real ladies and gentlemen, with tears in their eyes, came and waited on me, my manliness left me."
A want of manliness, O honest heart, for which there need be no shame! Precious tribute to our country's great love for her sons! For this is no sectional charity, only one example culled from thousands; for the land must, of a necessity, be overshadowed by the tree that has a root under almost every Northern hearth-stone; and then see how we are all bound together by the heart-strings!
Forty thousand men-at-arms are looking gravely at the height towering above the valley in which they stand. "Impregnable" military science pronounced it; but the men scaling it know nothing of this word "impregnable." They have heard nothing of an order for retreat,—they are filled with a divine wrath of battle, and each man is as mad as his neighbor, and the officers are powerless to hold them back, and catch the infection and are swept on with them, and climbing, jumping, slipping, toiling on hands and knees, swinging from tree and bush, any way, any how, but always onward, never backward, they surge up over the mountain-top, deadly volleys crashing right in among them, and set on the Rebels with a wild hurrah! and the hearts below beat faster, and rough lips curse the blinding smoke and fog that veil all the crest, and on a sudden a shout,—such a one as the children of Israel gave, when the high-piled walls of water bent and swayed and came waving and thundering down on Pharaoh's hopeless hosts,—for there, high up in heaven, streaming out through parting smoke, is the flag, torn, blood-stained, ball-riddled, but the dear old red, white, and blue, waving over the enemy's works; and then the telegraph flashed out the brave news over the exulting country, and the press took up the story, and women said, with kindling faces, "My son, or my brother, or my husband may be dead, but, oh, our boys have done glorious things at Lookout Mountain!"—and History will tell how a grander charge was never made, and calmly note the loss in dead and wounded,—so many thousands,—and pass on.
But we are not History, and our dead,—well, we will give them graves that shall be ever green with laurels, and their swords shall be our most precious legacy to our children, and their memories shall be a part of our household; but our wounded, for whom there is yet hope, who may yet live,—the cry goes up from Wisconsin, and Maine, and Iowa, and New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Where are they, and how cared for? We are all, as I said, bound by the heartstrings in a common interest. The Boston woman with her boy in the Army of the Cumberland, and the Maine mother with one in New Orleans or Texas, and the Kansas father with a son in the Army of the Potomac, all clamor, "Is mine among the wounded, and do care and science for him all that care and science should?"
The Field Relief Corps of the Sanitary Commission are prompt on the battle-field, reaching the groaning sufferers even before their own surgeons. Said one man, lying there badly wounded,—
"And what do they pay yez for this? What do you get?"
"Pay! We ask nothing, only the soldier's 'God bless you.'"
"And is that all? Then sure here's plenty of the coin, fresh minted! God bless you! God bless you! and the good Lord be good to you, and remember yez as you have remembered us, and love yez and your children after you; and sure, if that is all, it's plenty of that sort of pay the poor soldier has for you!"
God bless such men! we echo; but after that, what then? Our beloved are taken to the hospitals, and we know, in a general way, that hospitals are buildings containing long rows of beds, and that science is doing its utmost in their behalf; but when our friends write us from across seas, they tell us, not only how they are, but where,—jotting down little pen-and-ink pictures to show us how stands the writing-table, and how hangs the picture, and where is the fauteuil, that we may see them as they are daily; so we crave something more, we feel shut out, we want to get at their daily living, to know something of hospital-life.