In the fall of 1862 I found myself in Cape Girardeau, where hospitals were being improvised for the immediate use of the sick and dying then being brought in from the swamps by the returning regiments and up the rivers in closely crowded hospital boats. These hospitals were mere sheds filled with cots as thick as they could stand, with scarcely room for one person to pass between them. Pneumonia, typhoid, and camp fevers, and that fearful scourge of the southern swamps and rivers, chronic diarrhea, occupied every bed. A
surgeon once said to me, “There is nothing else there: here I see pneumonia, and there fever, and on that cot another disease, and I see nothing else! You had better stay away; the air is full of contagion, and contagion and sympathy do not go well together.”
One day a woman passed through these uncomfortable, illy-ventilated, hot, unclean, infected, wretched rooms, and she saw something else there. A hand reached out and clutched her dress. One caught her shawl and kissed it, another her hand, and pressed it to his fevered cheek; another in wild delirium, cried, “I want to go home! I want to go home! Lady! Lady! Take me in your chariot, take me away!” This was a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy of the South, who had left family and friends forever; obeying his country’s call, he enlisted under the stars and stripes because he could not be a traitor. He was therefore disowned, and was now dying among strangers with his mother and sisters not twenty miles away; and they knew that he was dying and would not come to him. Father, forgive them, they knew not what they did.
As this woman passed, these “diseases,” as the surgeon called them, whispered and smiled at each other, and even reached out and took hold of each others’ hands, saying, “She will take us home, I know her; she will not leave us here to die,” not dreaming that hovering just above them was a white robed one, who in a short time would take them to their heavenly home.
This woman failed to see on these cots aught but the human [beings] they were to her, the sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers of anxious weeping ones at home; and as such she cared for and thought of them. Arm in arm with health, she visited day by day every sufferer’s cot, doing, it is true, very little, but always taking with her from the outside world fresh air, fresh flowers, and all the hope and comfort she could find in her heart to give them. Now and then one would
totter forth into the open air, his good constitution having overcome disease, and the longings for life so strong within him that he grasped at straws, determined to live. If perchance he could get a furlough, in a few weeks a strong man would return and greet you with, “How do you do, I am on my way to my regiment!” Who this stranger might be, you could never imagine until reminded by him of the skeleton form and trembling steps you had so recently watched going to the landing, homeward bound. But if, as was too frequently the case, he was sent to convalescent camps, in a few weeks he was returned to hospital, and again to camp, and thus continued to vibrate between camp and hospital until hope and life were gone. This was the fate of thousands.
On a steamer from Cape Girardeau to Helena at table one day when the passengers were dining, among whom were several military officers, I heard a young major of the regular army very coolly remark that it was much cheaper for the government to keep her sick soldiers in hospitals on the river than to furlough them. A lady present quietly replied, “That is true, Major, if all were faithful to the government, but unfortunately a majority of the surgeons in the army have conscientious scruples, and verily believe it to be their duty to keep these sick men alive as long as possible. To be sure, their uneaten rations increased the hospital fund and so enabled your surgeons generously to provide all needed delicacies for the sick, but the pay was drawn by the soldiers from the government all the same. Don’t you think, Sir, it would be a trifle more economical,” continued the lady, “to send these poor fellows north for a few weeks, to regain their strength, that they might return at once to active service?” The laughter of his brother officers prevented my hearing his reply.
This young officer was the medical director at Helena, where I found over two thousand graves of Northeners. Two-thirds of these men might have been saved, could they
have been sent north. The surgeon in charge of the general hospital, when asked why he did not furlough some of the men from his over-crowded hospitals, replied that he had at one time and another made out certificates of disability for furlough for nearly every man in his hospital and for hundreds who rested on the nearby hill, but when sent for the signature and approval of the medical director, they had invariably been returned, disapproved; that he had also permitted the men themselves to go with their papers, only to have them severely reproved and ordered back to hospital, and, said he, with tears in his eyes, “many of them never returned, for, broken-hearted, they have lain down by the roadside and died.”
I once heard a person who had been instrumental in giving a dying boy back to his mother, that she might nurse him back to life, relate how it was done. The mother had succeeded in getting her son as far as St. Louis where his papers were to be sent. They came in the usual way to the medical director, were all wrong, of course—not made out according to army regulations and must therefore be returned to his regiment, which was somewhere with Sherman and could not be reached. The mother received the papers with that fearful word “disapproved” written upon them. There was nothing to do but to place her sick son in a St. Louis hospital, and leave him there to die; she must return to her family. She told her story with streaming eyes and a broken heart. The woman impulsively said, “Give me the papers,” and off she went to the medical director’s office. He was a man full six feet high, over fifty years of age, a head like Oliver Cromwell’s, a face stern as fate, and of the regular army. She entered his presence, seated herself, and waited to be spoken to.