“You have no idea of the intense excitement,” wrote my sister. “I am so nervous I know not what to write! No one goes to bed here at night. For several nights past no one could have slept for the confusion and noise. The city has been in a perfect uproar for a week. We have heard firing in two directions all the morning, on the Brook Turnpike and at Drewry’s Bluff. The wounded are being brought into the city in great numbers. General Walker is wounded! Poor General Stafford’s death cast a gloom over the city. I went with Mr. Davis to his funeral, and carried flowers!... General Benning is wounded, and Colonel Lamar, our dear L. Q. C.’s brother, also.... At the wedding” [of Miss Lyons] “you never saw such disorder in God’s house before in your life. Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Mallory and Mrs. Most-everybody-else, stood up in the pews, and you could not hear one word of the service for the noise. Mr. Davis was there—Mrs. Chestnut sat with me. She is going home very soon, so the Colonel told me. He said it was impossible for her to remain in Richmond with nothing to eat!”
To my sister’s panorama of horrors, our brother, who was stationed in Richmond, added a masculine picture.
“The enemy press us sorely with powerful forces of cavalry and infantry,” he wrote. “The former cut off our communications everywhere, hoping to reduce Lee to starvation, and the presence of the latter keeps from him reinforcements that otherwise would be promptly sent. We have lost severely around the city. General Stuart was shot by a Yankee soldier who fired upon him at ten paces as he galloped past him. He died last night, about twenty-eight hours after he received the wound. Brigadier General Gordon, also of the cavalry, had his arm shattered yesterday above the elbow, and ’tis said will probably have to suffer amputation. Mr. Randolph, the ‘Sir Anthony Absolute’ of your play, was wounded yesterday in the shoulder and thigh, and will lose the limb to-day. All the clerks of the office are in the intrenchments and no work goes on!”
Upon learning of my determination to push on to Georgia, our sister put away her anxiety and grew facetious at my expense. “I am inclined to think you are a great coward,” she wrote. “Why did you run from Petersburg?... I am almost ashamed of you! You never catch me running from Yankees! Georgia is certainly a safe place.... When we have killed all the Yankees and the city is perfectly quiet, I invite you to come on and see us.... I am weary from walking (not running) to see the wounded!”
A month or so later and my sweet sister, speeding to overtake me, joined me at Macon, in time to accompany me to the home of our friend, Mrs. Winter, in Columbus. Here, to compensate for the tribulations of the past months, we were promised the most care-free of summers. Refugees were flocking to that land of safety and plenty just then, and whether in Macon or Columbus, our time was spent in welcoming late-comers, in visiting and exchanging news or comment of the times, or making little excursions to nearby towns. Once we formed a party and visited the “White Farm” of Augusta Evans, then unmarried. It was a unique place and celebrated for the unsullied whiteness of every bird and beast on the place.
Upon our arrival at our friend’s home in Columbus, we found a very active field awaiting us. It was now mid-summer of ’4, somewhat after the bloody battle of Atlanta. In anticipation of our coming, Mrs. Winter had prepared her largest and coolest rooms for us. All was ready and we about due to arrive, when an unforeseen incident frustrated our hostess’s plans in regard of our intended pleasuring, and put us all to more serious work. It was in the late afternoon when our friend, driving in her calash along the boundaries of the town, came upon a pitiful sight. Near a group of tents a sick man, a soldier, lay writhing upon the ground in a delirium, while near by and watching him stood his alarmed and helpless coloured servant. Mrs. Winter, aroused to pity by the sight, immediately gave orders that the sufferer be carried to her home, where he was placed in the room that had been prepared for me.
When my sister and I arrived, a few hours afterward, our sympathies, too, were at once enlisted for the unfortunate man. He proved to be Captain Octave Vallette, a Creole, who, previous to his enlistment, with his brother, had been a ship-builder at Algiers, Louisiana.
A physician was already in attendance when my sister and I arrived, and an examination of the invalid’s wounds was making.
A week had elapsed since the first hasty dressing of the wound, and the blackened flesh now suggested the approach of the dreaded gangrene.
The cleansing of the dreadful wound was a terrible ordeal. For days the patient raved, and to us, just from the camps and hospitals of Virginia, his frenzied words conveyed most vivid pictures of the experiences our men were meeting in the deadly fray.