No one questioned or even noticed them as they boarded the train. They found seats opposite a pair of maiden ladies who confided sotto voce that they were refuging to Berry Springs. Though the line was Yankee held, they weren’t sure which sections of the country they would be riding through were in Northern or Southern hands.
“Best to behave like you don’t much care one way or the other,” the one who called herself Miss Banks advised.
“Yes, ma’am,” Babette replied in a cracked adolescent voice that suited her disguise.
She was in her element again—playing a game. The two old spinsters were completely taken in, smiling and nodding at them, giving advice, patting Babette on the knee. Amélie kept mostly silent, staring out of the window. She had warned Babette beforehand that the less they engaged others in conversation the better. But Babette saw no harm in it. She was good at imitating voices and dialects and she liked to imagine what would happen if she swept her hat off and shook out her hair. How those ladies’ eyes would goggle!
They had to get off the train in Charlottesville. A bridge ahead of the O & A line had been blown apart by Confederate guerrillas and no one could say when it would be repaired. By this time Amélie had decided their disguises were unnecessary and since the two old ladies had departed they could resume their normal dress. The train station had a “Convenience Room” for ladies and while one sister stood guard in front of the curtained off alcove, the other quickly slipped on her gown. They had no shawls, no hats, no gloves, musts for any decent woman going about in public. Amélie found a shop and purchased these items, ignoring the clerk, who looked at both of them suspiciously. In another shop she bought a portmanteau.
Back at the depot they learned from the stationmaster that it might be several weeks before the bridge was repaired and the train was running again.
Amélie did not want to wait. The stationmaster suggested they try the old stage depot. “They might be running a coach or two to accommodate stranded passengers.”
The coach had to be the most derelict conveyance Amélie had ever seen. Babette sniffed at it in derision. “Why, it probably carried George Washington to Yorktown,” she said. The wobbly wheels looked as if they would come off at the first turn, the sides were weather stained, and the torn upholstery with its bleeding stuffing suggested rats’ nests. And the horses! “They must have gotten them on the way to the glue factory,” Babette observed as she looked at the skeletal beasts whose backs were covered with saddle sores.
Squeezed into this contraption with a half dozen other passengers, Amélie and Babette made a two day journey that rattled their teeth and jarred their spines. Twice they had to descend and walk across a rickety bridge as the driver feared the span would collapse under the weight of coach and riders. Finally, covered with dust and exhausted from lack of sleep, they reached the railhead at Loudon wanting nothing better than a bath and bed. But there was no time. The train going south was leaving in half an hour and there might not be another for a week.
Amélie hurried Babette to the station five minutes before the train jerked to a start and chugged out of the town. Sinking gratefully into their seats they fell immediately into sound sleep. Their rest, however, was interrupted a few hours later when they were stopped once more by an obstruction. A dynamited tunnel had caved in.
So it went for the next two weeks—ruptured tracks, downed bridges, blocked rights of way. Delays, waiting, and more delays dogged them until Amélie felt they would never reach their destination. While she was pleased the Confederate raiders were giving the United States railroad so much trouble, she chafed at the slowness of their progress. Babette, however, had no such complaints. As long as she was fairly comfortable and could chat and gossip (and flirt) with fellow travelers, she did not care how long it took.
At last, boarding a train to Alabama, they came up through Confederate country, reaching Chickamauga a week after the rebels under General Hood and General Longstreet had ripped a Union army to shreds at Chickamauga River. Though the rebels were victorious their losses had been appalling. New graves filled the town’s cemeteries and crowded family plots where fresh mounds of raw earth rose among lichened tombstones. The hospitals, storehouses, and private homes overflowed with the wounded and dying and half the women of the city seemed to be wearing black. Yet Chickamauga celebrated in joy and thankfulness. It was a triumph badly needed by the South after the humiliating defeat at Vicksburg, and Confederate flags flew proudly from rooftops, from shop windows, schools, and churches. People who had not spoken to one another in years embraced, congratulated one another, boasted and bragged. “We’ve licked them!’’ “Sent them scurrying with their tails between their legs!” Deprivation, hardship, and the loss of loved ones were momentarily forgotten. The stream of refugees from East Tennessee with their stories of Yankee looting and burning had been avenged. The Union army was now bottled up in Chattanooga to the north awaiting General Bragg’s coup de grace. The end was in sight.
Amélie’s exultation was no less than if she herself had been a citizen of Chickamauga. They were all Southerners, all fighting for the cause. She was so proud of General Longstreet’s plucky daring, so proud of the boys in butternut she saw marching by, their uniforms in rags, their faces lined with fatigue, yet managing to step forward with the briskness of seasoned veterans.
For all Chickamauga’s morale boosting atmosphere, however, Amélie felt she had to push on to Nashville and Fort Donelson. Conditions for travel, never easy, had now grown even more complicated. She had thought to go by way of Chattanooga but the Confederate siege of the Union army there had not lifted. Rebels entrenched on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge south of Chattanooga meant to starve the Yankees out. Rumor had it they were succeeding, for the bluecoats were on quarter rations and thousands of horses and mules had died for lack of forage. But as the weeks went on Amélie learned that the Federals had managed to open a line of communication between their embattled troops and Bridgeport where supplies could be brought in. With the deadlock about to come to an end, Amélie decided to try to get to her destination by way of Bridgeport and Chattanooga. But how she could get through Union lines and into a city long since secured by Union forces she did not know.
She was trying to work this out when Babette befriended a young woman, Dora Holly, at a dressmaker’s establishment where she and Amélie had gone to replace their stained and threadbare gowns. About twenty, with black, glossy curls, she had an infectious laugh and an abiding hatred of the Yankees. Her father had been killed at Vicksburg and she took his death as a personal injury.
Upon hearing Amélie’s story she immediately offered a suggestion. “Volunteer as a nurse. The United States Sanitary Commission has a representative in Bridgeport now try in’ to recruit women for their hospitals in Nashville.”
“I’m afraid they might ask too many questions,” Amélie said.
“You can always lie a little. Besides you look respectable enough in that black widow’s gown. Although, come to think of it” she said, tilting her head to one side, inspecting Amélie, “you are a mite too young and pretty. I’ve heard tell the woman who heads up the commission in Washington is one of those stiff, high-collared spinsters who positively hates young, good-lookin’ girls. Feels if she puts them into the hospitals there’ll be all sorts of goings-on with the invalids. So she’s made a rule that her nurses should be over forty and plain.”
Amélie sighed. “I guess neither Babette nor I are old enough to qualify.”
“Well, now, I’m not too sure. They tell me the commission’s havin’ trouble gettin’ enough ladies to volunteer. Seems like they might bend a little. It’s worth a try, don’t you think?”
Babette disagreed. “You know I can’t stand the sight of blood,” she reminded Amélie. “And those smells— chloroform, sweat—ugh!”
“It’s our chance to get to Nashville. Once we’re safely there we can disappear. Right now, however, I’m more concerned about passing the Yankee picke
ts at Bridgeport.”
There again Dora Holly was most helpful: She had a friend who could take them through.
Mrs. Talbot, the Yankee recruiter for the commission, had set up her office in the parlor of a private residence commandeered by the Union army. She was a tired-looking woman with faded gray eyes and a rasping voice.
The sisters had concocted their story beforehand. They would pose as Marylanders, Union sympathizers who had come west to be with their brother, wounded at Chickamauga. However, he had died before they reached him. Now they wanted to offer their services to the Northern cause. They had heard that nurses were desperately needed in Nashville.
It was surprisingly easy. They were given a little lecture on what their duties would be, asked if they were sure they were up to such rigorous work, and told to wait for further instructions.
* * *
On the seventeenth of November they received a message from Mrs. Talbot to report for duty. A battle was shaping up at Lookout Mountain and hospital tents were being set up, creating a need for as many nurses as were available.
Babette flatly refused to go. “I’ll slit my wrists with a razor first.”
“No you won’t,” Amélie said. “Chattanooga is on the way to Nashville. Perhaps we can arrange to be transported with the first train of wounded. There’s no turning back now, Babette.”
Dressed in black riding habits, the skirts shortened to ankle length, and wearing brimmed Leghorn hats, the sisters were sent up the newly opened Union supply line, the “Cracker Route,” which crossed the Tennessee River at Brown’s Ferry.
Getting off the boat, Amélie, struggling with her portmanteau, was helped by a young Yankee officer. Doffing a felt slouch hat, he quickly introduced himself.
“Garret Tyson of the one hundred and fourth Illinois.” Tall, blond, with a deeply tanned face, he smiled down at her with friendly blue eyes. “Are you going to be patching us up, ma’am?”
“We’re going to try.”
His diction and courteous manner marked him as a gentleman but he wore the hated blue uniform and Amélie tried to stiffen her manner against him. But as he walked with them, carrying their luggage and chatting in an easy, eager manner, Amélie found herself thawing.
He had never been further south than Peoria, Illinois, he said, and thought the countryside in Tennessee with its hills, woods, and creeks beautiful. “Of course,” he told Amélie, “Peoria has a charm all its own.”
Babette flirted with him but soon lost interest when a short, dark sergeant walking beside them engaged her in conversation.
As the sisters and Tyson came to a parting of the ways he said, “Perhaps I can see you later, Mrs. Warner?”
“I don’t know whether it’s allowed,” Amélie replied.
“I can’t see why not,” he said with a disarming grin. “I’m harmless enough.”
The field hospital had been set up in tents on the plain below Lookout Mountain, well back from the breastworks and trenches. On the mountain itself the Confederates, with their batteries and rifles poised, had dug in where they could look down and watch every move the Federals made. Amélie did not see how the Yankees could possibly dislodge them. For the rebel boys in gray it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Moreover a few miles to the north Confederates also held Missionary Ridge, a five-hundred-foot palisade steeper and more impregnable than Lookout. It would be a Southern victory, she felt sure. There was no way an army could scale such heights and overwhelm an enemy who had earned a well-deserved reputation for accurate marksmanship and unfailing courage.
Yes, it would be another Chickamauga, she thought with grim satisfaction. It irked her to see how munificently the Union had provided for its military. The smart uniforms, the stout boots, the oiled Enfields, and crates of ammunition. As she made up cots to receive the wounded, going from one narrow bed to another, she noted the new blankets and fresh pillows, a marked contrast to the worn covers and dirty sacking they had to make do with at the Confederate prison hospitals. And the medicines, the stores of quinine, ointments, and salts! A prodigious bounty! How happy the harried surgeons at Fort McHenry would have been with these gleaming instruments, the dressings and poultices, when they had so little to work with, not even enough chloroform to ease a wounded man’s agonizing pain.
The November night fell with a chill wind from the north. She was standing outside the tent when Lieutenant Tyson appeared.
“I was told I’d find you here,” he said with a shy smile. “Would you like to walk? I’ve already inquired and no one objects. They say there’s to be an eclipse of the moon.’’
Amélie looked over at Babette who was laughing and joking with the dark sergeant. No, Babette said when asked, she’d rather not join them.
They strolled between a line of tents, Lieutenant Tyson making small talk. He said he had always wanted to be an engineer, building roads through forests and over mountains or helping to construct the railroad being planned to link the East with the West. He spoke of his home in Peoria, his family, of Betty, the girl he hoped to marry. Asking Amélie a discreet question or two about her own kin, he did not seem the least disconcerted at her sketchy replies. It was as if he had desperately wanted someone to talk to, a woman preferably, for he only spoke of himself, of homely things, not once mentioning the war.
They came to a hilly prominence where a knot of soldiers stood watching the sky. The moon hung there in midnight blackness, a large, luminous disc, bathing the tents, plain and entrenched mountain in milky radiance. As they gazed a dark shadow began to creep slowly across the face of the moon until it had completely blotted out the light like a lamp gradually shuttered. An awed hush had fallen over the two armies and nothing could be heard except the occasional clink of steel and the snuffing of horses. Campfires glimmered in the valley and up the mountain like fireflies winking under the silent, eclipsed sky.
“Bad luck,’’ one of the nearby Yankee soldiers whispered hoarsely, and a shiver ran down Amélie’s spine.
“Yes,” another agreed.
There was another silence in the eerie dark. Then the first speaker, who must have been thinking it over, said, “For the rebs, I guess. They’re closer to the moon up there than we are.’’
“So they are, poor bastards!”
Gradually the shadow moved away and the moon was revealed again.
“Quite a sight,” Lieutenant Tyson remarked as he and Amélie moved along.
Low, tense voices reached them from the men crouched over campfires, the voices of men who had been watching and waiting for two months to go into battle and whose nerves were stretched taut.
But Tyson when he spoke again did not say anything about the fighting to come, did not display the least apprehension that he, like the others, was on the verge of a bloody conflict. He talked of comets and shooting stars. His father had been an amateur astronomer and Tyson was full of interesting information.
But at last he said, “I wish it was all over and we could go home. You know, I’m not really angry at those rebs up there. Funny, isn’t it?”
The next morning Amélie was awakened by the sound of gunfire. She dressed quickly and stepped outside, where a group of doctors and nurses stood talking. The staccato stutter of artillery increased, the crack-crack sounding much like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Presently dirty plumes of smoke began to drift skyward. A surgeon stopped a cavalryman, asking “What's happening?”
“General Thomas is driving the rebs off the plain at Orchard Knob.” He pointed to a small hill in the distance.
The musket fire continued for perhaps an hour. Babette thought it all very exciting and kept straining on tiptoe to look. But except for a pall of smoke and the occasional glint of a rifle barrel there wasn’t much to see.
Word came that Orchard Knob had fallen to the Union with very few casualties. But it was a victory, one of the surgeons explained, that had very little effect on the main objective, the taking of Lookout Mountain. Soon the first of the wound
ed arrived and Amélie set to work, cutting away bloody trouser legs, washing and binding wounds.
But Babette, after one glance at broken limbs and gashed heads, slipped unobtrusively from the tent. While gunfire didn’t frighten her, the mangled bodies brought in on litters turned her stomach with fear and revulsion.
She stole quietly through a row of tents and down a small incline to a tiny brook that lapped over smooth, gray-blue stones. The sounds of battle were still loud, yet the setting—scrub oak, willow, and locust along the edge of the stream, a sparrow hawk sitting high on a bare tree limb—gave the noise a rural quality, as if the rumbling in the distance was faraway thunder.
Babette ambled along the edge of the stream until she came to a small, grassy space where a few pink bouncing bets still bloomed. It was here that she and her swarthy Yankee sergeant had come during the eclipse, making love in the darkness, rolling over and over in their passion, crushing spicy-smelling sorrel under their bodies. It had been awkward at first for he had a hard time getting under her skirts. At last she had unhooked and discarded them and he, ready and near bursting, had clawed at her pantalettes, tearing a hole in the crotch, pulled her down on his knees, and slid his organ into her. She remembered she had fallen backward, giggling, with him on top still attached to her. Wrapping her legs about his heaving hips she and the sergeant had tumbled together in their eagerness.
George, he called himself. He had filled a need, a hunger that could only be satisfied by a man’s lusty pleasuring. But for his unsavory breath, smelling of onions and stale tobacco, she had enjoyed their brief encounter. She wasn’t like Amélie who could live like a nun. Amélie and her principles! Where had they gotten her? She ought to be looking for a husband instead of gallivanting across half the country in search of a corpse. It wasn’t as if men weren’t attracted to her. If Thaddeus hadn’t monopolized her she could have had any number of beaux, Damon Fowler had cast an eye on her, too.
Honor's Fury Page 18
