Into the Long Dark Night

by Michael Phillips

  But I could not think that way. I could not let my spirit be broken in the same way as his had been. I had told him he could not blame God. Neither could I blame myself.

  I stood, tears still streaming down my cheeks, and looked down at the dead man. Peace was on his face. For that much I could be grateful. I could not understand how he could be glad to leave this earth. But he did not understand the true reason for living, so how could he possibly understand the true meaning of dying? “Oh, God . . . take care of him!” was all I could pray.

  I returned to Sister Janette and helped with other men fallen in battle. I suppose I did help to save others that day. But the face and words of Lt. Tomlinson stayed with me.

  Chapter 21

  Life in the Midst of Death

  The next two hours passed like five minutes! And yet as I try to recall the events, the time stretches out in my mind as if it were five days. I saw more death, more hand-to-hand fighting, and heard what must have been a million shots of gunfire. But in the midst of the smoke and tumultuous din, we were able to help a few men here and there who might not have survived the day otherwise.

  The surge of General Armistead’s Confederate troops didn’t succeed in dislodging the strong Union position along the ridge. After breaking through temporarily, Hancock’s men once again closed ranks, and eventually succeeded in killing or taking prisoner nearly every one of Armistead’s men. It was probably the most dramatic moment, the high-water mark of the Confederate attack. And it came close to winning the day for General Robert E. Lee, who was observing from the opposite ridge behind Pickett’s charge.

  Prior to the outbreak of the war, the regular army of the United States had been rather small. Most of the high-ranking officers knew one another professionally, and many lasting friendships went back to shared experiences at West Point and years of service together in various forts and posts of the army. When the country suddenly broke apart, some of these officers remained with the Union, others took up command positions in the Confederacy. Suddenly friends and former comrades found themselves fighting against one another!

  Even California came in for its share of this heartbreak. Back in 1861, as the Union was splitting up and the officers of the old army were forced to choose sides, a farewell party was held in the officers’ quarters of a little army post outside of Los Angeles. The host was Captain Winfield Hancock, and he was giving the party in honor of his companions and fellow officers who were resigning in order to join the Southern army. One of those present was another captain by the name of Lewis Armistead, one of Hancock’s close friends. When the party was over, Armistead shook Hancock’s hand with tears in his eyes. “You’ll never know,” he said, “what grief this decision has cost me. Goodbye, my friend.”

  He and Hancock would not see each other again. Now they were generals in opposing armies. And Armistead led the spearhead of Pickett’s charge up Cemetery Ridge, straight toward the little clump of trees, and straight toward his old friend Hancock, who was waiting for him at the top with his huge battery of Federal forces.

  The fighting was fierce, and the smoke so thick that sometimes the soldiers could hardly tell their own comrades from the enemy. Riding up into the middle of the fray to make sure the hole in his lines had been plugged, General Hancock was shot from his horse. He was immediately carried back to the rear of the fighting, seriously wounded but still alive. At nearly the same time, on the southern side, General Armistead kept waving his black felt hat, but the tip of his sword had pierced through and now the hat had slipped all the way down to the hilt. Then suddenly a bullet slammed into his body and he, too, fell. Both generals had now fallen, yet still the battle raged on.

  As much horror as I had seen, the most awful moment of the day was yet to come. It had been probably an hour since I had seen Sister Janette. All the sisters and Father McFey and I were scattered so widely over the battlefield, we only seemed to meet occasionally when one or more of us would be running back to fetch something from the wagons, or when one of us needed another’s help. By this time twenty or thirty men had been dragged or carried back to the relative safety of our wagons. At one of these times I ran into Sister Janette.

  “Corrie,” she called out when she saw me, “could you help me? There’s a fellow I can’t budge by myself.”

  I looked up toward her voice and saw her running toward me. She was an absolute mess—blood all over her habit, her face blotched with sweat and dirt. She looked exhausted, but as full of life as ever. I ran immediately to join her.

  “He’s a huge man,” she went on, leading me up the slope in the direction of the fighting. “I’m afraid for him if he stays where he is, but I can’t move him an inch by myself, even though he still has one good leg.”

  In another minute we were at the man’s side and Sister Janette was helping him to a sitting position. Then she stood behind him, grabbing at his broad shoulders and grunting and lifting, trying to help the man get his strong leg underneath him. She was right about his size . . . he must have weighed three hundred pounds! His left leg was badly shattered and bleeding.

  I got under one of his arms, and with his weight on both of us, he pulled himself up by using the butt of his rifle as a cane. Eventually the three of us managed to struggle to our feet. We turned and, with the man hobbling along with the two of us on either side helping to prop him up, we slowly staggered down the hill away from the fighting.

  I never heard the shot. They say you never hear the gun that kills you because the bullet gets to you before the sound of the gunfire. And there was so much fighting and gunfire filling the air that it was impossible to distinguish one shot from any of the other thousand shots going off every second. But the first thing I knew, I was toppling over onto the ground beside the big man. He swore a little, and cried out from the pain as his wounded leg crumpled beneath him.

  At first I thought we’d lost our balance. I scrambled out from amidst our tangled arms and legs to see what could be done to get the motley trio back on our feet. The man grunted and swore and got himself back to a sitting position. I jumped up and took my position again under one of his arms.

  Then suddenly I noticed Sister Janette lying face down on the ground on the other side of him. She wasn’t moving. The back of her shoulder was covered with blood—and not the blood of those she had been helping.

  “Sister Janette!” I screamed, rushing around the big girth of the man to her. “Oh, God . . . no . . . God, please!” I cried, gingerly turning her body over. Her eyes were closed, her face a ghastly pale white.

  I forgot about the wounded man completely, although there was nothing more I could do to move him by myself. Without even thinking what I was doing, I found myself lifting the limp body into my arms, unconscious of the blood of my dear friend spilling all over my own arms and chest. I hardly even felt the weight, even though Sister Janette was a larger woman than I was. With one of my arms under her knees, and the other under her shoulders, and with her head dangling back lifelessly, I staggered and half-ran the rest of the way down the slope and across the field to the wagons.

  I was completely out of breath when I arrived. Immediately the other sisters were at my side, sensing that a crisis was at hand that touched us all more closely than anything we had yet encountered.

  They took her from my arms, and before I could even catch my breath, had laid her gently in the wagon. The two sisters who were nurses were working frantically and talking between themselves.

  “Is she . . . is she—?”

  “No, Corrie,” replied one, “she is not dead. She has lost a lot of blood, but it appears that the bullet passed all the way through her arm. You probably saved her life by getting her to us so quickly. We have already managed to stop the bleeding.”

  I felt no relief at her words, but rather a numbness. Before I knew it, I was wandering away from the scene. I had tried to help others, but I guess I knew Sister Janette had the best care she could get right now, and I didn’t want to be in t
he way.

  I was walking almost aimlessly. I should have gotten someone else to go back and help me with the heavy man with the wounded leg, but I’m ashamed to say I had already forgotten about him. Not even knowing it, I went off in a different direction altogether, and then found myself almost stumbling over a man lying on the ground. He wore a Union uniform.

  “What are you doing out in the middle of all this, Miss?” he said.

  I glanced toward the voice, then stopped and knelt down beside him.

  “Trying to help, whenever I can,” I replied. “What can I do for you?”

  “I ain’t hurt too bad. I think the bullet broke the bone in my arm. I couldn’t hold my gun no more, so I figured I might as well sit myself down before I got myself killed outright. What’s your name?”

  “Corrie Hollister,” I answered, looking his arm over and pulling out some bandages I had shoved into the pocket of my dress when Sister Janette and I had begun lifting the big man. The fellow was right—his arm did look broken. But besides that, his ribs were pretty badly shot up, too. “What’s yours?” I said.

  “Alan Smith.” As friendly as he was, his voice was soft and he was in obvious pain. He wore a beard that was probably a week old, his clothes were scruffy, and he looked to be in his early twenties.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “Texas.”

  “But Texas is a slave state. And your uniform. . . ?”

  “Oh, I’m in the Union army, all right. But I live in Texas. My pa was a friend of Sam Houston’s. When they kicked Sam out of the governorship of the state ’cause he didn’t want slavery and wouldn’t go along with the Confederacy, why he up and left the state and came north. My pa and some of Sam’s other followers came with him, and I came with my pa, ’cause I ain’t no friend of Jefferson Davis neither. So I joined up with the Union army. Maybe I’ll go back when it’s all over, who knows? I reckon I’ll always be a Texan at heart, and I sure don’t consider myself a traitor to Texas. Why, shoot, I’m on the side of the tallest Texan ever, on the same side as Sam Houston. By the way, where you from?”

  “California,” I answered.

  All of a sudden a sharp pain seemed to come over his face. He closed his eyes and lay still. I was scared. I thought maybe he’d died. But then gradually he opened them again and started to breathe more easily. The jovial look he’d had just a moment before was completely gone. He seemed to have something much different than Texas on his mind.

  “How do you feel?” I asked him.

  “It ain’t the pain I mind so much, Miss . . . what did you say your name was?”

  “Corrie,” I said.

  “It ain’t so much the pain, Miss Corrie,” he went on, “although that last one was a real doozer. I thought I might be done for all over again. But the worst of it is realizing how close I come to dying back there without never really being prepared for it. What I’m trying to say is, I never really thought about what’s to become of anyone when they die.”

  “You’re pretty young to be thinking about dying,” I said. “If it hadn’t been for my ma, I’d probably never have thought much about it either.”

  “Your ma?”

  “She died when I was fifteen.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-six,” I said.

  “Well, I’m twenty-three. But I’m a soldier, and it don’t seem too smart for someone like me to go twenty-three years of his life never thinking about what might become of me later, after this life. Especially for a soldier. But the minute I was hit a little while back, suddenly I realized I’d faced what might have been a certain death if the bullet had been a couple inches one way or the other. I still might die of this thing!”

  “I think you’ll be fine, Mr. Smith,” I said. He was certainly in better shape than most of the other wounded men I’d seen.

  “What if you can’t stop the bleeding? What if I get shot again! You know what I’m getting at, Miss? What’s to happen? You understand what I’m trying to say?”

  “I think so,” I answered. “You’re wondering if there really is a heaven to go to after you die, is that it?”

  “I reckon that’s just about the size of the question exactly,” he said. “Or a hell too, for that matter. Heaven ain’t guaranteed for fellows like me that ain’t been all they maybe ought to have been!”

  “I certainly believe there is,” I said.

  “A heaven and hell?”

  “I don’t think too much about hell. But I know there’s a heaven because Jesus said so, and I believe in him more than I believe in anything.”

  “In Jesus? How do you mean that you believe in him?”

  “I mean he lives in my heart—his Spirit, I mean, not his actual bodily self that lived back so long ago in history.”

  “That don’t sound altogether reasonable. I mean, it don’t make no sense that somebody could live inside somebody else like that. That ain’t exactly what I meant about believing in God and heaven and hell.”

  “But that’s what God means by believing. Jesus said that his Spirit—his real deepest self, the part of him that was God’s Son—he said that part of him would live on and would come and dwell in the hearts of anybody that wanted to share life with him. He talked about it in the Bible a lot. That’s why he rose from the dead, so he could share life like that with us—in our hearts. That’s what he said belief was, and that’s why I know I’ll go to heaven when I die—because that’s his home, and he promised to take us there to live with him.”

  “That’s a heap more than I ever heard about in church when I was a kid! How do you know it’s all true?”

  “Because the Bible says so, and Jesus said so. And that’s enough for me to believe it. I reckon that’s what faith is too, just believing because God says something.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “I guess because Jesus is my friend, too. I’ve been sharing things with him in my mind and heart for long enough that I know I can trust him.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, and seemed to be real thoughtful.

  “I reckon it’s like this,” he said at length. “If anything should happen to me, like I was saying, like if I was to die or something, well, I want to make sure that I do go to be with God. I ain’t never thought about all this before. I always just took life as it came. To tell you the truth, Miss, I can’t even say as I know there’s a God at all.”

  “I don’t suppose I can answer every doubt you have,” I said. “I’ve had doubts from time to time myself, but I still know that God’s love for me is as real as anything there is in the world. And his love for you is just as real.”

  Again Alan was quiet for a while.

  “What about all my buddies who died?” he asked. “People like Sergeant Thomas and Corporal Harry—what if they never make it to heaven? One thing I know for sure, and that is that they weren’t Christians! Are they all doomed? I ain’t sure I’d want to go to heaven if none of my buddies are there.”

  “But if God is real, and if he’s the one that made you, and if he does love you like I say, then wouldn’t you rather be with him?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought much about what being with God would be like.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you about your friends, Alan,” I said. “I don’t know what happens to people like them. But I know that God knows. And I also know that he knows what is best, and that he will be completely fair and just and loving in everything he does. We’re not supposed to know everything about him. And where we don’t know, we can trust him to do whatever is best.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Well, I do reckon there’s a lot of sense in what you’re saying,” he said at last. “And the way you put it, a person’d be a fool not to want to know God better, especially if it’s all you say it is.”

  “Oh, it is,” I said, “and even more.”

  “Well then, how do you get to be Jesus’ friend, like you said? How do you get to bel
ieving him like you talked about, you know—with him in your heart and all that? What do you have to do?”

  “Just pray to him,” I said, “and tell him you want to be his friend, and that you want him to live inside you.”

  “That’s all . . . ain’t nothing more to it than that?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Sounds too simple.”

  “It is simple. All it takes is someone who wants to be friends with Jesus, because he’s more anxious to live with us and help us through life than we can even imagine. It’s just that most folks don’t want his company.”

  “Well, maybe it’s high time I quit being that way myself. So you just go ahead and tell me what I gotta do.”

  “Just pray to him and tell him just what you’re telling me. He’ll do the rest. Would you like me to pray for you?”

  “Would you? I’d be much obliged.”

  I closed my eyes and put my arm around Alan’s shoulder. “Lord,” I prayed, “I thank you for leading my steps here to my new friend, Alan Smith. I ask you to come into his heart and be his friend, and to live with him for the rest of his days. Take care of him, Lord Jesus. Heal him of these wounds he got today. Make him strong again, and protect him throughout the rest of this war. And most of all, show him what you are like. Show him how much you love him. And make every little part of his life such that he’ll want to share it all with you. Thank you, Lord, for giving us both your life and your love inside us. Amen.”

  I looked over at Alan. His eyes were still closed, but I could see a tear or two escaping out from under the lids. I knew that he had indeed opened his heart to the presence of Jesus. Oh, Father, I breathed silently, thank you . . . thank you so much for this dear new life!

  When I opened my eyes again, Alan was looking at me, a bright smile on his rough, dirty, unshaven face.

  Chapter 22

  The Morning After