Into the Long Dark Night

by Michael Phillips

  Lee’s strategy was not to defeat Grant. He knew he could never do that. To make up for Grant’s superior numbers, his strategy was to fight a skillful defensive game, making Grant attack him at the worst possible positions, and make the cost of Union losses so high that eventually the northern public would turn against the war effort and sue for peace. If he could just stall Grant’s march until November, until the presidential election, thought Lee, and if he could inflict enough damage on Grant’s army, Lincoln’s prestige would be hurt and he would be defeated in the election. With Lincoln gone, Lee was sure the North would eventually tire of the war and decide to let the South go her own way.

  But if that was Lee’s hope, Grant’s determination to win a decisive victory for his President was just as strong. Some called him ruthless, others called him brutal. But Lincoln had made him the President’s supreme commander because of the general’s willingness to fight. And fight he did!

  Through the summer, into the fall, and toward the end of the year, the great and terrible bloody standoff between Lee and Grant continued. Richmond still remained in Confederate hands, with Jefferson Davis still President of a rebel nation.

  The same week when Grant had plunged into the wilderness after Lee, General Sherman in the South left Chattanooga for Atlanta. This was the second objective in the North’s final two-pronged offensive to end the war. Once Atlanta and Richmond were in Union hands, the end of the war would not be long behind.

  But neither was easy to gain. The fighting on both fronts lasted all summer.

  When I left Washington with the Commission brigade, I envisioned being gone for months and perhaps traveling hundreds of miles. But the battle was so tightly confined that we were able to transport many of the wounded back to the Washington hospitals, and to travel back regularly ourselves for needed supplies. We never went more than a hundred and fifty miles from the Capital.

  Nevertheless, the wounded came faster than we could nurse them—two thousand a day for a month! The atrocities of war are too horrible to describe. I will spend the rest of my days on earth praying to God to erase those images from my memory.

  I saw huge mass graves filled with bodies. I had to walk across battlefield trenches strewn with so many corpses that I could scarcely make my way without stepping on them. I literally stumbled over the bones of the unburied dead from a year earlier while trying to make my way through the dense woods of the wilderness. I witnessed amputations, saw crates piled high with hands and feet and whole legs, waiting to be carted outside the camp and piled atop the mound from the previous day.

  I held men in my arms the moment they died. I prayed for the mercy of death to overtake some who couldn’t die. I listened to the screams for death while holding down panicked and demented men with all my strength, in the fiercest heat of battle. And I even had to take the knife in my own hand to cut away tissue down to the bone, making it ready for the surgeon.

  More than once I remember thinking it was the lucky ones who lay there dead. Ordeals more horrible and appalling awaited the wounded in the hospitals and our makeshift wards than they had encountered in the thick of enemy fire.

  Sometimes there was more peace among the dying than among the living. When the cannon fire and shelling would stop for a while, the doctors and surgeons and medics, if they could be spared, would go out onto the field of recent battle to see what could be done for the freshly wounded. Accompanying them was never pleasant, for despite all I had seen, I feared some new horror that was more awful yet.

  Following the doctors a few paces behind, we came upon the poor men the moment after the doctor had seen there was no hope and had moved on. Usually by this time the pain was past and life was quickly ebbing away. Sometimes fear filled their eyes, and they looked to us beseechingly, imploring us to do what the surgeon could not. Most seemed to show no fear. All had forced themselves to accept the inevitability of death, and to accept that it could come to them any day. Those who could do so usually mouthed only two words, “How long?”

  It was no good lying to them. Everyone knew what was coming.

  “Twenty minutes,” a doctor might say. “Soon . . . not long, son, be brave . . . only another fifteen minutes. . . .”

  And then to those of us who followed came the task of looking into those same eyes and communicating in those final moments something that said to them that life had been good. Mine was often the last human face a young man would ever see, mine the last eyes he would gaze into, mine the last voice his ears would hear.

  Not mother, not sister, not wife, not father . . . but me . . . me—a girl he didn’t know, had never seen before. And yet here I was, kneeling at his side, having to be the wife and mother and sister that he would never see again.

  In those few brief, awful seconds, with but a look into the eyes, how can you speak of love, of hope, of life? How can you tell a boy whose life is draining out of him and soaking into the dirt beneath him about a Father in heaven who loves him?

  Never was my faith so tested as in that furnace of terrible affliction when I followed the army of General Ulysses S. Grant into the wilderness of Virginia. I knew it had to be done. The war had to be won. But I hated it. I hated the death, even as I tried to give life in the midst of it.

  Usually there were no words—only a look from my eyes into theirs. After a while the tears even quit coming, and for that I was sad. My heart wept, but for a time after that awful summer of 1864 my eyes were dry.

  And then I would move on . . . to the next boy who perhaps could be saved and about whom the doctor was already giving me instructions . . . or on to the next pair of waiting eyes, and lips murmuring, “How long. . . ?”

  We “fixed” the corpses by pinning the toes of their stockings together after their boots were taken off. That way, when they hardened from the rigor mortis, their legs were straight and more bodies could be laid out and more easily carried off to burial.

  One boy the doctor had just passed looked up into my eyes as I knelt for a moment beside him. There was no fear in his face. Just a pale, white calm, the peace of knowing that it was nearly over.

  “Fix me,” he said softly to me.

  My heart tried to rise up into my mouth, and I stifled a great cry of anguish.

  Then he crossed his arms over his chest as he knew we did with corpses, and with the last strength of his legs managed to pull his feet together and touch his toes. I pulled off his boots, laid them beside him, then pinned his stockings together. He smiled thinly, then closed his eyes, looking so pleasantly at rest I thought him asleep.

  I leaned over and gently kissed his forehead.

  Not a muscle twitched as my lips met the grime-encrusted skin of his boyish forehead. He was so young!

  I stood up, looking down again at his face. I knew he was dead.

  Chapter 41

  Clara Barton

  In the wilderness of Virginia, behind the trenches and fortifications and siege works of Grant’s army, in our mobile field hospitals where we moved about doing what we could to alleviate the massive suffering, I met Clara Barton.

  I had heard of her, of course. Everyone involved in the medical and nursing aspect of the war knew of the bravery she had already demonstrated. When I suddenly found myself working beside her one day in a hastily erected tent, my first thought was not that I was meeting someone well known but that here was the first person I’d ever met who was like me! When we had the chance later, we talked about what had brought us here, and discovered so many similarities that we became fast friends at once.

  She was in her early forties and, unmarried like me, had gone through almost all the same quandaries and doubts and frustrations over that very thing—being unmarried and working and living alone, when everyone except nuns seemed to think it a completely unnatural thing. We had a good laugh and several long talks about that.

  She kept a journal, too, and that was as nice as finding out that she wasn’t married. My only regret was our meeting like this, in the mid
st of battle, where it was impossible to find enough time to talk. She was so sweet and pleasant, always with a kind word to the men, always smiling, it was no wonder she had come to be known as the angel of the battlefield.

  “How did you get started in all this?” I asked her one day when our hands were sharing a pot of warm water, scrubbing at the clothes that had been taken from the dead to use for bandages and slings.

  “I was a clerk in the Patent Office in Washington when the war began, Corrie. Actually, I am from Massachusetts. My first exposure to the troops came when I met some boys who were down from my home state. I’d visit them and talk to them and try to help ease their homesickness.”

  “I’m sure they were glad to see such a pretty, smiling face,” I said.

  “Pretty? Corrie . . . come now. If you and I are going to be friends, we mustn’t lie to each other!”

  I laughed. It was easy to see from the twinkle in her eye that she was teasing me.

  “Well, you’re as pretty as I am, anyway,” I said.

  “Then I’ll take your words as a compliment!”

  “Now who is stretching the truth?” I said back.

  It was time for both of us to laugh. It felt good to joke and laugh for a change in the midst of all the blood and death. These days there weren’t too many opportunities to see the bright side of anything.

  We were both silent a minute. Then a very thoughtful look came over Clara’s face.

  “Corrie,” she said seriously, “I don’t know what it’s like in California, if it’s anything like Massachusetts or Washington, but—”

  She paused, trying to find the right words.

  “Do you ever feel odd,” she went on, “strange, out of step with the rest of the world, because, you know—because you’re not married? Especially, do you think people look at you and think you a bit peculiar because you want to do other things in your life besides just marrying and having a family?”

  I nodded, relieved to find someone at last who understood my predicament.

  “You asked how I got started,” she said. “As soon as I began meeting those poor, homesick men, I wanted to do something for them. How do you explain that kind of thing to someone whose only thought is to have a little place to call home, where they can stay for their whole life, always cooking over the same stove, always going to sleep in the same bed at night? There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but I wanted to do something more than just go back to my boardinghouse every evening after my work at the Patent Office. . . . Corrie, I don’t even know where I would call home now . . . do you understand me?”

  How well I understood! After this last year, living in boardinghouses and traveling all around the North and visiting new cities and staying with people I’d never met before, and now here, following the fighting and sleeping outside under the stars or wherever there was room in one of the tents . . . I didn’t know where to call home, either.

  “So I started collecting things to take to the men—nothing much . . . soap and candies, tobacco and brandy when I could get it, lemons, supplies for sewing, homemade jellies. Oh, but you should have seen their faces! They were so appreciative.

  “And then came Bull Run, and the wounded poured into the Washington hospitals. Before I knew it I was doing more than just helping with homesickness with little treats. That’s when I began trying to help with nursing and assisting with the wounded in the hospitals, although at first I knew nothing whatever about it or what to do.”

  I thought of my own experience at Gettysburg. “When the blood is pouring out before your very eyes, I don’t suppose it takes long to learn where to put the bandage,” I said.

  “I remained in Washington for a time,” Clara went on. “I wanted to do more. I so hungered to help save lives, whether I knew anything about nursing or not. But I was afraid to follow the troops. I didn’t want to be seen as a camp follower. I’m sure you understand, Corrie. I knew what they’d all think—the surgeons and officers and commanders, and even the regular army nurses like old Dotty Dix—they’d all think I was after nothing more than a husband.”

  I smiled. “I have a very dear uncle who thinks like that too,” I said.

  “I don’t want a husband, Corrie. There’s too much to be done, and a lot of it takes a woman to do it, not a man. Nobody questions Mary Ann Bickerdyke—have you met her?”

  I told her I had.

  “A dear, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she’s older and a widow,” Clara went on, “so nobody thinks it strange of her to be involved. And Dotty Dix—how about that woman?—have you met her?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think she thought too much of me.”

  “She doesn’t want women like us around,” laughed Clara. “That’s exactly what I mean—even she, one of our own kind, thinks all we have on our mind before we’re fifty years old is marriage, and it’s just not right.”

  “You don’t call her Dragon Dix?” I asked.

  “Not that I haven’t wanted to a few times,” replied Clara. “I’ve been around her enough to know why she earned the title. And frankly, it’s not that far wrong! But I owe her the courtesy of treating her more nicely than she treated me.”

  Neither of us said anything for a while. It was time to rinse out the trousers and shirts and change the water. Fortunately this was one occasion when we had fresh water to begin a new batch with. In another ten minutes we were back scrubbing in the pot again, with white, wrinkled fingers and palms.

  “Have you ever thought about becoming a nun?” I asked her.

  “I’m not Catholic.”

  “Neither am I, but I still find myself thinking about it.” I told her briefly about my time at the Convent of John Seventeen.

  Clara was quiet a long time. Finally she spoke. “You know, it’s funny you should ask that,” she said. “I’d nearly forgotten about it, but now that you remind me it comes back to my mind that I did think about it for a time back when I was nineteen or twenty and didn’t know what a young, unmarried girl ought to do with herself. But then I went to Washington and later got involved in the war and found nursing more to my liking than praying and Bible reading.”

  “I don’t know if I could make a lifetime of being around blood,” I said.

  “You seem to be doing fine here.”

  “It’s what’s needed, and there aren’t enough hands. But I don’t think I could ever get used to it. My stomach is always in knots. Are you used to the blood, the death, the screams, the pain?”

  “Used to it—no,” replied Clara. “I hope I never become used to it. It’s unnatural, wrong. War is an evil thing. But the blood doesn’t bother me any more than lots of things. When there’s fighting, young men are wounded and need tending to. I suppose it’s something I feel called to do, why God put me on the earth. It’s when I feel most . . . I don’t know what to say exactly, most—myself . . . most at peace with who I am supposed to be . . . and least concerned with what anyone else—Dotty Dix or the generals who don’t think women ought to be near the fighting, or anyone else who thinks someone like me should be finding a husband and living a quiet life as somebody’s wife—might think. My place, Corrie, is anywhere between the bullet and the battlefield. I’m happy here. It’s what I want to do. It’s what I know I was meant to do.”

  She stopped, and her hands stilled for a moment. She looked across at me, then asked, “When are you most yourself, Corrie? When are you most at peace with what you want to be doing?”

  It was a hard question to answer. I had been trying to figure it out ever since meeting Sister Janette.

  “I suppose when I’m writing,” I said at length. “I love to think about ideas and try to put them on paper.”

  “What kind of ideas?”

  “Anything . . . all kinds. Things about God, mostly—how the truths in the Bible give meaning to life, how God speaks and moves and is involved in what we do. But I like to write about anything—describing how something looks, or telling abou
t people I’ve met. When I get the time, I’m writing right now about what it’s like trying to help the wounded. I may even write something about you!”

  Clara laughed. “And then what will you do with what you have written?”

  “Give it to the newspapers, send it to my editor back in San Francisco to be printed there. To me it’s important that people are told how things are, what it’s like. And when I’m doing that—whether I’m telling about the war or describing something I’ve seen or even telling what I’m thinking and feeling inside—I suppose that’s when I feel, as you called it, most myself.”

  “I write in my journal whenever I have the chance, but I’ve never thought of writing for a newspaper. Women aren’t supposed to do that.”

  “Neither are they supposed to be on the battlefield during a war!” I said.

  “You’re right,” laughed Clara. “And I suppose as long as women like you and I have it in our heads to be doing things that women don’t do, and have it in our hearts that we want to spend our lives doing them because we feel it’s right that we do, I don’t suppose we can ever get away from folks thinking of us as just a bit peculiar!”

  I joined in her laughter. It was nice to have a companion who shared some of the same feelings and could understand. For once, even if briefly, I didn’t mind being different than other young women my age.

  Chapter 42

  Lincoln vs. McClellan

  George McClellan was one of the Union generals with whom President Lincoln had grown extremely frustrated early in the war, long before the star of Ulysses Grant began to rise so brilliantly onto the horizon. He had been the President’s top general early in the war, and had led the first Union assault on Richmond back in 1862. Had Grant been in charge then instead, the war might have ended quickly. But McClellan was cautious, fearful, and indecisive. Rather than an all-out attack, he waited and probed timidly, sending message after message back to Washington for more troops, more supplies, more guns, more horses.