The river looked like a giant black blob in the night, and it swirled around them like a huge cold fist as they moved their horses into the current. Travis rode beside Kitty, holding the reins of her horse, guiding him through the waters. She did not speak. To bring her countrymen’s guns down on them now could kill her as easily as the Yankees she despised—particularly Captain Coltrane.
Bucher had ridden ahead to the spot where the soldiers said they would station someone to lead them to where they hoped to find Grant regrouping. There was the sound of an owl, which even Kitty recognized was faked, and then an answering sound as they stepped onto the muddy banks of the Tennessee River on the western side.
Silently, they moved into the thick woods, and they hadn’t gone far when a man up front, leading them, could be heard telling someone that General Buell’s troops had been found marching this way by a scout. When the sun rose, the Rebels would have a surprise waiting for them.
She could hear the screams of agony from the wounded men, and Kitty tensed. Suddenly she realized she was right in the middle of Grant’s forces, and hundreds and hundreds of soldiers lay dying in agony. In the flickering light of campfires, she could see the field surgeons at work, bones shimmering in the light as they were sawed from gouging wounds.
Her eyes darting about, horror-stricken at the gory sight, Kitty nearly fell from her horse when Coltrane gave her a gentle tug to pull her down. His arms about her, he righted her on her feet, then led her toward a tent.
“God, lady, help me, please…” someone cried. “Oh, God, let me die… I ain’t got no legs… I’m dyin’…please, somebody kill me…”
“Do you think it will matter to you what uniform they wear?” Travis asked her sharply, steering her beside him. “When they scream like that, does it matter?”
“I…I guess not,” she shook her head quickly. “They’re human beings, and one of them could be my poppa…” Her voice cracked, and he squeezed her arm gently, as though he understood. But how could he, she thought? He wasn’t capable of understanding another human being!
They stepped inside the tent, and the dark-baked, bearded man with the piercing eyes stopped pacing to stare at them quizzically.
“General Grant, sir,” Coltrane saluted smartly. “I got here as fast as I could…”
“But not before I’ve lost thousands of men today,” the General snapped, then waved a hand in front of his face and said, shaking his head, “I’m sorry. I don’t blame you, Captain. Your dozen or so men could have done precious little to stop what has happened here today.” He walked over to a table where a bottle of whiskey sat, poured the amber liquid into two cups and handed one to Travis, and began sipping from the other himself.
“They didn’t kill any Federals in bed, but they took us by surprise. We were able to rally quickly, and we’ve re covered somewhat since darkness fell, and with General Buell almost here, we’ll be ready to counterattack first thing in the morning…” His eyes rested on Kitty, as though seeing her for the first time. He raised an eyebrow and looked to Travis for an explanation.
“We found the men you sent us after,” Travis explained quietly, respect in his voice. “Their leader, a man named Luke Tate, got away. We found this young woman in their company. She’s a Southerner…”
General Grant’s look was such that Kitty cried indignantly, “How dare you look at me like that? I didn’t go with them by choice! As I tried to tell this…this Captain of yours, I was kidnapped by Luke Tate and held prisoner. I asked him to let me return to my home in North Carolina, but he refused and dragged me into all of this!”
She stepped closer, and Travis moved forward, as though afraid she might attack the General. “You’re obviously someone important, whoever you are,” she said. “Will you let me go, or is it the way of Yankees to kidnap innocent women?”
“It would seem,” said General Grant, scratching his beard, “that it is the way of your Southern gentlemen, if your story is true. But why did you bring her here?” He looked at Travis once again.
“One of the men we killed had just had his arm amputated, and expertly so. This young lady did the amputation.”
“You?” The officer’s eyes widened. “Extraordinary! You will be of much use to us. Later, when the battle is over, you will have to dine with me and tell me how you came to be so well trained.”
He nodded to Travis. “Take her to the field hospital, and then report back here. I’m setting up heavy artillery near the river to stop the Confederates advance.”
Anxious to return to the leader he admired and respected and get on with the business of whipping the Confederates, Travis jerked Kitty roughly from the tent. It was not hard to find the way to the nearest hospital tent—all they had to do was follow the line of dead and dying along the path.
Kitty saw horrors she never knew existed—men with most of their faces shot away, some of them with gaping stomach wounds—intestines mingling with the blood and dirt on the ground beside them as they waited to die. One young soldier curled infantlike on a bloody blanket, his severed left leg held in his arms lovingly as he sobbed and slowly bled to death.
Inside a lantern-lit tent, Kitty swayed at the sight of the blood-slick table—the growing pile of arms and legs to one side. The surgeon, spattered with blood, looked up with annoyance. “Damnit, I don’t like women around me. What the hell is she doing here?”
“She can do the job as well as you, Doc,” Travis snapped. “Now give her a table and a knife and put her to work.”
“I…I don’t think I can…” Kitty felt bile rising in her throat. A single operation on a single patient was one thing—wholesale severing of human limbs was something she had never experienced. “I don’t think I can do it. Get me out of here, please…”
The surgeon waved a bloody saw at them. “See what I mean? I can’t have her around screaming and fainting. Now get her out of here.”
“Listen to me,” Travis gave her a shake so hard her head bobbed to and fro on her shoulders. “If it was your daddy lying out there dying, you’d want someone to help him, wouldn’t you? Think about that—all these men, whether they’re Federals or not—are loved by someone just like your daddy is loved by you—and the ones that love them would want you to help them. Now are you going to help them?”
She raised her head to look into those steely eyes. His nostrils flared angrily. She could not speak—could not move. The sound of another limb dropping to the bloody earth with a sickening thud made her shudder.
“I should have known,” he sneered, his hands dropping away from her shoulders. “I should’ve known that for all your pretended toughness and guts, when it comes down to it, you’re nothing but a simpering, helpless female like the rest of your kind. Get out of here. You make me sick…”
He gave her a shove toward the tent exit, but she whirled around to knock his hand away. “Don’t you dare touch me.” Her voice came out an ominous whisper. “And don’t you talk to me that way! I’m every bit as good as a man when it comes down to a challenge.”
“Then prove it!”
Their eyes met and held. The challenge had been made. Kitty, pushed by him, made her way to the surgeon. He heard her saying curtly, “I’m going to work with you. Now what do you want me to do?”
He stepped out of the tent, smiling to himself, as Kitty signaled to one of the soldiers to set up another table, bring in another patient.
Soon her arms were stained crimson to the elbow, her dress soaked with blood and perspiration as she worked over the wounded. As soon as one soldier was brought in and everything possible done to try and save him, he would be carried swiftly out and another brought in. There was one with his throat lacerated by a bullet that had crushed down the tissue that separated windpipe from esophagus, and Kitty worked swiftly to suture, praying the soldier would have the strength to somehow throw off the fever that was sure to come with such an injury.
There was another boy, perhaps only fifteen or sixteen, she guessed pain
fully, with a spurting artery—the hastily applied tourniquet on the battlefield had slipped during the trip to the hospital. He bled to death before Kitty could start to try and save his life.
God, she prayed silently, was this nightmare never going to end—this procession of mutilated, disfigured bodies, that came in one end of the tent and went out the other? A parade of the dying, she thought dizzily. God, let it end. Let it end before I go mad and run from this tent shrieking with insanity. I don’t think I can go on, she cried silently, hands trembling as another wounded soldier was brought in.
On and on it went. Someone handed Kitty a cup of coffee once that she gulped down so quickly it burned her throat. Then there was a gulp of popskull—contraband liquor—and it seemed to peel the skin from her throat, but at least she was able to keep on her feet.
Outside, the artillery General Grant had set up along the river began to retch and rumble and explode their fury as dawn streaked the sky. Here and there she heard snatches of conversation among the soldiers who carried the wounded in and out of the tent. General Grant had his reinforcements. Buell had arrived. The Confederates were outnumbered. The Federals would win, they said. The Federals were using grapeshot—shells filled with balls the size of oranges, effective to seven hundred yards. And they were using Canister, a shell filled with lead balls about the size of plums, deadly for close action up to three hundred yards. And they had Napoleons—and they named another cannon—a Napoleon smoothbore howitzer, and it was powerful, they said. Rebels were dying by the hundreds!
Jubilant! They were jubilant because the Confederates were dying. Couldn’t they see the dead all around them? Couldn’t they see the suffering, the agony, on both sides? Was the death of the enemy so satisfying that it overshadowed the death of your own brother in uniform? None of it made any sense.
Before her, on the table, a soldier of eighteen or nineteen years of age lay writhing in the agony of having his lower jaw shot away. She began to wipe away the blood to see if anything could be done besides attempt to ease the boy’s suffering while he awaited death. Outside the tent, someone screamed that the Confederates were retreating. Cheers and cries of joy went up from the hundreds and hundreds of wounded soldiers lying in the woods—those that were able to shout.
She felt like a traitor. Her countrymen were retreating, whipped, beaten, while she stood here fighting to save the enemy. What if Nathan were out there in the midst of the battle? What if he were already dead—or wounded. This soldier lying here struggling to even moan in agony might have been the one to kill the man she loved. And she was supposed to save him? Dear God, she could not, she could not lift one more finger to save the life of one more Yankee!
Chloroform. She would take the chloroform and pretend to put the soldier to sleep so she could work on his wound, only she would administer a fatal dose. Doc had taught her how to use chloroform, and she had also read the books in his small library. She would merely put the soldier out of his misery, and then, in the confusion, she would slip away—pretend to be sitting down for a rest—only she would move farther and farther away, all the way to the river, and perhaps she could follow the Confederate retreat and escape. Surely, no one would shoot a blood-stained woman!
Suddenly she was aware that someone was standing right behind her. Turning, she saw the haggard, drawn face of the doctor who had first been so opposed to having her work along with him. His eyes were misty, and his lips were quivering.
“It’s…it’s more than I can bear,” he choked out the words. “All this killing…”
Kitty’s frustration unleashed itself upon the first person who had spoken directly to her all night long and on into the day, except to discuss the business at hand. “It’s what you Yankees want, isn’t it?” she cried. “All the killing and blood and maiming and suffering? That’s what you wanted all along when you tried to tell the South how to run her affairs. And now that war is here, and your own men are dying, you don’t like it so well, do you? Well, I’m not helping another Yankee this day…”
His eyes stared down at the soldier on the table, who was barely moaning now. Without shifting his gaze, he said, “I’m not a Yankee, miss. I’m a Southerner, like you, captured at Bull Run and forced to work as a doctor for the Federals…”
She swayed, dizzy with disbelief and sudden fatigue that threatened to take her off her feet. “Then how do you do it? How do you stand here for hours and hours with only whiskey and coffee to keep you going—only to try to put Yankees back together again so they can go out and kill more of our countrymen?”
The boy on the table gave one final moan, gasped, and a rasping gargle of blood oozed from the gaping wound onto his chest as his eyes rolled upward. He was dead.
The doctor reached over and touched the boy’s forehead gently. “I told myself the day might come when someone I loved would come by my table…that I could help save him…but I couldn’t do anything…”
Kitty stared at the tears rolling down his cheeks as he smoothed back the blood-matted hair of the dead Yankee soldier. “He was my son…” He choked out the words. “He wasn’t a Yankee—he was my son!”
It was too much. Turning, she ran from the tent. In the confusion and shouting and the smoke from the guns, no one paid any attention to her. She fell, scrambled to her feet again, plunging into the woods deeper. Where was the river? She had no knowledge of where she was. Which way had the Yankees gone? Which way had the Confederates gone? She stumbled over a body, screamed at the sight of only half a body—the lower parts blown away. Whirling, she stumbled, fell across a wounded soldier who clawed out at her with a bloody hand, begging for help.
“No…no…” she cried, moving away, scrambling, clawing, running. It was too much—all of it—too much…
She made her way through the brambles, felt her dress being torn to shreds, but still she kept moving. The uniforms on the bodies she passed looked different somehow, and through the hysterical fog that enveloped her consciousness, the realization came that these were Rebel soldiers. She was getting closer to the line of retreat. Escape was nearer now. If only she could keep running, she was bound to stumble upon some live Confederates who would help her. But dear God, she thought wildly, as the bodies seemed to be stacked on top of each other, were there any left alive? It was difficult to even take one step without her foot coming down on top of a dead soldier—and soon the ground was so strewn with bodies that she was walking on a carpet of death!
Soon it would be dark. She would be at the mercy of both sides, shooting carelessly at anything that moved in the dark. And with the daylight, with the Yankees obviously victorious, they would be out in number to round’ up any prisoners, and if she did not find the retreating Confederates before then—she would be recaptured.
She had to keep moving. Once her foot slipped down inside the gaping wound in the back of a long-dead body, and she felt bile once again gurgling from the pit of her stomach as the flesh and blood squeezed around her ankle. She was struggling to pull herself free when she heard the sound—weak, but yet strong enough to carry to her ears.
“Please…help me…please…”
No, she thought in terror. I can’t help anyone now except myself. I have to keep going. I can’t stop for anything!
“Please…God…let it be so…Miss Kitty…”
She froze. Her name. Someone had called her name! It wasn’t so. She was dreaming. She was so tired, so bone-weary that she was having hallucinations. Doc had told her that happened to people sometimes, and it had to be happening to her. She had to get out of this sea of the dead before it drove her hopelessly insane.
“Miss…Kitty…” There it was again. It had to be a nightmare. She jerked her foot free from the grizzle and muscle of the dead man’s back, and, hoisting her ripped skirt high, began to move away.
“Help me…please…”
She could not move. Something within compelled her to turn around, find out once and for all whether or not she was really hearing things
that weren’t really there. Her eyes moved slowly over the bodies strewn almost shoulder to shoulder along the ground.
“Miss Kitty…please…”
And then she saw him—the soldier in bloody gray, stretching out a hand to her. Nathan? Could it be? Cautiously, afraid to even breathe, she moved closer. No, it was not Nathan—he was too young, too small.
And then she recognized him, and a scream erupted from her heart as she realized it was Andy Shaw reaching out to her!
Stooping quickly, she tried to hug him but saw through her tears that he was wounded and she did not want to touch him. A large splotch of red was on the front of his shirt. “A cavalryman got me—they got most of us right here in this clearing,” he gasped out the words. “He stuck me with his sword. I think it’s in my side…but it hurts all over.”
Her fingers worked nervously to rip the shirt open. Using the hem of her skirt, she wiped the blood away gently. It was a sharp, piercing wound, in the side. With care, he could make it and live. If left here, he would die from the fever—if he didn’t bleed to death.
“Can you move?”
“No,” he whispered. “It hurts…to even talk. I…couldn’t believe…I saw you…”
“Thank God you did. I was running away from those damned Yankees to try and catch up with the retreating Rebels. Maybe it’s lucky I did stop, Andy, or I might not have found you.”
“No…you’ve got to go on…” He tried to raise his head but fell back weakly. “Catch up…escape…”
“You lie still,” she shushed him. “I won’t leave you, Andy.”
He closed his eyes, and she looked around frantically. There was no escape now, not if she stayed here. The Yankees would come through soon and find her. And she had to have help for Andy. How far away were the Confederates? How long before darkness fell?
Love and War: The Coltrane Saga, Book 1 Page 21
