Unholy Fire

by Robert J. Mrazek

  “No, Doctor,” I said, soaring toward the pink clouds.

  I awoke to the putrid smell of rotting flesh. The blistered, suppurating feet of the soldier in the bunk ahead of mine were squirming back and forth two inches from my nose.

  I was very thirsty and called out for water. An orderly filled a mug from the barrel next to the door and brought it to me. It had the odor of spoiled eggs, and the smell of it made me so nauseous I couldn’t finish it. Instead, I took several more swallows from the bottle of laudanum that Dr. Bolger had given me.

  For the next few days, I floated in and out of consciousness. At one point I recall a young man waking me to say that he understood I wanted to dictate a letter. He was holding a writing tablet and pencil. I remembered then that I wanted to send a letter to someone but couldn’t remember who it was. I desperately fought to clear my brain, but to no avail.

  My body had become a stranger to me, and I was no longer in control of its functions. Some days I would sweat from every pore until my bedclothes were drenched. At other times the chills shook me so hard that it seemed I was coming apart. I felt total disgust at the trembling creature I had become.

  Weeks passed. There appeared to be an endless supply of laudanum, and the orderlies provided me with a new bottle as soon as the old one was consumed. In late fall, rain became a constant, and its hammering on the tin roof of the chicken shed was usually sufficient to bring me back from the mellower world where I had gone. It also drowned out the lamentations of the others.

  The boy in the bunk above me was dying from multiple gunshot wounds, and early each morning he would begin to make the same low, groaning sounds. They would slowly build to a long, keening wail, shivering and desolate.

  “Fix it. Oh, please fix it,” he would repeat over and over. The night orderly finally cured his disruptions with laudanum. He was dead a few days later.

  There were more empty beds each morning. As men died, they were carried to the dead house for shipment home. The ones who recovered were sent back to their units or released as unfit for further active service.

  I spent every coherent hour thinking that it might well be my last on earth. I lived without hope in that hazy, opium-induced state, knowing where I was, but oblivious to what was happening beyond my fetid bunk. My wound emitted a stench all its own, along with a greasy yellow pus that was supposed to be carried through the copper tube into a receptacle beneath my bunk. Usually, I would find it pooled in my crotch when I came awake in the morning.

  I remembered Dr. Bolger once commending the fact that we were at least enjoying good country air. Certainly, there was wildlife. My body became covered with fleabites, my hair lousy with lice. The shed was overrun with field mice, and even the onset of winter failed to diminish the legion of flies that bombarded us. One of the boys joked, “Ever’time I kill one, another forty come to his funeral.”

  Prior to Ball’s Bluff, I had stood six feet, two inches’ tall and weighed 187 pounds. I lost a third of it during those first weeks. Looking back, I don’t know how I held onto life. Part of it stemmed from the insistence of Dr. Bolger that I consume small amounts of beef broth each day. The hospital also had a bakery in one of the farm buildings, and I occasionally enjoyed a soft roll with butter.

  I was mildly encouraged to discover that my internal plumbing continued to function, although I would usually have no control over when and in what form the end product would be delivered. Since I could not stir from the bed, I did my best to capture the contents in a bedpan.

  A slim sense of hope began to stir in my mind when I observed the reaction of Dr. Bolger each time he passed me on his daily rounds. As the weeks went by, his manner seemed to change from one of pity to questioning surprise.

  Then I looked up one morning to find Harlan Colfax standing at the side of my bed. His sergeant’s stripes shined bright gold on the arm of his new blue uniform. I couldn’t find the words to tell him how glad I was to see him. It must have been plain on my face.

  “Sorry to tell you this, Lieutenant, but I think there is an overheated horse under your bed,” he said, with the crooked grin of old. I couldn’t help but smile back at him.

  “Something infinitely worse, I’m afraid.”

  He pulled a stool next to my bunk and sat down.

  “Well,” he said, “you’re a hero, Lieutenant McKittredge.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said harshly.

  “You were mentioned in dispatches,” he said. “This was written by the little big man himself, George Brinton McClellan … General Order from Army Headquarters.”

  He unfolded a copy of the orders. “I wish to particularly commend Lt. John McKittredge of the Twentieth Massachusetts Infantry for his bravery in leading a valiant counterattack on the enemy position at Ball’s Bluff. He has gained lasting honor in this army for his courageous action in the face of an overwhelming enemy force. By order of, et cetera, et cetera …,” Sergeant Colfax concluded, handing me the paper. “Well, what do you think of that?”

  “Not much,” I said.

  “I also have an article here that my wife sent me from one of the Boston newspapers,” he said, removing another folded page from his tunic. “It compares you to Hercules, the young lion of Troy.”

  I pushed it back at him, unread.

  “How many did we lose?” I said, and his eyes became grave.

  “Thirteen of the twenty-two officers in the Twentieth. Two-thirds of the regiment was killed, wounded, or went missing.”

  “What about Johnny Harpswell?”

  “He’s on the missing list,” said Sergeant Colfax.

  “Then he’s dead,” I said, shaking my head. I told him what had happened to Johnny in the skiff.

  “If I’ve learned one thing about war, it is that there is nothing fair about who lives and who dies on a battlefield, Lieutenant … just as there is no reason to feel guilty about surviving,” said Harlan.

  “I will not survive … at least that’s what the doctors have told me.”

  “Well, you’d better ask them for another opinion. I did, and they started hemming and hawing. Hell, they are probably too embarrassed to admit they might have been wrong. Whatever it is you’re doing, just keep it up.”

  “The laudanum cure … That’s what I’ll call it if I ever get out of here,” I said, with a grin.

  His face remained grave.

  “That stuff will kill you, Lieutenant,” he said, sternly. “You should start cutting back on it right now.”

  Harlan stayed with me for more than an hour, telling me everything that had happened since the battle. There were rumors, he said, that General McClellan was planning to take the whole army in ships down to Yorktown, where it would attack up the Peninsula, capture Richmond, and end the war. After the victory, all of us were to come together for a great homecoming celebration in Boston, he said. But the look in his eyes told me that he didn’t believe a word of it.

  The last thing he said to me was, “I’ll tell you this, Lieutenant. From everything I’ve seen, the real problem is our generals. If we could just swap ours for the Rebel generals, I think this war would be over in a month.”

  The following weeks went by interminably slowly. Occasionally, a well-intentioned Washington society matron would bring some religious tracts and pamphlets through the hospital wards, but the women rarely stayed very long, driven off by the smell of bodily corruption. Since few of them were under the age of fifty, the men made no effort to retain their company.

  One young man from Indiana proved to be a remarkable animal trainer. His name was Walter Clapp, and he had been shot through the lung at Bull Run. In the hospital he had developed the nervous habit of blinking his eyes uncontrollably whenever someone was talking to him.

  A few weeks after his arrival, Walter captured two of the field mice that lived under the hospital sheds and then bribed the orderlies with tobacco to allow him to breed them in a copper boiler stored under his bunk. He began training the mice to do various
tricks by rewarding them each time they performed one correctly. It took months, but he eventually had them performing a macabre little dance on their hind legs, while another soldier played the “Wedding of Figaro” on his hornpipe. Figaro was also the name of Walter’s finest performer, the Edwin Booth of his mouse company.

  I celebrated my twenty-first birthday by leaving my bed for the first time. By then, Dr. Bolger was already convinced that I was the beneficiary of a major medical miracle, and that my case deserved a place of honor in the annals of medical science.

  With the help of an orderly, I lurched on my atrophied legs to the opposite wall, where I stood for all of ten seconds before nausea caused me to beat a hasty retreat to my bunk. It became a challenge to spend a little more time on my feet each day. Soon I could stand unaided for almost five minutes before returning to my bed. On Christmas Day, I walked to the washroom all by myself. There was a cracked section of mirror fastened to the wall over one of the sinks. I cautiously sidled up to it, actually afraid of what I was going to see. It was far worse than I imagined possible.

  The whites of my eyes were a muddy yellow, and jaundice had turned my skin the color of ripe squash. My eyes had retreated deep in their sockets, and my cheekbones stood out starkly against the jagged edges of my face. My brown hair was streaked with gray.

  Defeated, I went back to my bunk, lay down, and spent Christmas Day watching a winter squall deposit three inches of snow on the sill. The other men celebrated Christmas that night by singing hymns while they stood around a small evergreen tree lit with tiny candles. My own celebration consisted of a full pint of laudanum. When it was finished, I asked one of the orderlies for another.

  “Merry Christmas, Lieutenant,” he said, handing me the bottle.

  One brutally cold morning in February, I awoke to discover that the raw, pasty skin over my stomach wall no longer leaked yellow pussy fluid. The bad smell was suddenly gone, too. I knew then that I was physically getting better and celebrated by paying an orderly to heat me enough water for a hot bath. For an hour I soaked my body up to the neck in its restorative warmth. For the first time since I was wounded, I actually felt clean.

  It was only when Dr. Bolger decided that I no longer required the use of laudanum as a painkiller that I discovered the depth of my dependency on it. Although the orderlies would no longer give it to me, the opiate was easy enough to acquire elsewhere. The supply seemed endless, and it could be purchased for little more than the cost of a few ounces of tobacco.

  It was so plentiful in the wards that there was no way to control it. For men who had lost their faces or their legs or whose wounds were judged to be mortal, the overworked doctors had no other means of comforting them. It became as easy to purchase as coffee. That same day I acquired another bottle, this time a full quart. I can’t recall exactly how long I nursed it, but at some point, many hours later, the thought came to my addled brain that I needed to destroy the evidence of my illegal action. The obvious means of doing that was to finish the bottle. It put me into a comatose state.

  I regained consciousness to find Dr. Bolger roughly shaking me by the shoulders. From the look on his normally kindly face, I could see that he was outraged at my descent. Perhaps it was because he felt he had played a small part in my miraculous recovery. Perhaps he just liked me and didn’t want me to die. I don’t know.

  “You are throwing God’s gift away,” he said, with deep emotion. Seeing the empty bottle of laudanum next to my hand on the bunk, he picked it up and smashed it on the floor.

  “Lieutenant McKittredge is to receive no more pain medication of any kind,” he said angrily. “Notify everyone on the ward that this is an order.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the orderly.

  Dr. Bolger stood up and slowly shook his head in frustration and disappointment.

  “This is blasphemy,” he said.

  In spite of his orders and my own self-loathing, I had no intention of eliminating the one thing in my life that provided solace and escape. Now that I was ambulatory, it was easy for me to purchase the opiate in one of the other wards. My solution to the problem at hand was simply to hide it elsewhere on the hospital grounds. Meanwhile, I found my appetite slowly returning and began to regain a little of the weight I had lost, along with a small measure of my former strength.

  As my physical condition slowly improved, I worried that Dr. Bolger would order me released from the hospital. The thought that I would be permanently severed from my connection to an inexhaustible laudanum supply became a frightening concern. I began to feign symptoms that were designed to arouse his sympathy during morning rounds. However, I could tell from his manner that he wasn’t deceived.

  One morning in early April, I was dozing in my bunk when I smelled the odor of a strong cigar. Opening my eyes, I took in the form of a man so massive that he actually blocked out the light from the window.

  Unshaven and dirty, he was wearing the most disreputable uniform I had ever seen on a colonel in the federal army. Two of the buttons on the uniform coat were missing, and his linen was seedy and frayed.

  He had a thick mane of unruly hair the color of furnace ashes, and he was staring down at me out of enormous slate gray eyes that looked like huge nail heads. Taking the heavily chewed end of a large cigar out of his mouth, he said in a deep, gravelly voice, “I know exactly what you’re thinking.”

  The whole effect of him was so ludicrous that I said, “What is that?”

  “He stood before me like Polyphemus, shapeless and horrible,” said the behemoth.

  “Virgil?” I found myself replying foggily, as if performing for a professor back in Cambridge.

  “Excellent. You have a brain,” he said.

  I closed my eyes, already tired of his game.

  “Are you ready to report for duty?” he said.

  “No,” I said, eyes shut.

  “As the bard once wrote, you smell to heaven.”

  “No worse than your cigar,” I replied, looking up at him once more.

  “You are talking to a senior officer, Lieutenant. I could have you court-martialed for your insolence,” he said gruffly.

  At the same time, there was a mocking grin below his unshaven red cheeks. I again surveyed his unkempt appearance before deciding to say nothing further.

  “Beauty and wisdom are rarely conjoined,” he said, as if again divining my thoughts.

  “You have my invitation to leave,” I said.

  “I’ll be leaving soon enough,” he said, puffing on his cigar and blowing the smoke in my direction. “And you’re coming with me.”

  I laughed in his face.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself, slacking here while boys with serious wounds are lying in dog beds,” were his next words.

  “You have no right!” I blazed back at him.

  “So you had a small intestinal complaint,” he said, without a hint of humor. “Is the army supposed to beg for forgiveness before you to return to duty like a man?”

  I saw that he was trying to bait me and held my tongue.

  “I have an honest job for you,” he said.

  “I’m not looking for a job,” I said, sitting up to see him in better light.

  “The choice is yours,” he replied. “You can also be arrested for dereliction of duty”—his eyes bored into my mine—“among other charges.”

  In spite of his Falstaffian bulk, I saw now that he was neither fat nor dissolute. Deep-chested and broadly built, his gigantic head had an air of distinction to it, and his restless gray eyes glinted with intelligence. There was an air of authority to him, perhaps a faint echo of ruling blood.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “Ahh … you would pluck out the heart of my mystery,” he responded.

  “Then go to hell,” I growled, regardless of the consequences.

  “My name is Valentine Burdette,” he said, suddenly serious. “I work for General Marsena Patrick, the provost marshal general of the Army of the Potomac. We d
eal with thieves, murderers, and deserters.”

  “You’ve finally caught up with me then,” I said, sarcastically.

  He grinned once more, and deeply furrowed lines etched the corners of his eyes and mouth. I noticed that his long, high-bridged nose was canted over to one side as if someone had hit it repeatedly. With his personality, it wasn’t difficult to imagine why.

  “There are men seeking to profit from the Union and to destroy it by their actions. It is our job to make sure they are not successful. We also investigate corruption in the delivery to the army of substandard military stores and equipment that has already cost many soldiers their lives.”

  “Why me?” I said.

  “Why not you?”

  I shook my head in disbelief. None of it made sense, at least as far as it affected me.

  “The army takes care of its heroes,” he said then.

  “I’m no hero,” I said.

  “Some others think differently. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  “And what do you do, Colonel?” I said.

  “Thank you for the military courtesy. You can see how important military etiquette is to me,” he replied.

  “Yes,” I said, glancing once more at his atrocious uniform.

  “I, Lieutenant McKittredge, am a trial lawyer, and a very good one,” he added in a resonant voice that he probably used to good effect on juries. “I know you’ve been through a lot … but no more than thousands of other unlucky men in this war. Now I have need of someone like you for an important job. You’ll just have to trust me on that.”

  “I have no qualifications for an important job,” I said.

  “Yes, you do,” he came right back.

  “What are my qualifications?”

  “Before I tell you, I have a question. Are you addicted to opium?”

  “No,” I said, looking straight into his eyes and lying.