What when the dead and wounded numbered not hundreds but ten, twenty, or thirty thousand, the devil’s work of just one day or two in a small area of the earth? What about scarcity of water to bathe and refresh the wounded, and numberless bodies requiring burial with shovels in hard ground, along with a multitude of dead horses needing to be burned? And what when not one pig, but herds of wild hogs snuffled and chewed among the entrails of the dead and not-yet-dead lying on the field? What then?
— CHAPTER FOUR —
CLEARING THE BATTLEFIELD
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AFTER THEIR FIERCE ENCOUNTER, THE TROOPS MOVE ON, relieved to have survived intact at least one more bloodletting. The generals will engage in maneuvers to gain strategic advantage until, finally, they inevitably confront each other violently again. We will not march away with them but stay for now to witness desperate attempts to clear the field of both living and dead. Combat always produces an ugly detritus. The margins of the Bayeux Tapestry, a contemporary graphics account of the Battle of Hastings, 1066, show severed heads, arms, legs, chunks of horses hewn apart by broadsword and axe. European fighting from the Hundred Years War through the Napoleonic conflicts inflicted great carnage.
But the sheer efficiency of machine-age weapons produced a seemingly unparalleled butcher’s bill. World War I soldiers compared combat to a giant sausage machine, whole men fed into the hopper, a mishmash of ground flesh dropping from the blades. The Civil War introduced America to wholesale killing. One student of the violence likens a Civil War battle to two huge beasts, one gray and one blue, clawing at each other, “spouts of waste issuing at the rear, an offal of bleeding parts of bodies, arms, legs, hands, dead men, wounded men screaming” and “a slag of dead horses.”1
The medical and burial services must comb over the bloody floor of this abattoir, trying to retrieve those who still live and get them aid. Then they must dispose of the cadavers. We often tend to rush over this subject, cursorily referencing the flag-draped coffin and the official words of consolation. But this misleads us as to the real character of the grim landscape left by combat. The Duke of Wellington, British victor at Waterloo, 1815, famously said that, next to a battle lost, the saddest thing is a battle won. Let us begin to see what he meant, as the stretcher bearers start groping among battle’s offal.
The clearing of the field appears chaotic and clumsy, especially in the first phases of fighting. Nobody envisaged the scale of the coming slaughter. Southern politicians offered to drink all the blood spilled in fratricidal conflict. Northern leaders promised that just one advance on Richmond would burst rebellion’s balloon. Why bother to build a large, expensive surgical corps or fleets of ambulances? So the authorities remained underequipped to cope with the immense slaughter that occurred at such battles as Malvern Hill, Virginia, in the late spring of 1862, where Major Henry K. Douglas of Stonewall Jackson’s staff found himself trying to lead his trembling horse through reeking fetlock-deep blood pools. That day’s work produced 6,000 wounded and 1,400 dead. Earlier, at Manassas, in July 1861, the first major eastern engagement, the armies simply abandoned many wounded for want of means to help them.2
At first, two-wheeled unsprung ambulances predominated, carrying only two casualties apiece. Desperate transportation officers also pressed into service farm wagons and commercial vehicles to act as impromptu conveyances. As late as Fair Oaks, June 29, 1862, Robert Knox Sneden, on Union General Samuel P. Heintzelman’s staff, noted lines of wounded needing help “but few ambulances were to be seen—And they were all full of dying and desperately wounded men. Thin streams of blood ran out of the sides and bottoms of these vehicles, while the drivers were lashing the horses, and going over stumps in a reckless manner, jolting the remaining life out of the occupants.”3
Early on, the only medical corpsmen available to collect the wounded might be bandsmen, temporarily relieved of other duties. It took four corpsmen to carry a body in a makeshift conveyance, a blanket that tortured victims. Serving on Virginia’s Tidewater battlefields in 1861–62, Private Sidney Lanier, 2nd Georgia, heard pleas from the maimed to go steady: “Easy walking is desirable when each step of your four carriers spurts out the blood afresh, or grates the rough edges of a shot bone in your leg.” Hoping to hang on for help, men tried to stanch their wounds. At Kelly’s Ford, Virginia, on November 8, 1863, Sneden saw a dead Rebel whose “leg had been wrenched off at the knee, exposing all the arteries and tissues.” Despite the agony lastingly engraved on his face, he had managed to improvise a tourniquet, but he still bled to death. “He was covered with dust and dirt, and his long yellow hair was matted with blood, presenting a terrible sight.”4
Those who could still walk stumbled to the rear, nursing a shattered limb, body wound, or broken face. On this road of ruin, Stephen Crane’s Jim Conklin takes his final bow. Some, without hope, crawled away to die. Sergeant Amos Hurriston, 154th New York, mortally wounded at Gettysburg, expired in seclusion, clutching a family photograph. “I got the likeness of the children and it pleased me more than eney thing that you could have sent me,” he’d written home. In the first battles, finding a field hospital did not guarantee relief because many remained badly equipped. Charles J. Stillé, of the civilian U.S. Sanitary Commission, noted some wounded from summer 1862 Peninsula fighting laid on bare ground, “just as they had been left by the fortune of war (four days before); their wounds, as yet undressed, smeared with filth and blood, and all their wants unsupplied.” Frederick Law Olmsted, also a Commission member, reported that ambulances, failing to locate field hospitals, dumped men by a swamp in inches of water. As late as December 1862, Walt Whitman wrote grimly of “the wounded lying on the ground” with “No cots; seldom even a mattress. It is pretty cold.”5
Nevertheless, by late 1862, medical attention by both sides showed a perceptible improvement. Bigger, four-wheeled, sprung ambulances became available. Field hospitals increased in number and equipment. Rational procedures had been established. The wounded might hope for a temporary field dressing immediately behind the firing line: a tourniquet, rudimentary wound cleansing, and bandaging. Then, alone or supported, they looked for an ambulance pickup point, to be driven to a field hospital for diagnosis, treatment, and emergency surgery. Whenever possible the medical services located these facilities in sheltered houses, barns, under trees, and by a deep well or brook. Red flags identified them.6
Still, immediate retrieval of the wounded continued to be hamstrung by factors beyond the medical services’ control. Many casualties remained lying in no-man’s-land while the conflict ebbed and flowed over them, making retrieval hazardous. Sharpshooters targeted relief parties, even if under a white flag as they attempted to bring in enemy casualties. The piteous cries of the suffering, clearly audible after firing died for the night, haunted soldiers waiting for the next day’s combat. Major Samuel Hurst, 73rd Ohio, recalled being unable to sleep nights at Gettysburg: “It was the most distressful wail ever listened to. Thousands of sufferers upon the field, and hundreds lying between the two skirmish lines, who could not be cared for, through the night were groaning and wailing or crying out in their depth of suffering and pain.” As late as 1915, Major Wilbur Crummer, 45th Illinois, could still hear the night sounds of the wounded begging for water at Shiloh and Vicksburg.7
Even after the armies disengaged, sharpshooters continued to pick off relief workers because white flags went unrecognized until commanders signed a formal truce. Both sides hesitated to initiate this, because it looked like an admission of defeat. At Cold Harbor, June 3, 1864, thousands of wounded lay under a blazing sun while Grant and Lee waged a war of semantics. Although the Union assault had failed, Grant balked at straightforwardly requesting a truce until June 7.8
Torrential storms frequently fell after major battles, blackening the sky and turning the field to mud, impeding salvage work. Explanations for the rain varied. Perhaps reverberating cannonades disrupted cloud systems. Or hot air from gunfire condensed in the upper atmosphere to be
precipitated as rain. The fanciful opined the storms represented angels weeping over the slaughter. Whatever the cause, rain lashed down after New Market, Malvern Hill, Shiloh, Second Manassas, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Murfreesboro, and more. Grant noted how downpours stopped him following up Shiloh. Again, in Virginia, May 1864, he recorded “five days of almost constant rain without any prospect of clearing up. The roads have now become so impassable that ambulances with wounded men can no longer run between here and Fredericksburg.”9
Men experienced the nightmare of falling disabled while missiles still whistled overhead. At Antietam, Jonathan P. Stowe, 15th Massachusetts, managed to scribble, “I am wounded!” He added, “And am afraid shall be again as shells fly past me every few seconds.… Am in severe pain.” Herds of riderless horses and escaped mules trampled the wounded in crazed stampedes. Flying batteries, coming into action, ran over the helpless. Captain Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, 5th Kentucky Artillery (U.S.), depicted gun teams that “dare not swerve for Christ or brother,” whose “leaping wheels cut deep the field thick strewn With dead and wounded.” The wounded wave hands, hoping the guns will avoid them, but then “The helpless bow their heads, the wheels roar on—” further crushing bodies, ending lives.10
Before crashing rains could quench the flames, brush and grass fires started by red-hot projectiles consumed many wounded. Soldiers universally feared this end, and it traumatized men unable to save the crippled from the advancing inferno. The screams of roasting men, bellies ripped open by exploding cartridge boxes that ignited with a cheerful firecracker popping, haunted veterans. In 1867, Sherman vividly recalled “on Shiloh’s field, when our wounded men, mingled with rebels, charred and blackened by the burning tents and underbrush, were crawling about, begging for someone to end their misery.” In extremity, some who could still use an arm, and had a gun, prepared to shoot themselves. Other desperate men seeking shelter thoughtlessly crawled into haystacks and burned there. Major John Edwards, adjutant to Rebel General Joseph O. Shelby, recalled of Prairie Grove, Arkansas, December 7, 1862, roasted corpses in a blackened hayrick, gorged on by swine. “Intestines, heads, arms, feet, and even hearts were dragged over the ground and devoured at leisure.”11
Hogs also ate the living. At Cross Keys, Virginia, on June 8, 1862, Major R. L. Dabney, chaplain to the Stonewall brigade, recorded that corpses, “with some, perchance, of the mangled living, were partially devoured by swine before their burial.” Being eaten haunted Confederate veteran Thomas J. Key: “It is dreadful to contemplate being killed on the field of battle without a kind hand to hide one’s remains from the eye of the world or the gnawing of animals and buzzards.” Human scavengers, stragglers and depraved civilians who robbed bodies, also degraded the fallen, and sometimes finished off their victims. At Missionary Ridge on November 25, 1863, Captain Tom Taylor, 47th Ohio, helped a near-naked sufferer who had been stripped even of his shirt. The thieves tried to rip the boots off his grapeshot-shattered legs, but “he made such a noise because of the agony and suffering from the pulling they desisted.”12
Men lying exposed desperately needed water, but little was to be had unless they could drag themselves to bloody pools. A seventeen-year old in New York’s Excelsior Brigade, disabled by a leg wound in fighting before Richmond in June 1862, told his brigade chaplain, Joseph Twichell, that he used his fingers to clear goo constricting his throat and then “was forced to moisten his lips and throat with his own urine.” Dehydration produced madness. Corporal Cyrus Boyd, 15th Iowa, witnessed wounded men at Shiloh, “so near dead from exposure they were mostly insane.” One Rebel who had “died in great agony” lay “on his back with his hands raised above his head” in supplication.13
Neglect advanced the rotting of damaged tissue and bone. General Alpheus S. Williams recalled that one of his men at Chancellorsville “had been wounded through the hips, and his feet had lain in the water until they gangrened and more than half the flesh had fallen off, leaving the bones of the feet protruding fleshless, nothing but skeletons of toes and outer bones.” Often, a life might be saved only because maggots, hatched from eggs laid by flies in wounds, ate the rotten tissue.14
Reaching a field hospital failed to guarantee prompt attention. Although overwhelmed surgeons worked nonstop, many wounded went untended. According to Sneden, during heavy fighting on the Peninsula in late June 1862, the work so overwhelmed doctors that, “in a short time the surgeon sinks under prostration which paralyzes every vital power.” Federal nurse Cornelia Hancock estimated that at Gettysburg three hundred surgeons worked five days to perform the amputations. Lack of water often made conditions worse. Medical facilities came under fire: a Chancellorsville house and a Gettysburg barn used as hospitals both took fire and burned with the nonambulatory patients in them.15
John Stuckenberg, chaplain of the 145th Pennsylvania, sketched the daunting task facing the staff of a Gettysburg field hospital: “Here lies one with his leg shattered the flesh torn by a shell, nothing but shreds being left. There lies one shot through the abdomen, the intestines protruding—his life cannot be saved, perhaps even opium gives him but little temporary relief.” And on: “Here lies one with his arm almost severed from his body—waiting for amputation. There lies one young and handsome shot through the face and head—his eyes swollen shut and covered with a yellow, putrid matter, his hair clotted with blood, his jaws torn, and a bullet hole through each cheek.”16
The surgical staff steadily increased, rising to 11,000 in Federal service by 1865, a ratio of 1 per 133 men; the South had 1 per 324 yet somehow achieved about the same survival rate. In theory, personnel attending the wounded followed clearly prescribed procedures. Under optimum conditions, which rarely prevailed, a regimental surgeon rendered immediate attention to a casualty behind the lines to stop bleeding, superficially cleanse, and then dress wounds. Patients got a drink of water, if available, along with an opiate. U.S. surgeon W. W. Keen remembered the crudeness of administration—“doled out with a pocket knife [powder sprinkled directly into the wound] without worrying about superfluous exactitude in doling out the blessed relief that morphine brings to men in pain.”17
Senior surgeons met the wounded at the next stage, a division or corps field hospital. As soon as possible, they carried out a thorough diagnostic examination to ascertain the degree of damage and the action required. They used fingers and metal probes to locate foreign bodies in wounds, simultaneously extracting accessible debris and securing bleeding vessels. Physicians now performed minor surgery, quickly and perhaps without anesthetic, especially if the soldier appeared exhausted or in shock. However, he might receive whiskey and a bullet or twig to chew on. Joseph E. Crowell, 13th New Jersey, wounded in the hand at Chancellorsville, bit on a stick while the surgeon snipped off the remains of a finger. This expeditious intervention saved him from gangrene. If the surgeon prescribed no further procedures at this time, an attendant re-bandaged the patient and administered a stimulant of alcohol and tobacco. Unfortunately, with little water and disinfectant, surgeons’ hands and dressings became contaminated, leading to blood poisoning with complications such as lockjaw.18
Those requiring more radical intervention would be laid out for the head surgeon to inspect, attended by his assistants. Normally, the chief flagged complex abdominal or chest wounds for removal to major hospitals with superior facilities. He marked the remainder with a chalk line on the damaged limb, showing where amputation or resection cutting would occur. Often, a room in a house became the theater, the operating table a door laid across two barrels. Federal surgeon Patrick Binford recalled blood collecting in deep pools on the floor of a house used as a field hospital at Champion Hill, Mississippi, May 1863. Finally, he ordered drainage holes drilled through the floorboards under the table to drain off the fluid. Ether and chloroform administered via a cloth held over the face constituted the most common anesthetics available to Federal surgeons. Opinions differ on the consistency of Southern supplies, but Confederate medical staff
reported local shortages by late spring 1862. Physicians commonly preferred chloroform. The flammable properties of ether made it dangerous when surgeons performed many procedures by naked lamp or candle flame.19
“Guillotining” predominated as a method of amputation in the field. With a knife, the surgeon sliced to the bone the soft tissue just above the damaged area, and then completed severance with a hacksaw. He then tied off the arteries with oiled silk, the streamers left long enough for the rotted arterial ends to be tugged free days later. Good surgeons completed complex procedures in under two minutes. Naturally, men resisted losing their limbs, especially in an era when most jobs required physical dexterity, and such impairments meant social rejection. Michigan private Thomas A. Perrine, whose lady friend shortly ditched him, complained bitterly the war left him with “an empty sleeve, an empty heart.”20
To avoid amputation, surgeons might try excision and recision, procedures designed to save limbs by removing pieces of damaged bone from the shaft, leaving natural mending to bridge the gap. However, these long and complicated procedures incurred a greater chance of hemorrhage and infection. Unhealed ex-sections could abscess. Southern professor of medicine J. J. Chisolm observed of such cases: “the bones are carious [decayed]; the abscesses are interminable sinuses, from which are kept up a constant discharge.” Restoration of motor ability could not be assured: “the wound has healed, but the limb remains weak, shrunken, stiff, painful and nearly useless.” Artificial limbs often functioned better and, overall, surgeons favored amputation.21
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