Slaves of Obsession

by Anne Perry

  The firing ahead was very heavy. The sound of grape and canister being shot from cannon screamed through the air. She could clearly see the lines of men, blue-gray against the parched grass, half obscured by dust and gun smoke. Battle standards were high above them, hanging limply in the hot air. It must be after three o’clock. Sudley Church was a few hundred yards away.

  She passed more shattered carts, guns, bodies of the dead. The ground was red with blood. One man was lying half propped against a caisson, his abdomen ripped open and his intestines bulging out over his torn and bloody thighs. Incredibly, his eyes were open; he was alive.

  This was what she hated most, worse than the dead, those still in agony and horror, watching their own blood pour away, knowing they were dying and helpless to do anything about it. She wanted to walk on, pretend she had not seen, wipe it out of her memory. But of course she could not. It would have been easier to put a bullet through his head and stop the pain.

  She bent down in front of him.

  “There ain’t nothin’ you can do for me, ma’am,” he said through dry lips. “There’s plenty o’ fellows further on.…”

  “You first,” she answered softly. Then she lowered her eyes to his dreadful wound and the hands clenched over it, as if they could actually do something.

  Perhaps she could? It seemed to be the outer flesh which was torn; his actual organs looked undamaged. She could barely see for the dirt and blood.

  She put down the canteens of water and took out the first roll of bandages. She poured water onto a pad, and a little wine, and began to unclench his hands and wash the dirt off the pale flesh of his intestine. She tried in her mind to separate it from the live man watching her, to think only of tiny detail, of the little grains of earth, sand, the oozes of blood, to keep it all clean and try to place it where it should be in the cavity of his body.

  For a few moments she was even unaware of the heat burning her skin, the sweat dripping on her face, under her arms and down the hollow between her breasts. She moved as quickly as she could; time was short. He needed to be carried from here to Sudley Church, and then Fairfax or Alexandria. She refused to think of failure, that he might die here in the heat and sound of gunfire before she was even finished. She refused to think of the other men within a stone’s throw of her who were in as much pain, perhaps dying as she knelt here, simply because there was no one to help them. She could do only one thing at a time, if she were to do it well enough for it to matter.

  She was nearly finished. Another moment.

  The gunfire in the distance was growing heavier. She was aware of people passing her, of voices and cries and the bump of a cart over the dry ruts of the ground.

  She looked up at the man’s face, sick with dread that he might already be dead and that she had been laboring blindly, refusing to see the truth. The sweat was cold on her skin for an instant, then hot. He was staring back at her. His eyes were sunken in his head with shock and the sweat was dry on his cheeks, but he was definitely alive.

  She smiled at him, placing a clean cloth over the awful wound. She had nothing with her with which to stitch it. She picked up the canteen she had been using and moistened a new cloth and held it to his lips. After a moment she gently washed his face. It served no real purpose, except to comfort, and perhaps to give some kind of dignity, a shred of hope, an acknowledgment that he was still there, and his feelings mattered, urgent and individual.

  “Now we need someone to move you,” she told him. “You’ll be all right. A surgeon will sew and bandage it. It’ll take a while to heal, but it will. Just keep it clean … all the time.”

  “Yes, ma’am …” His voice was faint, his mouth dry. “Thank you …” He trailed off, but his meaning was in his eyes, not that she needed it. The reward was in the doing, and in the hope. There was a little less horror and, if he was lucky, another life not destroyed.

  She stood up awkwardly, her muscles locked for a moment, a trifle dizzy in the heat. Then she looked around for someone to help them. There was a soldier with a broken arm, another with blood splattered down his chest but apparently still able to walk. After a moment she saw Merrit on her way back from Sudley Church, dirty, bloodstained, staggering along under a weight of water canteens. She stooped every now and then to help the wounded or to look at someone and see whether he was already dead and beyond her power to aid.

  Hester told the man not to move, under any circumstance, and picking up her skirts she ran and stumbled across the rough turf to Merrit, calling out as she went.

  Merrit turned, her face twisted with fear and exhaustion, then she recognized Hester and came to her at a run, jumping over the rough tussocks of grass.

  Briefly Hester told her about the man with the abdominal injury, and the necessity of finding some kind of transport to take him and any other wounded they could carry to the church.

  “Yes,” Merrit said with a gulp. “Yes … I’ll …” She stopped. There was panic barely concealed in her eyes. All the brave words were absurd now, irrelevances from another life. Nothing could have prepared her for the reality. Hester could see that she wanted to say so, to deny the things she had said before. She needed Hester to know what she felt, to acknowledge the difference of everything.

  Hester smiled at her, a tiny rueful gesture. There was no time to waste in explanations of how they felt. The wounded came first, and there was going to be no second or third.

  “Go and get help,” Hester repeated.

  Merrit dropped most of the canteens, squared her shoulders and turned to obey, tripping on the rough ground, straightening up again, then moving a little faster.

  Hester picked up the canteens and walked towards the battle, tending others who were wounded, seeing more and more of the dead. Beyond the Bull Run the firing never stopped and the air was thick with dust and gun smoke. The heat was searing, parching the mouth, burning the skin.

  Finally she headed back towards the church. It was a small building surrounded by farmhouses about half a mile from Bull Run and had become the principal depot for the Union wounded.

  The seats from the body of the church had been removed and placed outside. Many men were propped up awkwardly, lying under trees and makeshift shelters. Others were in the open in the full glare of the sun. Some had no wounds but were suffering from the heat and dehydration.

  All around men were groaning and crying out for help. Some less hurt tried to assist the two or three orderlies struggling to make order out of the chaos.

  As Hester approached the door, the surgeon, scarlet-fronted, came out and dropped an arm on the pile of amputated and mangled flesh against the wall, and without even seeing her, turned and went back in again.

  An ambulance came jolting over the rough ground with more wounded.

  Hester pushed open the wooden door. Inside the church floor had been covered over with the blankets that could be spared. Hay from a nearby field had been scattered in loose heaps for men to rest on. There were several buckets of water, some fresh, others red with blood.

  In the center of the room was the operating table, instruments laid out on a board between two chairs next to it. There were pools of blood, making the floor slippery, and dried blood darkening. The smell caught in her throat. In the heat it was almost choking.

  She swallowed her nausea and began to work.

  All the sweltering afternoon the battle went on over Henry Hill. At first it looked to Monk and Breeland as if the Union troops would take it. It would be a crushing blow to the Confederacy. Perhaps it would even be enough to end the open conflict. Then they could return to diplomacy, maybe even agree that such bloodshed was too high a price to force union on a people who were prepared to die rather than accept it.

  But by late afternoon the Confederate troops were reinforced and Henry Hill stood against everything MacDowell could throw at it. Henry House itself seemed unreachable. Crouching in a patch of scrub on the side of Matthews Hill and looking across the stream that he had been told was
called Young’s Branch, Monk could see Confederate troops holding the crown of the hill. Union men had been charging it again and again, flags held high in the swirls of dust and gun smoke amid the trees, and had been repulsed each time.

  There were soldiers as close as twenty yards away. The roar of cannon was deafening. There was a constant crackle of muskets and every now and then the whine of a bullet and the spurt of dust as it hit the ground. One had grazed Monk’s arm, tearing his shirt and drawing scarlet blood. The sting of it shocked him, slight as it was compared with the agony of others.

  “I’m going to find that bastard!” Trace shouted over the din. “I don’t give a damn what the outcome of this battle is, he’s not getting away with it.…” He gave a bitter shrug. “Unless he’s dead! Then the devil will have beaten me to him. But if God’s on my side, I’ll get to him first.” He shaded his eyes and stared from where he knelt across Young’s Branch and over to Henry Hill. Union lines stretched as far as Chinn Ridge to the right, and all the way to Henry Hill to the left.

  The wind changed a little, sending the smoke across the fighting. A cannonball screamed past them and scythed through the trees, shearing away some branches and leaving them hanging.

  Monk wondered briefly why Trace did not join the battle himself. Why was he so determined, above all else, to pursue Breeland? He seemed obsessive about it, out of balance. Monk did not fight. It was not his war. He had no feeling for either side over the other. The issue of slavery did not give him a moment’s thought. He was irrevocably against it, but he could appreciate the Confederacy view that the economic oppression of the North was in actuality no better for the poor. One changed deeply rooted institutions slowly, but violence was not the answer.

  Neither did he understand the passion for union above all else. These things were intellectual arguments to him. What he felt was the reality of men maimed, crippled, bleeding to death here on these dusty hillsides. He saw no difference between Union and Confederate; they were all equally flesh and blood, passion, dreams and fears. For the first time he understood something of what Hester must feel as she worked with friend and foe without difference, seeing only the person.

  He hardly dared think of Hester. He looked at the wounded and the dying all around him, and had no idea how to help them. Horror made him feel sick. His hands shook; his legs almost failed to support him. He was dizzy with revulsion as his mind drowned in the abomination of it. How did she keep her head, bear all the pain, the dreadful mutilation of bodies? She had a strength beyond his power to imagine.

  Philo Trace was scanning the hill ahead, perhaps trying to recognize a uniform, or battle colors, to know where Breeland might be.

  “Would you go into that to look for him?” Monk shouted.

  “Yes,” Trace answered without turning, his eyes wrinkled up against the sun. “Any Southerner can fight for the Confederacy and our right to decide our own fate. I’m the only one who can take Breeland back to England and show everyone what he is … what a Union gun buyer will do to get arms.”

  Monk said nothing. He could understand, and it frightened him. He had seen crime and poverty before, individual hatred and injustice. This was on a scale of enormity, a national madness from which there was no escape, no rational core where one could find healing, or even respite.

  Over on Henry Hill men were killing and dying, and neither side appeared to gain.

  Trace set off down the slope towards Chinn Ridge. Monk turned back.

  There were wounded men on the ground, covered in blood and dust, limbs crooked, lying side by side with the dead. Carts were overturned, wood splintered, gun barrels cracked and pointing to the sky. Wheels were tilted at crazy angles.

  Monk did what he could to help, but he had no knowledge, no skills to call on. He did not know how to set a bone, how to stop bleeding, who could be moved and who would be harmed if he were moved. The heat burned the skin and clogged the throat, sweat stinging the eyes, and wet fabric rubbed the skin raw over his bullet-grazed arm. The glare of the sun was merciless. Flies were everywhere.

  Time and again he scrambled down the bank to the stream and filled canteens, carrying them back amid a rain of gunfire, to hold them up for the wounded.

  He carried men where he knew they should be taken, to the field hospitals, doing what they could to stanch bleeding, pad wounds, splint bones, there on the grass of the hillside.

  He saw Merrit at about half-past four, also carrying water, stopping where the wounded were capable of drinking.

  Her skirts were torn and she looked exhausted, almost sleepwalking. Her face was ashen, her eyes filled with horror. He was not certain if she even recognized him.

  Together they helped into a cart a man with a badly broken leg, and another man with a crushed hand, two more with heavily bleeding chest wounds, and Monk pulled the cart over the rough ground, straining his shoulders, feeling his muscles ache. The bullet graze on his arm seemed to have stopped bleeding.

  There were no horses around loose and unhurt themselves. There was something in him that hated seeing an animal hurt even more than a man. They had not chosen to fight. They were creatures with no part in war. But he knew better than to say so. Perhaps half the men in the battle had no will in it either, no decision not driven by fear or someone else’s idealism.

  He got the cart to within twenty yards of the field hospital at Sudley Church. He could go no farther. He and Merrit helped the men out, and leaning on each other, they staggered the last little distance.

  The shooting sounded closer behind them, as if the Rebels had held Henry Hill and were coming down towards them.

  Inside the church he saw Hester. He recognized the set of her shoulders instantly, square, a little thin, the cotton of her dress pulling tight as she moved quickly, deftly. Her hair was scraped back, poking out of its pins, and a tiny strand fell down her back. Her skirts were filthy, and several smears and splatters of blood showed even from the back.

  His heart lurched. His eyes stung with tears of pride, and so powerful an admiration welled up in him that for seconds he saw only her; the rest of the room was a dark cloud over the periphery of his vision. There need not have been other people, wounded men, a man standing still, uniform blue or gray, another woman on her knees.

  Hester had a saw in her hand and was cutting through the bone of a man’s forearm, moving quickly, with no hesitation, no time for weighing or judging. She must have done all that before she set the blade to the flesh. There was light, wet blood everywhere, on pads and bandages on the floor, in pools and spatters, staining her hands scarlet, and forming a dark stain on the thighs of the man’s uniform. His face was gray, as if he were already dead.

  She went on working. The useless arm, what was left of it, fell to the floor and she began stanching the wound, binding a loose flap of skin over it, holding a pad hard, so hard it compressed the vessels. All the time she did not speak. Monk watched her tense face, lips pressed together, sweat running down her brow and standing out on her lip. Once she brushed a hair out of her eyes, using the back of her wrist.

  When she was finished and the bleeding had stopped, she took a piece of cloth and dipped it into wine and held it to the man’s mouth, very gently.

  His eyelids fluttered.

  She gave him a few drops more.

  He opened his eyes, turned to focus on her face, and drifted into unconsciousness again.

  Monk had no idea whether the man would live or not. He did not know whether Hester knew. He looked at her face and could not read it in her. She was beyond exhaustion not only of body but of spirit. She was hardly even aware that anyone else was there, let alone that it was he, yet he was overwhelmed with the knowledge that he had never seen another woman so beautiful. Physically she was totally familiar. He knew every part of her, had held her, touched her, but the soul of her was something apart, amazing and unexplored, a thing that filled him with awe. And it frightened him, because he knew the dark regions within himself, and felt he would
never be worthy of what he saw in her. He also knew that he would never measure or touch the end of his hunger that she would love him equally, that he would be worthy of it, unclouded and whole.

  Hester turned and saw him, and the moment broke. Her eyes met his long enough for understanding and a flood of relief. She spoke his name, smiling, then began to work again.

  He did what he could to help, increasingly aware with every moment that he had no skill, he did not even know the names of the instruments she needed or the types of bandages, and the blood and pain horrified him. How did anyone deal with this day after day, for weeks … years … and cling to sanity?

  He went out again, back to the battlefield, and found to his quickening fear that it had moved closer. It was after five in the afternoon and the Union forces had not taken Henry Hill—far from it; the Rebels were streaming down the slope and hard fighting was now backing towards where he stood. Clouds of dust obscured the details.

  He went back into the church.

  “The battle’s coming this way!” he said sharply. “We must get these men out.”

  The surgeon was there now, ashen-faced, moving as in a dream.

  “Don’t panic,” he said crossly. “It just looks closer than it is.”

  “Come and see it yourself, man!” Monk retorted, hearing his own voice rise, almost out of control. “The Rebels are coming this way! The Union troops are in retreat!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” the surgeon shouted at him. “If you can’t keep from hysterics, get out of here! That’s an order, mister! Get out of our way!”

  Monk went outside again, shaking with anger and shame. Was he panicking in front of Hester, who was so calm in this inferno of horror?

  He must steady himself. His legs were shaking. The sweat poured off his body. That was heat! It was like an oven.