“You’ll be at a hospital soon,” she said. “They’re beginning to load the trains.”
The next man was shivering, his injury not readily apparent until he opened his jacket.
“How is it?” he asked.
Blood blacked his stomach, and the edges of the wound were swollen and beginning to suppurate.
Stifling a gasp, she said, “You’ll be on a train soon.”
The train, the train. The train was all. The train was hope. They were all going to Washington, where the brand-new Armory Square Hospital was waiting for them. For many months she had seen it rise, the many pavilions, the modern conveniences, the open wards, bed after bed at the ready. She couldn’t remember where she had left her bag, with its depleted dressings and lint and the surgery kit, but all that was unnecessary now, for the trains were coming. “Drink this,” she said, filling a mouth with whiskey. “They’re sending trains.” The emptied jam jars became cups for water mixed with whiskey. A swallow, two, three, and then she moved on. Some of the men were barely covered, their shirts and pants torn away by the artillery. She tore strips of clothing and wound them around legs and arms, but the dirty cloth fell apart in her hands. No matter, they were sending trains. She was a purveyor of hope, the assurance of help to come. Mary began to imagine the sound of thousands of railcar doors sliding open at once. The trains are coming. The trains.
From time to time she discovered that she was crying.
Later, the sun emerged from the dark clouds and the ground began to steam. But now the flies began to nestle in the edges of the wounds. She beat them away. Just one of these men needed all of her attention, but there were thousands. A sudden thought came to her that one of them might be Thomas, and she leapt to her feet, off balance, searching for him, but every one of them looked the same: blackened by gunpowder, undernourished, exhausted, torn to shreds, suffering. She wanted to find him and she didn’t. She had to put him from her mind. By midafternoon, only a few more trains had rumbled into the station. Men were loaded on and taken away, but it was making no difference, because more wounded were arriving with every moment. From time to time, she ran back to the well to fill her emptied whiskey bottles with water. She worked her way up a steep, rocky incline toward the woods, crawling on her knees, past teamsters searching for lost whips and gravediggers digging shallow troughs. Here, on the hillside, away from the station, it was quieter. She could hear snatches of conversations and individual cries for mercy, which somehow made everything worse.
She was tying a tourniquet of torn cloth around the calf of a soldier when a familiar voice floated above the din.
“It’s not bad, you’ll do just fine.”
She was certain she must be hearing things. Ghosts appearing, because of desire.
“Your tibia, I think. A man can live with just a broken leg.”
That voice, with its distinctive, deep growl, the measured words, the innate intelligence. Where was it coming from? She was hearing things. Hearing hope.
She stood and turned in a circle as Dr. Stipp stepped from behind a tree, raised a hand to shield his eyes, and looked her way.
His hair had turned completely gray. Deep furrows creased his sunburned cheeks and forehead. He was gaunt, lean and rawboned, his face a coil of worry and strain, though his eyes were still that fine china blue, but clouded now with fatigue and agitation.
For a full minute, William Stipp could not speak, and then in an instant breached the gap between them, seized her hand, and, ignoring the men who were pulling at her skirts, dragged her past them all and climbed to a rocky outcrop. From this vantage point, Mary could see legions of maimed lying side by side under the trees.
“What are you doing here?” Stipp asked.
Mary fumbled in her pocket to produce Stanton’s notice that she had torn from the newspaper, as if that would explain everything, but she was exhausted and her hands shook. Sunlight dappled the ground beneath them. At some point, the sun had emerged from behind the clouds.
Stipp stared at the newspaper cutting and then threw it away. “You shouldn’t have come,” he said.
“I had to,” she said. “I stayed away before.”
Jenny, Stipp thought. Of course. Mary’s skirts and hands were scarlet, her lips chapped, her hair a nest of twigs and locomotive soot. How he had thought of her, all those months on the Peninsula.
“Do you have any morphine? I don’t have any morphine,” she said.
“There is no morphine. There is nothing. No dressings. No more whiskey. Nothing. We left behind all our medicine wagons on the Peninsula. All we have are the trains.”
The trains. Yes, the trains.
“I looked for you after you left. Where did you go?” he asked, grasping her by the elbow, but then he let go again and shouted, “God damn it.”
Behind them, in the ever-filling valley, another line of ambulances was arriving, while at the station a single locomotive idled, its few cars being loaded by figures moving at the pace of a truculent child. An eternity was passing in the time it was taking to lift a man onto a stretcher and shove him into a boxcar. “God, they’re moving so slowly. Don’t they know there isn’t any time? The Rebels could be upon us at any moment. You’d think they’d have learned. It’s the Peninsula all over again.” He began to pace back and forth, raking his hands over the dome of his head, which glistened in the suddenly brilliant sunshine. Stipp stopped and shut his eyes for a moment, as if he couldn’t stand to see the unraveling scene before him. Then he said, “We don’t have a choice. We’ll have to transport the ones we can save first. That’s what we’ll do. Otherwise, we are all doomed. Afterwards, we’ll load the rest.” He turned toward Mary, relieved he’d found the answer. “I need you to help, Mary. I need you to go down to the depot and sort them.”
“Sort them?”
“Organize the wounded into groups.”
It took a moment for what Stipp was saying to her to penetrate, and then its meaning entered her like a knife. “You want me to choose?”
“Yes.”
“But I cannot choose.” She twisted away, stumbling backward on the rocks.
He lunged toward her and grabbed her by the elbow, thrusting her before him to witness the scene from which he had turned away. “Listen to me, Mary. You see all those men? Most of them will die. If not here, then back in Washington. On the Peninsula, no one shot in the belly or chest or head survived, not one, no matter how fast we got to them. Do you understand? We have to save the most men. If we let one on the train who will die anyway, it will doom two.”
Mary wrenched free of his grasp. “But what if we treat them here, what if we set up a hospital?”
“There isn’t time. I need you to go down to the station and make certain that no one gets on that train who can’t be saved.”
“But I told them all that they would get on a train. They’re waiting. I told them—” But her voice trailed away. Exhaustion was magnifying everything: the wearying hours, the clatter of the trains, the harsh light falling on Stipp’s face. “The men are depending on me. I told them everyone would get on a train.”
“Now you’ll have to tell them something different.”
“But I can’t decide who will go and who will stay.” She was losing her sense of balance; she might topple over the outcrop, tumble down the hill, might prefer that to what Stipp was asking of her. Hovering there, between earth and sky, she thought she heard the distant crackle of gunfire or thunder.
The world declaring the situation dire, as if no one knew.
“Someone has to decide,” Stipp said.
“I can’t.”
“Then go home,” Stipp shouted, and turned and walked away.
Mary put her head in her hands. At home, Amelia would be feeding the baby; dinner would be being served on a white tablecloth, upstairs a bed would be waiting, and sheets, and someone to take her bloodied clothes from her, heat her bath water, and gentle her into a clean bed. Perhaps, even, the months of separation mig
ht have rendered Amelia grateful to see her again.
You see, it is a war. Everything is a war.
“Wait,” Mary cried. She hurried after Stipp and seized his arm, and he wheeled on her. He was utterly changed, even from a moment ago. Sweat and blood matted his beard and hair; his eyes were wild and black. That night, so long ago, when he had tried to bar her from the amputation, angry as he had been, he had looked nothing like this.
“You want to be a surgeon? To be a surgeon is to look a man in the eye and tell him the truth. If you can’t do that, then get out of here. Go home.” He was shouting now, his fury echoing the thunder rising in the distance. Stipp had taken her by the scaffolding of her shoulders as if he no longer trusted her, but now he pulled her into an embrace and whispered, “It is all butchery. Every bit of it. You cannot help them with just whiskey, Mary.”
Mary lifted her face to the sun, but it had fled behind the clouds and rain spilled from the sky.
“Choose who you are,” he whispered into her ear. “Choose who you’ll be.”
She cried out then, but softly, and then a look of recognition flared between them, but only for the briefest moment, and then they parted, Stipp along the ridge, assessing, and Mary threading through the men, resisting the urge to stop, to touch, to soothe, to do any of the things she had been doing moments before. But she did not look away, either, for she was already quantifying and tagging the men in her mind, sorting them one from the other, practicing, steeling herself for the work ahead, because she had already chosen who she was a long time ago, the moment she had inserted a knife into Jenny’s pelvis.
Chapter Forty-four
James Blevens sat across from John Brinton in the Surgeon General’s office at the Riggs Bank Building near the Mansion. Blevens had been called to meet Brinton, who had been appointed to an as yet unnamed post in the office of the Surgeon General. Hammond, the latest man to become surgeon general, was away at the Armory Square Hospital on the mall, meeting victims of the Second Bull Run coming off the trains, trying to get a sense of the numbers and what still needed to be done. Blevens, too, wanted to be there, to see if he could help in some indeterminate way. His hands were still clumsy, though perhaps he could assist, he thought. But for now he was stuck here, trying to understand what this stranger wanted from him. James could hardly keep track of who was in charge anymore. Tripler had been banished; Stanton had made a disastrous plea for the public to become temporary nurses; the new surgeon general was no one anyone knew. The whole business was a great mess.
Brinton, a man of about thirty, leaned across the polished walnut desk and asked, “How are your hands?”
“They’re coming along,” James said.
Brinton nodded. He understood how self-conscious Blevens was about his predicament: a surgeon who had been kept from going to the Peninsula because he had not been able to adequately control a scalpel. Brinton would not embarrass Blevens further by asking how much progress he had made along that line; it was none of his concern. Indeed, it was to his advantage if Blevens were to remain completely out of field work.
“Hammond has instituted a medical museum.”
“A medical museum?”
“A place for research. It is not yet widely known. Joseph Woodward is in charge of the medical portion, I am in charge of the surgical.”
Startled, James said, “I think a place of research is essential. So much is known, but hardly anyone has compiled it. I’ve been looking at specimens, trying to discern cause. Microscopy is helpful, particularly in the stool, but even more so in sputum. The fluids of our bodies harbor more than we think they do. It’s entirely possible that contagion is not so much the effect of humors, but of—” James broke off. He was babbling. The months of isolated research had done that to him. “I think a center for research is an excellent idea,” he concluded.
“I thought you might think so. In this, I believe we will find some purpose for the carnage, if there can be any. Or at least we can make it so. Not just a silver lining, but silver, or gold itself, in the form of collective knowledge.”
“Exactly,” Blevens said. “Will you publish the findings?”
“Yes. Something like the History of the British Medical Services in the Crimea, but more extensive. A medical history of the war. We’ll write up cases. I particularly wish to look at statistics—of disease, efficacious treatment, occurrence, et cetera. So many men are dying of disease. I have particular interest, as do you, in microscopy.”
“The cause of disease, not just its symptoms.” Now Blevens was leaning forward too, his scarred hands on the desk.
“Yes. True causality, discoverable, I think, in the invisible.”
Blevens exhaled and sat back and worked his fingers, contemplating the depth and breadth of the proposed work
“But I need help,” Brinton said. “At present, what we require are specimens of morbid anatomy, surgical or medical, which can be regarded as valuable; along with the projectiles and foreign bodies that caused the wound. I need someone with an eye and a passion for research who can convince a field surgeon to go to the trouble of retaining examples of tissue and bone. Someone who’s been on a battlefield, who would know the pressures. From what I understand, you were at Bull Run.”
Blevens nodded.
“We’ll need histories, too, summaries to be sent along with the specimens. It will be a lot of extra work for the surgeons. They’ll need to be persuaded of the value of it, the need for it. I think you ought to explain that the medical officer who sends in a specimen will have his name attached to the report, credit given. This will provide incentive, I think. I need someone like you, someone who can talk the surgeons into seeing the advantage for them, but also someone who is very adept at acquiring specimens. You understand, this will be the entire army collaborating in research.” He studied James, watching for signs of objection, but there were none. “If you are willing, I’ll assign you to follow the Army of the Potomac.”
“To follow them?” Blevens asked. “But haven’t you heard? The army is all here.” That morning, a newspaper boy had been hawking the headlines: “Retreat from Fairfax Is Complete. Lincoln asks McClellan to Head the Defenses of Washington. Rebel Army in Motion.”
“For now, begin with the Armory Square Hospital. See what you can find. Follow cases, explain what we need. And then, if the war goes on—” He stopped speaking and looked down at the massive desk.
He is ashamed, Blevens thought. Without the war, there would be no research. Without the war, there would be no opportunity for learning.
They avoided one another’s eyes for a moment.
“Someone has to wring the good from all of this,” Blevens said.
Brinton brightened. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
Outside, on Pennsylvania Avenue, Blevens passed a line of Pope’s defeated soldiers hobbling toward Fort Stevens as citizens scurried to stock their homes in case of siege. How he wished he could tell Mary about the project. On his forays to the various hospitals across the city, he had searched for her, but it was as if she had vanished. From time to time he’d even perused the contract and transient nurse lists pouring into the Surgeon General’s office from the hospitals, but that had yielded nothing. Finally, he’d written Amelia, and her reply had hinted of panic and despair. She didn’t know where her daughter was, hadn’t heard from her since she’d sent her off on the train in February. Wasn’t there anything Blevens could do to help? There had been a breach. Jenny had died. Had he heard? Had he seen Mary? The baby was well, though. Thriving. If he found Mary, would he tell her this?
After receiving the letter, James had paid to have his name listed in the City Directory, though he wasn’t certain that Mary would seek him out. In his bleakest moments, he worried that Mary had been unable to forgive herself, worried what she might have done, in desperation. If anyone knew how to end her own life, it would be Mary. But he pushed the unholy thought away. He was imagining, out of worry.
He flagged down
a hack, climbed in, and headed for the Armory Square Hospital.
Chapter Forty-five
Jake Miles walked the grounds of Armory Square Hospital with a kind of jiggly, excitable gait that betrayed his agitation, shirttails hanging, his suspenders slipping from his shoulders. He’d been appointed guard when no one else knew what to do with him. In the heat of early September it was simply too hot to tolerate the scratchy, shoddy wool of his uniform jacket. Every so often in his assigned circumlocution of the hospital he crammed his hand down the inside of his pants leg to pluck his flask from its harness and knock back a good swallow. During the months of the hospital’s construction, when his job had been to prevent the theft of building materials, he’d found shelter in the lee of a pile of scrap wood, but all that had been cleaned up. To sneak a swallow now he had to look around and be quick about it. But in the last few days, the growing heap of limbs outside the surgery window had provided a refuge behind which he could hunker down. He squatted with his back turned, his shoulders hunched, knowing that to passersby on the mall he appeared to be reverently tending the pile, whose presence they greeted first with shock, then revulsion, followed by ashamed glances to verify the savagery.
It was near noon. The sun was white in the Washington sky. Jake could see the doctors through the open window of the surgery doing their depraved work of lopping off arms and legs. Jake had no idea if he was supposed to do something with the pile of limbs rising outside the window or not, but he refused to touch them. The wretched stink nauseated. That was the other reason he required the whiskey.
After tucking his flask away, he rose like a phoenix from behind the pile of limbs and sauntered around the side of the hospital to B Street, where ambulances and carriages bearing visitors had been arriving all morning. Jake idly surveyed the visitors, mostly Washington women swaying up the walk in their wide hoop skirts, but there were others whose object in coming was to search for loved ones. They were just off the train from somewhere distant, their faces a collective mask of grief. As Jake studied them, more as a matter of boredom than anything else, a tall man disengaged himself from a hack and strode up the walkway. There was something in his posture that made Jake feel a sudden longing for Bonnie, though he didn’t know why. Something about the way the man walked, or his studied absentmindedness. Jake hid in the corner under the eaves and watched him march past.
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