Confederates (12 page)

Searcy said: ‘Indeed he has.'

‘As I said,' muttered the General, ‘don't make a meal of it.' He looked at his plate. There was a carrot left on it. He had eaten nothing but carrots this evening.

Drunken Thomas began muttering at length, and the General decided the meal was over. Kyd Douglas, in his role as Jackson's pacifier, led Searcy out into the night and offered him a cigar, which Searcy refused, lighting instead one of his own cheroots. Down in the meadows campfires were burning out, but you could still hear laughter and violins – one violin to the west playing ‘Juanita', another from the fence by the Charles City Road sawing away at the ‘Grand March Innovation'.

‘The boys are well rested now,' Douglas said.

‘And going to remain so, by what the General says.'

‘You know the General. The summer isn't over yet. The bloom, Mr Searcy, the bloom's still on it.'

‘So that anything can happen?'

‘Bet your boots on it, sir. It's our slow government that's holding us here. But by the time they get enough letters from Lee and Jackson, they generally arrive at the right idea.'

‘Which is to invade the North.'

‘That's dead right, Mr Searcy, Of course everything I say to you here is as a friend.'

‘But aren't there men in the Confederate Army, Virginians, North Carolinans, who enlisted to defend the Confederacy but would shy off marching into the North?'

‘On every march you lose men. The footsore, the sore in spirit and all the rest.'

‘You come from Maryland, don't you, Mr Douglas?'

‘That's right.'

‘You hope to be home by autumn then?'

‘That's right. Though I don't wish to have that idea ascribed to me in your journal.'

Then something happened that took the edge off all Kyd Douglas's brave talk. Over the snuffling of horses, the chirring of insects, the burr of mosquitoes, the grate of fiddles, the drowsily sung songs, they could hear a man nearby who was weeping beyond all comfort. Instead of looking for whoever it was, they coughed and pretended not to have heard him, and walked off towards the staff tents.

10

The following evening, Mrs Dora Whipple was drinking tea in her living quarters, when the black girl came and said there was a soldier in Ward 17 who wanted to see her right away.

‘You wait here, Sally,' she told the girl, ‘right here at my table and if a Mr Searcy comes – an English gentleman – why, you make him some tea.'

Then Mrs Whipple pulled a shawl over her pretty but narrow shoulders. ‘And, Sally,' she said, ‘offer him some of that broth the boy in the Georgia ward wouldn't eat.'

She rushed out of her little house. It was not so much a house as a two-storey lean-to stuck on to the end of Wards 1 and 2, and it had been built of green lumber. As the timbers had seasoned and shrunk, spaces appeared between the boards of the wall and the floor. When there was a high wind even now, dust or rain swept in through these spaces. Next winter, she guessed, snow might too.

Now she walked the dusty avenue between long white huts. For this was Chimborazo, the great military hospital. In fact, the surgeon-in-chief and many of Mrs Whipple's friends in Richmond society said Chimborazo was the biggest military hospital in the world, and she supposed that was true. By moonlight she could see the white wards stretching away to the western stars. Chimborazo wasn't just one hospital, it was five, and each of these five had its dozens of wards. Mrs D. Whipple was matron of Hospital No. 2 and her charges were Virginians, Marylanders, Georgians, Alabamans. Experience as a matron had taught her to keep them apart in their own wards, for if a Virginian saw a Marylander getting attention he would complain. It was true both of boys on the mend and boys who were dying. In her first two months at Chimborazo, a dying Georgian used some of his small allotment of breath to compain that he saw a wounded Alabaman being tended more than he was.

So No. 17 was a Georgian ward. She didn't feel warmly towards Georgians, because they were fussy eaters. Just today Mrs Whipple had requisitioned three chickens and made them up into a rich broth, cutting up the raw meat herself, something she would never have thought of doing with her own hands in happier days, when she kept house with her late husband Major Yates Whipple. While she prepared the chicken, she had got an orderly to
steal
parsley from the nearby market garden so that she could season the broth. She'd been so proud of her chicken soup with parsley that she went herself into the Georgian ward with the orderly to see that the ones who needed it most got it. And there were many in Ward 17 who needed it. D. H. Hill's Georgia regiments had suffered many wounds at Gaines' Mill some ten days past.

Yet one grey-faced boy shook his head at the broth and told her: ‘I was never much of a hand for drinks.' Another, a ghost of a boy with a chest wound, pointed to the parsley: ‘My mammy's soup was not like that much. I might jest have worried down a little of it if it weren't for all them weeds a-floatin' round.'

This evening Ward 17 was quiet. Many of the boys were already sleeping. Lamps burnt softly on ledges over the beds. The floor was clean except for a few crumpled-up tract pages. Preachers handed religious tracts out in the day, and their brown absorbent pages – so bad for taking print – made first-rate handkerchiefs. There was a taint of urine and human waste about the place, but not a tenth as bad as when she'd first took the matron's job. When she first came here, she found that some assistant surgeons would drink the men's whisky supply during the morning, and then lock themselves away in their offices all day singing and smoking and telling vulgar stories, while men died in their cots and the chamber pots overflowed with human filth. Now Mrs Whipple kept the whisky supply under lock and key in her quarters, and some of the assistant surgeons hated her for it.

She could see who it was that had sent for her. It was a lean up-country Georgian, jaundice-yellow, sitting up awkwardly on his cot. His shoulder and upper arm were imprisoned in heavy bandages and his throat was also bound. Wispy and foul yellow hair hung all over the bandages. Mrs Whipple had seen him before – he'd been wounded by shell casing at Fair Oaks. He was a lucky young man in that he had the sort of wounds that were left alone by surgeons in the field, and the first one to lay a knife on him was the surgeon-in-chief at Chimborazo, who was said to be the best surgeon on the North American continent. Now, however, the Georgian's blue eyes were fever bright. Mrs Whipple believed she knew half the cause, for at the cot beside his, orderlies were wrapping up a corpse in its bedclothes.

‘You what they call the matron?' the boy asked Mrs Whipple.

‘I am. You know that. You've seen me in this ward before.'

‘I swear to you on my maw's honour I ain't ever lit eyes on you.'

‘You were likely in a fever.'

‘Maybe so. Can you write a letter for me?'

He reached out his hand. The nails were long; they were like claws.

‘Why don't you let the orderlies cut your nails?'

The boy ignored this. ‘I thought,' he said, ‘that since Hec there perished, I'd better get
some
letter or other off to my folks.'

‘Don't be so stupid, sir. You'll have lots of time for letters. And for clipping your nails as well.'

The Georgian looked down at those claws. ‘But I ain't got no spoon and I been using them instead.'

‘I'll get you a spoon. And that hair of yours. You can't get better with all that dirty hair hanging over your wounds.'

‘Ma'am, I can't get my hair cut, cause as how I promised my maw I'd let it grow till the war be over. It's unlucky as the devil hisself to lop it off, ma'am.'

The superstitions of poor whites! thought Mrs Whipple. ‘Then I can't write a letter for you,' she said.

From the next bed, two orderlies lifted the corpse now and carried it away. They seemed to do it easily, boys wasted to nothing after wounds, and half the surgeons didn't seem to know what to feed the ailing to stop them rotting away. Wide-eyed, the Georgian watched the orderlies toting their package down the ward and out of doors. ‘Farewell, Hector,' he called too loudly, and some of the sleeping stirred and complained.

‘I promise you, sir,' said Mrs Whipple, putting on a face as severe as she could manage, ‘that you are not going to join Hector. I shall call an orderly to cut your hair while you dictate your letter to me.'

She did so. The orderly was a pimply-faced boy who didn't like doing much after dark, but he and all his colleagues feared her, because she had power to complain to the chief surgeon. It was said too that she spent her days off at the house of the Secretary of the Navy in Richmond, where she got to speak with all manner of generals and the Secretary of War himself.

Soon lumps of dirty golden hair were falling on the Georgian's pillow and on the floor. The boy began his dictation, and Mrs Whipple wrote.

My dear mah,

I hope this finds you well as it leaves me well. And I hope I shall get a furlough at Christmas and come and see you, and I hope you will keep well, and all the folks be well by that time, as I hopes to be well again myself. I myself had a little damage on the shoulder and neck from the Yankees at Fair Oaks but the surgeons treated me passable and I was strong as Peterson's bull again so no cause for any fretting. It was some fight at Fair Oaks but they've all been passable fights according to the boys. A friend I met here called Hec …

He couldn't speak more than that. His eyes grew more fevered still. She slapped his wrist.

‘Come now, private, let's leave Hec to his God.'

His eyes came back to her face and fixed on it and grew wilder. ‘You married?' he asked.

‘I was. I am a widow.'

‘You're but passable pretty but you're a nice woman jest the same.'

‘I thank you, private.'

‘I would marry a sweet thing like you if'n ever you felt the need.'

Behind the Georgian's left ear the orderly began to snicker. Dora Whipple looked coldly at him and he quickly stopped. She finished the letter, folded the coarse army paper it was written on. She found a 5¢ stamp in the small purse she wore at her waist. Half her small income went on 5¢ stamps. ‘I am honoured by your offer, sir, and shall remember it.' She looked at the orderly. ‘Don't forget to sweep the floor,' she told him.

Back in her quarters, she found a young man sitting at a table, reading one of her books. He was clearly a gentleman. As he stood up, she decided that he was handsome. There was a square yet delicate face, a big cavalry officer's type of moustache. He was broad in the shoulders, and not of more than average height.

‘Mr Searcy?'

The young man nodded. ‘Mrs Whipple,' he said.

Searcy saw a little narrow-shouldered woman with a pug face. Yet she had a lively sort of aura that made her seem much bigger. Mrs Whipple asked him would he like tea and he said no. Therefore she sent the black girl off to bed. They could hear her tramping around upstairs. Searcy didn't want to say anything important in those circumstances, and began to make small talk.

‘I must say,' he began, ‘that I expected Chimborazo to be a scene of confusion, what with all the casualties …'

‘The confusion extends between the battleground and the hospital gates and stops there. If we let it spread into the hospital itself we would never get rid of it. But please speak as you wish, for if you're worrying about my black girl eavesdropping, then you needn't. I've known her for years, and it's against her nature to eavesdrop.'

‘Pardon me, Mrs Whipple, but it's not only your slave girl. You understand I can't be overly careful. I don't know how to say this, but how can I be assured of your standing in the … in the Union chain?'

‘Then how would I have known to send for you? Unless certain important people in the … what did you call it? … in the
Union chain
told me to do it.'

Searcy laughed and rubbed his brow. ‘You'll have to forgive me once again … but it seems that you could equally be an agent of the Confederacy trying to encourage me to give myself away. You're from North Carolina, I believe.…'

‘I was born in Boston, sir, and schooled there to the age of fifteen.'

‘Yes, but you married a North Carolina man. A man who rose to the rank of major in a North Carolina regiment and who was killed at … Ball's Bluff, wasn't it?'

‘Ball's Bluff, yes,' said the widow through narrowed lips.

‘Of course I feel deeply for you, madam, in your loss, and I wouldn't like to do anything to revive your sorrow. What I
am
saying is that you seem to have little reason to love the Union.'

‘The Confederacy killed Major Whipple, sir,' she said tranquilly. ‘By its rebellion – which he loyally followed-the Confederacy killed my husband.'

‘I am told you are a great friend of the Secretary of the Navy and his wife.…'

‘My husband and the secretary grew up together.'

‘Also with General Gilmer and his wife. And that you frequently take tea with Mrs Jeff Davis herself.'

Mrs Whipple screwed her little face up and grinned at him. ‘So you think I'm spying on you on Mrs Varina Davis's orders?'

‘What I wonder – and yet again you must forgive me, madam – is this. If you are an agent of the Union, how much do you feel towards all these good friends of yours? And how do you feel towards the soldiers in the wards of this hospital?'

The widow closed her eyes and the lips narrowed again. ‘That, Mr Searcy, is none of your business. In general I feel that in anything I do for the Union I am helping my friends and helping the boys in the wards. Because the rebellion cannot succeed, sir.'

‘Not everyone, even on the Union's side, is so sure about that, ma'am.'