The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (157 page)

Rob J. was setting up his medical station behind an imposing mausoleum that offered both protection and a little shade, when a heavily perspiring colonel came up and asked for the medical officer. He identified himself as Colonel Martin Nichols of the Medical Department, and said he was the organizer of medical services. “Are you experienced at surgery?” he asked.

It didn’t seem the time for modesty. “Yes, I am. Quite experienced,” Rob J. said.

“Then I need you at a hospital where serious cases are being sent for surgery.”

“If you don’t mind, Colonel, I want to remain with this regiment.”

“I do mind, Doctor, I do. I have some good surgeons, but also some young and inexperienced physicians performing vital surgery and making a damn mess of it. They’re amputating limbs without leaving flaps, and several are making stumps that have several inches of exposed bone. They’re trying strange experimental operations that experienced surgeons wouldn’t—resection of the head of the humerus, disarticulation of the hip joint, disarticulation of the shoulder joint. Making unnecessary cripples and patients who are going to wake up crying with terrible pain every morning for the rest of their lives. You’ll relieve one of those so-called surgeons, and I’ll send him up here to slap dressings onto the wounded.”

Rob J. nodded. He told Ordway he was in charge of the medical station
until another doctor got there, and he followed Colonel Nichols down the hill.

The hospital was in town, in the Catholic church, which he saw was named for Saint Francis; he would have to remember to tell that to Ferocious Miriam. There was an operating table placed in the entry, with the double doors wide open to give the surgeon maximum light. The pews had been covered with boards spread with straw and blankets to make beds for the wounded. In a small, damp room in the cellar, illuminated by lamps that gave off a yellow light, there were two more surgical tables, and Rob J. took over one of these. He removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves as far as they would go, while a corporal of the First Cavalry Division administered chloroform to a soldier whose hand had been carried off by a cannonball. As soon as the boy was anesthetized, Rob J. took the arm off above the wrist, leaving a good flap for the stump.

“Next!” he called. Another patient was carried in, and Rob J. gave himself up to the work.

The basement was about twenty by forty feet. There was another surgeon at a table across the room, but he and Rob seldom looked at one another and had little to say. In the course of the afternoon Rob J. noted that the other man did good work, and he received a similar appraisal, and each of them focused on his own table. Rob J. probed for bullets and metal, replaced eviscerated intestines and sewed up the wounds, and amputated. And amputated some more. The minié ball was a slow-moving projectile, especially damaging when it hit bone. When it carried away or destroyed bone in large pieces, the only thing the surgeons could do was take the limb. On the dirt floor between Rob J. and the other surgeon there rose a pile of arms and legs. From time to time, men came in and took the severed limbs away.

After four or five hours, another colonel, this one in a gray uniform, came into the basement room and told the two doctors they were prisoners. “We’re better soldiers than you folks, we’ve taken the whole town. Your troops have been pushed to the north, and we’ve captured four thousand of you.” There wasn’t much to say. The other surgeon looked at Rob J. and shrugged. Rob J. was operating and told the colonel he was in the way of the light.

Whenever there was a brief lull, he tried to doze for a few minutes, on his feet. But there were few lulls. The warring armies slept at night, but the
doctors worked steadily, trying to save the men the armies had torn apart. There was no window in the basement room, and the lamps were kept turned up. Soon Rob J. lost all comprehension of the time of day.

“Next,” he called.

Next! Next! Next!

It was the equivalent of having to clean out the Augean stable, because as soon as he finished with one patient, they carried in another. Some wore bloodstained and ragged gray uniforms and some wore bloodstained and ragged blue, but he soon understood they were available in inexhaustible supply.

Other things weren’t inexhaustible. The church hospital soon ran out of dressings; they had no food. The colonel who had told him the South had better soldiers, now told him the South had neither chloroform nor ether.

“You can’t put shoes on their feet or give them anesthesia for their pain. That’s why you’ll lose in the end,” Rob J. said without satisfaction, and asked the officer to round up a supply of liquor. The colonel went away, but sent someone with whiskey for the patients and hot pigeon soup for the doctors, which Rob J. drank down without tasting.

Without anesthesia, he got several strong men to hold the patients and he operated the way he had when he was younger, cutting, sawing, sewing, fast and expertly, the way William Fergusson had taught him. His victims screamed and thrashed. He didn’t yawn, and although he blinked a lot, his eyes stayed open. He was aware that his feet and ankles were becoming painfully swollen, and sometimes as they carried out one patient and carried in another, he stood and rubbed his right hand with his left. Every case was different, but there are only so many ways to destroy human beings and soon they were all the same, all duplicates, even the ones with their mouths destroyed, or their genitals shot off, or their eyes shot out.

The hours passed, one by one.

He came to feel he had spent most of his life in the small damp room cutting up human beings, and that he was damned to be there forever. But eventually there was change in the noises that reached them. The people in the church had grown accustomed to groans and cries, the cannon and musket sounds, the crumping of the mortars, and even the shuddering concussion of near-hits. But the firing and bombardment reached a new crescendo, a sustained frenzy of bursting sound that lasted for several hours, and then
there was a relative silence in which those in the church suddenly could hear what they said to one another. Then there came a new sound, a roar that lifted and went on and on like the ocean, and when Rob J. sent a Confederate orderly to find out what it was, the man came back and muttered brokenly that it was the goddamn mizzable fuckin Yankees cheerin, that’s what it was.

Lanning Ordway came a few hours later and found him still standing in the little room.

“Doc. My God, Doc, you come with me.”

Ordway told him he’d been there the better part of two days, and told him where the 131st was bivouacked. And Rob J. allowed Mine Good Comrade and Mine Terrible Enemy to lead him away into a safe and untenanted storage room where a soft bed of clean hay could be prepared, and he lay down and he slept.

It was late the next afternoon when he was awakened by the groaning and screams of the wounded they had placed all around him on the storeroom floor. Other surgeons were at the tables, doing fine without him. There was no point in trying to use the church’s latrine, which long since had been overtaxed. He went outside into a hard, driving rain, and in the healing wet he emptied his bladder behind some lilac bushes that the Union owned again.

The Union owned all of Gettysburg again. Rob J. walked through the rain, taking in the sights. He forgot where Ordway had said the 131st was camped, and he asked everyone he met. Finally he found them spread out over several farm fields south of the town, hunkered inside their tents.

Wilcox and Ordway greeted him with warmth that moved him. They had eggs! While Lanning Ordway crushed hardtack and fried the crumbs and the eggs in pork grease for the doctor’s breakfast, they filled him in on what had happened, the bad first. The band’s best bass horn player, Thad Bushman, had been killed. “One tiny little hole in his chest, Doc,” Wilcox said. “Must of hit just the right spot.”

Of the litter-bearers, Lew Robinson was the first to get shot. “He got hit in the foot right after you left us,” Ordway said. “Oscar Lawrence got near cut in two by artillery yesterday.”

Ordway finished scrambling the eggs and set the pan before Rob J., who was thinking with genuine sorrow about the clumsy young drummer. But to his shame he couldn’t resist the food, wolfing it down.

“Oscar was too young. He should of been home with his momma,” Wilcox said bitterly.

Rob J. burned his mouth on the black coffee, which was terrible but tasted fine. “We all should have been home with our mommas,” he said, and belched. He finished the rest of the eggs slowly and had another cup of coffee while they told him what had happened while he was in the church cellar.

“That first day, they pushed us back to the high ground north of the town,” Ordway said. “That was the luckiest thing could of happened to us.

“The next day we was on Cemetery Ridge in a long skirmish line that run between two pairs of hills, Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill on the north, closest to the town, and Round Top and Little Round Top a couple of miles to the south. The fightin was terrible, terrible. A lot was killed. We kept busy haulin the wounded.”

“We did all right, too,” Wilcox said. “Just like you showed us.”

“I bet you did.”

“Next day the 131st was moved out onto Cemetery Ridge, to reinforce Howard’s Corps. Around noon we took a hell of a beatin from the Confederate cannon,” Ordway said. “Our forward pickets could see that while they was shellin us, a whole lot of Confederate troops was movin well below us, into the woods other side of the Emmitsburg Road. We could see metal, shiny here and there among the trees. They kept up the shellin for a hour or more, and they scored a good many hits too, but all the time we was gettin ready, because we knew they was goin to attack.

“Midafternoon, their cannon stopped, and so did ours. And then somebody yelled, ‘They’re comin!’ and fifteen thousand rebel bastards in gray uniforms stepped outta those woods. Those boys of Lee’s moved toward us shoulder to shoulder, line after line. Their bayonets was like a long curvin fence of steel pickets above their heads, with the sun bright and hard on it. They didn’t yell, didn’t say a word, just come toward us at a fast, steady walk.

“I tell you, Doc,” Ordway said, “Robert E. Lee whipped our arse lots of times and I know he’s a mean, smart sonofabitch, but he wasn’t smart here in Gettysburg. We couldn’t believe it, watchin them rebels come at us like that across open fields, with us on high, protected ground. We knew they was dead men, and they must of knew it too. We watched them come most a mile. Colonel Symonds and other officers up and down the line was yellin, ‘Hold your fire! Let em get close. Hold your fire!’ They must of been able to hear that too.

“When they was close enough for us to make out their faces, our artillery from Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge opened up, and a lot of them just disappeared. Those that was left came at us through the smoke, and Symonds finally yelled ‘Fire!’ and everybody shot hisself a rebel. Somebody yelled, ‘Fredericksburg!’ and then everybody was yellin it. ‘Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!’ and shootin and reloadin, and shootin and reloadin, and shootin …

“They reached the stone wall at the bottom of our ridge only at one place. Them that did fought like doomed men, but they was all killed or captured,” Ordway said, and Rob J. nodded. That, he knew, was when he had heard the cheering.

Wilcox and Ordway had worked all night carrying wounded, and now they were going back. Rob J. went with them, through the downpour. As they approached the place of the battle, he saw the rain was a blessing, because it kept down the smell of death, which already was terrible nonetheless. Swelling bodies lay everywhere. Amid the wreckage and carnage of war, rescuers searched to glean the living.

For the rest of the morning Rob J. worked in the rain, dressing wounds and carrying one corner of a litter. When he brought the wounded to the hospitals, he saw why his boys had had eggs. Wagons were being unloaded everywhere. There was plenty of medicine and anesthesia, plenty of dressings, plenty of food. Surgeons were three deep at every operating table. A grateful United States had heard that at last they had a victory, paid for at a terrible price, and they had determined nothing should be spared those who had survived.

Near the railroad depot he was approached by a civilian man about his own age, who asked him politely if he knew where it might be possible to get a soldier embalmed, as if asking him for the time of day or the directions to the town building. The man said he was Winfield S. Walker, Jr., a farmer from Havre de Grace, Maryland. When he’d heard of the battle, something had told him to come and see his son Peter, and he had found him among the dead. “Now I would like to have the body embalmed so I can take him home, don’t you know.”

Rob J. did. “I’ve heard they are embalming at the Washington House Hotel, sir.”

“Yessir. But they told me there they have an exceedingly long list, many before me. I thought to look elsewhere.” His son’s body was at
the Harold farm, a farmhouse-hospital off the Emmitsburg Road.

“I’m a physician. I can do it for you,” Rob J. said.

He had the necessary items in the medical pannier back at the 131st, and he went and collected them and then met Mr. Walker at the farmhouse. Rob J. had to tell him as delicately as possible to go get an army coffin that was zinc-lined, because there would be leakage. While the father was off on that sorry errand, he tended to the son, in a bedroom where six other dead men were stored. Peter Walker was a beautiful young man, perhaps twenty years old, with his father’s chiseled features and thick dark hair. He was unmarked save that a shell had torn off his left leg at the thigh. He had bled to death, and his body had the whiteness of a marble statue.

Rob J. mixed an ounce of chloride of zinc salts into two quarts of alcohol and water. He tied off the artery in the severed leg so the fluid would be retained, then slit the femoral artery of the uninjured leg and injected the embalming fluid into it with a syringe.

Mr. Walker had no trouble getting a casket from the army. He tried to pay for the embalming, but Rob J. shook his head. “One father helping another,” he said.