A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [198]
Mary Sophia Hill went to Fredericksburg to offer her help and found it a ghost town: “If ever you saw a city of desolation it was this.”40 Every house was perforated by cannonballs; whole streets lay in rubble. But when Captain Phillips, who had been reunited with his friend Captain Wynne, went down into the town to investigate, they discovered it was far from empty. Major von Borcke accompanied them, recalling in his memoirs, “A number of the houses which we entered presented a horrid spectacle—dead and wounded intermingled in thick masses.”
As they trod carefully over human debris, Phillips suddenly grabbed von Borcke’s arm and pointed to the body of a soldier who was missing a part of his skull: “Great God, that man is still alive!” His cry caused the soldier to open his eyes and stare “at us with so pitiable an expression that I could not for long after recall it without shuddering.” Helpless, the men knelt down and stayed with him for a moment.15.2 41 Francis Lawley was gripped by similar scenes in other parts of the town. “Death, nothing but death everywhere,” he wrote afterward; “great masses of bodies tossed out of the churches as the sufferers expire; layers of corpses stretched in the balconies of houses as though taking a siesta … horrified and aghast at what I saw, I could not look.”42 Sickened by the unrelieved suffering around him, he returned to Richmond without waiting for his friends.
The first of the wounded began to arrive in Washington on December 14. These were the men who could drag themselves off the battlefield and board steamers without assistance. It was another two days before the seriously injured were brought from the field hospitals. An English military observer at one of these hospitals thought he had never witnessed anything so barbarous:
There were about 60 surgeons without coats (chiefly French, German and Irish), covered in blood and dirt, chatting, arguing, and laughing and swearing, and cutting and sawing more like the devils and machines than human beings. Large heaps of legs, and arms were piled here and there, all sizes, and stages of decomposition … I thought I could stand a good deal but … I felt myself grow pale and dared not speak for a few minutes.43
It seemed incredible that any patient could leave such a place alive.
The hospital ships disgorged thousands of stretchers along the crowded waterfront. The wounded lay on the ground for hours until ambulance drivers heaved them onto wagons and ferried them to various hospitals around the city. The new pavilion-style hospitals advocated by Florence Nightingale were being built as quickly as possible. The haste produced careless mistakes: one hospital was left without a mortuary, forcing administrators to stack the dead in an adjacent lot until burial; another was placed next to an open sewer. The newest hospital, Lincoln General, opened the week of the Battle of Fredericksburg, but even though it had a capacity of 2,575 patients, the number of casualties far exceeded the available beds: hotels, churches, warehouses, even a floor of the Patent Office were converted into makeshift wards. The novelist Louisa May Alcott had been a nurse for all of three days when a line of carts drew up outside the old Union Hotel in Georgetown. The ballroom became Ward Number One with forty beds. The filthy, blood-smeared arrivals were undressed and washed before they were allowed to lie on the sheets. Miss Alcott amazed herself by performing the task without shuddering. Then a British surgeon dressed their wounds. “He had served in the Crimea,” she wrote,