Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [119]
The plague of flies that tormented all these poor, suffering souls seemed biblical in its proportions. Many soldiers survived their wounds and hasty field amputations only to be killed by one of the diseases that quickly spread in the suffocating heat. There were not enough bed sheets in all of Richmond to tear into bandages, not nearly enough drugs to deaden the pain, not enough help for the exhausted doctors who wept as still more ambulances arrived. Eli worked tirelessly beside me, lifting soldiers out of the ambulances in his brawny arms, carrying away the bodies of men who had died, making room for more. Gilbert drove Aunt Anne’s farm wagon back and forth from the battlefield all day, heaping it with wounded.
“I seen too many young men die today,” Eli told me with tears in his eyes. “They in the prime of they lives . . . Such a terrible waste.”
I couldn’t even speak of what I’d seen and experienced. By the end of the third day I returned home mute, certain that I’d never find the courage to return to the hospital again. Only the loving nourishment of Esther’s meals and Tessie’s enfolding arms gave me the strength to go back.
The battles continued the next day and the next, lasting an entire week. Each morning I gathered my courage to drive downtown and read the casualty lists. The stench of death in the sweltering city was so horrific I had to travel with a handkerchief pressed over my nose and mouth. The city couldn’t dig new graves and bury the dead fast enough, and the corpses quickly swelled and stank in the heat as they piled up.
“Look away, Missy Caroline,” Gilbert warned whenever we had to pass an open wagonload of the dead, headed for Hollywood or Oakwood cemeteries. With so many casualties, there was scarcely time for proper burial services as neither the clergy nor the gravediggers could keep up.
If General McClellan had received the information I’d brought, he hadn’t taken advantage of it. I was amazed to learn that the week-long battles hadn’t begun because he and his massive army had finally attacked us, but because our own Confederate forces under General Lee had launched an offensive strike, determined to push the Federals back down the Peninsula. I was even more amazed when the sounds of battle gradually receded in the distance day after day. The largest army ever assembled on American soil was, in fact, retreating—from Mechanicsville to Gaines’ Mill, to Savage’s Station, to Frayser’s Farm, and finally to Malvern Hill. From June 25 to July 1, Lee had attacked and won in battle after battle. His only defeat had come in the last battle at Malvern Hill, where Confederate troops bravely charged up an open slope and were mowed down wholesale. According to General Daniel Hill, “It was not war—it was murder.”
General Lee halted his offensive after Malvern Hill. But I couldn’t comprehend the news that McClellan continued to retreat, all the way to Harrison’s Landing and the safety of his gunboats on the James River. By summer’s end, he and his vast army were preparing to leave the Peninsula.
Once again Richmond had been spared—but there were no victory celebrations this time. Far too many people were in mourning. The price of victory had been costly—twenty-one thousand Confederate soldiers killed, wounded, or taken prisoner that terrible week. It seemed that every family in Richmond knew someone who had been among the casualties. Miraculously, my loved ones had been spared. After what I’d done, I knew I would never forgive myself if Charles had been killed.