Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [98]
We rolled up our sleeves, fetched the food and water, and set to work. But less than a minute passed after we’d entered the stifling room before the mingled smells of sweat and blood and sickness made my gorge rise. I battled to hold it down. As soon as the injured men saw us, they began clamoring for our help, moaning, whimpering. Dozens of them had survived amputations at the field hospitals, and as the morphine finally wore off, they screamed in shock and pain at the loss of their arms, their legs.
The first soldier Sally approached broke into anguished sobs, weeping, “My leg! Oh, God! They cut off my leg!” and Sally collapsed in a faint on top of him.
I ran into the hallway, calling for the matron. “Please, somebody help my friend, she’s fainted!”
The nurse gave me a withering look. “Push her aside and help the injured man.” She hurried past me toward another room.
I found smelling salts in Sally’s reticule and revived her. When she finished vomiting into her handkerchief, I rinsed her face with the washcloth meant for the soldiers.
“I can’t do this,” Sally wept. “I can’t look at those horrible amputated arms and legs. . . .”
“Don’t. Look at his face. Pretend that he’s Jonathan or one of your other beaux.” My voice gentled. “Because someday he might be.”
In the end, Sally stayed. We worked until late that afternoon, until neither of us could stand on our feet for another moment. If we had stayed until we were no longer needed, we would have been there for weeks.
That terrible day, I watched men die for the first time. Some of them struggled and grasped to hold on to life until the very end; others relinquished it with a peaceful sigh, a final exhaled breath. As Sally and I finally stepped outside into the thick July heat, I recognized that my own life hung from God’s hand by a slender silver thread. Its fragility made it no less precious in His eyes, but it pointed to the need to treasure it, to protect life at all costs.
Injured men crammed the yards and sidewalks outside the almshouse, some of them too weak to swat away the flies that swarmed around their wounds. Like so many other Richmond ladies that day, I gave an ambulance driver my address, and by nightfall my drawing room was filled with wounded men to nurse and feed.
“Lord have mercy on their souls!” Esther said when she saw their wretched condition. Luella and Eli carried every mattress and cushion in the house down to the drawing room, every pillow and blanket they could find. Esther cooked gallons of soup, which was all that many of the invalids could manage to eat. Ruby tore some of our linen bed sheets into strips for clean bandages, and Tessie volunteered to change and dress their wounds, nearly fainting herself the first time she saw the damage that a Minie ball could inflict. Eli spent the next several nights sleeping on the floor alongside the men, the only one of us strong enough to help a man turn over.
Along with my work at the almshouse, I now endured allnight vigils at home by the soldiers’ bedsides, making sure that no one had to spend the last hours of his life alone. On one such night, I sat with a young soldier named Wade, from Mississippi. I knew from the fetid smell of his shoulder wound and the ominous streaks that radiated from it like spokes that he would probably die. Wade knew it, too, and he struggled to die manfully, without weeping. He’d told me he was eighteen, but I didn’t believe him. The soft fuzz on his cheeks and his trembling youthful limbs told me that he couldn’t possibly be more than sixteen. Lying down made it difficult for Wade to breathe, so Eli helped him sit up, supporting him in his strong arms.
“Would you like us to pray with you?” I asked.
“I used to go to Sunday meetings. . . .” Wade mumbled. “Haven’t been in a long time. . . .”
“That doesn’t matter right now. God is always willing to hear your prayers.”
Wade nodded weakly and closed his eyes. I held his hand in mine and signaled to Eli to pray.
“Oh, Lord Jesus,” Eli began, “we ask you to—”
“No . . . no . .