Fire by Night (11 page)
Three days later, Julia and her father sat in the Christian Commission’s tiny downtown office with Reverend Greene. The minister spent several minutes enthusiastically explaining the group’s goals and principles, probably expecting a sizable donation from Judge Hoffman, who listened in stern silence.
“Any monetary contributions are being spent to purchase Bibles,” Greene finished. “We’re staffed by volunteers, as you know, who donate a few weeks or months of their time to go into the field with our soldiers. I’ll be going as a volunteer myself this spring to distribute the items we collected at the bazaar. By the way, Miss Hoffman,” he said, turning to Julia, “I want to thank you again for all your hard work. The event was an enormous success.”
“I’m glad.” She saw respect in his gray-blue eyes and summoned the courage to plunge ahead, not waiting for her father. “The reason we’ve come, Reverend, is because I was quite moved by your words on the night of the bazaar. I would like to volunteer my time to work for the Commission.”
“Wonderful! We certainly could use your help in organizing more events like the last one. Any funds you raise will be greatly appreciated by—”
“That’s not what I mean. I want to go out in the field as a volunteer.”
His warm smile faded. He looked from Julia to her father, then back to Julia with an expression of concern. “I’m very sorry if my words were misleading the other night. While it’s true that we do need volunteers, I’m afraid that it would be out of the question to accept an unmarried woman as a delegate.”
“But …but why?” Julia’s disappointment was so great the words sprang from her mouth before she could stop them. “That’s not fair!”
“I’m sorry …but surely you understand, Judge Hoffman. Our volunteers live in tents alongside thousands of soldiers. There are a few female volunteers, but they are all married women.”
“Yes, I do understand,” Julia’s father replied. “I tried to explain this to my daughter, but she wouldn’t listen to me. I thought she might accept it better if it came directly from you. Thank you for your time.” He stood to go. Julia was unable to move from her chair.
“Please, you said you needed nurses,” she begged. “That’s what I want to be. Isn’t there any way?”
“Women from your station in life simply don’t do that sort of work,” her father insisted. “Come now. We don’t want to take any more of Reverend Greene’s time.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Greene said, “but that’s not quite true. Dorothea Dix has been appointed the Director of Nurses inWashington, and I assure you that the women she’s training to become nurses have come from the finest of backgrounds, just like your daughter.”
“Is that so? Does she accept unmarried women?”
“Well, I’m not sure, but Miss Dix herself is single. And I know that the need for nurses is very great. If Julia is serious about becoming a nurse—”
“I am,” she said. “I’ve given it a great deal of thought, and it’s what I want to do.”
“Then I suggest you write to Miss Dix for a list of her qualifications,” Nathaniel said. “In the meantime, you could gather a few letters of recommendation to accompany your application.”
Buoyed by hope, Julia wrote to the Director of Nurses inWashington that same day. The stiff reply she received from Miss Dix’s office, outlining the qualifications for army nurses, didn’t discourage her in the least:
No young ladies should be sent at all; only mature women who are sober, earnest, self-sacrificing, and self-sustained; who can bear the presence of suffering and exercise entire self-control of speech and manner; who can be calm, gentle, quiet, active, and steadfast in duty. All nurses are required to be plain-looking women. Their dresses must be brown or black, with no bows, no curls, no jewelry, and no hoop skirts
.
Julia paid a visit to their family doctor, explaining that she wanted to become an army nurse and asking him for a letter of reference.
“It’s no use going to Miss Dix,” Dr. Lowe told her. “She will send you right back. You’re much too young.”
“Will you write the letter anyway?” she pleaded. “I need you to testify to my good character, my upbringing and sincerity. Please, just give me a chance.”
When Congressman Rhodes returned to Philadelphia for the holiday break, she asked him the same thing. He stared at her in disbelief.
“Bull Run was a terrible experience for all of us. Why on earth would you want to be exposed to such sights again?”
“I have to go back. I’m so ashamed of my actions that day, and I know that I could do better this time. Please, I want to help.”
“The scenes you witnessed on that battlefield won’t look any different the second time around,” he said.
“The bombs frightened me, falling as close as they did. If I worked in a hospital, I know I could keep my wits about me. I could help those poor wounded men.”
“Do you have your father’s permission, Julia?” he asked quietly.
“Well, to be honest, he’s not at all happy about my decision. But he’s allowing me to pursue it. He says that if Miss Dix accepts me, he’ll support me. All I need from you, Congressman, is a letter of recommendation.”
He sighed and gave her what she’d asked for.
Armed with letters from him, Dr. Lowe, and the retired pastor of her church, Julia went into her father’s study one night and begged him to allow her to go to Washington after the first of the year and apply in person to Miss Dix. He looked at her with such distaste, she might just as well have been requesting permission to rob a bank.
“I’m going to ask you one more time, Julia—forget this foolishness and settle down to a respectable life.” He sat stiffly behind his desk, appealing to her as a judge might appeal to a criminal to forsake a life of crime. “Why would you want to sacrifice what you have always known, a life that is safe and comfortable and predictable, to venture into the unknown? Don’t you realize that if you take such a risk, you might never get this life back again?”
“I don’t want this life,” she said. But she spoke the words very softly, not sure she believed them. She told herself that it wasn’t just a boring, vain existence she was casting aside but the person she feared she would become if she stayed home, the woman Nathaniel had called shallow and spoiled and unbearably self-absorbed.
“In many ways you’ve been sheltered from the world,” her father continued. “And now, for some strange reason, you’ve analyzed the way you live, the life your mother and I have worked hard to give you, and you’ve seen only its faults. What I fear is that you will finally come to appreciate what you’ve been given only after you’ve seen the ugliness in the world—and by then it might be too late. You might have lost your chances for a decent husband and a respectable life.”
Julia couldn’t reply. Deep inside she feared the same thing, feared that she was about to make an irreparable mistake. Should she take the risk?
“Surely there is one young man in all of Philadelphia,” he said, “who might appeal to you if you gave him a chance?”
She was surprised to find herself thinking of Nathaniel. Even though she knew his low opinion of her, she still dreamed that he would see her in a different light once she became a nurse, that he’d discover she had changed and would fall in love with her at last.
“I’m not ready to settle down,” she told her father. “If you force me to marry, I’ll be miserable.”
“Then why not take a trip abroad—visit London, perhaps, or France?”
“I don’t like the ocean. Please, Daddy, let me try my hand at being a nurse for a few months. If you let me go to Washington, I promise I’ll take courting seriously when I come home.”
He leaned toward her, his eyes soft, as if he’d suddenly stripped off his judge’s robes and allowed himself to be her father. “Do I have your word on that, Julia? You will truly settle down if I let you try this?”
She felt a shiver of excitement. He was really going to let her go. “Yes, I promise.”
“You do realize that you cannot go without a chaperone.” He leaned back in his chair, the analytical judge once again. The tender moment had passed. “And it may be as late as next summer before your mother is free to accompany you.”
Julia saw this excuse for what it was—a delaying tactic. Her father hoped she would change her mind before next summer. She knew that she wouldn’t. In fact, the delay would only make her more restlessly unhappy than she already was.
“Maybe Aunt Eunice could take me,” she said, thinking quickly.
Her father’s spinster sister adored Julia. She could sweet talk Aunt Eunice into anything.
“You may ask her,” he said reluctantly, “but she has social obligations, too. If she agrees to accompany you, I’ll agree to let you go. If not…”
“Thank you, Daddy! Thank you!” She ran around his desk and surprised him with a hug, then hurried from the room before he changed his mind.
Phoebe bent to crawl out of the Sibley tent at morning reveille and came upon a small surprise: three inches of fresh snow had blanketed the frozen ground during the night. A gray, icy haze hung over the camp, and the mess sergeant was chipping through a layer of ice in the frozen water barrel with an ax. Phoebe fastened all the buttons on her new winter overcoat and hunched her shoulders against the cold.
All around her, the other soldiers huddled together in their long overcoats as they tried to shake off their slumber. Some smoked cigarettes, while others cupped their hands and blew on their fingers to warm them. A few stood near the cook’s fire, waiting to fill their mugs with hot coffee. The snow crunched beneath their boots, and their breath fogged the air as they waited for morning roll call and breakfast.
The camp was starting to feel like home to Phoebe and to look like it, too. She and the other soldiers had fashioned tables and improvised other furnishings from whatever they could find—logs, empty crates, upturned barrels—to make the camp more comfortable. Near the door of her tent, her brand-new .58-caliber Springfield rifle was stacked teepee-style with five of her tentmates’ rifles. The army had finally issued the new weapons, and on this cold December morning the men were going to drill with them for the first time. Phoebe carefully separated hers from the others and brushed off the snow with her bare fingers, wiping it dry on the sleeve of her coat. She would have kept the gun inside the tent with her last night if she’d known it was going to snow.
When the metal was reasonably dry, she stuck the rifle under her arm and shoved her hands in her pockets to warm them. Ted had gone off toward the latrine earlier, and she gazed in that direction until she saw him striding back. He was easy to spot; the sleeves of his new greatcoat hung below his fingertips and the lower hem reached nearly to his ankles.
“Hey, our rifles aren’t going to get rusty sitting out here, are they?” he asked, pushing up his sleeves. “Maybe we should keep them inside with us.”
“I was just thinking the same thing.” She pulled her hands out of her pockets and helped Ted remove his rifle from the stack. He wiped off the snow, then slung the strap over his shoulder so the gun hung behind his back.
“You know, this blasted thing is heavy,” he said. “I’m going to wish I had my fence rail back if they expect us to march with these things all day.”
“You don’t really wish that,” she said, gently poking him in the ribs with her gun barrel. “Can’t shoot Rebels with a fence rail, you know.” She lifted the gun to her shoulder and sighted down its length, aiming into the distant woods and squeezing the trigger. “I can’t wait to try this thing out. How ’bout you?”
“It would be a real treat to shoot it—especially at Johnny Reb. But knowing the army, they’re just going to make us march around in circles with it until we’re too tired to stand up. I’ll bet it’ll be months before they even give us any ammunition.”
“Boy, I hope you’re wrong,” she said, lowering the rifle again.
So far, their schedule in this new camp varied only slightly from the one they’d followed in their first training camp in Pennsylvania. Phoebe and Ted drilled endlessly, sometimes eight hours a day. But now their company of recruits was part of a new regiment—which meant hundreds and hundreds of men marching together, with bands playing and drums pounding and regimental flags waving. Phoebe was starting to hear the tramp of marching feet in her dreams.
Here in their winter quarters inWashington, General McClellan was whipping them into fighting shape. Phoebe often saw him watching their dress parades, riding around on his big black horse or strutting around like he was cock of the roost. The men called him “Little Mac” or “the young Napoleon” because he wasn’t a very big fellow. But they loved their commander, and they were ready to follow General McClellan to the ends of the earth.
Phoebe and the others had learned to form a marching column of four men abreast, then change to two tightly packed battle lines on command. The way they all whirled and twirled at the same time, playing follow-the-leader, reminded Phoebe of a row of baby ducklings following the mama duck wherever she went. They had also learned to tell the difference between twenty-two different drum rolls and thirty-four different bugle calls.
“Once the battle starts,” their commanding officer had explained, “there’ll be so much noise you won’t hear me shouting orders anymore. You have to know what each drum roll and bugle call means and be able to respond to it right away.”
The new routine also included a daily sick call. Phoebe grew worried when hundreds of her fellow recruits took sick with silly kids’ diseases like measles and chicken pox. One of her biggest fears was that she would wind up in the hospital and her secret would get found out, so she kept to herself to make sure she wouldn’t catch anything. This morning there were two more suspected cases of measles, including a man from her own tent. Dozens of men were coughing. One recruit, who had a rag tied around his jaw because of a sore tooth, argued loudly with the sergeant who wanted him to report to the regimental physician.
“Nobody’s pulling my tooth!” he insisted. “We’re starting rifle and bayonet drills today, and I ain’t missing out.”