Slaves of Obsession (18 page)

They had already turned the church into a hospital, and other buildings also, and seen their first casualties from earlier, brief engagements. The last of those who could be moved were being put into ambulances to be taken to Fair-Fax Station, seven miles away, and from there to Alexandria.

A tall, slender woman with dark hair seemed to be in charge. There was a moment when she and Hester came face-to-face, having given conflicting orders on the storage of supplies.

“And who are you, may I ask?” the woman said abruptly.

“Hester Monk. I nursed in the Crimea, with Florence Nightingale. I thought I could be of help.…”

The anger in the woman’s face melted away. “Thank you,” she said simply. “General MacDowell’s men have been scouting the battlefield all day. I think they will probably attack about dawn. They cannot all be here yet, but they will be by then, or soon after.”

“That’s if they are to attack at first light,” Hester said quietly. “We had better get our rest so we have our strength to do what is necessary then.”

“Do you think …” The woman stopped. There was a moment’s blank fear in her face as she realized the reality was only hours away. Then her courage reasserted itself and the
determination was back. There was only the slightest tremor in her voice when she continued. “We cannot rest until we are certain we have done all we can. Our men will be marching through the night. How can they have confidence in us if they find us asleep?”

“Post a watch,” Hester said simply. “Idealism has its place, and morale, but common sense is what will keep us going. We will need all our strength tomorrow, believe me. We will have to be working long after the battle itself is won or lost. For us that is only the beginning. Even the longest battle is very short, compared with the aftermath.”

The woman hesitated.

Merrit came into the room, her face white, her hair straggling out of its pins; she had tied it back with a torn kerchief. She looked dizzy with exhaustion.

“We need rest,” Hester said. “Tired people make mistakes, and our errors could cost soldiers their lives. What’s your name?”

“Emma.”

“There’s nothing more we can do now. We have lint, adhesive plasters, bandages, brandy, canteens of water, and instruments to hand. Now we need the strength to use them, and a steady hand.”

Emma conceded, and in weary gratitude they ate a little, drank from the water canteens, and settled in for what was left of the short night. Hester lay next to Merrit, and knew that she was not asleep. After a little while she heard her crying quietly. She did not touch her. Merrit needed to weep, and privacy was best. Hester hoped if anyone else were awake and heard her they would take it for fear and leave her to conquer it without the embarrassment of being noticed.

Monk and Trace also heard word that battle was bound to commence on Sunday, the twenty-first of July, and that the last of the volunteers and supplies had gone out to Centreville and the other tiny settlements near Manassas Junction, ready to do all they could to help.

They were in the street just outside the Willard Hotel. People were shouting. A man ran out of the foyer, waving his hat in the air. Two women clung to each other, sobbing.

“Damnation!” Trace said vehemently. “Now there’s no chance of getting Breeland before the fighting. It’ll be the devil’s own job to find him. He could be wounded and taken back to one of the field hospitals, or even evacuated back here.”

“There was never any chance of getting him before the battle,” Monk said realistically. “Chaos is our friend, not our enemy. And if he’s injured we’ll just have to leave him behind. If he’s killed, it hardly matters. Except it will be harder to blacken the name of a man who died fighting for his beliefs, whatever they were.”

Trace stared at him. “You’re a pragmatic devil, aren’t you. Our nation is about to tear itself apart, and you can be as cold as one of your English summers.”

Monk smiled at him, a wry baring of the teeth.

“Better than this suffocation!” he retorted. “I’ll recover from a cold in the head faster than from malaria.”

Trace sighed and smiled back, but his expression was shaky, too close to weeping.

A man careered by on horseback, shouting something unintelligible, sending up a cloud of dust.

Monk stiffened. “Our best chance of getting Breeland is if we can find him in the battlefield and take him by force, as if we were Confederates capturing a Union officer. No one will think anything odd of it, and from the fancy dress party of uniforms you’ve got, no one will know who anybody else is anyway! You could probably be joined by ancient Greeks and Romans without causing a stir, from what I’ve seen. You’ve already got Scots with kilts, French Zouaves in every color of the rainbow, not to mention sashes around the waist and everything on their heads from a turban to a fez!”

“They were supposed to be in gray,” Trace said with a shake of his head. “And the Union in blue. God! What a mess! We’ll be shooting friends and foes alike.”

Monk wished desperately that he could offer any comfort.
If it had been England fighting its own he would not know how to bear it. There was nothing good or hopeful to say, nothing to ease the terrible truth. To try would be to show that he did not understand—or worse, that he did not care.

They took horses—there were no more carts or carriages to be hired—and rode through the night towards Manassas, stopping only for a short while to rest. The knowledge of what lay ahead prevented anything but the most fitful sleep.

By early Sunday morning just before dawn they passed columns of troops marching at double speed, others at a full run. Monk was horrified to see their sweating bodies stumbling along, some with haggard faces, gasping for breath in air already hot and clinging in the throat, thick with tiny flies.

Some men even threw away their blankets and haversacks, and the roadside was strewn with dropped equipment. Later, as the sky paled in the east and they got closer to the little river known as Bull Run, there were exhausted men tripped or fallen and simply lying, trying to regather some strength before they should be called upon to load their weapons and charge the enemy. Many of them had taken off their boots and socks, and their feet were rubbed raw and bleeding. Monk had heard at least one officer trying to get the men to slow down, but they were constantly pressed forward by those behind and had no choice but to keep moving. He could see disaster closing in on them as inevitably as the heat of the coming day.

Monk started as he heard the sharp report of a thirty-pounder gun firing three rounds, and he judged it to be on the side of the river he was on and aimed across to the other, close to a beautiful double-arched stone bridge which took the main turnpike over the Bull Run. It was the signal for the battle to begin.

He looked at Trace beside him, sitting half slumped in the saddle, his legs covered with dust, his horse’s flanks sweating. This would be the first pitched battle between the Union and the Confederacy; the die was cast forever, no more skirmishes—this was war irrevocable.

Monk searched Trace’s features and saw no anger, no hatred, no excitement, only an inner exhaustion of the emotions and a sense that somehow he had failed to grasp the vital thing which could have prevented this, and now it was too late.

Again Monk tried to imagine how he would feel if this were England, if these rolling hills and valleys dotted with copses of trees and small settlements were the older, greener hillsides he was familiar with. It was Northumberland he saw in his mind, the sweep of the high, bare moors, heather-covered in late summer, the wind-driven clouds, the farms huddled in the lea, stone walls dividing the fields, stone bridges like the one crossing the creek below them, the long line of the coast and the bright water beyond.

If it were his own land at war with itself it would wound him so the pain would never heal.

Behind them more men were drawing up and being mustered into formation, ready to attack. There were carts and wagons rigged up as ambulances. They had passed pointed-roofed tents that would serve as field hospitals, and seen men and women, white-faced, trying to think of anything more they could do to be ready for the wounded. To Monk it had an air of farce about it. Could these tens of thousands of men really be waiting to slaughter each other, men who were of the same blood and the same language, who had created a country out of the wilderness, founded on the same ideals?

The tension was gathering. Men were on the move, as they had been since reveille had been sounded at two in the morning, but in the dark few had been able to gather themselves, their weapons and equipment, and form into any sort of order.

Hester waited in an agony of suspense as she heard the gunfire in the distance. Merrit kept glancing towards the door of the church where they were waiting for the first wounded. Nine o’clock passed. A few men were brought in, half carried, half supported. The military surgeon took out a
ball from one man’s shoulder, another’s leg. Now and then word came of the fighting.

“Can’t take the Stone Bridge!” one wounded man gasped, his hand clutching his other arm, blood streaming through his fingers. “Rebels have got a hell of a force there.” Hester judged him to be about twenty, his face gray with exhaustion, eyes wide and fixed. The surgeon was busy with someone else.

“Come and we’ll bind that up for you,” she said gently, taking him by the other arm and guiding him to a chair where she could reach him easily. “Get me water,” she said over her shoulder to Merrit. “And some for him to drink too.”

“There’s thousands of them!” the man went on, staring at Hester. “Our boys are dying … all over the ground, they are. You can smell blood in the air. I stood on … someone’s …” He could not finish.

Hester knew what he meant. She had walked on battlefields where dismembered bodies lay frozen in a last horror, human beings torn or blown apart. She had wanted never to see it again, never to allow it back into her mind. She turned away from his face, and found her hands shaking as she cut his sleeve off and exposed the flesh of the wound. It was mangled and bleeding heavily, but as far as she could judge the bone was untouched, and it was certainly not arterial bleeding, or he would not still be alive, let alone able to have staggered to the church. The main thing was to keep the wound clean and remove the shot. She had seen gangrene too often. The smell was one she could never forget. It was worse than death, a living necrosis.

“It’ll be all right.” She meant to say it strongly, reassuringly, soothe away his fear, but her voice was wobbly, as if she herself were terrified. Her hands worked automatically. They had done it so many times before, probing delicately with tweezers, trying not to hurt and knowing that it was agony, searching to find the little piece of metal that had caused such damage to living tissue, trying to be certain she
had it all. Some of them fragmented, leaving behind poisonous shards. She had to work quickly, for pain, or shock which could kill, and before too much blood was lost. But equally she had to be sure.

And while she was working her mind was caught in a web of nightmare memory until she could hear the rats’ feet as if they were around her again, scuttering on the floor, their fat bodies plopping off the walls, their squeaking to each other. She could smell the human waste, feel its texture under her feet on the boards overrun with it, from men too weak to move, bodies emaciated from starvation and dysentery or cholera. She could see their faces, hollow-eyed, knowing they were dying, hear their voices as they spoke of what they loved, tried to tell each other it was worth it, joked about the tomorrows they knew would never come, denied the rage they had so much cause, so much right, to feel at their betrayal by ignorance and stupidity.

She could remember some of them individually: a fair-haired lieutenant who had lost a leg and died of gangrene, a Welsh boy who had loved his home and his dog, and talked of them until others told him to be quiet and teased him about it. He had died of cholera.

There were others, countless men who had perished one way or another. Most of them had been brave, hiding their horror and their fear. Some had been shamed into silence; to others it came naturally. She had felt for all of them.

She had thought that the present, her love for Monk, all the causes and the issues there were to fight now, the puzzles, the people who filled her life, had healed the past over in forgetting.

But the dust, the blood, the smell of canvas and wine and vinegar, the knowledge of pain, had brought it back again with a vividness that left her shaking, bewildered, more drenched with horror than those new to it, like Merrit, who had barely guessed at what was to come. The sweat was running down Hester’s body inside her clothes and turning cold, even in the suffocating, airless heat.

She was terrified. She could not cope, not again. She had done her share of this, seen too much already!

She found the shot and drew it out; it came followed by a gush of blood. For an instant she froze. She could not bear to watch one more person die! This was not her war. It was all monumentally stupid, a terrible madness risen from the darkness of hell. It must be stopped. She should rush outside, now, and scream at them until they put away the guns and saw the humanity in all their faces, every one, the sameness, not the difference, saw their own reflections in the enemy’s eyes and knew themselves in it all!

But as her mind was racing, her fingers were stitching the wound, reaching for bandages, pads, binding it up, testing that the dressing was not too tight, calling for a little wine to mix with the water. She heard herself comforting the man, telling him what to do now, how to look after the wound, and to get it dressed again when he reached Alexandria, or wherever he would be shipped.

She heard his voice replying, steadier than before, stronger. She watched him climb to his feet and stagger away, supported by an orderly, turning to smile before he left the tent.

More wounded were brought in. She helped fetch, roll bandages, hold instruments and bottles, carry things, lift people, speak to them, ease their fear or their pain.