Distant cries woke Virgilia on Tuesday morning. She turned her head toward the small window. Black. Not yet daylight.
The window was unbroken, a rarity in the ancient Union Hotel. New-style hospitals — pavilions on the Nightingale plan — were under construction to supply fifteen thousand beds and promote healing rather than impede it. Construction funds had been appropriated a year ago July. Until the work was finished, however, all sorts of unsuitable structures, from public buildings and churches to warehouses and private homes, had to be used — especially in this bleak December when Burnside's bungling had cost over twelve thousand casualties.
The cries kept on. Virgilia sat up hurriedly. Something fell to the floor from her hard, narrow bed. She groped and retrieved the small book, slipping it under a thin pillow. She reread certain passages in
She reached for the lamp on the floor. She had gone to sleep in her plain gray dress and long white apron with the tabard top. She hadn't known when she would be needed because no one had said whether casualties destined for the Union Hotel Hospital would arrive in Washington by rail or by steamer.
She knew how they were arriving in Georgetown. 'Those infernal two-wheelers,' she muttered as she lit the lamp. The outcries, characterized by abruptness as well as anguish, told her the wounded were coming in the ambulances that were the curse of the medical service. Some of the patients she had attended since joining Miss Dix's corps said that after riding in one of the tilting, bouncing conveyances, they found themselves wishing they had remained where they had fallen. Better four-wheel models were being tested, but getting them took money and time.
The shimmery lamp revealed the room's tawdry furnishings, warped flooring, peeling paper. The entire hotel was like that, a ruin. But it was where she had been sent. Ironically, she was less than half a mile from the house of George and Constance. She didn't know if her brother knew she was a nurse in Washington, but she had no plans to call and inform him.
She did remain grudgingly grateful to Constance and even to Billy's wife for helping her improve her appearance and showing her a better course. Beyond that, if she never saw any of them again, it wouldn't trouble her.
Virgilia straightened her hairnet, left her room, and strode downstairs with the lamp. A neat, full-bosomed figure, with an aura of authority, she smelled of the brown soap with which she was careful to wash frequently. Already she had been put in charge of Ward One. Virgilia accepted the customary salary of twelve dollars a month, which some of the volunteers did not take. For her it was a necessity, a hedge against some future misfortune.
The hotel was astir. She smelled coffee and beef soup from the kitchen. Soldier nurses, men still convalescing, were rising from none too clean pallets and cots in the halls and ground-floor parlors. Her wardmaster, a youthful Illinois artilleryman named Bob Pip, yawned and squinted at her as she approached.
'Morning, matron.'
'Up, Bob, up — they're here.'
To confirm it, she stopped at a broken window. A little light showed in the bleak sky, revealing a long line of the two-wheeled horrors snaking through the narrow street to the main entrance. Surveying the hall again, she saw no surgeons. They were customarily the last to arrive, something to do with dramatizing their importance, she had decided.
Despite her dislike of the doctors, she realized that all who worked at the hospital had a common cause — succoring and healing men injured in battle with a detestable enemy. Those crying out from the ambulances had fought in behalf of poor dead Grady, against the vicious army of aristocrats and mudsills Virgilia hated more than anything except slavery itself. That was why she worked so hard to replace dirt with cleanliness, pain with ease, despair with contentment.
She had taken to the work. It was honorable. Favorite lines from the Shakespeare play set five centuries before Christ reinforced her view. Every day or so, she silently repeated Volumnia's scornful speech to Virgilia about the shedding of blood.
Virgilia had the stomach for nursing. Many of the well-meaning volunteers didn't and quickly returned home. She had a person like that in her ward now. In Washington only three days, the young woman was clearly revolted by her duties. Still, Virgilia liked her.
She knocked loudly at the door of a parlor converted to a dormitory for the female nurses; the matrons had small separate rooms, no great blessing.
'Ladies? Get up, please. They've come. Hurry, you're needed immediately.'
She heard bustling, soft talk in the parlor. She pivoted with a precision that was unconsciously military and, marched toward the flung-back doors of her ward. On one of them a sorry brass sign hung from a nail in its corner. Reading downward at a forty-five-degree angle, the engraved script said ball room.
The ward consisted of forty beds and a central stove into which Bob Pip was tossing kindling while another soldier nurse lit the mantles. Virgilia marched down the aisles, inspecting to the right and to the left, and when necessary straightening coverlets or the beds themselves. Miss Dix's experiment of employing women had been an unexpected success because the original plan — to place the soldier nurses in charge of the wards — had two flaws: convalescing men tired quickly, and they could not easily and naturally provide the one thing a battle-weary veteran wanted almost as much as he wanted to be well and free of pain — tenderness. Virgilia spent as much time sitting at bedsides, holding hands and listening, as she did changing dressings and assisting surgeons.
As she completed the inspection, her female assistant came in. She was a husky, plain woman, about thirty, with a pleasant face and a great amount of brown hair done up in braids and held by her hairnet. She had told Virgilia she had ambitions as a writer and had already published some articles and verse when patriotic fervor lured her to the volunteer nurses.
'Good morning, Miss Alcott. Please come along and help me bring in our wounded.'
'Certainly, Miss Hazard.'
With clear command, Virgilia gestured and called out, 'Bob — Lloyd — Casey — to the lobby, please.'
She marched at the head of her group. A bilious look spread over the face of Louisa Alcott. The lobby was not yet in sight, but they could smell its strong odors — familiar odors that had made Virgilia ill the first time she was exposed to them.
She did hope Miss Alcott would last; something told her the woman had the makings of a fine nurse. She came of a famous family. Her father, Bronson, the Concord educator and transcendentalism conducted experiments with model schools and communal living. But pedigree wouldn't help her here. Virgilia was dismayed when Miss Alcott gulped and said, 'Oh, dear heaven,' as the group from Ward One entered the lobby.
Similar groups were arriving from other wards to claim their charges. And there they were, walking unaided or on crutches or being carried, the young, brave boys from Fredericksburg, some so encrusted with mud and bloody bandages it was hard to see their uniforms. She heard Louisa Alcott choke and quickly said, 'From now on carry a handkerchief soaked in ammonia or cologne, whichever you prefer. You'll soon find you don't need it.'
'You mean you've gotten used to —?'
But Virgilia was off among the litter-bearers, pointing. 'Take forty that way, to the ballroom.'
Her heart broke as she watched them go. A youth with his right hand sawed off and the stump bandaged. A man about her age, wounded in the foot, struggling with his crutch and staring with eyes like panes of glass. A soldier on a litter, thrashing back and forth, tears trickling into his mud-caked beard while he repeated, 'Mother. Mother.' Virgilia picked up his hand and walked along beside the litter. He quieted; the anguished lines vanished from his face. She held his hand till they reached the ballroom entrance.
The soap and disinfectant sloshed everywhere last night might have been saved for all the good it did now. Very quickly, the wounded generated a reeking miasma of dirt, festering wounds, feces, vomit. As always, the stench had a strange effect on Virgilia. Rather than disgusting her, it sharpened her sense of being needed and her conviction that the struggle would and must end just one way — with the South reduced to a mudhole, as Congressman Stevens put it so splendidly.
The efficient Bob Pip set out towels, sponges, and blocks of brown soap. A black man brought a kettle from
