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.
News came in of the battle. Much of it meant little to Hester or to Merrit, neither of whom knew the area, but whether it was good or ill was easily read on the faces of those who did.
Some time after eleven the surgeon came in, white-faced, his uniform blouse covered with blood. He stopped abruptly when he saw Hester.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded, his voice sliding up close to hysteria.
She stood up from the man whose wound she had just finished binding. She turned towards the surgeon and saw the fear in his eyes. He was not more than thirty and she knew that nothing in his life had prepared him for this.
“I’m a nurse,” she said steadily. “I’ve seen war before.”
“Gunshot … wounds?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“More Rebel troops have arrived on Matthews Hill,” he said, watching her. “There are a lot more wounded coming in. We’ve got to get them out of here.”
She nodded.
He did not know what to say. He was foundering in circumstances beyond his skill or imagination. He was grateful for any help at all, even from a woman. He did not question it.
An hour later a man with a badly shattered arm told them with a smile through his agony that Sherman had crossed the Bull Run River and the Rebels were pulling back to Henry Hill. There was a cheer, mostly through gritted teeth, from the other wounded men.
Hester glanced across at Merrit, the front of her dress wrinkled and smeared with blood, and saw her smile. The girl’s eyes brightened for a moment, and then she turned back to pass more bandages to the surgeon, who had barely taken time to look up at the news.
During the next hour the wounded grew fewer. The surgeon relaxed a trifle and sat down for a few moments, taking time for a drink of water and wiping his hand across his brow. He smiled ruefully at Merrit, who had been working most closely with him.
“Looks like we’re doing well,” he said with a lift in his voice. “We’ll drive them back. They’ll know they’ve had a battle. Maybe they’ll think better of it, eh?”
Merrit pushed her hair off her brow and repositioned a few of her pins.
“It’s a hard price to pay though, isn’t it!”
Hester could still hear the gunfire, cannon and rifles in the distance. She felt a sickness creeping through her.
