Martyria Part 9

In earlier times public charity was rare or impulsive among the civil communities. It was only the suffering and disabled defenders of the general service who were cared for at the expense of the state, as at the Prytaneum among the Athenians, or the numerous asylums which munificent Rome erected to the brave men who carved out with their strong arms and their blades of steel the colossal forms of her glory and grandeur. The magnificent ruins of Italica, which sheltered the disabled veterans and heroes of Africa.n.u.s, look down at the present day over the vast and fertile plains of the Guadalquivir, to reproach later and higher civilizations with neglect and ingrat.i.tude.

II.

But it is to the beneficent and sublime influences of Christianity that are to be attributed the n.o.ble inst.i.tutions of the present day, where the suffering and infirm receive the attentions of science and the consolations of humanity.

Never among civilized nations are they profaned for the purposes of cruelty, never defiled by murder under the mask of philanthropy.

Enlightened communities vie with each other in self-sacrifice in the great and heroic labor of devotion to suffering mortality. It is the distinguishing degree of difference in their excellence, their refinement, their religion.

It is the last thought and reflection of the dying man, who, in dividing his worldly material with charity and benevolence, hopes to be kindly remembered on earth. It is the first dawning idea of childhood, with its infant hands filled with roses and garlands of flowers to relieve the pains of human suffering, or adorn the pale features of the departed.

To delight in human misery is the last degree of earthly degradation and perversity. The mockery of the agony of death belongs only to the fiends of h.e.l.l and their baser imitators.

III.

Not until some time after the occupation of the prison did the care and condition of the sick attract the attention and excite the solicitude of the prison-keepers. Then a s.p.a.ce was selected to the eastward, and almost adjoining the stockade, and here were pitched the decayed and dilapidated tents which were to form the hospital.

The exact size of the s.p.a.ce is not known, the boundaries having disappeared since the evacuation; but the tents were arranged, it is said, with some degree of regularity, and the collection was surrounded by a fence, which served only to obstruct the circulation of free air, which was of vital importance; and besides, the fence was of no service whatever as protection against the escape of the inmates, as they were before admission generally far too feeble to make even an effort.

The actual amount of accommodation furnished is not known. By some it is stated that there were nothing whatever but a few rotten tent flies; by others, and among them one of the surgeons, it is narrated that there were tents to cover one thousand men, and three large kettles to provide for their cooking, and nothing more. Yet the records show that there were nearly four thousand men at one time in this hospital. This distribution of the means for the protection and sustenance of life is too terrible to be believed. Let us overlook it, for there is sufficient for execration elsewhere, without turning to the more revolting violation and desecration of one of the sanctuaries of civilization.

Beneath these tent covers there was neither straw, nor mattresses, nor bunks: there was simply the bare earth, with no protection but what was afforded by the rotten canvas, the scanty clothing, the ragged blanket, which the hapless sufferer might possess. Many of the unfortunate men who perished here had neither shelter nor clothing. The rapacity of the captors had taken the remnants of the rags left by the fury of battle. For this want of shelter, and couches to protect and rest the weary limbs, there is no excuse, and there can be none; for in the adjoining forests there were immense quant.i.ties of timber accessible, and easy of conversion into manufacture, and the extremities of the boughs of the long-leaved or Southern pine afforded the means of making comfortable and healthy beds.

There were then within the stockade many thousands of men accustomed to the use of the axe, the adze, the saw, and the plane, who would have in few days fashioned implements of steel out of the useless sc.r.a.ps of railway iron lying at the depot, and transformed the forest into vast, even magnificent buildings, replete with the comforts, the conveniences of advanced art. There were artisans here, of education and ingenuity, who could have formed out of the very dust of the place edifices as beautiful and wonderful to the imagination and understanding as the reality was repulsive and strange.

IV.

The guards furnished themselves with comfortable huts, arranged with the common conveniences, and their bunks were suspended above the contact of the treacherous ground. Their invalids were well cared for also in the large hospital which was erected expressly for the garrison, and which consisted of two large two-story wooden buildings, admirably arranged, with the conveniences proper to the service. The kitchen, the dispensary, the ventilation, and the general arrangement, showed that scientific care and forethought had been observed there.

The hospital system of the rebels was quite complete, and most of their hospitals throughout the country were well constructed and equipped; and some of them were models of neatness, comfort, and scientific arrangement.

The garrison hospital at Andersonville offers a terrible contrast to the open s.p.a.ce, the wretched agglomeration, which the rebel authorities called a hospital for the prisoners.

It is true that the commanding officers were compelled, from some unknown pressure,--whether the sense of shame, or dictate from Richmond,--to order and commence the erection, at a late date, of a new hospital stockade.

This was to consist of a high palisade, about one thousand feet in length, with twenty-two open sheds erected in the interior; but it was never finished, nor occupied, and it remains to-day as it was left by the rude, black artisans, one of the evidences of either remorse or reluctant obedience to the lingering sense of natural compa.s.sion of its senseless and heartless rulers.

V.

In the organization of a hospital the most important parts are the system of nursing and the supply and cooking of food; when these are observed, much exposure to the elements can be endured.

Pestilences are r.e.t.a.r.ded, and sometimes completely checked, in their destructive career when opposed by generous alimentation and sympathetic care; and the vital powers,--the _vis medicatrix naturae_,--rally their mighty strength for renewed effort. We have for instance the great and marked change in the healthy condition and the mortality of the British army before Sebastopol in the spring of 1856, when England poured out lavishly her treasures, and sent men of scientific ability to correct the well-nigh fatal errors of hygiene which were committed by her military men.

We have also another instance in the check of a devastating pestilence at New Orleans, as observed and mentioned by Dr. Cartwright. "As soon as a generous public diffused the comforts of life among the seventy thousand dest.i.tute emigrant population of New Orleans, last summer, the pestilence, which was sweeping into eternity three hundred a day, immediately began to disappear, before frost or any other change in the weather, its artificial fabric being broken down by the beneficent hand of the American people."

VI.

Here there appears to have been neither system, nor order, nor humanity.

The chances of recovery were far less than the certainty of death. In reality, it was almost certain death; for only twenty-four out of the hundred who entered ever returned to the prison again. Those patients who possessed sufficient strength helped themselves to what was at hand, and what was afforded by the meagre dietary; those who had not, folded their arms and died.

Medical men went through the formality of prescribing for the dying men, but with formulae whose ingredients were unknown to them.

Some of these surgeons gloated over the distresses of their fellow-men, and delighted in the awful destruction of life which was branding with eternal infamy the manhood of their nation.

Others turned and wept, for humanity was not extinct. Those tears have in part blotted out and redeemed the fearful inscriptions in that record of the events of life which form the history of the human race.

It is not known that woman ever visited these precincts from feelings of compa.s.sion, and offered to console the last moments of the dying. We do know that they gazed upon the scene from a distance, but with what emotion history wisely makes no note.

In Catholic countries we observe the hospitals attended by nuns, sisters of mercy and charity, all eager to labor in behalf of humanity. Besides these, the deaconesses of the Rhine and the beguines of Flanders have acquired an imperishable record in history for their philanthropic efforts. "There is nothing," says Voltaire, "n.o.bler than the sight of delicate females sacrificing beauty, youth, often wealth and rank, to devote themselves to the relief of human miseries under the most revolting forms." We have seen in our own time, in the hospitals of the Federal armies, a devoted band of self-sacrificing women striving to perform their part in the great work of philanthropy. Here woman never appeared.

There were, in reality, only the vivid impressions of horror, complaints, groans, delirium, and the agony of death.

More than eight thousand of our men perished miserably in this neglected and iniquitous spot.

Men were seen here in all stages of idiocy and imbecility from the effects of starvation. They were seen asking for bones to gnaw to relieve the pangs of hunger. Compa.s.sion never will believe that this request was made by dying mortals, and that too in a hospital, which is regarded among men as the holy inst.i.tution of society, and even by infuriated combatants as the only sacred precinct on the brutal fields of war.

The same wail of distress was heard on the plains of Texas, and along the military lines of Virginia.

Thus the black flag, threatened by the rebel cabinet, was hoisted. Without the courage to proclaim their intentions openly and boldly upon the battle-field, they exhibited them in as sure, but different form, in the management of their prisons.

VII.

The stories relating to vaccination with poisonous matter are doubtless untrue. That there were disastrous effects from vaccination is probably correct, but they must have been the results of accident. Similar consequences have been observed in civil communities, in armies, and in hospitals. Serious results have been noticed by the writer in our own armies and hospitals.

Vaccine matter is extremely liable to decomposition; and when heated, even by the warmth of the body, fermentation arises, and by catalytic action putrefaction results, forming a positive poison. That the directors of this hospital should resort to such means for the destruction of human life is not at all probable, for the process required labor: and besides, the wretched invalids died with sufficient rapidity without the intervention of this new art of malice.

VIII.

In all military hospitals, food is to be regarded as the princ.i.p.al medicament. With good food, the results of surgery may be foretold with tolerable certainty, and the obstructions to the medical treatment lessen greatly or disappear. Without the aid of pure, healthful, life-giving aliment, the duration of animal life is always brief when exposed to vicious and hostile influences.

The ration used here, or the system of dietary, was not constant; neither do we know sufficiently well the quant.i.ty, or quality, or variety, to form a true and candid estimate of its value in sustaining the physical strength, or repairing the waste and metamorphose of the organs and tissues of the system.

We know, however, that it was supposed to be bacon, flour, and corn bread--rarely fresh meat; and vegetables were almost unknown. The only vegetables and delicacies were either obtained in exchange, at exorbitant rates, for the little currency which the prisoners had managed to secrete among their rags, or they were now and then introduced stealthily by a few of the humane surgeons at the peril of their lives. Persons whose systems are weakened by want of proper food, by exhaustion from excessive labor, or exposure, or disease, require a great variety of articles from which to select the substances which a depraved but instinctive palate often craves. Food which would disgust the healthy appet.i.te, will not quicken into action the debilitated and flickering sensation of taste.

During an enfeebled condition, loathsome morsels become injurious; for digestion is clearly at the command of the mind, and is often checked by its caprices.

IX.

The effect of gentle care and kindly sympathy is more felt, more marked in the military hospitals, than in the civil. Home is farther away, and the sense of loneliness which all invalids experience is far more oppressive.

Here it is that woman's influence is the strongest, and her sweet disposition, her friendly, compa.s.sionate smile, seems to prolong life, and put to flight the advancing shadows of death. "It is not medicine," says Charles Lamb; "it is not broth and coa.r.s.e meats served up at stated hours with all the hard formality of a prison; it is not the scanty dole of a bed to lie on which a dying man requires from his species. Looks, attentions, consolations, in a word, sympathies, are what a man most needs in this awful close of human sufferings. A kind look, a smile, a drop of cold water to a parched lip--for these things a man shall bless you in death."

With soldiers, these little attentions have great effect; partly from the law of contrast with the roughness of their every-day occupations and life, and partly from the rarity of such influences. And finally, when grim Death appears, there is with them a singular philosophy, calmness, and resignation. The writer has observed this upon many battle-fields, and in the hospitals far removed. Rarely do we hear lamentations, regrets, and shrieks for help: the conscious man folds his arms, and resigns himself to his inward thoughts, thinking, perhaps, of

"His native hills that rise in happier climes, The grot that heard his song of other times, His cottage home, his bark of slender sail, His gla.s.sy lake, and broomwood blossomed vale."