The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 102

They had no idea where they were going. When Rob J. walked to the end of the car and opened the door, the noise was loud and rackety, but he looked up between the swaying cars at the points of light in the sky and found the Big Dipper. He followed the two pointer stars at the end of the bowl, and there was the North Star.

"We're traveling east," he said, back in the car.

"s.h.i.t," Abner Wilc.o.x said. "They're sending us to the Army of the Potomac."

Lew Robinson stopped making his little black marks. "What's wrong with that?"

"Potomac Army ain't done nothin good, ever. All it does is wait around. When it fights, once in a blue moon, those fartheads always manage to lose to the rebels. I wanted to go to Grant. That man's a general."

"You don't get killed waiting around," Robinson said.

"I hate to go east," Ordway said. "Whole d.a.m.n East is full of Irishers, Roman Catholic sc.u.m. Filthy b.u.g.g.e.rs."

"n.o.body performed better at Fredericksburg than the Irish Brigade. Most of them died," Robinson said thinly.

It didn't require much thought on Rob J.'s part, just an instant decision. He placed his fingertip under his right eye and slid it slowly down the side of his nose, the signal from one member of the order to another that he was saying too much.

Did it work, or was it coincidence? Lanning Ordway stared at him for a moment, then stopped talking and went to sleep.

At three o'clock in the morning there was a long stop at Louisville, where an artillery battery joined the troop train. The night air was heavier than in Illinois, and softer. Those who were awake left the train to stretch their legs, and Rob J. arranged for the sick corporal to be taken to the local hospital. When he was finished, he walked down the track, past two p.i.s.sing men. "No time to dig sinks here, sir," one of them said, and they both laughed. The civilian doctor was still a joke.

He went to where the battery's great ten-pound Parrotts and twelve-pound howitzers were being secured to flatcars with heavy chains. The cannon were being loaded in the yellow light of large calcium lamps that sputtered and flickered, throwing shadows that appeared to move with a life of their own.

"Doctor," someone said softly.

The man stepped out of the darkness next to him and took his hand, making the signal of recognition. Too nervous even to feel absurd, Rob J. endeavored to perform the countersign as though he had done it many times before.

Ordway looked at him. "Well," he said.

53.

THE LONG GRAY LINE.

They came to hate the troop train. It crept so slowly across the length of Kentucky and wound so tiredly between the hills, a snake-shaped, boring jail. When the train entered Virginia the news traveled from car to car. The soldiers peered from the windows, expecting at once to witness the face of the enemy, but all they saw was a country of mountains and woods. When they stopped for fuel and water in small towns, the people were as friendly as they'd been in Kentucky, because the western section of Virginia supported the Union. They could tell when they reached the other part of Virginia. There were no women at the stations with drinks of cool mountain water or lemonade, and the men had bland, blank faces and watchful, heavy-lidded eyes.

The 131st Indiana detrained at a place called Winchester, an occupied town, blue uniforms everywhere. While the horses and equipment were unloaded, Colonel Symonds disappeared inside a headquarters building near the railroad station, and when he emerged the troops and the wagons were arrayed in marching order, and they set out southward.

When Rob J. had signed on, he'd been told he had to buy his own horse, but there had been no urgent need for him to have a horse in Cairo, because he didn't wear a uniform or take part in parades. Besides, horses were scarce wherever the army was located, because the cavalry claimed every remount in sight, whether the animal ran races or pulled a plow. So now, horseless, he rode in the ambulance on the seat next to Corporal Ordway, who drove the team. Rob J. was still tense in Lanning Ordway's presence, but Ordway's only question had been to wonder warily why a member of the OSSB should "speak with a foreigner's tongue," referring to the trace of Scots burr that on occasion still crept into Rob J.'s speech. Rob had said he'd been born in Boston and taken to Edinburgh as a youth to be educated, and Ordway appeared satisfied. He was now cheerful and friendly, obviously pleased to be working for a man who had a political reason for taking good care of him.

They pa.s.sed a marker on the dusty road that indicated it was the route to Fredericksburg. "G.o.d Almighty," Ordway said. "I hope n.o.body's got it in mind to send a second group of Yankees up against those rebel gunners on the heights at Fredericksburg."

Rob J. could only agree.

Several hours before dusk the 131st came to the banks of the Rappahannock River, and Symonds halted them and ordered a camp. He called a meeting of all officers in front of his tent, and Rob J. stood on the fringes of the uniforms and listened.

"Gentlemen, for half a day we have been members of the Federal Army of the Potomac, under the command of General Joseph Hooker," Symonds said.

He told them Hooker had gathered a force of about 122,000 men, spread out over a long perimeter. Robert E. Lee had about ninety thousand Confederates and was at Fredericksburg. Hooker's cavalry had scouted Lee's army for a long time and they were convinced Lee was getting ready to invade the North in an attempt to draw Union forces away from the siege at Vicksburg, but no one knew where or when the invasion would take place. "The people in Washington are understandably nervous, with the Confederate Army only a couple of hours away from the White House door. The 131st is traveling to join other units near Fredericksburg."

The officers took the news soberly. They laid out several layers of pickets, far and near, and the camp settled down for the night. When Rob J. had eaten his pork and beans, he lay back and looked up at the fat summer stars of evening. It was too much for him to contemplate contending forces that were so enormous. About ninety thousand Confederate men! About 122,000 Union men! And all of them doing their best to kill one another.

A limpid night. The 614 soldiers of the Indiana 131st lay on the warm bare ground without bothering to raise tents. Most of them still had northern colds, and the sound of their coughing was enough to warn any nearby enemy of their existence. Rob J. had a brief doctor's nightmare, wondering about the sound of 122,000 men all coughing at the same time. The acting a.s.sistant surgeon clasped his arms about his body, chilled. He knew that if two such giant armies were to meet and fight, it would take more than the men of the band to carry the wounded away.

It took them two and one-half days to march to Fredericksburg. On the way they almost succ.u.mbed to Virginia's secret weapon, the chigger. The tiny red mite fell on them when they pa.s.sed under overhanging trees and became attached to them as they walked through gra.s.s. If it clung to their clothing, it migrated until it reached bare skin, where it burrowed its entire body into human flesh to feed. Soon men had chigger rashes between their fingers and toes, in their b.u.t.tocks and on their p.e.n.i.ses. The mite had a two-part body; if a soldier saw one working its way into his flesh and tried to pull it out, the chigger broke at its narrow waist, and the portion that was embedded did as much damage as a whole chigger would have. By the third day most of the soldiers were scratching and swearing, and some of the wounds already had begun to fester in the moist heat. Rob J. could do nothing more than sprinkle sulfur on the embedded insects, but a few of the men had had experience with chiggers, and they taught the rest that the only remedy was to hold the glowing end of a stick or a lighted cigar just off the skin until the chigger started to back up, drawn to the heat. Then it could be seized and pulled out slowly and carefully, so it wouldn't break. All over the camp, men removed chiggers from one another, reminding Rob J. of the monkeys he used to watch grooming each other for lice in the Edinburgh Zoo.

Chigger misery didn't eradicate terror. Their apprehension grew as they approached Fredericksburg, which had been the scene of such Yankee slaughter at the earlier battle. But when they arrived they saw only Union blue, because Robert E. Lee had adroitly and quietly pulled out his troops several nights earlier under cover of darkness, and his Army of Northern Virginia was heading north. The Union cavalry was scouting Lee's progress but the Army of the Potomac wasn't in pursuit, for reasons only General Hooker knew.

They camped at Fredericksburg for six days, resting, tending to blisters on their feet, removing chiggers, cleaning and oiling weapons. When they were off-duty, in small groups they climbed the ridge where only six months before almost thirteen thousand Union men had been killed or wounded. Looking down at the easy targets their comrades made struggling to climb after them, they were glad Lee had left before they got there.

When Symonds got new orders, they had to move north again. They were on the march along a dusty road when they heard the news that Winchester, where they had disembarked from their troop train, had been hit hard by Confederates under General Richard S. Ewell. It was another rebel victory-ninety-five Union men had been killed, 348 wounded, and more than four thousand were missing or taken prisoner.

Riding uncomfortably in the ambulance along that peaceful country lane, Rob J. didn't allow himself to believe in combat, just as when he had been a young boy he hadn't allowed himself to believe in death. Why should people die? It made no sense, since it was more pleasant to live. And why should people actually fight during a war? It was more pleasant to proceed sleepily down this curving, sun-baked road than to engage in the business of killing.

But just as Rob J.'s childhood disbelief in mortality had been ended by his father's death, the reality of the present was brought home to him when they came to Fairfax Courthouse and he saw what the Bible meant when it described an enormous army as a host.

They camped on a farm in six fields amid artillery and cavalry and other infantry. Everywhere Rob J. looked there were Union soldiers. The army was in flux, troops coming and leaving. The day after the 131st arrived they learned that Lee's Army of Northern Virginia already had invaded the North, crossing the Potomac River into Maryland. Once Lee had committed himself, so did Hooker, tardily sending the first units of his army north, trying to stay between Lee and Washington. It was forty more hours before the 131st fell in and resumed its northward march.

Each army was too large and diffuse to be relocated swiftly and completely. Part of Lee's force still was in Virginia, moving to cross the river and join its commander. The two armies were shapeless, pulsating monsters, spreading and contracting, always on the move, sometimes alongside one another. When their edges happened to touch, there were skirmishes like bursts of sparks-at Upperville, at Haymarket, at Aldie, and a dozen other places. The Indiana 131st had no concrete evidence of the fighting except in the middle of one night when the outer line of pickets exchanged brief and ineffectual fire with hors.e.m.e.n who hurried away.

The men of the 131st crossed the Potomac in small boats at night, on the twenty-seventh of June. The next morning they resumed their march north, and Fitts's band struck up "Maryland, My Maryland." Sometimes when they came to people, somebody would wave, but the Maryland civilians they pa.s.sed seemed unimpressed, because for days they had been witnessing troops marching through. Rob J. and the soldiers soon grew heartily sick of the Maryland state anthem, but the band still was playing it on the morning when they made their way through good rolling farmland and into a neat central village.

"What part of Maryland is this?" Ordway asked Rob J.

"I don't know." They were pa.s.sing a bench on which an old man sat and watched the military. "Mister," Rob J. called, "what's the name of this pretty community?"

The compliment seemed to disconcert the old man. "Our town? This town is Gettysburg."

Although the men of the 131st Indiana didn't know it, the day they pa.s.sed into Pennsylvania they had had a new commanding general for twenty-four hours. General George Meade had been named to replace General Joe Hooker, who paid the price for his tardy pursuit of the Confederates.

They went through the little town and marched along the Taneytown Road. The Union Army was ma.s.sed south of Gettysburg, and Symonds called a halt at an enormous rolling meadow where they could camp. The air was heavy and hot and full of moisture and fearful bravado. The men of the 131st talked about the rebel yell. They hadn't heard it when they were in Tennessee, but they had heard a lot about it, and listened to a lot of imitations. They wondered if they were going to hear the real thing in the next few days.

Colonel Symonds knew work was the best thing for nerves, so he got up labor parties and had them dig shallow firing positions behind piles of boulders that could be used as sangars. That night they went to sleep to birdsong and katydid shrill, and next morning awoke to more hot and heavy air and the sound of frequent firing several miles to the northwest, toward the Chambersburg Pike.

About eleven A.M. Colonel Symonds received new orders, and the 131st was marched half a mile over a wooded ridge to a meadow on high ground east of the Emmitsburg Road. Evidence that the new position was closer to the enemy was the grim discovery of six Union soldiers who seemed to be sprawled asleep on the mowing. All the dead pickets were barefoot, the poorly shod Southerners having stolen their shoes.

Symonds ordered new breastworks dug, and he placed living pickets. At Rob J.'s request, a long narrow log framework like a grape arbor was put up at the edge of the woods and roofed over with leafy branches to provide shade for the wounded, and outside this shelter Rob J. placed his operating table.

They learned from dispatch riders that the first gunfire had been a clash between cavalry. As the day progressed, the sounds of battle grew to the north of the 131st, a steady, hoa.r.s.e noise of rifled muskets like the barking of thousands of deadly dogs, and a great ragged, unending cannon thunder. Each slight movement of the heavy air seemed to smite their faces.

Early in the afternoon the 131st was moved a third time that day and marched toward the town and the sound of the fighting, toward the flash of cannon fire and clouds of white-gray smoke. Rob J. had come to know the soldiers and was aware that most of them yearned for a minor wound, no more than a scratch, but one that would leave a mark when it quickly healed, so the folks back home could see how they had suffered for a valorous victory. But now they were moving toward where men were dying. They marched through the town, and presently, as they climbed a hill, they were surrounded by the sounds they had earlier heard from afar. Several times artillery rounds whooshed overhead, and they pa.s.sed dug-in infantry and four batteries of cannon being fired. At the top, where they were told to settle in, they found they'd been placed in the middle of a burial ground that gave the place its name, Cemetery Hill.

Rob J. was setting up his medical station behind an imposing mausoleum that offered both protection and a little shade, when a heavily perspiring colonel came up and asked for the medical officer. He identified himself as Colonel Martin Nichols of the Medical Department, and said he was the organizer of medical services. "Are you experienced at surgery?" he asked.

It didn't seem the time for modesty. "Yes, I am. Quite experienced," Rob J. said.

"Then I need you at a hospital where serious cases are being sent for surgery."

"If you don't mind, Colonel, I want to remain with this regiment."

"I do mind, Doctor, I do. I have some good surgeons, but also some young and inexperienced physicians performing vital surgery and making a d.a.m.n mess of it. They're amputating limbs without leaving flaps, and several are making stumps that have several inches of exposed bone. They're trying strange experimental operations that experienced surgeons wouldn't-resection of the head of the humerus, disarticulation of the hip joint, disarticulation of the shoulder joint. Making unnecessary cripples and patients who are going to wake up crying with terrible pain every morning for the rest of their lives. You'll relieve one of those so-called surgeons, and I'll send him up here to slap dressings onto the wounded."

Rob J. nodded. He told Ordway he was in charge of the medical station until another doctor got there, and he followed Colonel Nichols down the hill.

The hospital was in town, in the Catholic church, which he saw was named for Saint Francis; he would have to remember to tell that to Ferocious Miriam. There was an operating table placed in the entry, with the double doors wide open to give the surgeon maximum light. The pews had been covered with boards spread with straw and blankets to make beds for the wounded. In a small, damp room in the cellar, illuminated by lamps that gave off a yellow light, there were two more surgical tables, and Rob J. took over one of these. He removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves as far as they would go, while a corporal of the First Cavalry Division administered chloroform to a soldier whose hand had been carried off by a cannonball. As soon as the boy was anesthetized, Rob J. took the arm off above the wrist, leaving a good flap for the stump.

"Next!" he called. Another patient was carried in, and Rob J. gave himself up to the work.

The bas.e.m.e.nt was about twenty by forty feet. There was another surgeon at a table across the room, but he and Rob seldom looked at one another and had little to say. In the course of the afternoon Rob J. noted that the other man did good work, and he received a similar appraisal, and each of them focused on his own table. Rob J. probed for bullets and metal, replaced eviscerated intestines and sewed up the wounds, and amputated. And amputated some more. The minie ball was a slow-moving projectile, especially damaging when it hit bone. When it carried away or destroyed bone in large pieces, the only thing the surgeons could do was take the limb. On the dirt floor between Rob J. and the other surgeon there rose a pile of arms and legs. From time to time, men came in and took the severed limbs away.

After four or five hours, another colonel, this one in a gray uniform, came into the bas.e.m.e.nt room and told the two doctors they were prisoners. "We're better soldiers than you folks, we've taken the whole town. Your troops have been pushed to the north, and we've captured four thousand of you." There wasn't much to say. The other surgeon looked at Rob J. and shrugged. Rob J. was operating and told the colonel he was in the way of the light.

Whenever there was a brief lull, he tried to doze for a few minutes, on his feet. But there were few lulls. The warring armies slept at night, but the doctors worked steadily, trying to save the men the armies had torn apart. There was no window in the bas.e.m.e.nt room, and the lamps were kept turned up. Soon Rob J. lost all comprehension of the time of day.

"Next," he called.

Next! Next! Next!

It was the equivalent of having to clean out the Augean stable, because as soon as he finished with one patient, they carried in another. Some wore bloodstained and ragged gray uniforms and some wore bloodstained and ragged blue, but he soon understood they were available in inexhaustible supply.

Other things weren't inexhaustible. The church hospital soon ran out of dressings; they had no food. The colonel who had told him the South had better soldiers, now told him the South had neither chloroform nor ether.

"You can't put shoes on their feet or give them anesthesia for their pain. That's why you'll lose in the end," Rob J. said without satisfaction, and asked the officer to round up a supply of liquor. The colonel went away, but sent someone with whiskey for the patients and hot pigeon soup for the doctors, which Rob J. drank down without tasting.

Without anesthesia, he got several strong men to hold the patients and he operated the way he had when he was younger, cutting, sawing, sewing, fast and expertly, the way William Fergusson had taught him. His victims screamed and thrashed. He didn't yawn, and although he blinked a lot, his eyes stayed open. He was aware that his feet and ankles were becoming painfully swollen, and sometimes as they carried out one patient and carried in another, he stood and rubbed his right hand with his left. Every case was different, but there are only so many ways to destroy human beings and soon they were all the same, all duplicates, even the ones with their mouths destroyed, or their genitals shot off, or their eyes shot out.

The hours pa.s.sed, one by one.

He came to feel he had spent most of his life in the small damp room cutting up human beings, and that he was d.a.m.ned to be there forever. But eventually there was change in the noises that reached them. The people in the church had grown accustomed to groans and cries, the cannon and musket sounds, the crumping of the mortars, and even the shuddering concussion of near-hits. But the firing and bombardment reached a new crescendo, a sustained frenzy of bursting sound that lasted for several hours, and then there was a relative silence in which those in the church suddenly could hear what they said to one another. Then there came a new sound, a roar that lifted and went on and on like the ocean, and when Rob J. sent a Confederate orderly to find out what it was, the man came back and muttered brokenly that it was the G.o.dd.a.m.n mizzable f.u.c.kin Yankees cheerin, that's what it was.

Lanning Ordway came a few hours later and found him still standing in the little room.

"Doc. My G.o.d, Doc, you come with me."

Ordway told him he'd been there the better part of two days, and told him where the 131st was bivouacked. And Rob J. allowed Mine Good Comrade and Mine Terrible Enemy to lead him away into a safe and untenanted storage room where a soft bed of clean hay could be prepared, and he lay down and he slept.

It was late the next afternoon when he was awakened by the groaning and screams of the wounded they had placed all around him on the storeroom floor. Other surgeons were at the tables, doing fine without him. There was no point in trying to use the church's latrine, which long since had been overtaxed. He went outside into a hard, driving rain, and in the healing wet he emptied his bladder behind some lilac bushes that the Union owned again.

The Union owned all of Gettysburg again. Rob J. walked through the rain, taking in the sights. He forgot where Ordway had said the 131st was camped, and he asked everyone he met. Finally he found them spread out over several farm fields south of the town, hunkered inside their tents.

Wilc.o.x and Ordway greeted him with warmth that moved him. They had eggs! While Lanning Ordway crushed hardtack and fried the crumbs and the eggs in pork grease for the doctor's breakfast, they filled him in on what had happened, the bad first. The band's best ba.s.s horn player, Thad Bushman, had been killed. "One tiny little hole in his chest, Doc," Wilc.o.x said. "Must of hit just the right spot."

Of the litter-bearers, Lew Robinson was the first to get shot. "He got hit in the foot right after you left us," Ordway said. "Oscar Lawrence got near cut in two by artillery yesterday."

Ordway finished scrambling the eggs and set the pan before Rob J., who was thinking with genuine sorrow about the clumsy young drummer. But to his shame he couldn't resist the food, wolfing it down.

"Oscar was too young. He should of been home with his momma," Wilc.o.x said bitterly.

Rob J. burned his mouth on the black coffee, which was terrible but tasted fine. "We all should have been home with our mommas," he said, and belched. He finished the rest of the eggs slowly and had another cup of coffee while they told him what had happened while he was in the church cellar.

"That first day, they pushed us back to the high ground north of the town," Ordway said. "That was the luckiest thing could of happened to us.

"The next day we was on Cemetery Ridge in a long skirmish line that run between two pairs of hills, Cemetery Hill and Culp's Hill on the north, closest to the town, and Round Top and Little Round Top a couple of miles to the south. The fightin was terrible, terrible. A lot was killed. We kept busy haulin the wounded."

"We did all right, too," Wilc.o.x said. "Just like you showed us."

"I bet you did."

"Next day the 131st was moved out onto Cemetery Ridge, to reinforce Howard's Corps. Around noon we took a h.e.l.l of a beatin from the Confederate cannon," Ordway said. "Our forward pickets could see that while they was sh.e.l.lin us, a whole lot of Confederate troops was movin well below us, into the woods other side of the Emmitsburg Road. We could see metal, shiny here and there among the trees. They kept up the sh.e.l.lin for a hour or more, and they scored a good many hits too, but all the time we was gettin ready, because we knew they was goin to attack.

"Midafternoon, their cannon stopped, and so did ours. And then somebody yelled, 'They're comin!' and fifteen thousand rebel b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in gray uniforms stepped outta those woods. Those boys of Lee's moved toward us shoulder to shoulder, line after line. Their bayonets was like a long curvin fence of steel pickets above their heads, with the sun bright and hard on it. They didn't yell, didn't say a word, just come toward us at a fast, steady walk.

"I tell you, Doc," Ordway said, "Robert E. Lee whipped our a.r.s.e lots of times and I know he's a mean, smart sonofab.i.t.c.h, but he wasn't smart here in Gettysburg. We couldn't believe it, watchin them rebels come at us like that across open fields, with us on high, protected ground. We knew they was dead men, and they must of knew it too. We watched them come most a mile. Colonel Symonds and other officers up and down the line was yellin, 'Hold your fire! Let em get close. Hold your fire!' They must of been able to hear that too.

"When they was close enough for us to make out their faces, our artillery from Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge opened up, and a lot of them just disappeared. Those that was left came at us through the smoke, and Symonds finally yelled 'Fire!' and everybody shot hisself a rebel. Somebody yelled, 'Fredericksburg!' and then everybody was yellin it. 'Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!' and shootin and reloadin, and shootin and reloadin, and shootin ...

"They reached the stone wall at the bottom of our ridge only at one place. Them that did fought like doomed men, but they was all killed or captured," Ordway said, and Rob J. nodded. That, he knew, was when he had heard the cheering.

Wilc.o.x and Ordway had worked all night carrying wounded, and now they were going back. Rob J. went with them, through the downpour. As they approached the place of the battle, he saw the rain was a blessing, because it kept down the smell of death, which already was terrible nonetheless. Swelling bodies lay everywhere. Amid the wreckage and carnage of war, rescuers searched to glean the living.

For the rest of the morning Rob J. worked in the rain, dressing wounds and carrying one corner of a litter. When he brought the wounded to the hospitals, he saw why his boys had had eggs. Wagons were being unloaded everywhere. There was plenty of medicine and anesthesia, plenty of dressings, plenty of food. Surgeons were three deep at every operating table. A grateful United States had heard that at last they had a victory, paid for at a terrible price, and they had determined nothing should be spared those who had survived.

Near the railroad depot he was approached by a civilian man about his own age, who asked him politely if he knew where it might be possible to get a soldier embalmed, as if asking him for the time of day or the directions to the town building. The man said he was Winfield S. Walker, Jr., a farmer from Havre de Grace, Maryland. When he'd heard of the battle, something had told him to come and see his son Peter, and he had found him among the dead. "Now I would like to have the body embalmed so I can take him home, don't you know."

Rob J. did. "I've heard they are embalming at the Washington House Hotel, sir."

"Yessir. But they told me there they have an exceedingly long list, many before me. I thought to look elsewhere." His son's body was at the Harold farm, a farmhouse-hospital off the Emmitsburg Road.

"I'm a physician. I can do it for you," Rob J. said.

He had the necessary items in the medical pannier back at the 131st, and he went and collected them and then met Mr. Walker at the farmhouse. Rob J. had to tell him as delicately as possible to go get an army coffin that was zinc-lined, because there would be leakage. While the father was off on that sorry errand, he tended to the son, in a bedroom where six other dead men were stored. Peter Walker was a beautiful young man, perhaps twenty years old, with his father's chiseled features and thick dark hair. He was unmarked save that a sh.e.l.l had torn off his left leg at the thigh. He had bled to death, and his body had the whiteness of a marble statue.

Rob J. mixed an ounce of chloride of zinc salts into two quarts of alcohol and water. He tied off the artery in the severed leg so the fluid would be retained, then slit the femoral artery of the uninjured leg and injected the embalming fluid into it with a syringe.

Mr. Walker had no trouble getting a casket from the army. He tried to pay for the embalming, but Rob J. shook his head. "One father helping another," he said.

The rain continued. It was a beastly rain. In the first savage downpour, it had brought some small streams over their banks and drowned some of the severely wounded. Now it fell more gently, and he went back to the battlefield and looked for wounded until dusk. He stopped then, because younger and stronger men had appeared with lamps and torches to search the battlefield, and because he was bone tired.

The Sanitary Commission had set up a kitchen in a warehouse near the center of Gettysburg, and Rob J. went there and had soup containing the first beef he had had in months. He had three bowls, and six slices of white bread.

After he had eaten, he went into the Presbyterian church and went along the pews, stopping at each improvised bed to try to do some homely thing that might help-give water, wipe a sweaty face. Whenever the patient was a Confederate, he always asked the same question. "Son, have you ever run across, in your army, a twenty-three-year-old yellow-haired man from Holden's Crossing, Illinois, name of Alexander Cole?"