He could see the boy meant it, and was scared of what it might do to the risky balance of that firing line if too many generals got shot.
‘Staying here didn’t do Dick Ewell much good,’ Andie Lawton said. ‘So you better come when I tell you.’
Tom Jackson saw the two horses cross the railroad cut at a poor pace. He thought some officer had sent him a few lazy despatch riders. Hunter Maguire, watching too, saw him set his face, readying himself to yell and roar at them.
But at the same second both Stonewall and Hunter Maguire came to the knowledge that it was Dick Ewell there, flopping about loosely on that horse. Surgeon Maguire ran a little way down the slope to this patient who had dropped in on him. He did not drag Dick Ewell off the horse – he could see the horse’s withers were slick with too much of the discharge of Popeye’s blood.
‘Dick Ewell?’ Stonewall called. Maguire inspected the knee without touching it.
‘The patella, General. The kneecap.’
‘Bad, would you say, Hunter?’
‘No doubt,’ said Maguire.
A few grooms were round about, hanging on to the staff’s horses. So was the surgeon’s orderly. Maguire told these boys to lay blankets out on the ground. They delayed about it for they knew the blankets wouldn’t be much use after a general or anyone else had bled away on them. ‘Put down goddam blankets!’ Maguire roared.
Jackson drew near to Popeye’s horse. ‘Hullo, Dick,’ he said. Standing, he was taller than the neck of Ewell’s little mount. Dick Ewell didn’t answer. ‘He’s a bad colour, Doctor Maguire,’ said Stonewall, as if the information would be of professional help to Hunter.
Hunter had the grooms and his own orderly lift Ewell down. The orderly was a good man and he held the leg in its slight bend as the others dragged Popeye down, and he said the things that needed to be said: ‘Don’t haul him like potatoes! No jolts there, goddamit!’
On a pile of blankets and waterproofs, they laid Popeye down. Hunter’s orderly, dropping further blankets atop Dick Ewell’s upper body, looked in the mouth to see what was making all the grunting and gagging noise that was going on. He found the general’s false teeth askew in the mouth and jammed hard up against the palate. He took them out. He didn’t have any bedside stand to put them on, and Maguire was yelling at him to fetch his medical bag. So he put the teeth in his own jacket pocket.
The shiny instruments were laid out. Instruments shinier than most of the wounded got treated with, laid out there on the ground on strips of sealskin. Hunter Maguire cut into the cloth of General Ewell’s trousers, cutting close to the left crutch with a sawtooth penknife.
‘Can you see all right there, Hunter,’ Tom Jackson called over his shoulders. His eyes were still on the fight some half-mile off, down past the railroad cut near the road. Maguire was somehow pleased that Tom Jackson wouldn’t be staring down at the surgical work. He went on sawing and ripping but gently as he could. If you gave this knee a good jolt one of the deep arteries might spout.
All round the blankets where Popeye Ewell lay, Maguire’s orderly was putting down star candles that had been found on the march, and lighting them so there’d be enough illumination. By their flame, Maguire got Popeye’s leg bare. It was a white, wizened little leg with the veins blue high up on the thigh. It was blue too and awfully swollen all round the kneecap which had been hit, as Maguire had guessed, square on. The bone had been fragmented by the minie ball and turned all inside out. The cartilages had been twisted too and it would have looked to a layman like there were strands of rope mixed up in the mess. You could bet, without probing, that the head of the femur was all shattered. There was nothing that could be done to pack those bones back into their correct relationship one to the other. There was no fancy surgery you could try on that mess. The knowing orderly was already tying a tourniquet high on the leg. In the background – because to Hunter anything else than this task was background – Tom Jackson sent Byron off with orders for Lawton. ‘There’s a barn there, well up the road,’ Stonewall was saying. ‘I want him to anchor his flank right there.’ ‘I think, sir,’ said this Byron, ‘that’s already been done by General Ewell’s orders.’
‘Then make sure they stay there,’ Stonewall said.
‘I believe the leg must go sir,’ Hunter called. He uttered the sentence firmly. A lot of generals thought that amputation was the method of quacks and butchers and poor country doctors. A lot of them thought that, if they were shot in the leg or arm, the good doctors they had on the staff could always save that limb, no matter what.
‘Go?’ asked Stonewall, a subscriber to the general theory.
‘The bones are a shambles. I can’t get at those deep arteries to stop the bleeding. It has to come off.’
Hunter was very sure not to make apologies. His Professor of Ethical Medicine and Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania had always said that apologies were the last recourse of the second-rate surgeon. Once you start apologising, he’d said, you’ll never finish. You’ll be apologising to yourself in the end, for you’re bound to be finished off by the same diseases that afflict your patients and for which you’re always saying that you’re sorry. If you had to treat President Buchanan for piles, he used to say, and they still pained him after a year’s treatment, you might frown a little, but you never said, sorry, Mr President.
‘Well of course you ought to do it,’ said Tom Jackson. ‘Here?’
‘I wouldn’t wish to move him as he is. Not even on a litter.’
Stonewall looked down the hill at the conflict roaring along there by the road. ‘Afterwards? Can he be moved afterwards?’ He was thinking all at once of the widow Popeye had courted in Richmond. It wasn’t a very passionate business; Popeye firmly called her Mrs Brown whether he was speaking to her or of her. She seemed a sensible woman and, potentially, a good nurse.
‘He can be moved by midnight, General.’ Hunter said.
There was a straggle of litter-bearers coming through the railroad cut and Stonewall called to two of them. They staggered near. The boy they were carrying was arguing away in a loud voice. His face was lopsidedly swollen; he’d been shot in the right cheek. He was chiding someone, and it turned out it was his maw. ‘The only thing being, maw,’ he kept saying. He was arguing with his maw about putting in a share-crop on the river pasture. His maw must have been some arguer. His brow was knitted in an awful fixed frown.
The litter-bearers, one of them with but one good eye and the other pretty thick-browed, stared at Stonewall. He told them to get that boy down to the surgeons fast and to tell them to treat him straight up and then to come right back here and wait. Did they understand?
They both nodded madly. Their mouths were agape. Maguire hoped it was from the labours of litter-bearing but feared it was dimness of intellect.
Dick Ewell woke and saw Hunter kneeling above him. ‘Jesus have mercy,’ he said. ‘It’s the Pennsylvania society doctor.’
‘You’ll be well, general.’
‘It’s a hell of a pain, Hunter. It’s a goddam county fair of a pain!’
The orderly was already mixing a quarter grain of morphine in a tin cup of water. ‘Drink this,’ said Hunter when the solution was ready. Ewell’s popping eyes were nearly on his cheeks with the force of the agony. ‘Holding ’em, Tom?’ he called to Jackson.
‘Holding ’em nicely, Dick,’ Tom Jackson said over his shoulder though no one could have guessed whether he meant it. So Ewell drank the narcotic cup and his arms went loose and he sighed a long sigh. Even so, Maguire had the orderly kneel at the general’s head holding a pad soaked in ether close up to the beaky nose.
This is the first kneeling-down amputation I’ve ever done, Maguire told himself.
Hunter plied the long shining scalpel and the file and the bright saw and the fresh bone wax to seal off the marrow when the leg came off. The packages of silk and cord and catgut were open only because he’d used them to sew up that Maryland lawyer, Snowdon Andrews, who’d been disembowe
lled at the Cedar Run. Apart from Andrews and Ewell and a number of the staff now and then who might have got a hot little slug of shrapnel in his cheek, Maguire had hardly practised any surgery in a long day.
Kyd Douglas, back with a report from Bill Telfer, saw Hunter, in an apron that looked fresh but had a smear of gore across its middle, cutting into the leg. Kyd kept his eyes ahead while the rasp of the bone saw went on, and the filing. When it stopped he turned and saw the surgeon working away with those silken threads in the bloody stump and then, with broad movements of the arm, sealing a flap of flesh back over the wound. It was as well Maguire was fast. The star candles were burning out, the last light of day was just about gone.
Later, turning around again, Kyd saw one of the grooms setting off with a crooked lump wrapped in a blanket. He’d been ordered to take Popeye Ewell’s leg back to the field surgeries to be burnt with all the other fragments of this evening’s conflict. Though Kyd had seen a lot of boys on their backs this evening, that was the only time he felt bile in his mouth. He thought, if I were that boy I’d throw the thing into the first ravine rather than carry it all the way back through the woods. Then I’d sit down and chew tobacco like hell just to get certain tastes out of my mouth and certain stenches from my nostrils.
Which was just about what the groom did anyway.
About an hour later, the Yankees dragged away across the meadows. They gave up the field that is, but Tom Jackson, yawning, said later that evening that they’d done it in a well-ordered manner. And that was a sort of praise.
4
When Canty approached her on the second floor of the hospital that morning, Dora Whipple was feeding gruel to an Alabamanan private who had just come through typhus. Canty stood by the soldier’s bed, but looked at Dora Whipple instead of at his patient. That was characteristic of him, she thought.
Raising her eyes, she saw past Canty to the end of the ward. There was a colonel down there in the doorway, a grey-haired man. Two soldiers almost as ancient as him also waited there with muskets in their hands. Mrs Whipple had seen that colonel around Orange. If Orange could have been described as having a garrison, then he would have had to be considered the garrison commander. He controlled a few companies of senior soldiers, nearly all of them over 45, the others limpy or lacking a limb. They worked around the railroad depot and kept order amongst the convalescing patients of Mrs Whipple’s hospital.
Canty said, as if it was the best news he’d had in a month: ‘The colonel would like to speak to you.’
‘He’s welcome,’ said Mrs Whipple. ‘Tell him to come in.’
‘He’d rather speak to you on your own.’
Mrs Whipple sighed and put down the gruel beside the boy. ‘Now you make sure you finish that up,’ she told the survivor of typhus.
‘Only cos you say so, ma’am,’ the boy told her. ‘But I can’t tell why anyone would eat that mush of their own free will.’
They always said things like that, the farm boys. They weren’t big on broth or gruel.
Mrs Whipple walked to the door of the ward. The old grey-haired colonel watched her coming. He must have been at least seventy years and very likely 75. Canty, she noticed, was right behind her, had followed her on her passage up the hospital aisle. ‘Thank you, Doctor Canty,’ the old colonel said, as if dismissing him. But Canty would not go.
The colonel sighed. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘what I do is not of my own choosing. I’ve orders to arrest and detain you, pending a military trial. In fact, it’s shaping up to be a special court-martial.’
Mrs Whipple could not think of anything to say which might talk the old man round. But she frowned and opened her mouth. ‘Don’t say anything at all, ma’am. Let me tell you, I cleaned out the lockup down by the depot yard and it’s all set up for your comfort. I will accompany you to your quarters here in the hospital right away, in case there’s anything you have a mind to bring with you, though mind you, you can’t bring more than my boys can carry. There ain’t so much room in a cell. I’m sorry, ma’am.’
She had part-way recovered now. ‘This is a fantasy, colonel.’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Don’t I even get told what it all means?’
‘The charge is such, ma’am,’ he said, glancing at Canty, ‘that if I said what it was in a halfway public place, it might not be in the interests of your well-being, ma’am. For these are passionate times.’
She laughed. ‘I’m not coming with you, colonel.’
‘Please, ma’am. I wouldn’t know what the hell to do if you refused – excusing the expression. My boys here wouldn’t know what the hell to do. We got our orders. Why don’t you for the moment make it smooth for us? In the end you got to come with us in any case – there ain’t no way that that can be avoided. Let me tell you, I got manacles, ma’am, I don’t want to put on you. We can walk through the streets, you and I, down to the lockup like friends or you can go in chains.…’
Mrs Whipple took thought for a while. ‘I’ll come with you, colonel,’ she said, like someone granting a favour.
He was so kind to her. He made his ‘boys’ walk many paces behind, so that any citizens of Orange who saw them on their way to the lockup that day might have thought they were strolling together. When they reached the lockup, he showed her inside. There were three cells, one of them hung with old green drapes to give her privacy.
‘My men,’ he told her, ‘are all family men of mature age, ma’am. You’ll find you’ll get treated with some delicacy.…’
‘But the reason for the arrest, sir. In this whole ridiculous matter, what is the charge?’
‘There’s some army lawyer coming to see you, ma’am, in just a moment. He can tell you more. But the grounds for the arrest, ma’am, is that you are a spy.’ He looked away. ‘I ain’t saying for a second I believe it.’
He showed her into the cell. Beside the bed, there was a table with a basin on it full of fresh water, and with a little square of yellow soap beside it. There was a covered enamel bucket in one corner. Somehow it was the niceness of these arrangements that gave her her first onrush of terror. She would have liked it better if they’d thrown her in with other prisoners, into a cell with straw on the floor and a foul open bucket in the corner. They were treating her in a way that made it seem as if they pitied her because there wasn’t any escape open to her.
She managed to laugh. ‘The whole idea is so stupid. My husband, sir, died for your beloved Confederacy.’
The old colonel waved his hands at this argument, like a man troubled by insects. ‘I know all that, ma’am.’
He left her, and someone locked the door. When she heard the lock shift, her head became light, her ears cold. She had to resist rushing to that enamel bucket and being ill in it.
She sat there half an hour and made use of the Bible they’d left on the pillow of the bed. She read Psalm 147 over and over, and was just finished it for the tenth time when another officer appeared at her cell door.
This one was much younger than the colonel. He looked as if he had just stepped off the train from Richmond via Charlottesville. He had not done much campaigning, she decided, for his uniform was fresh and well tailored.
‘Major Pember,’ he said, ‘from the Judge Advocate’s Department, ma’am. I believe you’ve been worried as to the cause for your arrest, so the first thing I’ll do is read this to you.’
He’d taken from a valise he carried a document which he began to read aloud to her. It was the formal charge of treason. His voice was gentle and ordinary as he read, and took the sting out of the words he was conveying to her. He quoted the Act of Congress under which the charges against her made her liable to the judgement of a military court. When he finished he lowered the paper. ‘May I come in, ma’am? I’ve been detailed to act as your counsel.’
She smiled and shook her head, amazed. ‘This cell is no property of mine, sir. You know well you can come in here if you wish.’
The lawyer nodded his head to the
turnkey, who unlocked her cell door. Then he came through, his eyes looking about in a well-mannered way for a place to sit. There was only the one chair.
‘Please,’ Mrs Whipple said, ‘you can sit on the edge of my … rather of this cot.’
When they had both seated and settled themselves he studied her awhile. ‘It seems to me, ma’am, that we will have little trouble defeating this charge.’
‘And if I do defeat it and walk free again, what are my chances of surviving the mob feeling, the crowds in the streets, Major Pember?’
‘We are not making any grand show out of your trial, ma’am. You will be protected.’
‘But why was I arrested? And on what evidence?’
‘It seems, ma’am, a Union spy called Mr Rupert Pleasance was arrested in Richmond two days ago. Did you perhaps know a Pleasance?’
‘I did not know anyone by such a name.’
‘A man of maybe 45 years,’ said Major Pember. ‘Slight in the shoulders. Reddish hair. When arrested, he was wearing a light seersucker suit and a beaver hat.…’
‘There are many men of 45 who wear beaver hats,’ Dora Whipple said. But she knew, of course, that the man described was the one she used to meet on the waste ground west of Chimborazo on Thursday evenings. ‘Why would anyone arrest me for a connection with a man of middle age in a beaver hat?’ she asked ironically.
‘The gentleman in question had a notebook with your name in it – other names as well. I believe that all persons named in a certain way in that notebook have been arrested … as you have been yourself … and charged with treason. Now, ma’am, I do not fully know the prosecutor’s case, but it seems to me to be circumstantial. Therefore, do not be too distressed at this stage, my dear lady.’
‘The man in the beaver hat?’ she asked. ‘Does he have grounds to be distressed?’
‘Yes, ma’am. He has already come to a painful end. It might be better if you did not enquire …’
‘I am no infant, sir.’
‘Then I have to tell you he was hanged in Richmond this morning.’