Never Look Back

  She was taller than Matilda by a couple of inches, and thinner than she had been back in Ohio. Her plain brown unhooped dress, the regulations Miss Dix insisted on for her nurses, made her skin look sallow, and her severe hair-style, parted in the middle and plaited into two coils over her ears did nothing to flatter her. Yet those mournful dark eyes which even as a small child had always dominated her face were so expressive and beautiful.

  ‘What you see outwardly isn’t important,’ Tabitha replied with a touch of indignation. ‘I hope you hadn’t expected me to turn into a beauty, I’ll never be that.’

  ‘Tabby, my love,’ Matilda laughed, ‘you will always be beautiful to me. Just that you are here and wanted to nurse wounded men so badly is enough for me to know I was a good nursemaid. But I’m not so sure I’ll be a good nurse.’

  As Matilda walked out of the ward she saw Tabitha at the last bed, bent over, washing the stump of an amputated leg. Such sights no longer distressed either of them, they were ordinary duties they performed day after day. But seven months ago, on that first terrifying day on the wards of The Lodge hospital, such a sight made them avert their eyes and clamp their hands over their mouths in nausea.

  Matilda still had the sights, smells and sounds of that day firmly locked in her mind, the disgusting stench of putrefying flesh, blood in pools on the floor, the screams of men in agony. That day alone there had been over twenty deaths. Suddenly she was seeing the real face of war, brave young men crying for their mothers as the surgeon hacked off their leg or arm with a saw. Men with their guts spilling out beneath dirty bandages, pools of blood and vomit, pus, and wounds so putrid they almost defied cleaning.

  She remembered how on their first night together in their lodgings Tabitha had raged about a doctor who had dropped a surgical instrument on the filthy floor, wiped it on his already blood-soaked gown, then delved into the patient again. She couldn’t believe from what she’d learnt so far in her medical studies, that all the wounded got here before major surgery was a few drops of ether to calm them. She kept saying it was as barbaric as the Middle Ages, and they had to do something to make people realize how bad it was here.

  But in the weeks that followed they came to see that the nurses and doctors did the best they could for their patients, despite grave shortages of medicine, bandages and linen. They learned too that it was the brutal field hospitals to which the men were taken first which were responsible for the worst of the horror. There men bled to death for lack of a tourniquet, they were left for so long on the ground that flies laid eggs in undressed wounds, and limbs were often cut off rather than precious time being spent on removing bullets. They heard how some soldiers kept a gun beneath their pillow, to warn off butcher doctors intent on amputation.

  There were sixteen hospitals in Washington, but only a few had been purpose-built, the rest, like The Lodge, were just ageing, empty buildings pressed into service. The tin roof at The Lodge leaked, many of the broken windows were boarded over, the old floors were bare planks and impossible to keep clean, in the cold weather it couldn’t be heated adequately. Even sixteen hospitals weren’t enough, some casualties were cared for in the Senate House and chambers, even in Georgetown jail.

  They got used to the long hours, the hard work, the smells, the screams of pain, and the ravings of the delirious. They learned to eat the disgusting hospital food and put up with their cramped, cheerless room, but it was the feeling of helplessness that affected them and all the other nurses the most. Even the most tender care couldn’t save many of their patients, all they could do was make their last hours as comfortable as possible. But as fast as one man died, and his corpse was removed, so another man was moved into the bed. Sometimes they lived for such a short time the nurses never even got a chance to speak to them, let alone soothe them in their last moments.

  Sometimes when Matilda and Tabitha left the hospital in the early evening, they had to stop and sit down somewhere, just to breathe in some fresh air and take a rest before they had the strength to walk home after a twelve-hour shift. It was only when they were in bed together, in the tiny airless room of the house they boarded at, that they talked. They would reminisce about Tabitha’s childhood, Primrose Hill, the voyage to America, the times in New York and Missouri. It was the happy times they reflected on most, funnier aspects of the trail to Oregon and the good times with Cissie and John at the cabin.

  In time Matilda came to tell Tabitha the things she’d hid from her as a young girl. Why she led her to believe she was running a restaurant, who Zandra really was, why she felt compelled to help prostitutes and how she came to have a love affair with James and that she didn’t care if they could never be married, just as long as she could spend the rest of her life with him.

  Just a couple of years ago Matilda couldn’t ever have imagined herself talking about such things to Tabitha, for there had always been a clear demarcation line between woman and child. But Tabitha was a woman herself now. She might have been protected from the hardships Matilda had endured, never had a passionate love affair, but she had great sensitivity and intelligence, and her father’s gift of being able to put herself in others’ shoes.

  ‘When you were my age you’d already done so much,’ Tabitha said one night as they lay in bed. ‘I don’t seem to have done anything.’

  ‘You call going to medical college nothing!’ Matilda exclaimed. ‘I think that amounts to far more than anything I’ve done.’

  ‘But even when I’ve got the degree, I won’t be able to practise medicine,’ Tabitha said in a forlorn voice. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll get to deliver babies, and maybe treat the poor in a big city. But women doctors just aren’t acceptable to most folk.’

  ‘That will change,’ Matilda said stoutly. ‘You wait and see! Maybe it won’t be for years yet, but I’m sure it will come. Most women would rather have a lady doctor, if they had a choice.’

  ‘I expected you to say “you’ll be married with children to look after in the few years,” that’s what most people think,’ Tabitha replied.

  ‘People used to say that to me too.’ Matilda laughed softly. ‘I know I’m getting old now because no one says it any more.’

  ‘Would you have liked that?’

  ‘Yes, I would more than anything,’ Matilda admitted. ‘But what about you?’

  ‘If a very special man came along,’ Tabitha said, the slight catch in her voice proving this was something she hoped for. ‘And if I could feel about him the way you did about Papa and do now about James. But I don’t attract men, Matty, special or otherwise. I guess I’m too smart and too plain.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ Matilda said quickly. She had noted the respectful way men reacted to Tabitha, and she knew its meaning. ‘It’s because they can tell the minute they meet you that you have something important to do.’

  Tabitha was silent for a moment as if mulling that over in her mind. ‘You know what I like best about you, Matty?’

  ‘No, do tell me,’ Matilda whispered back.

  ‘How you always tell the truth. Mama said that about you one day, when we were in Missouri. She said, “If Matty tells you something, you should always believe it.” That day when we buried Cissie and the girls, do you remember the things you said to me afterwards?’

  ‘That I wanted you to stay in Oregon, is that what you mean?’

  ‘Not so much that, it was more what you said about always thinking of me as your daughter. I remembered what Mama had said then, and I knew I could believe you. I was sad I had to stay in Oregon. But I knew you weren’t casting me off. That gave me such comfort.’

  ‘That was a terrible time,’ Matilda sighed. ‘If I hadn’t had you and Peter to think about, I don’t know what I would have done.’

  Tabitha put her arms right around her and cuddled her tightly. ‘I wish I could take away that hurt,’ she whispered. ‘I was too young then to really understand what it must have been like for you. But I do now.’

  ‘I wonder if we’ll get any
letters today,’ Tabitha said thoughtfully on the morning of 1 July. It was half past five, and she was plaiting her hair in preparation for a day on the wards. ‘It seems so long since we heard anything from the boys.’

  Letters tended to arrive in batches. Sometimes they were miraculously written only a couple of weeks earlier, but mostly they were months old. When they’d last heard from Sidney back in April, he was at Fort Henry in Tennessee. An injury to his foot had resulted in him getting a job in the stores, and, still firmly unpatriotic, he hoped he’d get to stay there. He voiced no concern about the war, win or lose, only for those he loved and getting through the weeks so they could all be together again.

  James and Peter always seemed to be on the move, back towards Virginia, and said little about any fighting they had encountered on the long march, or even what lay ahead of them. Peter’s letters never had a serious note in them, and centred mainly on the men he’d met, mud, digging ditches, and army rations. He described the hardtack as so tough you could use it as armour. He said the only way to eat it was to soak it in coffee, then skim off the weevils which came out of it.

  James’s letters immediately after Shiloh were cheerful, amusing ones too, but after the Union’s defeat at the Battle of Fredericksburg in Virginia, his own home town, a bitterness had crept in. Fortunately he and Peter had been spared being involved in that battle, the humiliating defeat and the loss of some 12,600 Union men, for they were still on the march to Virginia. But James was not only furious that ‘Poppycock Generals’ had ordered their men into a situation where they could only be massacred, he was also appalled that the town had been looted by Union men after the Confederates had urged the townspeople to leave their homes for safety. Six thousand civilians left the town, trudging through snow with nowhere to go. The victorious rebels finished what the Union had started after the battle, burning and ransacking till there was nothing left for the owners to return to. He said he could never understand such wickedness if he lived to be a hundred.

  The letter he penned on New Year’s Day, after President Lincoln had announced the Emancipation Proclamation, was even more troubled. While delighted in principle that it was to end slavery, he pointed out the loopholes, that Lincoln hadn’t set all slaves free, only those in Confederate States. The ones in the loyal states such as Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky were left out of it because Lincoln was too anxious to retain the goodwill of the slave owners there. He added that no decision had been reached about what to do with the thousands of Negroes who were flocking to the Union army for refuge either. He said Lincoln was weak, and unless he addressed the problems immediately there would be worse trouble in the future.

  But while Matilda sympathized that James often found himself with an unsteady foot in both Yankee and Confederate camps, her primary concern was that he and Peter should stay unharmed. Infuriatingly, he didn’t say exactly where they were or which battles they were involved in, and each time a new batch of injured were brought to the hospital, both she and Tabitha were always quizzing the men to see what they knew, and worse still scanning the men’s faces in terror as they arrived, in dread that one day Peter or James might be among them.

  Just as Matilda and Tabitha were leaving the ward to go home that day, word arrived that a battle had begun in Gettysburg. Matilda didn’t even know where this was, but while lingering outside the hospital to listen to the gossip, they heard it was just a little cross-roads town further upstate.

  They heard that the battle had begun over boots. There was rumoured to be a large supply of them in this town, and both armies had made their way to it, and when they met, fighting had broken out.

  To Matilda it sounded like just a mild skirmish, and she and Tabitha walked home laughing about men fighting over boots.

  They heard nothing more about Gettysburg the next day, but the following morning as they arrived for duty, there was talk of nothing else. Apparently vast numbers of troops on both sides had all converged on the area, and at four on the previous afternoon battle had commenced. Some of the nurses volunteered to go and help in the field hospitals, but this idea was turned down as no one had any idea of casualties, and anyway, everyone was needed here at The Lodge.

  As it was the Fourth of July the following day, some of the men in the convalescence ward had made bunting to hang up, and they came into A1 to hang some in there, and talk to the badly injured men. Matilda thought as they made their way home that evening that it was one of the best days she’d known. Not one death, and no new arrivals. Yet she had a queasy feeling in her stomach that it was just the lull before the storm.

  There was no celebration for the Fourth of July, for by mid-morning the storm Matilda had anticipated began with the first batch of wounded soldiers from Gettsyburg brought in. As the nurses worked at the jobs they’d become so familiar with, cutting uniforms from injured flesh and bathing wounds so the doctors could see the full damage, they heard from the men that this was the worst battle yet. These men were mostly from 20th Maine, and they seemed to want to speak of how they had advanced on the enemy with fixed bayonets and taken the Confederates by surprise. ‘Some of them dropped their weapons,’ one young private whispered to Matilda. ‘I thought we were home and dry, but then I got a bullet through my knee.’

  He was one of the luckier ones, it turned out, as he had been put in a wagon and hauled away to the safety of the tents of the field hospital, then quickly despatched here to Washington before even a scalpel was put near his knee, let alone the surgeon’s saw.

  Neither Matilda nor Tabitha left the ward till midnight. The story was circulating that there would be thousands of casualties in the next day or so. That was, if there were enough wagons to get the men to a hospital.

  Hell was the only word Matilda felt was appropriate for what she saw in the next few days. A constant stream of wagons was coming into Washington, all heavily laden with wounded. Many of them had lain for two days in open fields in hot sunshine alongside the corpses of both their comrades and their foes, watching the bodies bloat and putrefy in the heat.

  They didn’t only use the beds now, but the floor and corridors too. The less badly wounded were left outside on the ground until they could be seen. All the nurses worked sixteen-hour shifts, every pair of hands was needed. There was no time for writing to someone’s mother, no time to coax a man to drink if he didn’t do so willingly. Often they couldn’t even change the bloody sheets on the beds between patients.

  They heard that 51,000 men had been killed, 23,000 of them Union men. The Confederates were limping back to Virginia, taking their wounded with them in the wagon train seventeen miles long.

  Then Peter was brought in.

  It was his voice that Matilda recognized, not his face, for like most of the men he was so blackened with gunpowder that his features were blurred.

  ‘Aunt Matty!’ she heard as the stretcher was carried by her. ‘Is that really you, or am I dreaming?’

  She was so startled she almost spilled the pitcher of water in her hands. The right leg of his pants was split right up his thigh and the dressing around the wound was soaked in blood.

  ‘Peter!’ she exclaimed, rushing up to his stretcher, hands instinctively reached to wipe his brow. ‘Oh my poor love, I never wanted to see you here.’

  She immediately organized for him to be given the bed in the corner, it was the one they called lucky, as more men seemed to make it who’d been put there. Tabitha came rushing over, greeted Peter, and quickly stripped off the blood-soaked dressing which the field hospital had applied over the bullet wound in his thigh.

  ‘The bullet is still in there,’ she said as she probed into the wound. ‘But it looks reasonably clean compared with the other men’s. Matty will wash you, and I’ll get the doctor to come as quickly as possible. Were you lying outside for long?’

  ‘No, the Brigadier saved me,’ he said, wincing with the pain.

  Both women wanted to know more, and to ask where James was, but Peter was in
terrible pain, he’d lost a great deal of blood, the wound needed cleaning, and there were many other men needing even more urgent help.

  Peter passed out with pain as Matilda washed the wound. Once she had it and the surrounding area of his thigh clean, she put a fresh dressing on it, then began undressing and washing him. She had done the same thing to hundreds of men before, but this time she was choked by emotion, remembering him as a baby and how he’d howled in that cellar while Cissie fed little Pearl. She remembered too her delight in seeing him every time she went to the Waifs’ and Strays’ Home in New Jersey. He’d been such a delightful, fat, bonny baby. But that was twenty years ago, he was a man now. No dimpled fat thighs that invited her to kiss them, just hard, taut muscle.

  Yet as she washed his face, the boy she’d brought back to San Francisco after the death of his mother came back, still only downy hair on his chin, the little scar he’d got on his right cheek when he’d fallen from a tree out at the cabin still there amongst the freckles. He came to again, light brown eyes looking at her in wonder.

  ‘It really is me, Peter,’ she whispered. ‘And I’m going to make you better. Just go back to sleep, you are safe now.’

  She wasn’t going to let him die, she had promised Cissie she would care for him. If she had to bribe the doctor to get that bullet out, then she’d do it.

  The bullet was removed at eight that evening. Matilda held his hands while the doctor dug it out, and she stitched the wound herself. He didn’t cry out, and his endurance reminded her so much of the way he had been when Cissie and the girls were dying.

  ‘You are a brave man,’ she said, as she and Tabitha lifted him from the stretcher, back into his bed. ‘I’ve never been prouder of you.’

  Matilda sent Tabitha home to bed, but she remained on the ward. There were many men much more gravely wounded than Peter, few would last the night and they needed someone to comfort them, but it was Peter she stayed for.