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, compassionate 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 coarse 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 glassy lake, and broomwood blossomed vale."