As the tall ship whose lofty prore
Shall never stem the billows more
Deserted by her gallant band,
Amid the breakers lies astrand--
Soon his couch lay Rhoderick Dhu,
And oft his fevered limbs he threw
In toss abrupt, as when her sides
Lie rocking in the advancing tides,
That shake her frame with ceaseless beat,
Yet can not heave her from her seat;--
O, how unlike her course on sea!
Or his free step on hill and lea!--Lady of the Lake.
An Army Hospital is the vestibule of the Cemetery--the ante-room
where the recruiting-agents of Death--Wounds and Disease--assemble
their conscripts to prepare them for the ranks from which there is
neither desertion nor discharge. Therein enter those who are to
lay aside “this muddy vesture of decay,” for the changeless garb
of the Beyond. Thither troop the Wasted and Stricken to rest a
little, and prepare for the last great journey, the first milestone
of which is placed over their heads.
Humanity and Science have done much for the Army Hospital, but still
its swinging doors wave two to the tomb where they return one to
health and activity.
It was a broiling hot day when Rachel Bond descended from the
ambulance which had brought her from the station to camp.
She shielded her eyes with a plam-leaf fan, and surveyed the
surroundings of the post of duty to which she had been assigned.
She found herself in a little city of rough plank barracks, arranged
in geometrically correct streets and angles about a great plain
of a parade ground, from which the heat radiated as from a glowing
stove. A flag drooped as if wilted from the top of a tall pole
standing on the side of the parade-ground opposite her. Languidly
pacing in front of the Colonel's tent was an Orderly, who had
been selected in the morning for his spruce neatness, but who now
looked like some enormous blue vegetable, rapidly withering under
the sun's blistering rays.
Beyond were the barracks, baking and sweltering, cracking their rough,
unpainted sides into yawning fissures, and filling the smothering
air with resinous odors distilled from the fat knots in the refuse
planking of which they were built. Beyond these was the line of
camp-guards--bright gun-barrels and bayonets glistening painfully,
and those who bore them walking with as weary slowness as was
consistent with any motion whatever, along their beats.
On straw in the oven-like barracks, and under the few trees in the
camp-ground, lay the flushed and panting soldiers, waiting wearily
for that relief which the descending sun would bring.
The hospital to which Rachel had been brought differed from the rest
of the sheds in the camp by being whitewashed within and without,
which made it radiate a still more unendurable heat than its
duller-lustered companions. A powerful odor of chloride of lime
and carbolic acid shocked her sensitive nostrils with their tales
of all the repulsiveness those disinfectants were intended to
destroy or hide.
Several dejected, hollow-eyed convalescents, whose uniforms hung
about their wasted bodies as they would about wooden crosses, sat
on benches in the scanty shade by one side of the building, and
fanned themselves weakly with fans clumsily fashioned from old
newspapers. They looked up as the trim, lady-like figure stepped
lightly down from the ambulance, and the long-absent luster returned
briefly to their sad eyes.
“That looks like home, Jim,” said one of the fever-wasted.
“That it does. Lord! she looks as fresh and sweet as the
Johnny-jump-ups down by our old spring-house. I expect she's come
down here to find somebody that belongs to her that's sick. Don't
I wish it was me!”
“I wouldn't mind being a brother, or a cousin, or a sweetheart to
her myself. That'd be better luck than to be given a sutler-shop.
Just see her move! She's got a purtier gait than our thoroughbred
colt.”
“IT does one's eyes good to look at her. It makes me feel better
than a cart-load of the stuff that old Pillbags forces down our
throats.”
“You're a-talking. She's a lady--every inch of her--genuine,
simon-pure, fast colors, all-wool, a yard wide, as fine as silk,
and bright a a May morning.”
“And as wholesome as Spring sunshine.”
All unconscious that her appearance was to the invalids who looked
upon her like a sweet, health-giving breeze bursting through a
tainted atmosphere, Rachel passed wearily along the burning walks
toward the Surgeon's office, with a growing heart-sickness at the
unwelcome appearance of the task she had elected for herself.
The journey had been full of irritating discomforts. Heat, dust,
and soiled linen are only annoyances to a man; they are real miseries
to a woman. The marvel is not that Joan of Arc dared the perils
of battle, but that she endured the continued wretchedness of camp
uncleanliness, to the triumphant end.
With her throat parched, garments “sticky,” hair, eyes, ears and
nostrils filled with irritating dust, and a feeling that collar
and cuffs were, as ladies phrase it, “a sight to behold,” Rachel's
heoric enthusiasm ebbed to the bottom. Ushered into the Surgeon's
office she was presented to a red-faced, harsh-eyed man, past
the middle age, who neither rose nor apologized to her for being
discovered in the undress of a hot day. He montioned her to a
seat with the wave of the fan he was vigorously using, and taking
her letter of introduction, adjusted eye-glasses upon a ripe-colored
nose, and read it with a scowl that rippled his face with furrows.
“So you're the first of the women nurses that's to be assigned to
me,” he said ungraciously, after finishing the letter, and scanning
her severely for a moment over the top of his glasses. “I suppose
I have to have 'em.”
The manner hurt Rachel even more than the words. Before she could
frame a reply he continued:
“I don't take much stock in this idea of women nurses, especially
when they're young and pretty.” He scowled at Rachel as if she had
committed a crime in being young and beautiful. “But the country's
full of women with a Quixotic notion of being Florence Nightingales,
and they've badgered the Government into accepting their services.
I suppose I'll have to take my share of them. Ever nursed?”
“No, sir,” responded Rachel, compressing as much ahughtiness as
possible into the answer.
“Of course not. Girls at your age are not at all likely to know
anything that is useful, and least of all how to nurse a sick
man. I hardly know which is the worst, a young one who don't know
anything, or a middle-aged one who thinks she knows it all, and
continually interferes with the management of a case. I believe
though, I'd rather have had the middle-aged one to start with.
She'd be more likely to tend to her business, and not have her
head turned by the attentions of the good-looking young officers
who swarm around her. Mind, I'll not allow any flirting here.”
Rachel's face crimsoned. “You forget yourself,” she said, cuttingly;
“or perhaps you have nothing to forget. At least, man an effort
to remember that I'm a lady.”
The bristly eyebrows straightened down to a level line over the
small blue eyes, and unpleasant furrows drew themselves around the
corners of his mouth. “YOU forget,” he said, “that if you enter
upon these duties you are in the military service and subject to
your superior officers. You forget the necessity of the most rigid
discipline, and that it is my duty to explain and enforce this.”
“I certainly expect to obey orders,” said Rachel, a little overawed.
“You may rightly expect to,” he answere with a slight sneer; “because
it will be a matter of necessity--you will have to. We must have
instant and unquestioning obedience to orders here, as well as
everywhere else in the Army, or it would be like a rope of sand--of
no strength whatever--no strength, whatever.”
“I know it,” answered Rachel, depressed even more by th apparition
of martial law than she had been by the heat.
“And what I have been telling you is only the beginning,” continued
the Surgeon, noting the effect of his words, and exulting in
their humbling power. “The cornerstone of everything military is
obedience--prompt, unfailing obedience, by everybody, soldier or
officer, to his superiors. Without it---”
“Major Moxon,” said an officer, entering and saluting, “the General
presents his compliments, and desires to know why his repeated
orders in regard to the furloughing of men have been so persistently
disregarded.”
“Because,” said the Surgeon, getting purplish-red about the cheeks
and nose, “ because the matter's one which I consider outside of
his province--beyond his control, sir. I am Chief of the Medical
Department, as you are perhaps aware, sir.”
“We presumed that you were taking that view of the matter, from
your course,” answered the Aide calmly. “I am not here to argue
the matter with you, but simply to direct you to consider yourself
under arrest. Charges are being prepared against you, to which I
will add specifications based on this interview. Good afternoon,
sir.” The Aide saluted stiffly and moved away, leaving the Surgeon
in a state of collapse at the prospect of what he had brought upon
himself by his injudicious contumacy. Mis Rachel was in that state
of wonderment that comes to pupils at seeing their teachers rebel
agains their own precepts. The Surgeon was too much engrossed in
his own affairs to pay farther heed to her. He tapped a bell.
“Orderly,” he said, to the soldier who responded, “conduct this
young woman to Dr. Denslow. Inform him that she is to be with us
as a nurse, and ask him to be kind enough to assign her suitable
quarters. Good afternoon, ma'am.”
In another office, much smaller and far less luxuriously furnished,
she found Dr. Denslow, a hazel-eyed, brown-bearded man of thirty,
whose shoulder-straps bore the modest bars of Captain. The reader
has already made his acquaintance. He received her with the pleasant,
manly sympathy for her sex, which had already made him one of the
most popular of family physicians in the city where he was practicing
at the outbreak of the war.
Rachel's depressed spirits rose again at his cordial reception.
“I am so busy,” he said, after a brief exchange of commonplaces,
“that I'll not have the time to give you much information this
afternoon as to your duties, and I know that you are so fatigued with
your journey and the heat that you will not care to do anything but
rest and refresh yourself. I will therefore show you immediately
to your quarters.”
“This will be your field of labor,” he said, as he led her down
the long aisle between rows of cots toward her room. “It's not a
cheerful one to contemplate at first. Human suffering is always
a depressing spectacle, and you will see here more of it and more
varied agony than you can find anywhere outside of an army hospital's
walls. But as the deed is so is the duty, and the glory of doing
it. To one who wants to serve God and his fellow-creatures--which
I take it is the highest form of religion--here is an opportunity
that he may bless God for giving him. Here he can earn a brighter
crown than is given them who die at the stake for opinion's sake.”
So earnest was his enthusiasm that Rachel felt herself lifted up
by it, in spite of her discomforts. But then she turned her eyes
away from his impassioned face, and looked over the array of white
beds, each with its pale and haggard occupant, his eyes blazing
with the delirium of fever, or closed in the langor of exhaustion,
with limbs tossing as the febrile fire seethed the blood, or quivering
with the last agonies. Groans, prayers, and not a few oaths fell
on her ears. The repulsive smell of the disinfectants, the nauseating
odor of the sick room where hundreds of invalids were lying, the
horrible effluvia of the typhus rose on the hot air, and seemed
part of the misery which so strongly assailed her other senses.
She was sick at heart, and with every feeling in active revolt,
but without a word she turned and followed Dr. Denslow to a hot,
close, little room which had been cut off one end of the hospital,
though not so separated from it but that the sounds and odors from
the sick wards continually filtered in through the wide cracks in
its plank sides. An iron bedstead, of the same pattern as that
upon which the sick lay, stood in one corner, and in another was
a rudely-fashioned stand, upon which was a tin-basin, a cake of
yellow bar-soap, and a bucket of water for washing. This was all
the furniture.
As the door closed behind the Doctor, Rachel threw herself upon
the cot, in a fit of despair at the wreck of all her fancies, and
the repulsiveness of the career upon which she had embarked.
“I can not--I will not--live here a week,” she said to herself,
over and over again. “I will die for the lack of comforts--of the
decencies of life, even--to say nothing of being poisoned by these
horrible smells, or driven distracted by the raving sick and that
boor of a Surgeon. But I can not draw back; I would rather die than
go back to Sardis with a confession of failure at the very outset
of my attempt to play the heroine.”
Then she remembered her last words to Harry Glen: “I only know that
you have failed where a number of commonplace men have succeeded,
and that is sufficient.”
Would she subject herself to having him throw these words in her
teeth? No. Any shape of trial and death, rather.