The military hospitals, convalescent camps, etc., in Washington and its
neighborhood, sometimes contain over fifty thousand sick and wounded men.
Every form of wound (the mere sight of some of them having been known to
make a tolerably hardy visitor faint away), every kind of malady, like a
long procession, with typhoid fever and diarrhoea at the head as
leaders, are here in steady motion. The soldier's hospital! how many
sleepless nights, how many women's tears, how many long and waking hours
and days of suspense, from every one of the Middle, Eastern, and Western
States, have concentrated here! Our own New York, in the form of hundreds
and thousands of her young men, may consider herself here--Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Indiana, and all the West and Northwest the same--and all the New
England States the same.
Upon a few of these hospitals I have been almost daily calling as a
missionary, on my own account, for the sustenance and consolation of some
of the most needy cases of sick and dying men, for the last two months.
One has much to learn to do good in these places. Great tact is required.
These are not like other hospitals. By far the greatest proportion (I
should say five sixths) of the patients are American young men,
intelligent, of independent spirit, tender feelings, used to a hardy and
healthy life; largely the farmers are represented by their sons--largely
the mechanics and workingmen of the cities. Then they are soldiers. All
these points must be borne in mind.
People through our Northern cities have little or no idea of the great and
prominent feature which these military hospitals and convalescent camps
make in and around Washington. There are not merely two or three or a
dozen, but some fifty of them, of different degrees of capacity. Some have
a thousand and more patients. The newspapers here find it necessary to
print every day a directory of the hospitals--a long list, something like
what a directory of the churches would be in New York, Philadelphia, or
Boston.
The Government (which really tries, I think, to do the best and quickest
it can for these sad necessities) is gradually settling down to adopt the
plan of placing the hospitals in clusters of one-story wooden barracks,
with their accompanying tents and sheds for cooking and all needed
purposes. Taking all things into consideration, no doubt these are best
adapted to the purpose; better than using churches and large public
buildings like the Patent office. These sheds now adopted are long,
one-story edifices, sometimes ranged along in a row, with their heads to
the street, and numbered either alphabetically, Wards A or B, C, D, and so
on; or Wards 1, 2, 3, etc. The middle one will be marked by a flagstaff,
and is the office of the establishment, with rooms for the ward surgeons,
etc. One of these sheds, or wards, will contain sixty cots; sometimes, on
an emergency, they move them close together, and crowd in more. Some of
the barracks are larger, with, of course, more inmates. Frequently there
are tents, more comfortable here than one might think, whatever they may
be down in the army.
Each ward has a ward-master, and generally a nurse for every ten or twelve
men. A ward surgeon has, generally, two wards--although this varies. Some
of the wards have a woman nurse; the Armory-square wards have some very
good ones. The one in Ward E is one of the best.
A few weeks ago the vast area of the second story of that noblest of
Washington buildings, the Patent office, was crowded close with rows of
sick, badly wounded, and dying soldiers. They were placed in three very
large apartments. I went there several times. It was a strange, solemn,
and, with all its features of suffering and death, a sort of fascinating
sight. I went sometimes at night to soothe and relieve particular cases;
some, I found, needed a little cheering up and friendly consolation at
that time, for they went to sleep better afterwards. Two of the immense
apartments are filled with high and ponderous glass cases crowded with
models in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine, or invention it
ever entered into the mind of man to conceive, and with curiosities and
foreign presents. Between these cases were lateral openings, perhaps
eight feet wide, and quite deep, and in these were placed many of the
sick; besides a great long double row of them up and down through the
middle of the hall. Many of them were very bad cases, wounds and
amputations. Then there was a gallery running above the hall, in which
there were beds also. It was, indeed, a curious scene at night when lit
up. The glass cases, the beds, the sick, the gallery above and the marble
pavement under foot; the suffering, and the fortitude to bear it in the
various degrees; occasionally, from some, the groan that could not be
repressed; sometimes a poor fellow dying, with emaciated face and glassy
eyes, the nurse by his side, the doctor also there, but no friend, no
relative--such were the sights but lately in the Patent office. The
wounded have since been removed from there, and it is now vacant again.
Of course there are among these thousands of prostrated soldiers in
hospital here all sorts of individual cases. On recurring to my note-book,
I am puzzled which cases to select to illustrate the average of these
young men and their experiences. I may here say, too, in general terms,
that I could not wish for more candor and manliness, among all their
sufferings, than I find among them.
Take this case in Ward 6, Campbell hospital: a young man from Plymouth
county, Massachusetts; a farmer's son, aged about twenty or twenty-one; a
soldierly, American young fellow, but with sensitive and tender feelings.
Most of December and January last he lay very low, and for quite a while
I never expected he would recover. He had become prostrated with an
obstinate diarrhoea: his stomach would hardly keep the least thing down;
he was vomiting half the time. But that was hardly the worst of it. Let me
tell his story--it is but one of thousands.
He had been some time sick with his regiment in the field, in front, but
did his duty as long as he could; was in the battle of Fredericksburg;
soon after was put in the regimental hospital. He kept getting
worse--could not eat anything they had there; the doctor told him nothing
could be done for him there. The poor fellow had fever also; received
(perhaps it could not be helped) little or no attention; lay on the
ground, getting worse. Toward the latter part of December, very much
enfeebled, he was sent up from the front, from Falmouth station, in an
open platform car (such as hogs are transported upon North), and dumped
with a crowd of others on the boat at Aquia creek, falling down like a rag
where they deposited him, too weak and sick to sit up or help himself at
all. No one spoke to him or assisted him; he had nothing to eat or drink;
was used (amid the great crowds of sick) either with perfect indifference,
or, as in two or three instances, with heartless brutality.
On the boat, when night came and when the air grew chilly, he tried a long
time to undo the blankets he had in his knapsack, but was too feeble. He
asked one of the employees, who was moving around deck, for a moment's
assistance to get the blankets. The man asked him back if he could not get
them himself. He answered, no, he had been trying for more than half an
hour, and found himself too weak. The man rejoined, he might then go
without them, and walked off. So H. lay chilled and damp on deck all
night, without anything under or over him, while two good blankets were
within reach. It caused him a great injury--nearly cost him his life.
Arrived at Washington, he was brought ashore and again left on the wharf,
or above it, amid the great crowds, as before, without any
nourishment--not a drink for his parched mouth; no kind hand had offered
to cover his face from the forenoon sun. Conveyed at last some two miles
by the ambulance to the hospital, and assigned a bed (Bed 49, Ward 6,
Campbell hospital, January and February, 1863), he fell down exhausted
upon the bed. But the ward-master (he has since been changed) came to him
with a growling order to get up: the rules, he said, permitted no man to
lie down in that way with his own clothes on; he must sit up--must first
go to the bath-room, be washed, and have his clothes completely changed.
(A very good rule, properly applied.) He was taken to the bath-room and
scrubbed well with cold water. The attendants, callous for a while, were
soon alarmed, for suddenly the half-frozen and lifeless body fell limpsy
in their hands, and they hurried it back to the cot, plainly insensible,
perhaps dying.
Poor boy! the long train of exhaustion, deprivation, rudeness, no food, no
friendly word or deed, but all kinds of upstart airs and impudent,
unfeeling speeches and deeds, from all kinds of small officials (and some
big ones), cutting like razors into that sensitive heart, had at last done
the job. He now lay, at times out of his head but quite silent, asking
nothing of any one, for some days, with death getting a closer and a surer
grip upon him; he cared not, or rather he welcomed death. His heart was
broken. He felt the struggle to keep up any longer to be useless. God, the
world, humanity--all had abandoned him. It would feel so good to shut his
eyes forever on the cruel things around him and toward him.
As luck would have it, at this time I found him. I was passing down Ward
No. 6 one day about dusk (4th January, I think), and noticed his glassy
eyes, with a look of despair and hopelessness, sunk low in his thin,
pallid-brown young face. One learns to divine quickly in the hospital, and
as I stopped by him and spoke some commonplace remark (to which he made no
reply), I saw as I looked that it was a case for ministering to the
affection first, and other nourishment and medicines afterward. I sat down
by him without any fuss; talked a little; soon saw that it did him good;
led him to talk a little himself; got him somewhat interested; wrote a
letter for him to his folks in Massachusetts (to L. H. Campbell, Plymouth
county); soothed him down as I saw he was getting a little too much
agitated, and tears in his eyes; gave him some small gifts, and told him I
should come again soon. (He has told me since that this little visit, at
that hour, just saved him; a day more, and it would have been perhaps too
late.)
Of course I did not forget him, for he was a young fellow to interest any
one. He remained very sick--vomiting much every day, frequent diarrhoea,
and also something like bronchitis, the doctor said. For a while I visited
him almost every day, cheered him up, took him some little gifts, and gave
him small sums of money (he relished a drink of new milk, when it was
brought through the ward for sale). For a couple of weeks his condition
was uncertain--sometimes I thought there was no chance for him at all; but
of late he is doing better--is up and dressed, and goes around more and
more (February 21) every day. He will not die, but will recover.
The other evening, passing through the ward, he called me--he wanted to
say a few words, particular. I sat down by his side on the cot in the
dimness of the long ward, with the wounded soldiers there in their beds,
ranging up and down. H. told me I had saved his life. He was in the
deepest earnest about it. It was one of those things that repay a
soldiers' hospital missionary a thousandfold--one of the hours he never
forgets.
A benevolent person, with the right qualities and tact, cannot, perhaps,
make a better investment of himself, at present, anywhere upon the varied
surface of the whole of this big world, than in these military hospitals,
among such thousands of most interesting young men. The army is very
young--and so much more American than I supposed. Reader, how can I
describe to you the mute appealing look that rolls and moves from many a
manly eye, from many a sick cot, following you as you walk slowly down one
of these wards? To see these, and to be incapable of responding to them,
except in a few cases (so very few compared to the whole of the suffering
men), is enough to make one's heart crack. I go through in some cases,
cheering up the men, distributing now and then little sums of money--and,
regularly, letter-paper and envelopes, oranges, tobacco, jellies, etc.,
etc.
Many things invite comment, and some of them sharp criticism, in these
hospitals. The Government, as I said, is anxious and liberal in its
practice toward its sick; but the work has to be left, in its personal
application to the men, to hundreds of officials of one grade or another
about the hospitals, who are sometimes entirely lacking in the right
qualities. There are tyrants and shysters in all positions, and especially
those dressed in subordinate authority. Some of the ward doctors are
careless, rude, capricious, needlessly strict. One I found who prohibited
the men from all enlivening amusements; I found him sending men to the
guard-house for the most trifling offence. In general, perhaps, the
officials--especially the new ones, with their straps or badges--put on
too many airs. Of all places in the world, the hospitals of American young
men and soldiers, wounded in the volunteer service of their country, ought
to be exempt from mere conventional military airs and etiquette of
shoulder-straps. But they are not exempt.