He knew over and over again the prosaic horror of the orderlies coming with the death-stretcher, the lifting of the shattered hulk, the laying of it on the stretcher, the bearing of it off out of light and time forever.
And he knew that the greatest anguish of all was the thought of dying far from home, of going down into the void without a single face from home to watch the descent, without a single hand to touch the lost hand—except the equally lost hands and lonely faces of the other soldiers who were there.
There were few visitors to the hospital. Now and then some ladies would go through the ward, bravely unembarrassed by the smell and look of the wounded. They would leave gifts of fruit or Bibles. One day a very pretty girl prominent in Washington society walked through the ward. She smiled sweetly and looked radiantly healthy and talked cheerfully with several of the patients. After she had left, the men talked for hours about her face, her dress, her eyes, speculated on whether or not she was married, and agreed that she was a damn good scout.
Another visitor was a big grayhaired, graybearded man with ruddy face and light blue eyes. He came three or four times to Johnny’s ward, left oranges and tobacco, wrote letters home for those who wished it, brought books and read aloud whatever the patients requested, listened to boys talk about home hours without interrupting, and sat hours at the bedsides of dying men, lest they should lack company. The boys knew him as Walt. After a while, the word got about that he was a poet named Walt Whitman, but Johnny, who was the literary authority of the ward, had never heard of him before.
One day, the orderlies worked especially hard to clean up the ward and make the patients presentable. Around noon the chief surgeon came in and told the men that they were to have a distinguished visitor, who had asked that his name not be disclosed. Shortly after, a tall, gaunt, ugly man appeared at the door holding a tall black hat in his hand. His face was dark, coarsegrained, and graven with deep lines. His hair and beard were coarse and black, with a beginning of gray. He had a wart beside his nose. His clothes were illfitting. His gaunt neck stuck far out of his collar. His knees had made bags in his pants. He was so tall he had to stoop to get through the doorway. He seemed to be the most awkward, sorrowful figure in a room of awkward, sorrowful men. He stepped to the bedside of the man nearest the door and held out his hand.
—I’m Mister Lincoln, he said.
His voice was highpitched, clear, and kindly. He got the boy’s name and regiment and asked him what battle he had been wounded in. He seemed to become completely at ease as he went down the line of cots. The men found their tongues, saying,
—Howdy do, Mister Lincoln.
—Glad to meet yuh, Mister Lincoln.
—Very happy to make your acquaintance, Mister Lincoln.
Approaching Johnny’s bedside, the President held out his hand.
—Where are you from, my boy?
—Indiana, Johnny said. Freehaven.
—Well, it’s good to see a fellow Hoosier, the President said.
Where did you get your wound?
—Near Columbia, Johnny said.
The President looked surprised.
—You were with Sherman then? On the Great March?
—Yes.
The President spoke with unusual warmth.
—It was a bold move—and boldly executed. I congratulate you.
Johnny blushed and looked down. The President looked as though he wanted to linger and ask more questions about the March, but some of his attendants whispered to him, and it was evident that the President was expected somewhere and was far off schedule.
—I’d a lot rather talk with this boy than with the Secretary of War, the President said.
One of the aides raised his hands in a gesture of good-natured acquiescence. But the President nodded pleasantly to Johnny and went on slowly down the line. He shook hands with every man in the ward and exchanged a few words with each. At the end of the row, he must have said something funny to the man who had the leg gone, the chest wound, and all the complications, for the soldier laughed heartily and so did all the men within hearing.
At the far door, the President turned, stood a moment, a scarred, gaunt figure, lifted his hand, and said in a clear voice,
—Get well, boys, and go back to your homes. There’s good reason to hope that the War will soon be over.
When he was gone, the men talked for a long time about the visit.
—He’s just like your own folks, they all agreed.
It turned out that the President had told a joke. The man with all the complications had remarked that he had so many ailments he had given up trying to count them. The President’s joke involved an old coon dog that had so many fleas ‘he’d give up scratchin’ ’em ‘cause it only stirred ’em up wuss.’ The men told the joke up and down the ward. It didn’t sound very funny in the retelling, but it must have had a remarkable fitness because the man with all the complications kept laughing about it for hours afterwards.
—Where does he git all them jokes? a man asked.
—I reckon he makes ’em up.
—But didn’t he look sad!
—Yes, sir, the man with all the complications said. This war’s really been hard on ’im.
And so the days went by, and Corporal Johnny Shawnessy lingered on while that impersonal thing, his body, tried to make up its mind whether to live or die. As for himself, he had never had a more terrible passion to live, to stand up, to walk, to move about in sunlight, to touch human hands, to laugh, to smoke a cigar, to mosey downtown. It seemed absurd that the affair was going to be decided for him by a hundred some-odd pounds of sweating clay.
These were the days of his most violent dualism. He had never before been so passionately addicted to the belief that the spirit is everything, that there is some kind of God, that the Cause was just, that the Republic was a worthwhile institution, that all men are brothers, that love is forever, and that there is no death. On the other hand, he had never been so utterly absorbed by the phenomenon of his body, of which he had once been very proud and which he had enjoyed with the naïve pleasure of a young pagan.
Those days, he clung to his belief in human souls with unreasoning fervor—during the very time when it seemed to him that life was a process in which human beings were carefully endowed with a feeling of importance only that they might be wantonly tortured and destroyed.
The men in Johnny’s hospital were intensely religious, and though they swore all the time, they never really took God’s name in vain.
These men were the most miserable, unhappy, and wretched men he had ever seen. At the same time they had none of the vanities and pomps of healthy people. They were completely humble. They had no aspirations for wealth, revenge, or guilty pleasures. They only wanted to live and let live, to love and be loved. They were the simplest people in the world. The sicker they were, the more saintly they were. Going on the cross seemed to make them all like Christ.
Johnny never afterward saw so much misery and so much nobility in human beings as he did in the Soldiers’ Hospital. He knew that sick people in general showed all the baseness and cowardice in them. Why it wasn’t true of the wounded soldiers of the Republic, he couldn’t exactly say. When he and the rest of them left the hospital, he felt sure they would all slip back into their old vices and vanities, but as long as they were in the hospital they seemed to rise collectively to a code of behavior that they had always understood, even if they had never practiced it before.
Johnny was conscious of the paradox of the wounded soldier. Out of the most passionate selfishness of his life—the desire to live, to be well, to be whole, no matter what happened to the rest of the world—came also a wonderful unselfishness. For when one of the veteran comrades died, every man went down into death, and all felt miserable for days. By clinging to others, they clung to themselves. Several men in the ward wept bitterly when the cheerful man with all the complications died a few days after the President’s visit.
During this time Corporal Jo
hnny Shawnessy dreamed the dreams of the wounded soldier. He dreamed of home. And over and over again in the dream, he wanted to make the ones there understand how desperately he needed them, how much he had longed to see them, how much it meant to him that they were still there. Some of the dreams had a frustrate sweetness as when it seemed to him that he was back in the old Academy Building and he saw the cool, pale form of Nell Gaither standing in the ivied yard and looking at him from eyes alive with love and tenderness. Sometimes too he dreamed that he lay sick in his bed at home. He hoped that now he would be really healed, that she who had given life to him once could give it again. The irregular, vivid face of his mother Ellen Shawnessy bent over him in his dream, a lock of loose hair hung from under her cap, her eyes were full of belief in his recovery. He felt that here was a great strength from which he could draw inexhaustibly. Then he was happy to tears that he was home again.
His worst dreams were those in which it seemed to him that he had come back to Raintree County, sick, lonely, perhaps dying, and no one paid any attention to him.
In the darkest period of his fight to live, when it seemed that he got no better and was perhaps not even holding his own, his strength gone, his shoulder swollen with corruption, his insides weak and sore, his fever climbing to the danger zone, he had sunk one night into a half-delirious sleep. It seemed that he had been on some kind of excursion with a great many people to Lake Paradise in the center of the County. Somehow, he had got separated from the others and had become lost in the Great Swamp. The ancient muds and pools heaved yellow in hideous sunlight. He saw what seemed to be a tree standing cool on an island of firm ground. Sinking in slime, he made his way painfully to the tree and reaching up caught a golden branch. Instantly, the tree changed, the branch became a scaly arm, a little dragon wallowed lustfully down and sprang on his mudded form. Its clawed hands closed around his chest, squeezing the breath from his body. He began to cry out in horror. He was going down in the warm mud of the Swamp. The reptile body sat implacably on his arms and shoulders, dragging him down to death. He shut his eyes, choking, trying to shake the thing loose. He could hear his own cries, feebly, as from a great distance. He was being violently shaken. He heard voices, footsteps. People were perhaps coming to rescue him after all. He went on holding his breath. Something cold was dashed into his face.
He was standing between the bedrows of the Soldiers’ Hospital. Three orderlies were fighting with him, trying to hold him. One of his soldier comrades had got out of bed and was yelling over and over,
—Johnny! Johnny! For Christ’s sake, wake up!
Most of the soldiers were sitting up. A man was standing with a white pitcher in his hand. Johnny was dripping with cold water. They got him back into bed. He was panting as if he had run a race. He was shivering all over. His teeth chattered violently.
—Get some blankets on him, the orderly said. My God, boy, it took three men to hold you! What was the matter anyway?
—I don’t know—I’m sorry, Johnny muttered between clenched teeth.
He was still horrified by the dream. A tired surgeon came in, looked him over, and dressed his wound again.
—I guess you’re all right, he said. Everybody go back to sleep.
—Jesus, Johnny! the man next to him said, you really had a bad one.
It had happened often before to others, of course. Every night or so, some boy tried to get out of bed in a delirium.
As Corporal Johnny Shawnessy lay there chattering, sore, weak, soaked in a cold sweat, there came to him with more than usual vividness the memory of the younger Johnny of before the War, the boy who had believed that he would one day be a greater poet than Shakespeare, a faster runner than Flash Perkins, a lover for whom waited the most passionate of women, a hero for whom the Republic reserved her wildest applause. He remembered this Johnny—his strong young arms and legs, his inexhaustible vitality, his happy smile, his strong competitive heart; and then he thought of the miserable shrunken creature who lay in a makeshift building a thousand miles from home, perhaps dying. Hot tears came to his eyes. He buried his face in the pillow to stifle his sobs. He was afraid some of the other boys would hear him—as he had often heard them. He wept—the terrible tears of the soldier sick and far from home. He fought with himself and finally managed to stop. He was amazed and a little heartened by the violence of his fit. The sobbing had been like part of the dream. Then he felt very still and calm. An orderly went by and put a hand on his forehead.
—Your fever’s gone, son, he said. That’s why you threw that fit. Your fever dropped all of a sudden.
Corporal Johnny Shawnessy closed his eyes. He was exhausted. He sank into a dreamless sleep and didn’t awaken until broad daylight. After that he was out of danger. Apparently, that night he had gone down to the brink and had come back.
So Corporal Johnny Shawnessy learned that behind all the victories of the War was this perpetual defeat, and behind all the defeats of the War this strange victory.
During the worst days of his sickness, he had read President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, delivered March 4. Johnny went back in memory to the First Inaugural, four years before, in March of 1861; and the strange, devious pattern of the War and of his own life passed in review through his mind. Four years ago, he had been living in the house south of the Square in Freehaven, and Susanna was waiting for the birth of Little Jim. The Republic was split in two. Men were talking War with foolish pride, and yet no certain policy had emerged in the confusion of the moment. The President was then an untried man, a political accident, an oddlooking Westerner. He had stood on a scaffold in front of a capitol building whose dome was only half completed, had looked down at a crowd of Americans, and had said a few remarkably wise and patient words, which were immediately swept away in the violence of Sumter and the ensuing battles. No one had known then what a long, bloody epic of courage, despair, sickness, and death the Republic was about to fashion. Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain were only obscure towns and local landmarks. Ulysses S. Grant was a nobody. William Tecumseh Sherman was superintendent of a military academy in the South. ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ hadn’t been written. The word ‘contraband’ didn’t mean a black man. Andersonville was inconceivable. The Emancipation Proclamation was unthinkable. The Bloody Angle at Spottsylvania was unimaginable. And no one North or South could possibly have dreamed up the half a hundred thousand strong young men in blue uniforms who marched from Atlanta to the Sea.
Nor could anyone have foreseen what lay in wait for Johnny Shawnessy along the railroad tracks of time—a son, a tall house burning, two days at Chickamauga Creek, an afternoon on the slopes of Missionary Ridge, a summer of battles before Atlanta, marches and bivouacs and burning cities, the death of comrades, the hospital near Washington.
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln had stood bareheaded before the Nation, had said solemn words, and had accepted a solemn trust. Then they had taken the ceremonial platform down. Slowly the dome of the Capitol had gone on a-building, and Washington had become a City at War.
Now the four years were done. Once again the tall, ungainly man stood on a platform on the steps of the Capitol. The dome was complete. Again a throng of anonymous Americans gathered to hear the President’s words. Corporal Johnny Shawnessy read them while lying in a hospital cot near Washington:
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.
T
hese words of wisdom and forbearance seemed already part of the old legend of this war fought for the preservation of the Republic and the Emancipation of a Race.
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
These words did nothing to insult or offend the memories of the men who lay in the hospitals, North or South. They were the brooding, almost doubtful words of a man who had carried on his conscience the moral burden of the War, had already, as it seemed, delivered history’s verdict on the contest, and had achieved a solemn victory over himself. Abraham Lincoln was obviously the most un-gloating victor who ever lived.
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the Nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.
Around the first of April, just as Johnny was beginning to recover his strength, the War went suddenly into its final convulsions. For the last time the newspapers published the Theatre of Operations and began to pour forth the confidently inaccurate reportage of battle. The words told of renewed attacks around Petersburg, where Grant had been besieging Lee since the summer before. From habit of many disappointments the soldiers in the hospital refused to be excited. Then the words came telling that Petersburg had fallen and Lee was retreating. Name after name—legendary names that had been defended to the death earlier in the War—fell almost unnoticed. The Theatre of Operations had lost its power to resist. The invading words poured into it and across it, became excited, hopeful, triumphant, ecstatic. One day a man came into Johnny’s ward waving a paper with the headlines