I saw fires burning in the distance and thought we were on the verge of battle. The whole valley by the river seemed to be in flames. There were clouds in the sky, and the fires were big enough to stain their bottoms with an orange coloring. It was an awful sight. I hurried to Reverend Grisholm, who was standing near his tent calmly smoking a pipe, to find out what was happening.
“No, Miss Bébinn, that’s not a battle.” He blew a stream of smoke into the evening air. “The rebels, God help them, are burning their cotton harvest.”
“Burning it? Why? So our army won’t have it?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes, so our army won’t confiscate it.”
I knew the will of the Confederacy was deep and stubborn, but to burn cotton? I realized then just how deep this fight was ingrained in them. I knew the blood and sweat of the thousands of slaves who had grown and picked such cotton. To burn it was another sad, senseless waste in the whole of the conflict.
Another fearsome sight: there were days when common people, white and colored, ran from the shelling and streamed past our tents. I’d been used to our regiments setting up operations in the woods. Now we were near a city, and I was stunned to see regular people who were not soldiers, people who lived right where the fighting was, fleeing for their lives. Some weren’t even dressed and ran shirtless or in their night clothing. I saw one man who’d managed to escape with his unconscious wife in his arms. She must have fainted.
I thought of Poney and how he and I had stumbled into the middle of a battle. No one had shouted, Stop! There are civilians on the battlefield! Cease fire! It hadn’t stopped after Poney had been shot or after the soldiers had seen me, a woman, driving through the artillery fire. They’d only told me which direction to go to get out of the way. The nature of the conflict, involving a question of how people, namely Southerners, lived their lives, could only mean, I supposed, that some of the fighting would take place in the fields and on the streets where people lived. And that meant ordinary people would be in the line of fire.
I didn’t teach the groups of soldiers anymore. The fighting was different from before, so an orderly way of expectations, about when the soldiers would have time off or even when they would eat, was now impossible. The regiments were all over, on the water and the ground. Shelling and gunfire happened day and night. It was just one huge battle, day after day.
At the hospital we were fighting another vigorous enemy: illness. Yellow fever and typhus were regular occurrences in the South—I knew it all too well from Papa’s illness and death. But with so many soldiers and all of us being so closely packed in at the camps, the contagion moved quickly through the troops. The yellow fever and typhus devastated us even more than a Confederate battalion. I felt sad that we couldn’t do more for the sick. With a wounded man we could extract minié balls or perform amputations, which, though awful and unsightly, did save some of the men who were threatened by gangrene. But men lingering with typhus lay with fever and their skin sometimes covered in red lesions. Their stomachs would bloat from distemper. There was nothing we could give them. No medicine other than an opiate or whiskey if they were in pain. The only thing we could do was wait to see if they recovered or died. Both happened, but I think more died than got well.
I would inevitably see a familiar face in the hospital. Not from my previous life—no one from the Holloway Plantation or Catalpa Valley or even Fortitude. But even though I knew Mr. Colchester had gone to Louisiana, that didn’t stop me from seeing him. I lost count of the times when I thought I had detected him reaching out for me from a stretcher. Or thought he was a body lying awkward and still after a shell blast. I craved the sight of him, and yet I didn’t want to see him there, sick or wounded or both. I liked thinking about him being in Louisiana and wondered what the conditions were like for him there. In odd moments, like when I was waiting for the first wounded of the day to come in or doing an inventory of our supplies, I would see Mr. Colchester in my mind’s eye strolling down a street in New Orleans or along the waters of the bayou. If I daydreamed long enough, I would be in the image, too, taking his hand and walking with him.
More often than not, though, the familiar faces that I encountered were from earlier battles and connections I’d made teaching the men. One of them was a Lieutenant Walter Stone. He had grown up in upstate New York, where his family owned an apple orchard. I guessed he was probably handsome when cleaned up, but like so many of the men, Walter had long gone unshaven, and his black hair had grown bushy and rough. One day he called to me from his bed and asked me to retrieve a book from the pocket of his uniform coat. It was The Three Musketeers. He had been an eager learner and an even more eager reader. When I first taught him, I remember thinking that, based on our conversations and his questions, he seemed like an intelligent man who probably would be in college if his family situation were different.
I pushed his hair back from his eyes, which were light blue. I smiled at the title. “Where did you get this?”
“I traded for it. Gave a man my ham sandwich.” He laughed. “That sandwich is long gone, but I still got the musketeers!”
He asked me to read to him. I didn’t know the book, but I could tell right away why it was a treasure to him. It was a story a boy would love, with sword fighting and brotherhood and intrigue and adventure.
“Four men traveling together would be suspected. D’Artagnan will give each of us his instructions. I will go by the way of Boulogne to clear the way; Athos will set out two hours after, by that of Amiens; Aramis will follow us by that of Noyon; as to D’Artagnan, he will go by what route he thinks is best, in Planchet’s clothes, while Planchet will follow us like D’Artagnan, in the uniform of the Guards.”
“Gentlemen,” said Athos, “my opinion is that it is not proper to allow lackeys to have anything to do in such an affair. A secret may, by chance, be betrayed by gentlemen; but it is almost always sold by lackeys.”
I smiled as I read. The part about the number of men traveling together looking suspicious reminded me of being with “Lynne” and “Jean” and the Dillinghams and how we’d known Silas couldn’t go with us because too many men would be suspect. The musketeers were even staggering their departure times, as we had with Silas and Mr. Dillingham. It was bittersweet, though, to think of Silas and how I had left him a second time. I tried not to dwell on it.
Walter had been shot through the shoulder and was still in a lot of pain. I noticed that as I read to him, his body relaxed, and his eyes half closed. He had gone into the story and was probably imagining himself as one of the characters. Learning to read must have given him a way to escape the nightmare of all the fighting as the war dragged on. It made me feel like I’d really done something. For all the men I couldn’t help heal, I had taught some of them how to read. And now here was a kind of healing happening because of it. I decided to think of it as another one of those gifts that God surprises you with—another small bauble to help you feel good. It’s like God just goes around and slips these gifts in your pocket. I’m grateful I notice them when they show up.
Come May, the generals decided that the fighting they were doing wasn’t working. The canal turned out to be a failure, too, but not for the reason I had expected. The water level on the river that spring was so low that the canal’s level never rose high enough to float anything.