“There you are,” Dr. Otto said, peering over his spectacles at Marcus. “Where have you been, Mr. Doc?”
“He’s been in a tavern reading newspapers,” Dr. Frederick said. “His fingers are black, and the smell of beer is overwhelming. You might have at least rinsed out your mouth, Doc.”
Marcus bristled, his lips pressed firmly closed. He said not a word but picked up a box of stoppered bottles and took it over to Dr. Otto.
“Here is the camphor! I asked you for it three times, boy. How did you not see it? It was at your elbow this whole time,” Dr. Otto exclaimed.
John, who had recently married and was often thinking about more pleasant matters than apothecary chests and jalap, heard his name and looked around in confusion.
Dr. Otto muttered in German, clearly irritated. Marcus’s knowledge of the language was growing. He caught the words for “idiot,” “lewd,” “wife,” and “hopeless.” John heard, too, and turned pink.
“Where will you go first, Bodo?” Mrs. Otto packed her rolled bandage away in a basket and picked up another length of cloth. “To the hospital in Bethlehem to wait for the wounded?”
“I leave such decisions to the Big Man, Mrs. Otto,” the doctor replied.
“Surely we will be going straight to the battlefield,” Junior said. “They say the whole British army is at the mouth of the Elk River, and marching north.”
“They say many things, most of which turn out to be false,” Frederick observed.
“There is one thing that is for sure,” Dr. Otto said, his tone sober. “Wherever we are going, we are going soon. The battle is coming. I can feel it, pricking at my soles.”
Everyone within earshot stopped to listen. Dr. Otto did have a preternatural ability to anticipate the orders that Washington handed down. No one had realized Dr. Otto was getting his intelligence from his feet, however. Mrs. Otto looked down at her husband’s shoes with new respect.
“Don’t stand there gawping, Mr. Chauncey!” After her husband’s prognostication, Mrs. Otto was seized with anxiety and spurred to greater efficiency. “You heard the doctor. You are not pulling a cannon any longer. There is no time for idleness in the hospital service.”
Marcus put down the box of camphor and picked up another. Not every tyrant, he had discovered, was a man. Some wore skirts.
* * *
—
WHEN AT LAST the battle came, at a small town outside Philadelphia on the shores of the Brandywine, the chaos was unspeakable.
Marcus thought he knew what to expect. He had been with Dr. Otto since January, had inoculated hundreds of men, and had seen soldiers die of smallpox, typhus, camp fever, wounds acquired during foraging expeditions, exposure, and starvation.
But Marcus had never been behind the advancing army with the medical service, waiting for the casualties to arrive after the orders to fire had been given. From the rear, it was impossible to tell whether the Continental army was inches from victory or if the British had routed them.
The medical corps set up their first hospital in a mercantile just outside the battle lines, where the surgeons’ mates transformed the dry goods counter into an operating table. They stacked the dead in a small room where extra flour and sugar had once been stored. Those awaiting treatment lay in rows on the floor, filling the hall and the porch outside.
As the battle commenced, and the number of wounded and dying men rose, Dr. Cochran and Dr. Otto decided that a dressing station should be set up closer to the action to evaluate the wounded. Dr. Otto took Marcus to his new field hospital, leaving Dr. Cochran in charge at the store.
“Dressings. Why are there no dressings? I must have dressings,” Dr. Otto repeated in a low mutter as they set up the treatment areas.
But the dressings and bandages that Mrs. Otto had so assiduously rolled and packed had all been used. Marcus and Dr. Otto were forced to use blotting paper and soiled dressings from dead men instead, the blood wrung out into buckets that attracted the summer’s black flies.
“Hold him there,” Dr. Otto said, directing Marcus’s attention with a shift of his eyes. Underneath their hands, a soldier writhed in agony.
Marcus could see crushed bone and raw muscle through torn clothing. His stomach tightened.
“The patient may faint, Mr. Doc, but not the surgeon,” Dr. Otto said sternly. “Go out to the porch and take six lungfuls of air and then come back. It will steel your nerves.”
Marcus bolted for the door but was barred from leaving the farmhouse by a stranger who cast a long shadow in the hall.