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“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Sudley Church,” he replied. “It’s about eight miles away … nearer where the fighting is now.”
“Wait!” Hester ordered. “We’re coming!” And she ran back inside to get Merrit. The surgeon was still busy trying to evacuate the last of the wounded.
Merrit came with her, carrying as many canteens as she could manage. They scrambled up into the ambulance and set out the eight miles to Sudley.
The heat was like a furnace; the glare of the sun hurt the eyes. Clouds of dust and gunpowder marked easily where the fighting was densest, on a rise beyond the river, whose course was well marked by the trees along the banks.
It took them over an hour, and Hester got off at least a mile before the hospital, carrying half a dozen canteens and setting out to reach the men still lying where they had fallen.
She passed broken carts and wagons, a few wounded horses, but there was very little cavalry. There were shattered weapons lying in the grass. She saw one which had obviously exploded; its owner was dead a couple of yards away, his face blackened, the ground dark with blood. Beside him others lay wounded.
She swore blindly at the ignorance and incompetence which had sent young men into battle with guns that were so old and ill-made they slaughtered the users. The irony brought tears of helplessness to her eyes. Was she really sure it would be better if they fired properly, and killed whoever was in their sights instead? Guns were created to kill, to maim, cripple, disfigure, cause pain and fear. It was their purpose.
The firing ahead was very heavy. The sound of grape and canister being shot from cannon screamed through the air. She could clearly see the lines of men, blue-gray against the parched grass, half obscured by dust and gun smoke. Battle standards were high above them, hanging limply in the hot air. It must be after three o’clock. Sudley Church was a few hundred yards away.
She passed more shattered carts, guns, bodies of the dead. The ground was red with blood. One man was lying half propped against a caisson, his abdomen ripped open and his intestines bulging out over his torn and bloody thighs. Incredibly, his eyes were open; he was alive.
This was what she hated most, worse than the dead, those still in agony and horror, watching their own blood pour away, knowing they were dying and helpless to do anything about it. She wanted to walk on, pretend she had not seen, wipe it out of her memory. But of course she could not. It would have been easier to put a bullet through his head and stop the pain.
She bent down in front of him.
“There ain’t nothin’ you can do for me, ma’am,” he said through dry lips. “There’s plenty o’ fellows further on.…”
“You first,” she answered softly. Then she lowered her eyes to his dreadful wound and the hands clenched over it, as if they could actually do something.
Perhaps she could? It seemed to be the outer flesh which was torn; his actual organs looked undamaged. She could barely see for the dirt and blood.
She put down the canteens of water and took out the first roll of bandages. She poured water onto a pad, and a little wine, and began to unclench his hands and wash the dirt off the pale flesh of his intestine. She tried in her mind to separate it from the live man watching her, to think only of tiny detail, of the little grains of earth, sand, the oozes of blood, to keep it all clean and try to place it where it should be in the cavity of his body.
For a few moments she was even unaware of the heat burning her skin, the sweat dripping on her face, under her arms and down the hollow between her breasts. She moved as quickly as she could; tim
e was short. He needed to be carried from here to Sudley Church, and then Fairfax or Alexandria. She refused to think of failure, that he might die here in the heat and sound of gunfire before she was even finished. She refused to think of the other men within a stone’s throw of her who were in as much pain, perhaps dying as she knelt here, simply because there was no one to help them. She could do only one thing at a time, if she were to do it well enough for it to matter.
She was nearly finished. Another moment.
The gunfire in the distance was growing heavier. She was aware of people passing her, of voices and cries and the bump of a cart over the dry ruts of the ground.
She looked up at the man’s face, sick with dread that he might already be dead and that she had been laboring blindly, refusing to see the truth. The sweat was cold on her skin for an instant, then hot. He was staring back at her. His eyes were sunken in his head with shock and the sweat was dry on his cheeks, but he was definitely alive.
She smiled at him, placing a clean cloth over the awful wound. She had nothing with her with which to stitch it. She picked up the canteen she had been using and moistened a new cloth and held it to his lips. After a moment she gently washed his face. It served no real purpose, except to comfort, and perhaps to give some kind of dignity, a shred of hope, an acknowledgment that he was still there, and his feelings mattered, urgent and individual.
“Now we need someone to move you,” she told him. “You’ll be all right. A surgeon will sew and bandage it. It’ll take a while to heal, but it will. Just keep it clean … all the time.”
“Yes, ma’am …” His voice was faint, his mouth dry. “Thank you …” He trailed off, but his meaning was in his eyes, not that she needed it. The reward was in the doing, and in the hope. There was a little less horror and, if he was lucky, another life not destroyed.
She stood up awkwardly, her muscles locked for a moment, a trifle dizzy in the heat. Then she looked around for someone to help them. There was a soldier with a broken arm, another with blood splattered down his chest but apparently still able to walk. After a moment she saw Merrit on her way back from Sudley Church, dirty, bloodstained, staggering along under a weight of water canteens. She stooped every now and then to help the wounded or to look at someone and see whether he was already dead and beyond her power to aid.
Hester told the man not to move, under any circumstance, and picking up her skirts she ran and stumbled across the rough turf to Merrit, calling out as she went.
Merrit turned, her face twisted with fear and exhaustion, then she recognized Hester and came to her at a run, jumping over the rough tussocks of grass.
Briefly Hester told her about the man with the abdominal injury, and the necessity of finding some kind of transport to take him and any other wounded they could carry to the church.
“Yes,” Merrit said with a gulp. “Yes … I’ll …” She stopped. There was panic barely concealed in her eyes. All the brave words were absurd now, irrelevances from another life. Nothing could have prepared her for the reality. Hester could see that she wanted to say so, to deny the things she had said before. She needed Hester to know what she felt, to acknowledge the difference of everything.
Hester smiled at her, a tiny rueful gesture. There was no time to waste in explanations of how they felt. The wounded came first, and there was going to be no second or third.
