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“Go and get help,” Hester repeated.
Merrit dropped most of the canteens, squared her shoulders and turned to obey, tripping on the rough ground, straightening up again, then moving a little faster.
Hester picked up the canteens and walked towards the battle, tending others who were wounded, seeing more and more of the dead. Beyond the Bull Run the firing never stopped and the air was thick with dust and gun smoke. The heat was searing, parching the mouth, burning the skin.
Finally she headed back towards the church. It was a small building surrounded by farmhouses about half a mile from Bull Run and had become the principal depot for the Union wounded.
The seats from the body of the church had been removed and placed outside. Many men were propped up awkwardly, lying under trees and makeshift shelters. Others were in the open in the full glare of the sun. Some had no wounds but were suffering from the heat and dehydration.
All around men were groaning and crying out for help. Some less hurt tried to assist the two or three orderlies struggling to make order out of the chaos.
As Hester approached the door, the surgeon, scarlet-fronted, came out and dropped an arm on the pile of amputated and mangled flesh against the wall, and without even seeing her, turned and went back in again.
An ambulance came jolting over the rough ground with more wounded.
Hester pushed open the wooden door. Inside the church floor had been covered over with the blankets that could be spared. Hay from a nearby field had been scattered in loose heaps for men to rest on. There were several buckets of water, some fresh, others red with blood.
In the center of the room was the operating table, instruments laid out on a board between two chairs next to it. There were pools of blood, making the floor slippery, and dried blood darkening. The smell caught in her throat. In the heat it was almost choking.
She swallowed her nausea and began to work.
All the sweltering afternoon the battle went on over Henry Hill. At first it looked to Monk and Breeland as if the Union troops would take it. It would be a crushing blow to the Confederacy. Perhaps it would even be enough to end the open conflict. Then they could return to diplomacy, maybe even agree that such bloodshed was too high a price to force union on a people who were prepared to die rather than accept it.
But by late afternoon the Confederate troops were reinforced and Henry Hill stood against everything MacDowell could throw at it. Henry House itself seemed unreachable. Crouching in a patch of scrub on the side of Matthews Hill and looking across the stream that he had been told was called Young’s Branch, Monk could see Confederate troops holding the crown of the hill. Union men had been charging it again and again, flags held high in the swirls of dust and gun smoke amid the trees, and had been repulsed each time.
There were soldiers as close as twenty yards away. The roar of cannon was deafening. There was a constant crackle of muskets and every now and then the whine of a bullet and the spurt of dust as it hit the ground. One had grazed Monk’s arm, tearing his shirt and drawing scarlet blood. The sting of it shocked him, slight as it was compared with the agony of others.
“I’m going to find that bastard!” Trace shouted over the din. “I don’t give a damn what the outcome of this battle is, he’s not getting away with it.…” He gave a bitter shrug. “Unless he’s dead! Then the devil will have beaten me to him. But if God’s on my side, I’ll get to him first.” He shaded his eyes and stared from where he knelt across Young’s Branch and over to Henry Hill. Union lines stretched as far as Chinn Ridge to the right, and all the way to Henry Hill to the left.
The wind changed a little, sending the smoke across the fighting. A cannonball screamed past them and scythed through the trees, shearing away some branches and leaving them hanging.
Monk wondered briefly why Trace did not join the battle himself. Why was he so determined, above all else, to pursue Breeland? He seemed obsessive about it, out of balance. Monk did not fight. It was not his war. He had no feeling for either side over the other. The issue of slavery did not give him a moment’s thought. He was irrevocably against it, but he could appreciate the Confederacy view that the economic oppression of the North was in actuality no better for the poor. One changed deeply rooted institutions slowly, but violence was not the answer.
Neither did he understand the passion for union above all else. These things were intellectual arguments to him. What he felt was the reality of men maimed, crippled, bleeding to death here on these dusty hillsides. He saw no difference between Union and Confederate; they were all equally flesh and blood, passion, dreams and fears. For the first time he understood something of what Hester must feel as she worked with friend and foe without difference, seeing only the person.
He hardly dared think of Hester. He looked at the wounded and the dying all around him, and had no idea how to help them. Horror made him feel sick. His hands shook; his legs almost failed to support him. He was dizzy with revulsion as his mind drowned in the abomination of it. How did she keep her head, bear all the pain, the dreadful mutilation of bodies? She had a strength beyond his power to imagine.
Philo Trace was scanning the hill ahead, perhaps trying to recognize a uniform, or battle colors, to know where Breeland might be.
“Would you go into that to look for him?” Monk shouted.
“Yes,” Trace answered without turning, his eyes wrinkled up against the sun. “Any Southerner can fight for the Confederacy and our right to decide our own fate. I’m the only one who can take Breeland back to England and show everyone what he is … what a Union gun buyer will do to get arms.”
Monk said nothing. He could understand, and it frightened him. He had seen crime and poverty before, individual hatred and injustice. This was on a scale of enormity, a national madness from which there was no escape, no rational core where one could find healing, or even respite.
Over on Henry Hill men were killing and dying, and neither side appeared to gain.
Trace set off down the slope towards Chinn Ridge. Monk turned back.
There were wounded men on the ground, covered in blood and dust, limbs crooked, lying side by side with the dead. Carts were overturned, wood splintered, gun barrels cracked and pointing to the sky. Wheels were tilted at crazy angles.
Monk did what he could to help, but he had no knowledge, no skills to call on. He did not know how to set a bone, how to stop bleeding, who could be moved and who would be harmed if he were moved. The heat burned the skin and clogged the throat, sweat stinging the eyes, and wet fabric rubbed the skin raw over his bullet-grazed arm. The glare of the sun was merciless. Flies were everywhere.
Time and again he scrambled down the bank to the stream and filled canteens, carrying them back amid a rain of gunfire, to hold them up for the wounded.
He carried men where he knew they should be taken, to the field hospitals, doing what they could to stanch bleeding, pad wounds, splint bones, there on the
grass of the hillside.
