Complete weird tales of.., p.523
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 523
“W-what?” asked Ailsa.
“The right kind of devil, ma’am. I’ve been to see him! He wanted my sword; he tried to chew off my shoulder straps; he almost impaled himself on my spurs. By heaven, ma’am, that’s a boy for you!”
Ailsa smiled. She knew about babies; implanted in her had always been a perfect madness to possess one.
She and the red-faced Major talked babies. Letty, knowing nothing about babies and not deeply interested, lay back in her seat, watching Ailsa in the dim light of the ceiling lamps. She seemed never to have enough of Ailsa. It had been so from the first.
In Baltimore dawn was breaking when Ailsa awoke at the summons of the major; and he remained devoted to the two nurses of Sainte Ursula, attending to their baggage and transfer across the city, finding seats in the waiting-room already invaded by the officers of several regiments in transit, and finally saw them safely aboard the cars again.
“Good-bye, little ladies,” he said cheerily. “If I’m hit, God send one of you to wash my face for me. My card, ladies — if I may be permitted the honour. I’m to be at Fortress Monroe as soon as my command leaves Baltimore.”
After he had gone away, Ailsa looked at his card:
A. J. DENISLOW MAJOR, ART., U. S. A.
“I thought he was a regular,” she said, smiling at Letty. “He’s a perfect old dear. Shall we open the parcel and see what he has left us for breakfast?”
There was more milk, more peaches and pears, more bread and butter, and a cold roast chicken; and they made very merry over it, doing the best they could without knife and fork.
They were nearing Washington now. Every little while they passed bodies of troops marching or encamped along the roads; and once they saw a line of army waggons, drab coloured, with yellow canvas tops, moving slowly in clouds of dust.
In the limpid morning light buzzards were already soaring over the green fields; the fresh odour of wild flowers came blowing in at the open car window; butterflies fluttered, wind-driven, helpless.
And now they were passing mounds of freshly turned red earth — long stretches of hillocks banked high and squared at the ends. Hundreds of negroes were at work sodding them; here and there a flag fluttered and a bayonet gleamed.
“I believe all these little hills and ditches have something to do with forts,” said Ailsa. “Certainly that great mound must be part of a fort. Do you see the cannon?”
Letty nodded, wide-eyed. And now they were passing soldiers on every road, at every bridge, along every creek bank.
Squads of them, muskets shining, marched briskly along beside the railroad track; sentinels stood at every culvert, every flag house, every water tank and local station past which they rolled without stopping. Acres of white tents flashed into view; houses and negro cabins became thicker; brick houses, too, appeared at intervals, then half-finished blocks fronting the dusty roads, then rows and lines of dwellings, and street after street swarming with negroes and whites. And before they realised it they had arrived.
They descended from the car amid a pandemonium of porters, hackmen, soldiers, newsboys, distracted fellow-passengers, locomotives noisily blowing off steam, baggagemen trundling and slamming trunks about; and stood irresolute and confused.
“Could you direct us to the offices of the Sanitary Commission?” asked Ailsa of a passing soldier wearing the insignia of the hospital service on his sleeve.
“You bet I can, ladies! Are you nurses?”
“Yes,” said Ailsa, smiling.
“Bully for you,” said the boy; “step right this way, Sanitary. One moment — —”
He planted himself before a bawling negro hack driver and began to apply injurious observations to him, followed by terrible threats if he didn’t take these “Sanitary Ladies” to the headquarters of the Commission.
“I’m going up that way, too,” he ended, “and I’m going to sit on the box with you, and I’ll punch your nose off if you charge my Sanitary Ladies more than fifty cents!”
And escorted in this amazing manner, cinder-smeared, hot, rumpled, and very tired, Ailsa Paige and Letty Lynden entered the unspeakably dirty streets of the Capital of their country and turned into the magnificent squalor of Pennsylvania Avenue which lay, flanked by ignoble architecture, straight and wide and hazy under its drifting golden dust from the great unfinished dome of the Capitol to the Corinthian colonnade of the Treasury. Their negro drove slowly; their self-constituted escort, legs crossed, cap over one impish eye, lolled on the box, enjoying the drive.
Past them sped a company of cavalry in blue and yellow, bouncing considerably in their saddles, red faces very dusty under their tightly strapped caps, sabres and canteens jangling like an unexpected avalanche of tin-ware in a demoralised pantry.
“Go it, young ‘uns!” cried their soldier escort from the box, waving his hand patronisingly. He also saluted an officer in spectacles as “Bully boy with a glass eye,” and later informed another officer in a broad yellow sash that he was “the cheese.” All of which painfully mortified the two young nurses of Sainte Ursula, especially when passing the fashionably-dressed throng gathered in front of the Willard and promenading Lafayette Square.
“Oh, dear,” said Ailsa, “I suppose he’s only a boy, but I didn’t know soldiers were permitted to be so impudent. What on earth do all these people think of us?”
Letty, who had been mischievously amused and inclined to enjoy it, looked very grave as the boy, after a particularly outrageous jibe at a highly respectable old gentleman, turned and deliberately winked at his “Sanitary Ladies.”
“That’s old hoss Cameron,” he said. “I made such a mug at the old terrapin that he’ll never be able to recognise my face.”
“The — the Secretary of War!” gasped Ailsa.
“You very wicked little boy, don’t you dare to make another face at anybody! — or I’ll — I’ll report your conduct to — to the Sanitary Commission!”
“Oh, come!” he said blankly, “don’t do that, lady! They’ll raise hell with me, if you do. I want to get hunky with the Sanitary boss.”
“Then behave yourself!” said Ailsa, furious; “and don’t you dare to swear again. Do you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am — I will — I won’t, I mean. And if I see that old mudsill, Simon Cameron, I’ll take off my cap to him, b’gosh!”
It was an anxious and subdued soldier who showed them the door of the Commission’s office, and stood at attention, saluting carefully as the ladies passed him.
“You won’t peach, will you?” he whispered loudly, as Ailsa stopped to pay the driver.
“No, I won’t — this time,” she said, smiling, “if you promise to be a very good soldier hereafter.”
He promised fervidly. He happened to be on duty at headquarters, and the fear of the Commission had been driven into him deep. So she and Letty entered the door with a stream of people who evidently had business with the officials of the American Sanitary Commission; and a very amiable young man received them in their turn, took their papers, examined their credentials, nodded smilingly, and directed them to a small boarding-house on F Street, where, he explained, they had better remain until further orders.
There had been some desultory fighting in Virginia, he said, also there were a great many sick soldiers in the army.
Perhaps, added the young man, they would be sent to one of the city hospitals, but the chances were that they would be ordered directly to a field hospital. In that case their transportation would be by army waggon or ambulance, or the Commission might send one of its own mule-drawn conveyances. At any rate, they had better rest and not worry, because as long as the Commission had sent for them, the Commission certainly needed them, and would see that they arrived safely at their destination.
Which turned out to be a perfectly true prophecy; for after a refreshing bath in their boarding-house quarters, and a grateful change of linen, and an early supper, a big, bony cavalryman came clanking to their door, saying that a supply train was leaving for the South, and that an ambulance of the Sanitary Commission was waiting for them in front of the house.
The night was fearfully hot; scarcely a breath of dir stirred as their ambulance creaked put toward the river.
The Long Bridge, flanked by its gate houses, loomed up in the dusk; and:
“Halt! Who goes there?”
“Friends with the countersign.”
“Dismount one and advance with the countersign!”
And the Sergeant of cavalry dismounted and moved forward; there was a low murmur; then: “Pass on, Sanitary!”
A few large and very yellow stars looked down from the blackness above; under the wheels the rotten planking and worn girders of the Long Bridge groaned and complained and sagged.
Ailsa, looking out from under the skeleton hood, behind her, saw other waggons following, loaded heavily with hospital supplies and baggage, escorted by the cavalrymen, who rode as though exhausted, yellow trimmed shell jackets unbuttoned exposing sweat-soaked undershirts, caps pushed back on their perspiring heads.
Letty, lying on a mattress, had fallen asleep. Ailsa, scarcely able to breathe in the heavy heat, leaned panting against the framework, watching the darkness.
It seemed to be a little cooler on the Virginia side after they had passed the General Hospital, and had gone forward through the deserted city of Alexandria. About a mile beyond a slight freshness, scarcely a breeze, stirred Ailsa’s hair. The driver said to her, pointing at a shadowy bulk with his whip-stock:
“That’s the Marshall House, where Colonel Ellsworth was killed.
God help their ‘Tigers’ if the Fire Zouaves ever git at ‘em.”
She looked at the unlighted building in silence. Farther on the white tents of a Pennsylvania regiment loomed gray under the stars; beyond them the sentinels were zouaves of an Indiana regiment, wearing scarlet fezzes.
Along the road, which for a while paralleled the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, cavalry vedettes sat their horses, carbine on thigh. No trains passed the embankment; once she saw, on a weed-grown siding, half a dozen locomotives apparently intact; but no fire burned in their furnaces, no smoke curled from their huge drumhead stacks; and on the bell frame of one an owl was sitting.
And now, between a double line of ditches, where a battalion of engineers lay asleep in their blankets, the road entered the pine woods.
Ailsa slept fitfully, but the far challenge and the halting of the waggon usually awoke her in darkness feebly lit by the rays of a candle-set lantern, swung up inquiringly by the corporal of some guard. And, “Pass forward, Sanitary!” was the invariable formula; and the ambulance rolled on again between a double abattis of fallen trees, flanked on either horizon by tall, quiet pines.
Once she heard singing; a small company of cavalry-men straggled by, and, seeing their long lances and their Belgian forage caps, she leaned out and asked what regiment it might be. Somebody answered: “Escort Squad of Rankin’s Lancers, 1st United States. Our regiment is in Detroit, Miss, and thank God we’re going back there.”
And they rode on toward Washington, singing their monotonous “Do They Miss Me at Home” song, till she lost them against the darkness of the distant woods, and dropped back to her bed of shawls and blankets once more.
After midnight she slept, and it was only the noise the driver made pulling the canvas cover of the frame above her that awakened her, and she sat up, half frozen, in a fine fog that became a drizzle soon after the cover was up.
“The sunny South,” observed the driver in disgust. “Yesterday the thermometer stood at 105 in Washington, and now look at this here weather, lady.”
Day broke, bitter cold; it was raining heavily; but soon after sunrise the rain slackened, the fog grew thinner, and the air warmer. Slowly the sun appeared, at first only a dazzling blot through the smother, then brassy, glittering, flooding the chilled earth with radiance.
Through steaming fields, over thickets, above woods, the vapours were rising, disclosing a shining and wet world, sweet and fresh in its early autumn beauty.
The road to Fairfax Court House was deep in red mud, set with runnels and pools of gold reflecting corners of blue sky. Through it slopped mules and horses and wheels, sending splashes of spray and red mud over the roadside bushes. A few birds sang; overhead sailed and circled hundreds of buzzards, the sun gilding their upcurled wing tips as they sheered the tree-tops.
And now, everywhere over the landscape soldiers were visible, squads clothed only in trousers and shirts, marching among the oaks and magnolias with pick and shovel; squads carrying saws and axes and chains. A little farther on a wet, laurel-bordered road into the woods was being corduroyed; here they were bridging the lazy and discoloured waters of a creek, there erecting log huts. Hammer strokes rang from half-cleared hillsides, where some regiment, newly encamped, was busily flooring its tents; the blows of axes sounded from the oak woods; and Ailsa could see great trees bending, slowly slanting, then falling with a rippling crash of smashed branches.
The noises in the forest awoke Letty. Whimpering sleepily, but warm under the shawls which Ailsa had piled around her, she sat up rubbing her dark eyes; then, with a little quick-drawn breath of content, took Ailsa’s hand.
The driver said: “It’s them gallus lumbermen from some o’ the Maine regiments clearing the ground. They’re some with the axe. Yonder’s the new fort the Forty Thieves is building.”
“The — what?” asked Ailsa, perplexed.
“Fortieth New York Infantry, ma’am. The army calls ’em the Forty Thieves, they’re that bright at foraging, flag or no flag! Chickens, pigs, sheep — God knows they’re a light-fingered lot; but their colonel is one of the best officers in the land. Why shouldn’t they be a good fat regiment, with their haversacks full o’ the best, when half the army feeds on tack and sow-belly, and the other half can’t git that!”
The driver, evidently nearing his destination, became confidentially loquacious.
“Yonder’s Fort Elsworth, ladies! It’s hid by the forest, but it’s there, you bet! If you ladies could climb up one o’ them big pines, you’d see the line of forts and trenches in a half-moon from the Chain Bridge at Georgetown to Alexandria, and you’d see the seminary in its pretty park, and, belike, Gineral McClellan in the chapel cupola, a-spying through his spy-glass what deviltry them rebel batteries is hatching on the hill over yonder.”
“Are the rebels there?”
“Yes’m. Little Mac, he lets ’em stay there till he’s good ‘n’ ready to gobble ‘em.”
Ailsa and Letty stared at the bluish hill, the top of which just showed above the forest.
A young soldier of engineers, carrying a bundle of axes, came along the road, singing in a delightful tenor voice the hymn, “Arise, My Soul, Arise!” He glanced admiringly at Ailsa, then at Letty, as the ambulance drove by, but his song did not falter; and far away they heard him singing gloriously through the autumn woods.
Presently a brigade medical officer rode up, signalling the driver to stop, with his gloved hand.
“Where do you come from, ladies — the General Hospital at
Alexandria?”
Ailsa explained.
“That’s good,” he said emphatically; “the brigade hospitals are short handed. We need experienced nurses badly.” And he pointed across the fields toward a hillside where a group of farm-houses and barns stood. A red flag napped darkly against the sky from the cupola of a barn.
“Is that the hospital?” asked Ailsa, noticing some ambulances parked near by.
“Yes, madam. You will report to Dr. West.” He looked at them for a second, shook his head thoughtfully, then saluted and wheeled his horse.
“Pass on, Sanitary!” he added to the driver.
There was a deeply rutted farm road across the fields, guarded by gates which now hung wide open. Through these the supply waggons and the Commission ambulance rolled, followed slowly by the rain-soaked troopers of the escort.
In front of one of the outhouses a tall, bald-headed, jolly-faced civilian stood in his checked shirt sleeves, washing bloody hands in a tin basin. To Ailsa’s question he answered:
“I’m Dr. Hammond of the Sanitary Commission. Dr. West is in the wards. Very glad you came, Mrs. Paige; very glad, indeed, Miss Lynden. Here’s an orderly who’ll show you your quarters — can’t give you more than one room and one bed. You’ll get breakfast in that house over there, as soon as it’s ready. After that come back here to me. There’s plenty to do,” he added grimly; “we’re just sending fifty patients to Alexandria, and twenty-five to Washington. Oh, yes, there’s plenty to do — plenty to do in this God-forsaken land. And, it isn’t battles that are keeping us busy.”
No, it was not battles that kept the doctors, nurses, and details for the ambulance corps busy at the front that first autumn and winter in Virginia. Few patients required the surgeon, few wounded were received, victims of skirmish or sharpshooting or of their own comrades’ carelessness. But unwounded patients were arriving faster and faster from the corduroy road squads, from the outposts in the marshy forests, from the pickets’ hovels on the red-mud banks of the river, from chilly rifle pits and windy hill camps, from the trenches along Richmond Turnpike, from the stockades at Fairfax. And there seemed no end of them. Hundreds of regimental hospital tents, big affairs, sixty feet long by forty wide, were always full. The hospitals at Alexandria, Kalorama, the Columbia, and the Stone Mansion, took the overflow, or directed it to Washington, Philadelphia, and the North.
In one regiment alone, the Saratoga Regiment, the majority of the men were unfit for duty. In one company only twelve men could be mustered for evening parade. Typhoid, pneumonia, diphtheria, spotted fever were doing their work in the raw, unacclimated regiments. Regimental medical officers were exhausted.
Two steady streams of human beings, flowing in opposite directions, had set in with the autumn; the sick, going North, the new regiments arriving from the North to this vast rendezvous, where a great organizer of men was welding together militia and volunteers, hammering out of the raw mass something, that was slowly beginning to resemble an army.
