April 13.—There has been a skirmish at the front, and a battle is expected there daily. I have just been looking at loads of wounded coming in.
There are numbers dying in our hospital every day, and scarcely any note is taken of them.
At home, when a member of a family is about to go to his last resting-place, loving friends are around the couch of the sufferer, and by kind words and acts rob King Death of half his terrors, and smooth the pathway to the valley and shadow of death. But here a man near dissolution is usually in a ward with perhaps twenty more. To wait on that number a single nurse keeps vigil. He knows the man will likely die during the night, but he can not spend time by his bedside, as others need his care. The ward is dimly lighted, as candles are scarce; the patient is perhaps in a dark corner; the death-rattle is heard; when that ceases the nurse knows that all is over. He then wakes some of the other nurses up, and in the silent hour of night these men prepare their comrade for the tomb, and bear him to the dead-house. The surgeon, when going his rounds the next morning, is not at all startled when he finds an empty bunk where the evening before was one occupied. He knows without asking what has become of the inmate, and that “somebody’s darling” has gone to his long home. It is sad to see so many dying with no kindred near them to soothe their last moments and close their eyes. What a sacred duty is here left undone by our women! I do not say that all are guilty of this neglect, for I know there are many good women who have their home duties to attend to, and others who have not strength physically; but how many are there, at this moment, who do not know how to pass their time—rich, refined, intellectual, and will I say Christian? They are so called, and I have no doubt would be much shocked were they called any thing else, and yet they not only neglect this Christian and sacred duty, but look on it as beneath them. How can we expect to succeed when there is such a gross disregard of our Savior’s own words, “In that ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto me?”
And what an opportunity this is to exercise the greatest of all Christian virtues— charity? Yet it is not charity in the sense in which it is commonly used, but a sacred duty we owe to our own people and country; practicing which has made the most uncouth seem lovely, and the beauteous more beautiful.
“No radiant pearl which crested fortune wears,
No gem that sparkling hangs from beauteous cars,
Not the bright stars which night’s blue arch adorn,
Nor rising sun that gilds the vernal morn,
Shines with such luster as the tears that break
For other’s woos down virtue’s lovely cheek.”
O, that the women of the South may wake from their dream ere it is too late; when remorse will bring in retrospect before them, as it did in “that awful dream,”
“Each pleading look, that long ago
I scanned with heedless eye;
Each face was gazing as plainly there
As when I passed it by;
Woe, woe for me, if the past should be
Thus present when I die.”
