“Wilson Small,” May 13.
Dear Mother,—Yours of the ninth received. The mails come with sufficient regularity. We all rush at the letter-bag, and think ourselves blighted beings if we get nothing. Yesterday I came on board this boat, where there are thirty very bad cases,—four or five amputations. One poor fellow, a lieutenant in the Thirty-second New York Volunteers, shot through the knee, and enduring more than mortal agony; a fair-haired boy of seventeen, shot through the lungs, every breath he draws hissing through the wound; another man, a poet, with seven holes in him, but irrepressibly poetic and very comical. He dictated to me last night a foolscap sheet full of poetry composed for the occasion. His appearance as he sits up in bed, swathed in a nondescript garment or poncho, constructed for him by Miss Whetten out of an old green table-cloth, is irresistibly funny. There is also a captain of the Sixteenth New York Volunteers, mortally wounded while leading his company against a regiment. He is said to measure six feet seven inches, — and I believe it, looking at him as he lies there on a cot, pieced out at the foot with two chairs.[1]
I took my first actual watch last night; and this morning I feel the same ease about the work which yesterday I was surprised to see in. others. We begin the day by getting them all washed, and freshened up, and breakfasted. Then the surgeons and dressers make their rounds, open the wounds, apply the remedies, and replace the bandages. This is an awful hour; I sat with. my fingers in my ears this morning. When it is over, we go back to the men and put the ward in order once more; remaking several of the beds, and giving clean handkerchiefs with a little cologne or baywater on them, — so prized in the sickening atmosphere of wounds. We sponge the bandages over the wounds constantly, — which alone carries us round from cot to cot almost without stopping, except to talk to some, read to others, or write letters for them; occasionally giving medicine or brandy, etc., according to order. Then comes dinner, which we serve out ourselves, feeding those who can’t feed themselves. After that we go off duty, and get first washed and then fed ourselves; our dinner-table being the top of an old stove, with slices of bread for plates, fingers for knives and forks, and carpet-bags for chairs, — all this because everything available is being used for our poor fellows. After dinner other ladies keep the same sort of watch through the afternoon and evening, while we sit on the floor of our staterooms resting, and perhaps writing letters, as I am doing now.
Meantime this boat has run up the York River as far as West Point (where a battle was fought on Thursday), in obedience to a telegram from the Medical Director of the Army, requesting the Commission to take off two hundred wounded men immediately. A transport accompanies us. But we pay little heed to the outside world, and though we have been under-way and running here and there for hours, I have only just found it out. Don’t fret if you do not hear from me. I may go to Washington on a hospital transport, or — to Richmond with the army! and you may not hear of me for a week. Let no one pity or praise us. I admit painfullness; but no one can tell how sweet it is to be the drop of comfort to so much agony.
[1] Now General N. M. Curtis, the hero of Fort Fisher.
