LITMIR.BIZ

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sugar to feed the languishing men. “Not very inviting you will think, but I assure you always acceptable.” She lacked receptacles in which to hand it round, relying on empty jelly jars and wine bottles for the purpose.³⁵ In moments away from the kettle, she ministered to whatever need she found among the men. For many she bound wounds, to others she gave last rites or a clean shirt, or simply closed their glazed eyes. Many needed encouragement and a friendly voice as much as they needed water. One young boy, who haunted Barton for the remainder of her life, mistook her for his sister, and she sat with him through a fever-raged night, then pleaded with surgeons to include him on the hospital train, though his case was hopeless. If in her own estimation her resources were inadequate, her assistance again seemed a godsend to those about her. Dr. Dunn who had seen her as a “homely angel” at Culpeper, remembered the despair of the surgeons at Fairfax Station, where he said, “we had nothing but our instruments, not even a bottle of wine.” To his amazement and joy he saw that “when the cars whistled up to the station, the first person on the platform was Miss Barton to again supply us with bandages, brandy, wine, prepared soup, jellies, meals, and every article that could be thought of.”³⁶

      The inadequate medical services of the Union army made Barton's work at this battlefield station among the most difficult—and important—that she would perform. No system of hospital care or emergency relief had yet been established, though Dr. Jonathan Letterman, an earnest and creative surgeon, had been brought on a month earlier to tackle the problem. Care for those who were shot or ill was left to the individual regiments, and this generally collapsed in the pandemonium that followed a battle. Among the worst problems was the lack of trained ambulance workers, not to mention the disastrous design of the ambulances themselves, which were ungainly, two-wheeled ox carts that swayed and tipped on the rough roads so that a man had not even the consolation of a level bed. If he survived the trip he could look forward to medical care that included ignorance of bacterial infection. “We operated in old blood-stained and often pus-stained coats…with undisinfected hands,” wrote a Union surgeon. “We used undisinfected instruments…and marine sponges which had been used in prior pus cases and only washed in tap water.” Quinine and morphia were practically the only drugs available for whatever ailed the men, and the mortality rate among the wounded during this early part of the war was truly dismaying. Nearly 90 percent of those suffering abdominal wounds died despite hospital ministrations, as did 62 percent of those with other wounds. The statistics were even higher at the field of Second Bull Run. On the long retreat down the Rappahannock the valuable medical supplies, considered cumbersome and expendable, were left by the roadside as the men wearied. In all only two wagons of medical supplies reached hospital personnel at this battle.³⁷

      Though Barton would rail against the “heartless officers” whom she thought responsible for these statistics, it was impossible for her to view her wounded boys in aggregate numbers, for she was caught up with the private suffering of each individual soldier. Her accounts of this most personal of wars, which touched Americans as no other conflict, appear not as a continuum but a collection of stories and scenes, strung together like beads on string by a memory so jumbled with weariness, blood, and a thousand small crises, that it could not possibly sort them into consecutive facts. She was too busy to note each day’s events in the small pocket diaries she always carried with her, but they are filled with the names of dying men and last messages, each one too precious at that instant to be overshadowed by the larger reality of war. With more grief than surprise she recognized some powder-stained faces. It was not “a light thing…to pick up a shattered arm to bind and sling it and find the other suddenly thrown across your neck in recognition. Oh what a place,” she lamented, “to meet an old-time friend.”³⁸

      Thus she worked on through that night and the next day, overwhelmed by the numbers yet never losing sight of new ambulance trains leaving more men to take the place of those already transferred to Washington. At night the horrors were increased, for the wounded men lay so close to each other that the workers could not step for fear of injuring them. The candles they carried made fire an ever-present risk on the windy, hay-covered hillside, and Clara lived “in terror lest some ones candle fall into the hay and consume them all.”³⁹ Their supplies gave out with woeful rapidity. “I never realized until that day how little a human being could be grateful for—and that day’s experience also taught me the utter worthlessness of that which could not be made to contribute directly to our necessities,” Barton acknowledged. “Of what real value was that which could not save life? the bit of bread which would rest on the surface of a gold [coin] was worth more than the coin itself.”⁴⁰ She feared, and rightly so, that whatever measure of aid she gave, it was not enough.

      All day Monday' she labored as she had on Sunday, unable to think of anything beyond the crisis of immediate need. She was working by rote now, squeezing out her own last drops of strength, for she had had no sleep for two days and had eaten nothing. As food became scarce she and the other workers took the meat from their own sandwiches and gave it to the stricken men. Clara and the others were demoralized, overwhelmed by the ceaseless parade of ambulances, the seeming indifference among army officials, and the confirmed reports of disastrous defeat at the hands of the Southerners. “It is no light thing to travel days and nights among acres of wounded and dying men, to feel that your last mouthful is gone and still they famish at your feet.”⁴¹

      Barton and the other relief workers could hear the shots of rebel skirmishers in the nearby hills, reminding them of Confederate dominance of the area and warning them that they must hurry.⁴² Ebbing strength and fear of the guerrillas caused two women of the party to scurry home to Washington, leaving only Reverend Welles to labor beside Clara.⁴³ And beyond every impersonal sorrow was the dreadful start of recognition Clara felt when she saw the faces of friends and former pupils among the sufferers. “Seven times! in one train of ambulances, I passed this ordeal,” she mourned, “you will not wonder that my heart is sore.”⁴⁴

      Late that afternoon a thunderstorm blew up, and so did the sounds of another battle. Pope’s ragged and angry men were retreating along country roads to the west when they encountered Stonewall Jackson’s forces. Jackson’s men challenged the Unionists to make a stand near the tiny hamlet of Chantilly. It was a brief battle, fought furiously in the rain, and two popular Union generals, Isaac Stevéns and Philip Kearny, were lost here. Though it was a small victory for the South, it heightened the already serious demoralization of the United States troops.

      This “cavalry charge in a cornfield,” as a curious bystander described it, inevitably meant yet more ambulances, more stunned and bleeding men, more need and fewer supplies to relieve it.⁴⁵ Barton had caught a catnap by huddling in a waterlogged tent among baskets and boxes, unable to completely lie down. After sleeping for two hours, she sprang again to action after removing the matted grass and leaves from her hair and wringing the muddy water from her skirts. She spent the next day climbing from the wheel hub to the brake of every ambulance, determined to see that no man faced the long trip to the hospital without some water or a small portion of food.⁴⁶

      Rebel scouts appeared more frequently now among the rain-glistening trees. An officer rode up to Clara and asked her if she could ride a horse bareback. “Then you can risk another hour,” he shouted to her affirmative reply. Should the Confederates close in, Barton knew, she would have to ride an unfamiliar horse cross-country through enemy lines to reach Washington. Fortunately this emergency did not arise. At breakneck speed Barton and Welles loaded the last man on the train about five o’clock Tuesday afternoon, then jumped aboard themselves, escaping just as a band of rebel cavalrymen galloped up to the station. Barton peered out from the boxcar as the engine puffed away and saw them setting fire to the little station, which had sheltered the helpless. “Two hours later,” she told Vira, “and Fairfax Station is no more.”⁴⁷

      In the days that followed, the carnage she had witnessed seemed almost too much for Clara to comprehend. The well-known scenes of Washington life, the fashion-conscious patina and nonchalance—even gaiety—appeared brutal and yet steeped in a familiarity that made the desperate days with the wounded only a horrible fantasy. She slept and wrote letters, including some for public consumption, and though she described events, she could not bring herself to retell the grisly details. “My heart is too sore today

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