The thin Moses forceps with the sharp beak soon had her gingerly withdrawing the minié ball. He never complained and when she showed him the bloodied missile, he said, ‘Thank you, ma’am. I’d like to keep it as a souvenir ’case I collect no more of them!’
‘You were lucky, Sergeant O’Brien,’ she said. ‘No splintering … and that the second one skidded from your head, rather than collided with it.’
‘Would have made no differ ma’am,’ Hercules O’Brien answered, tapping his skull. ‘Not even the damned minié ball could get in there.’
Later, she came back, asked him if he’d come across a soldier named Lavelle O’Malley, thinking by now that both Patrick and Lavelle would have enlisted. Because it seemed as if all the rest of America had.
‘No, ma’am,’ he answered, watching her. ‘Three-quarters of America is out there … and half of Ireland. What brigade is he with?’
When she couldn’t tell him he enquired, ‘Is he your husband, ma’am?’
‘He was …’ she almost said, then corrected herself. ‘Yes.’
The hospital was one of many field hospitals dotted all over the countryside, wherever men might fall in battle. A once-schoolhouse, now it had rows of rough bunks lining each wall, an anteroom for amputations and an added-on storeroom for medical supplies and operating implements. A further room was used as a makeshift canteen – for those who could walk to it. A nearby cabin, abandoned to war, provided accommodation for Ellen, the two nuns, and occasionally for those who came temporarily to assist. Dr Sawyer had private accommodation some slight further distance away.
They could comfortably take one hundred patients – at times stretched to two hundred. Three nurses and a doctor were not sufficient … but it was all they had to make do with, most of the time.
Although officially a Union hospital for soldiers of the North, Mary and Louisa had impressed on Dr Sawyer that ‘all the fallen of whichever side, should fall under our care, if needed.’ It was not a philosophy to which the brusque doctor easily subscribed, even with Mary gently reminding him that, ‘if your own son were wounded near Confederate lines, you would wish some kind Sister to take him in – or a good Christian doctor, such as you, to save him.’
In the end he had little choice, the two nuns and Ellen gathering in whomsoever they found needing attention – Union Blue or Confederate Grey.
Regularly, Ellen enquired of those whom she tended from both North and South, of Patrick and Lavelle. But it was ever without success. Most were sympathetic, complimenting her on her son’s and husband’s valour in serving ‘the cause’ – whichever cause they considered it to be – and her own womanly duty to the wounded.
From a few, her enquiry evoked a different response – a gruff Georgian officer telling her, ‘Lady, chaos rules out there. Nobody knows nobody … no more. A quarter of my gallant lads were killed the first day, a quarter more the second. Moving men into battle is like shovelling fleas ’cross a farmyard – not half of them get there.’
She had begun to give up hope of ever seeing them again. This whole bloody business about ‘valour’ and ‘gallant lads’ was beginning to weary her. There seemed to be no end to the harvest of wounded and wasted who, day by day, were being shunted into the hospitals. Or the more deadly harvest … the hundreds and hundreds of young men being regularly flung two or three deep into earthen pits. A lonely thin board then scrawled with some illegible writing to mark their brief existence in this life. One such makeshift cross she had seen had stated only that: Here lyes 120 brave men who dyed for there contree. Not even the loved one’s name to comfort those who later would come searching for them.
‘Fleas across a farmyard.’ Word had come down that over a million men had begun the year massing for war. How in a million could she find but two – Patrick and Lavelle?
She never spoke to Mary or Louisa about her rapidly fading hopes. Nor did they enquire of her. She had asked Dr Sawyer and he had sought for her the list of the dead, wounded and missing from Union Headquarters. When it eventually came, he apologised for its incompleteness. ‘It changes hourly – they cannot write quickly enough to keep up with the dead.’
She raced through the names – O’Malley, Bartley; O’Malley, Thomas; O’Malley, John; O’Malley, Peter. She heaved a sigh of relief. No Patrick O’Malley. Nowhere either could she find the name Lavelle, making her think perhaps they had both sided with the South. It was some comfort, this not knowing – if only a crumb. Maybe Patrick had not become embroiled in this war madness after all? She prayed that if he had, he would be with Lavelle. Lavelle would shelter Patrick from harm, as if his own son, because he was hers.
Ellen thought she had witnessed everything in this demonic war but when Private Edward Long was smilingly delivered to her, she had to stop in disbelief.
‘How old are you?’ she asked the pint-sized patient.
‘Nine years, ma’am … but squarin’ up to ten!’ the private proudly replied.
‘Nine … years … of … age …?’ she drew out the words one by one. ‘Nine years of age?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ the child confirmed, as if there should be any doubt in her mind.
‘Private Edward Long – Illinois – at your service, ma’am,’ he added, looking up at her.
‘Yes!’ she said, ‘but what are you doing here?’
‘For to get mended … again,’ he said, with all the innocence of childhood. ‘I got clipped by a minié ball.’
‘Where?’ she asked, and saw him hesitate. There was no obvious sign of injury on him.
He threw his eyes down to the ground.
‘I’m not saying, ma’am … but another one went in front of me and shot my drum.’
Then she understood. He had been grazed by a bullet on his buttocks and manfully wasn’t about to reveal that fact to any female. She resisted the urge to pick him up, cradle him in her arms.
‘All right, soldier!’ she said, ‘follow me – we’ve a special private place here for the brave musicians who lead our boys into battle.’
Off she set, him falling in behind her, trying to keep pace, swinging his arms up and down, all four foot six of him.
‘Where’s your mother?’ she asked, when she got him down to the end of the ward.
‘At home!’ he said, matter-of-factly.
‘Does she know where you are?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he answered, ‘she sure does. Me and all my six brothers joined up to fight. Four is dead now. Just me and Jess and Billy-Bob left.’
She looked at him. ‘You should go home, Edward,’ she said gently, thinking of his mother.
‘Oh, but I will, ma’am, when I git my furlough. I’ll be going home for a month.’
‘Why not stay there … with your mother?’ she persevered.
‘I couldn’t do that, ma’am,’ he said, his baby blue eyes fixed on hers, ‘until we whip the Rebs and send them home!’
She gave up. He was the youngest she had seen. Most of the American boys were about eighteen, the foreign soldiers older. Many, though, of the homegrown farm boys who enlisted were much younger.
‘A hundred thousand fifteen-year-olds’, Dr Sawyer had told