The Civil War Memories of Elizabeth Bacon Custer by Elizabeth Bacon Custer

Author:Elizabeth Bacon Custer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2014-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

“Let’s Take Our Hour”

Even now if I go to Washington it all comes back, the very stones in the pavement seem to cry out to me with the groans of the sufferers who passed. I stand on Capital Hill looking off at the matchless view as I have never seen it before. I surely remember no exaltation over the rare sight, life when I had seen it first was too terrible, too sad, too absorbing to take in the landscape. The world had narrowed down to the Virginia battlefields.

Washington was the saddest city on earth the summer of 1864. There was no escape from the fearful sights: night dreams and fitful sleep, photographs of rows of slain soldiers, unidentified dead, and the trenches open where they were to be laid. In every street ghastly, hollow-eyed men with bandaged heads, arms pinioned to the side, or painfully hobbling with crutches. Through open windows one heard the groans of the sufferers as long trains of ambulances trailed through the city. After a battle the wounded men were brought, often in army wagons when there were not enough ambulances, over corduroy or country roads deeply rutted from the constant passage of long trains of supplies, ammunition, and cannon, to the railroad at City Point, removed to steamer for Washington and there transferred again by ambulance to the hospitals. The removal from the battlefield was often such excruciating agony that the sufferers begged to die. The ambulances, built for durability, had cumbersome springs; I know, I have often made marches in them. They were the only conveyances. Dragged through rough fields, over corduroy roads, through streams and mud [they] were torture to the suffering. Sometimes the stretchers for carrying the disabled gave out and the wounded were carried on the backs of their comrades.

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