A Worse Place Than Hell by John Matteson

Author:John Matteson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-12-23T00:00:00+00:00

By then, Whitman knew the soldier’s name: John A. Holmes of the Twenty-Ninth Massachusetts. Stationed at the quiet center of Burnside’s line at Fredericksburg, the Twenty-Ninth had come through the battle virtually unscathed; the entire brigade to which it was attached reported only seven wounded and not a single man killed. These statistics omitted Holmes’s ordeal. The soldier was evidently no relative of the famous doctor. If he was, the connection had been too remote to buy him any privileges. Despite already suffering from diarrhea, Holmes had stood in wait with his company at Fredericksburg. Consigned to the regimental hospital after the battle, he had received almost no attention. He had lain on the cold ground, getting worse. Once the field doctor determined that nothing could be done for him there, Holmes was sent toward Washington on an open platform car similar to the one Whitman himself had ridden— “such as hogs are transported upon,” an aghast Whitman later reported.60

At Aquia Creek the train crew dumped Holmes onto the boat that would take him and a mass of other sick and wounded men to the capital. Holmes had fallen down like a rag, too sick and weak to sit up or help himself in any way. Night fell during the voyage and, with it, a raw December chill. Holmes struggled to unpack the two blankets he had stowed in his knapsack but was too feeble for the task. He sought the assistance of a deckhand, who replied that if he could not get them himself, he might then go without them. He arrived at the Campbell Hospital having had neither food nor water since leaving Falmouth. Hospital regulations demanded that he be given a bath and a change of clothes before being put to bed. The cold water of the bath was too much for him; halffrozen and exhausted, he collapsed unconscious in the arms of the attendants. For days since, he had lain on his cot, sometimes out of his wits. No longer asking for any relief, he was waiting to die. With pardonable melodrama, Whitman wrote, “His heart was broken. He felt the struggle to keep up any longer to be useless. God, the world, humanity— all had abandoned him. It would feel so good to shut his eyes forever on the cruel things around him and toward him.”61 It was then that Walt Whitman strolled into John Holmes’s life. Some time later, he told Whitman “that this little visit, at that hour, just saved him— a day more, and it would have been perhaps too late.”62

Whitman used Holmes’s account in a newspaper story he wrote for The New York Times. Toward the end of it, he observed, “A benevolent person with the right qualities and tact, cannot perhaps make a better investment of himself, at present, anywhere upon the varied surface of this whole big world, than in these same military hospitals.”63

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