Now the Drum of War by Robert Roper

Author:Robert Roper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Another young soldier, a “New York man with a bright, handsome face,” had been “lying several months from a most disagreeable wound . . . A bullet had shot him right through the bladder, hitting him front, low in the belly, and coming out back. He had suffer’d much—the water came out of the wound, by slow but steady quantities, for many weeks—so that he lay almost constantly in a sort of puddle.”22

Walt came to know this soldier well; his name was John Mahay, and, there being only a slim chance of repairing such a lesion, Mahay’s task was to await the end with as much composure as he could summon. Walt saw such things if not every day then often enough. He came to prefer Armory Square to the other hospitals in Washington at the time—it routinely accepted the worst cases, and it was commanded by a competent surgeon, D. Willard Bliss, who was friendly to Walt and welcomed his presence on the wards.*

President Lincoln sometimes showed up at Armory Square, moving gravely from bed to bed and clasping the hand of each soldier.23 The hospital was located close to a steamboat landing at the foot of Seventh Street, SW, and near the tracks of the Washington and Alexandria Railroad. Soldiers wounded in battles in northern Virginia were often left there as a matter of convenience or for fear of carrying them any farther. Over the course of the war, it recorded more deaths than any other hospital in Washington, although it was not the largest.24

Walt had visited in hospitals before. In New York he had been well known at the general hospital on Broadway, which he sometimes wrote about in the papers. He described an operation he attended there on

an United States soldier, who had been badly wounded in the foot . . . Under the old dispensations, the operation would have taken off the leg nearly up to the knee . . . but in this case it was done . . . after what is known as the Symes’ [method]. The bones of the foot forward were all amputated, and then the flap of the heel brought around and left to make a cushion to walk upon, so that the crippled leg will only be a trifle shorter.25

His detached tone—scientific, doctorly—hinted at a degree of pride in his own cool head. But what began in January 1863 was different, an immersion to the very end. This was not just “the tragic interest of mortal reality,” as he described, in an article, what had drawn him to hospitals in the first place; no, it was reality, a flood of it.

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