Brendan Graham - The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night

‘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 her, ‘barely out of knee-britches and learning to kill! The fresh flower of manhood, thus brutalised by an old man’s war.’

She had seen them come in, stretchered and corpsed, some as young as twelve. But never before a nine-year-old.

She heard Louisa calling her, squeezed both his arms. ‘Wait here, soldier, you need the doctor to fix you up,’ she said, to spare his blushes.

‘What about my drum?’ he asked. ‘Can he fix my drum too?’

‘I’m sure he can,’ she smiled, and hurried to where Louisa and the commotion of some new arrivals beckoned.

The little fellow had grit, real Illinois grit. She doubted there was much the matter with him. They’d see to his bum and his drum. Send him home to his mother. Maybe this time she’d keep her little drummer boy at home in Illinois. If she could afford to feed another mouth as good as the army could.

Later, she sat deep into the night, keeping the last vigil with some frightened soul admitted earlier and for whom nothing could be done. Nights such as these were the darkest hours, when her God would seem to have deserted her and she would pray instead to Science. That it would deliver its yet most infernal machine, and in one hellish blow strike down the massing millions of men. Be so terrible a holocaust that it would stop everything. Then, the pitying cry of some farm boy, or some veteran’s curse, demanding her to be present, would draw her back from the abyss.

One such night she could bear it no longer. Stole away from her watch, went into the night. The land was flat here on the plains of Virginia – some rolling hills to break the monotony, the misty Blue Ridge Mountains to the west, behind them. It was a rich land, far better than what she had known in Ireland. No bare acre here but gentle farmlands where wheat could be harvested, peaches plucked, a pig or a rooster raised. Until they were commandeered for hungry marching bellies, by one side or the other … or stolen by marauding men, cut adrift from their regiments and the mainstream of battle. She walked to the copse of trees, now bathed in the glimmering moonlight of her adopted land. Sad for all that had been visited upon it. There in the sheltering trees she found a horse, black as Hades, gashed above the foreleg, watching over its fallen master. The man, a captain, was beyond repair. She prayed over him, went deeper into the twining trees, the horse hobbling behind her. Ahead some snuffling sounds.

Following the sounds, her eyes made out the low shapes of hogs, feeding on the ungathered dead.

She ran at them, shouting, the night-horse her ally. Grudgingly they gave ground, snorting and bellowing their way further into the undergrowth.

She scrambled onto the horse’s back, fearful they would return before she had raised help. The horse bore her bravely, terrible images assailing her mind. Images of the famished dead back in her own land, Ireland … ravenous pigs and dogs. Her own neighbours, every last hope of food gone; the cabin pulled down around them, so no one would witness their last indignity; the dog whose head she had cracked as it defended its food. Somehow, it all – the spectre of famine back again and the Hades horse – decided her. No longer would she remain a spectator, waiting. She would rise herself, go out and find Lavelle and Patrick.

And she would go South. When the time was right.

‘Niggerology! That’s what’s causing all the trouble!’ Jeremiah Finnegan roared. ‘That’s why all of yous in here is bent and broken. Niggerology!’ he roared again.

Ellen ran down the room to where the man was lying, head back, face to the ceiling.

‘If I’m going to die, I’m going to die roarin’!’ he yelled, before she could reach him.

‘Jeremiah! Jeremiah!’ she said sternly. ‘Stop that! You’re not helping any by shouting your head off.’

She caught him by his remaining arm.

‘But it’s true, Miss Ellie – it’s true! Look at me – all I’m fit for is to be roarin’!’

‘I know, Jeremiah, I know,’ she said more gently, looking at the half-man on the ramshackle cot; over one eye, a wad of cotton wool to cover the blank hole where his eye had been. Taken clean by a minié ball. Then his arm and his leg with cannon fire, as he fell.

‘I have only my roarin’ so that people can know me. I can’t see. I can’t walk. I can’t hold a lady to dance with. I’m eternally bollixed!’ he said defiantly.

She couldn’t but help smile at the man’s description of himself. With his one good eye he caught her smile – and kept going. ‘But I can ring the rafters of Heaven and Hell! Damn their heathen eyes – the niggers – and those what supports them!’

What could she say to him? ‘But you’re not eternally damned and neither are those “niggers”, as you call them,’ she whispered, rubbing her palm along his remaining arm.

‘Ticket’ Finnegan – as they called him back home in the County Monaghan hinterland, always wanting to be off, get his ticket to America … to anywhere out of the humpbacked hills of Monaghan – calmed to her touch.

‘I’m not afraid of dying, Miss Ellie,’ he said, still remonstrating with her. ‘But I won’t die easy, whimperin’ me way out like those Rebs over there. I came into the world roarin’ and I’m goin’ out of it the same way!’

‘I’m sure you are,’ she answered.

He was a fine block of a man; had a good few years on most of the boys that both armies had gobbled up. Now, like all around him, he had been cut down in his prime. It was a shame, a crying shame.