Brendan Graham - The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night

‘Well, look how Science has lepped into action in this war.’

She waited till he continued.

‘Exploding mines that go in the ground, so a man, even if he is safe from battle, cannot take a walk to a leafy glade or a cooling brook for fear he step on one and be blown to smithereens.’

Ellen thought how cruel a mind had human science to invent such an inhuman device.

‘… and there isn’t a sharpshooter but has the new telescope lens. There’s no place safe left to hide … and the Gatlings, the repeating guns,’ he explained for her benefit, ‘cut a man in two, they would … leave his legs still walking and his body gone.

‘The generals are fighting with the old tactics while the men are cut to ribbons with the new weapons. General Meagher is still calling for bayonet charges. “Let them taste steel,” he says, but all we get is Rebel lead.’

‘Stop talking,’ she ordered, ‘while I bandage this head of yours!’

Hercules O’Brien paid no heed to her. ‘I’m telling you, missus, before the century is out, Science will be the master of mankind. Science will blow up the world!’

Whatever about ‘Science blowing up the world’, Ellen had already seen the devastating results of the minié ball.

The old round musket ball used early on by the Confederates, would pierce clothing and skin but would bounce off the deeper tissues. The conical minié ball however would bore through all tissue, usually resting near the opposite side of the body to which it had entered. If it did not exit entirely, it left a trail of destruction in its wake.

Now, his head at last bandaged, she gently pushed a probing finger into the sergeant’s other wound. The human finger still more sensitive than what Science could produce. And less likely to damage arteries and nervous tissues.

She kept looking at him, talking, feeling the tension rise within him; wondering how this pint-sized man had earned the name of Hercules?

‘I’m a great big man in a little man’s body,’ he said seriously. ‘Hercules lived in ancient times and he lifted the world on his back … and sure amn’t I carrying the whole Union army on mine!’

She looked at him. His visible eye, from where she had just bandaged him, was dancing with mirth. At last her fingertip found something hard and solid.

‘I’ve found it, Sergeant O’Brien!’ she said.

‘No matter that science will kill us all, you can’t beat the human touch.’ He winked at her, the eye still working overtime.

‘Well, I will need the forceps with which to get it out,’ she countered.

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.