 | WOMAN'S SACRIFICES. Women of the war : |  |
"That feels like Mother's Hand."
During the last year of the conflict a young officer in a
Rhode Island battery received a fearful wound in his right
leg from a fragment of a shell. A week of dreadful pain
and hardship ensued, during which he was transported from
the front, near Richmond, to Washington. The surgeons
here, upon consultation, advised an amputation. He telegraphed
home that all was well, and composed himself to
bear whatever might be in the future, with the fortitude of
a true soldier. The operation was performed; but the
condition of the patient was critical. His constitution did
not rally after the shock, and he was carefully nursed by
one of those angels of mercy whose presence illuminated
so many of our military hospitals.
His mother, in Rhode Island, who, with the intuition of a
woman, had apprehended the extent of the danger, left
home on the receipt of the telegraph, and reached Washington
at midnight. As the surgeon had enjoined the utmost
calmness and quiet as indispensable to the wounded hero,
the mother was not allowed to see her suffering boy at
once, but sat in an adjoining room patiently waiting for
daylight and the permission of the surgeon to enter the
ward where he lay.
As the nurse sat there fanning the patient and resting
her fingers on the fluttering and feverish pulse, she was
thinking every moment of that heavy-hearted mother in
the next room, every fibre of whose heart was yearning
to come and sit where she was sitting, and lay her hand on
her boy. At length, when the ward was still and dark, she
glided out, and told his mother that she might go in very
softly and take her place; that he seemed to be sleeping, and
probably would not know the difference. Gently and without
uttering a word, she moved to his bedside, and laid her
fingers on the wrist, as the nurse had directed; but the
patient, though apparently asleep, perceived a change in the
character of the touch. Nature was too strong to be deceived:
opening his eyes, he said, "That feels like my
mother's hand. Who is this beside me? It is my mother!
Turn up the gas, and let me see mother!"
The gas was turned up. The true-hearted boy saw that
he was right, and their faces now met in a long, joyful,
sobbing embrace.
He rallied a little after she came, and seemed to try very
hard, on her account, to feel stronger. But the stump
body, was decided upon, after which he sank.
As the end approached, weeping friends told him that it
only remained to make his condition comfortable. He said
he had looked death in the face too many times to be afraid
now. He had just completed his twenty-first year, and the
third of his service in the United States army, when the
final bugle-call reached his ears, and the mother laid away
the mutilated form of her soldier boy in a sleep from which
no electrical touch of maternal love can ever waken him.
| WOMAN'S SACRIFICES. Women of the war : | |