 | MISS EMILY W. DANA. Women of the war : |  |
MISS EMILY W. DANA.
PROBABLY there were none of the military hospitals
that had concentrated within their walls a greater
number of the elements of deep and touching interest than
the General Hospital established in the buildings and on
the grounds of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.
Others were nearer the front, and contained a
greater proportion of surgical and very serious cases. The
amputating table, with its terrible array of glittering apparatus,
was little used at Annapolis. The soldiers who
came there were those whose constitutions had been shattered
to the foundation by long sickness, fearful hardships,
or deep and torturing wounds. The sufferings of many
were hopeless. They would never again shoulder arms or
draw a ramrod. And, what was a far keener thought, the
bent and wasted figure that a few months before had
stepped across the threshold full of the vigor and hope of
young manhood, would never enter again the far-off mountain
or prairie home. The only hope of the doctor and the
nurse was to alleviate the sufferings of the patient, and
make his slow march to the grave less gloomy and
appalling.
During the last year of the war this hospital became the
general rendezvous of the hundreds and thousands of
Salisbury, and Andersonville. No language can be too
graphic to depict the appearance of those miserable groups
that every few days came in special trains from Washington,
or in boats from Fortress Monroe, fresh from the long tortures
of those infamous prison pens. Moving skeletons
they were, or shrivelled mummies they seemed, half restored
to the world of breathing, hopeful existence, the
minds of many stupefied by the dreary and hopeless
monotony of suffering through which they had passed.
Others, again, were goaded almost to madness by the
thought that these enormous cruelties, and the countless
deaths they had witnessed, and which they had expected to
suffer, were the result of a system of slow torture, deliberately
adopted by the rebel authorities, or of a reckless
indifference to the lives of captured enemies and the usages
of civilized warfare, equally barbarous and criminal.
None of the sufferers by war appealed more directly or
more feelingly to the sympathizing heart and the Christian
charity of woman than the inmates of the Naval School
Hospital. And nobly was that appeal met by the corps
of nurses who devoted themselves to these hundreds and
thousands of patients. The surgeon in charge at the Naval
School was Dr. Vanderkieft. The lady superintendent in
charge of the nursing and special diet of the whole establishment
was, for a time, Miss Tyler, of Baltimore; and
afterwards, that model of what is most excellent in character,
and most admirable in practical efficiency, Miss
Maria M. C. Hall, of Washington City.
At different times there were associated with Miss Hall,
loyal states. The most of those who occupied this interesting
field were from Maine and Massachusetts. So
numerous was the deputation from the former state that
they were sometimes called the "Maine stay" of the
Annapolis Hospital.
In the fall of 1863 a large number of ladies came out
from Portland and its vicinity, and labored for different
periods in the various wards of the hospital. The work
was so systematized that each person had a particular
number of patients assigned to her. The hospital was
divided into sections, and each section into wards. Miss
Emily W. Dana came, with several others, in August, 1863,
and was assigned to wards B and C of section three.
The most of these patients were prisoners just released
from Belle Isle and Libby Prisons. Medicines were of
little avail to reach their cases. Suitable food, in proper
quantities, seasoned with cheerful talk, sometimes a song
or a story, and, more than all, the presence of a graceful
woman, reminding them of the homes and delights they
had so long been absent from, and suggesting the hopes
and joys of social and refined existence, were more potent
for their recovery than any drug, or balsam, or sulphate.
During the eight months that Miss Dana was ministering
to the succession of sufferers who filled the cots and chairs
of these wards, she saw many cases of the most profound
and touching interest.
It was never an easy matter to obey the instructions of
the physician, who ordered a special and carefully regulated
diet for those whose systems had become thoroughly
each day, she was obliged to say to some of these poor
fellows, "You must not have this or that," while their
longing eyes were watching each mouthful, and devouring
every morsel of a heartier neighbor's food. So bitterly
had they suffered the pangs of hunger, that often their
latest breath was expended in the most pitiful supplications
for something to eat.
One day Miss Dana found a new patient in one of the
cots that she was accustomed to visit. He was a beautiful
boy from Kentucky, and his name was Thomas Munday.
Not even the terrible ordeal through which he had passed
had dimmed the sunny lustre of his chestnut curls, or
blurred the brightness of his eye. She asked him what
she could do for him — the usual question upon approaching
a new patient. "Write to Kentucky, immediately, for
my father to come." She wondered, somewhat, at the
earnestness of the request, for there was nothing threatening
about his symptoms; but a day or two proved that
the poor boy knew best. The suffering from hunger had
gone too far, and though he had "gotten back" — as he
called it — "to God's country," and the ample resources
of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions afforded abundant
variety of the most delicate and tempting dishes,
nothing that was brought could, for a moment, satisfy or
nourish him. Day after day, for a week, his strength
wasted, until all likelihood of recovery was abandoned;
and Miss Dana could only hope to keep the vital spark
alive, so that the father might arrive from the distant state
in time to see his bright-haired boy before he died. He
"Can't you do something for me?" his great blue eyes,
with their dilated pupils, pleading even more earnestly
than words. But suddenly she saw them charged with an
expression entirely new and fearful. One morning, as she
approached his cot, the boy that had been so patient and
passive cast upon her a wistful, greedy look, as of a
hungry animal. She was bringing him a little brandy.
He raised himself with a painful and nervous energy, and
clinched the glass, exclaiming, "I'm glad you've come!
I'm so hungry! Is that all the breakfast you've brought
me? I'm starving! O," said he, in tones inexpressibly
plaintive, "I'm so hungry!" He drew one deep sigh, that
seemed loaded with the agony of the long months of pain
which he had suffered, and fell back upon his cot. The
wildness died out instantly from his eyes; they became dim
and stony. The slow torture was ended. It was not until
the next day that the old Kentucky farmer came, and
looked down at the pinched features, and heard from his
nurse, with a heart whose heaviness none can tell, the story
of his death.
One beautiful Sunday morning in September, Miss Dana
entered ward C with a handful of flowers for one of her
patients. In the cot beside his she saw a fresh arrival, a
noble-looking soldier, with evidences of a high order of
intellectual and spiritual manhood stamped upon his fine
features. The patient to whom she brought the flowers
introduced him as Sergeant Martin Armstrong, and he
seemed proud to claim him as a friend, and a member of
the regiment to which he belonged. The little hospital cot
bolstered up, his grave and penetrating but kindly eyes
following every look and motion of those about him,
silently measuring and fathoming all. Though his brow
was knit from the exquisite pain he constantly suffered,
no one thought of offering to him, that august and self-contained
spirit, the sympathy which he quietly bestowed
on others. Tortured by his wound, and steadily sinking
to his grave, there was yet a something about this man that
changed the atmosphere of the whole ward; and all the
men in it were lifted above their every-day selves by the
magnetism of his noble patience, and the elevated fortitude
with which he faced death. The more she saw of him, the
more deeply was she impressed with the rare qualities of
this dying patriot. It was evident that he had entered the
army fresh from the fine and pure enthusiasms of classic
culture, and communion with the most elevated authors of
antiquity. His studies had been religious, as well as literary.
Homer and David, Moses and Tacitus, Solomon
and Seneca, had been his chosen authors before the gown
of the scholar was exchanged for the sword of the dragoon,
and they had been his companions at many a solitary picket
stand, and his consolation at the camp fire. On the little
table by his side lay his books — an uncommon collection,
surely, for a soldier's knapsack. They were all well worn,
and had been collected, since he took the field, from miscellaneous
sources. There were the campaigns of that
"laurelled scholar" of Rome, and all adown the margin
were notes and criticisms, that indicated how carefully he
had studied, and how thoroughly he comprehended the
Romœ; and all the passages where the peculiar fortitude
of the Roman character was delineated were approvingly
marked and commented upon. His books would have indicated
the scholar and the moral enthusiast, even if his
manner had not already betrayed it.
His sickness was caused by an old wound in the left
thigh, which, from a forced march to Richmond, after
being taken prisoner at Gettysburg, a distance of a hundred
and eighty-two miles, opened afresh, and with fatal
symptoms. Two weeks he suffered from the wound,
and from a slow typhoid fever. At last gangrene set
in, and ended the chapter. Once only he wondered
what he had ever done that he should suffer so; and
then not in a spirit of complaint, but rather as a religious
philosopher. Adams, the nurse in the ward, was
from the same place, Pittsburg, a member of the same
company, and a personal friend of Armstrong. It was
touching to see the tenderness with which the strong,
bearded soldier nursed his dying friend. His love was
like the love of Jonathan; it passed the love of woman.
He had neither eye nor ear for others, but sat, night and
day, with a Roman patience, watching, in painful solicitude,
the long, hard struggle between such fine physical powers
and the relentless grasp of the disease. The poor body
was fearfully racked and emaciated. At length, after two
weeks of great agony, his reason gave way. Wild
snatches of old songs, fine passages from classic orators
and poets, were mingled with cries of distress and incoherent
mutterings. Even in its chaos, and in the extremity
Ophelia, —
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword."
Sunday morning, Miss Dana, at the first bugle-call, hastened
to the ward, and found the officer of the day closing
his eyes, and fitting the chin-cloth under his marble features.
Close beside the manly but now rigid figure sat
poor Adams, his head bowed upon his hands, and his
strong frame convulsed by the grief that would have way.
Never afterwards could Armstrong's name be mentioned
that quick tears did not start in his eyes. From him
she learned that Armstrong was nearly fitted for the pulpit
when the war broke out; that he had enlisted in the sixth
United States cavalry, and was noted in the regiment for
his soldierly qualities, and the grave and elevated spirit of
patriotism and manliness with which he was ever actuated.
The presence and the death of this man in the ward had a
marked effect upon the patients. They recognized in him
a strength of moral character, and a power in his reliant,
yet self-sacrificing example, that made them proud to suffer
in a cause that was consecrated by the death of victims so
noble.
During the whole of her period of attendance, from
August till the following May, Miss Dana was impressed
with the uncomplaining endurance with which all the
sufferings she witnessed were borne. "No matter," she
says, "what the case or cause, — I rarely heard a word of
noted, and the unfortunate complainant marked, and almost
scorned, by those of stronger will."
The whole of her experience there, though in the midst
of agony, and under the shadow of frequent deaths, was
so full of instances of what is most admirable and praiseworthy
in human character and the manly virtues, that she
regards it by far the richest and most satisfactory in life.
| MISS EMILY W. DANA. Women of the war : | |