XXVI

A BROKEN MUSKET

                                “What seest thou else
     In the dark backward and abysm of time? 
     If thou remember’st ought, ere thou cam’st here,
     How thou cam’st here, thou may’st.”—­SHAKESPEARE.

When the train of wounded arrived in Richmond, it was early morning.  Many men and women had forsaken their beds to minister unto the needs of the suffering; delicacies were served bountifully, and hearts as well as stomachs were cheered; there were evidences of sympathy and honour on every hand.

Late in the forenoon I was taken to Byrd Island Hospital—­an old tobacco factory now turned into something far different.  My clothing was cut from me and taken away.  Then my wound—­full of dirt and even worms—­was carefully dressed.  The next morning the nurse brought me the contents of my pockets.  She gave me, among the rest, a marble and a flattened musket-ball, which, she had found in the watch-pocket of my trousers.  Now I recalled that I had put my “taw” in that pocket; the bullet had struck the marble, which had saved me from a serious if not fatal wound.

The ward in which I found myself contained perhaps a hundred wounded men, not one of whom I knew, though there were a few belonging to my regiment—­other companies than mine.  Acquaintance was quickly made, however, by men on adjoining cots; but no man, I think, was ever called by his name.  He was Georgia, or Alabama,—­his State, whatever that was.  My neighbours called me, of course, South Carolina.

Many had fatal wounds; almost every morning showed a vacant cot.  I remember that the man on the next cot at my left, whose name in ward vernacular was Alabama, had a story to tell.  One morning I noticed that he was wearing a clean white homespun shirt on which were amazingly big blue buttons.  I allowed myself to ask him why such buttons had been used.  He replied that, a month before he had been on furlough at his home in Alabama, and that his mother had made him two new shirts, and had made use of the extraordinary objects which I now saw because they were all she had.  He had told her jestingly that she was putting that big blue button on the middle of his breast to be a target for some Yankee; and, sure enough, the wound which had sent him to the hospital was a rifle shot that struck the middle button.  I laughed, and Alabama laughed, too, but not long.  He died.

For nearly two months I remained in this woful hospital.  Life there was totally void of incident.  After the first week, in which we learned of the further successes of the Confederate arms and of our final check at Malvern Hill, anxiety was no longer felt concerning Lee’s army, now doing nothing more than watching McClellan, who had intrenched on the river below Richmond, under the protection of the Federal fleet.  We learned with some degree of interest that another Federal army was organizing under General Pope somewhere near Warrenton; but Southern hopes were so high in consequence of the ruin of McClellan’s campaign, and the manifest safety of Richmond, that the new army gave us no concern; of course I am speaking of the common soldiers amongst whom I found myself.