It was a strange lifeasleep half the day,exploring Washington the other half,and all night hovering,like a massive cherubim,in a red rigolette,over the slumbering sons of man.I liked it,and found many things to amuse,instruct,and interest me.The snores alone were quite a study,varying from the mild sniff to the stentorian snort,which startled the echoes and hoisted the performer erect to accuse his neighbor of the deed,magnanimously forgive him,and wrapping the drapery of his couch about him,lie down to vocal slumber.After listening for a week to this band of wind instruments,I indulged in the belief that I could recognize each by the snore alone,and was tempted to join the chorus by breaking out with John Brown's favorite hymn:"Blow ye the trumpet,blow!"I would have given much to have possessed the art of sketching,for many of the faces became wonderfully interesting when unconscious.Some grew stern and grim,the men evidently dreaming of war,as they gave orders,groaned over their wounds,or damned the rebels vigorously;some grew sad and infinitely pathetic,as if the pain borne silently all day,revenged itself by now betraying what the man's pride had concealed so well.Often the roughest grew young and pleasant when sleep smothed the hard lines away,letting the real nature assert itself;many almost seemed to speak,and I learned to know these men better by night than through any intercourse by day.Sometimes they disappointed me,for faces that looked merry and good in the light,grew bad and sly when the shadows came;and though they made no confidences in words,Iread their lives,leaving them to wonder at the change of manner this midnight magic wrought in their nurse.A few talked busily;one drummer boy sang sweetly,though no persuasions could win a note from him by day;and several depended on being told what they had talked of in the morning.Even my constitutionals in the chilly halls,possessed a certain charm,for the house was never still.Sentinels tramped round it all night long,their muskets glittering in the wintry moonlight as they walked,or stood before the doors,straight and silent,as figures of stone,causing one to conjure up romantic visions of guarded forts,sudden surprises,and daring deeds;for in these war times the hum drum life of Yankeedom had vanished,and the most prosaic feel some thrill of that excitement which stirs the nation's heart,and makes its capital a camp of hospitals.Wandering up and down these lower halls,I often heard cries from above,steps hurrying to and fro,saw surgeons passing up,or men coming down carrying a stretcher,where lay a long white figure,whose face was shrouded and whose fight was done.Sometimes I stopped to watch the passers in the street,the moonlight shining on the spire opposite,or the gleam of some vessel floating,like a white-winged sea-gull,down the broad Potomac,whose fullest flow can never wash away the red stain of the land.
The night whose events I have a fancy to record,opened with a little comedy,and closed with a great tragedy;for a virtuous and useful life untimely ended is always tragical to those who see not as God sees.My headquarters were beside the bed of a New Jersey boy,crazed by the horrors of that dreadful Saturday.A slight wound in the knee brought him there;but his mind had suffered more than his body;some string of that delicate machine was over strained,and,for days,he had been reliving in imagination,the scenes he could not forget,till his distress broke out in incoherent ravings,pitiful to hear.
As I sat by him,endeavoring to soothe his poor distracted brain by the constant touch of wet hands over his hot forehead,he lay cheering his comrades on,hurrying them back,then counting them as they fell around him,often clutching my arm,to drag me from the vicinity of a bursting shell,or covering up his head to screen himself from a shower of shot;his face brilliant with fever;his eyes restless;his head never still;every muscle strained and rigid;while an incessant stream of defiant shouts,whispered warnings,and broken laments,poured from his lips with that forceful bewilderment which makes such wanderings so hard to overhear.
It was past eleven,and my patient was slowly wearying himself into fitful intervals of quietude,when,in one of these pauses,a curious sound arrested my attention.Looking over my shoulder,I saw a one-legged phantom hopping nimbly down the room;and,going to meet it,recognized a certain Pennsylvania gentleman,whose wound-fever had taken a turn for the worse,and,depriving him of the few wits a drunken campaign had left him,set him literally tripping on the light,fantastic toe "toward home,"as he blandly informed me,touching the military cap which formed a striking contrast to the severe simplicity of the rest of his decidedly undress uniform.When sane,the least movement produced a roar of pain or a volley of oaths;but the departure of reason seemed to have wrought an agreeable change,both in the man and his manners;for,balancing himself on one leg,like a meditative stork,he plunged into an animated discussion of the war,the President,lager beer,and Enfield rifles,regardless of any suggestions of mine as to the propriety of returning to bed,lest he be court-martialed for desertion.
