on the rough roads so that a man had not even the consolation of a level bed. If he survived the trip he could look forward to medical care that included ignorance of bacterial infection. “We operated in old blood-stained and often pus-stained coats…with undisinfected hands,” wrote a Union surgeon. “We used undisinfected instruments…and marine sponges which had been used in prior pus cases and only washed in tap water.” Quinine and morphia were practically the only drugs available for whatever ailed the men, and the mortality rate among the wounded during this early part of the war was truly dismaying. Nearly 90 percent of those suffering abdominal wounds died despite hospital ministrations, as did 62 percent of those with other wounds. The statistics were even higher at the field of Second Bull Run. On the long retreat down the Rappahannock the valuable medical supplies, considered cumbersome and expendable, were left by the roadside as the men wearied. In all only two wagons of medical supplies reached hospital personnel at this battle.37
Though Barton would rail against the “heartless officers” whom she thought responsible for these statistics, it was impossible for her to view her wounded boys in aggregate numbers, for she was caught up with the private suffering of each individual soldier. Her accounts of this most personal of wars, which touched Americans as no other conflict, appear not as a continuum but a collection of stories and scenes, strung together like beads on string by a memory so jumbled with weariness, blood, and a thousand small crises, that it could not possibly sort them into consecutive facts. She was too busy to note each day’s events in the small pocket diaries she always carried with her, but they are filled with the names of dying men and last messages, each one too precious at that instant to be overshadowed by the larger reality of war. With more grief than surprise she recognized some powder-stained faces. It was not “a light thing…to pick up a shattered arm to bind and sling it and find the other suddenly thrown across your neck in recognition. Oh what a place,” she lamented, “to meet an old-time friend.”38
Thus she worked on through that night and the next day, overwhelmed by the numbers yet never losing sight of new ambulance trains leaving more men to take the place of those already transferred to Washington. At night the horrors were increased, for the wounded men lay so close to each other that the workers could not step for fear of injuring them. The candles they carried made fire an ever-present risk on the windy, hay-covered hillside, and Clara lived “in terror lest some ones candle fall into the hay and consume them all.”39 Their supplies gave out with woeful rapidity. “I never realized until that day how little a human being could be grateful for—and that day’s experience also taught me the utter worthlessness of that which could not be made to contribute directly to our necessities,” Barton acknowledged. “Of what real value was that which could not save life? the bit of bread which would rest on the surface of a gold [coin] was worth more than the coin itself.”40 She feared, and rightly so, that whatever measure of aid she gave, it was not enough.
All day Monday' she labored as she had on Sunday, unable to think of anything beyond the crisis of immediate need. She was working by rote now, squeezing out her own last drops of strength, for she had had no sleep for two days and had eaten nothing. As food became scarce she and the other workers took the meat from their own sandwiches and gave it to the stricken men. Clara and the others were demoralized, overwhelmed by the ceaseless parade of ambulances, the seeming indifference among army officials, and the confirmed reports of disastrous defeat at the hands of the Southerners. “It is no light thing to travel days and nights among acres of wounded and dying men, to feel that your last mouthful is gone and still they famish at your feet.”41
Barton and the other relief workers could hear the shots of rebel skirmishers in the nearby hills, reminding them of Confederate dominance of the area and warning them that they must hurry.42 Ebbing strength and fear of the guerrillas caused two women of the party to scurry home to Washington, leaving only Reverend Welles to labor beside Clara.43 And beyond every impersonal sorrow was the dreadful start of recognition Clara felt when she saw the faces of friends and former pupils among the sufferers. “Seven times! in one train of ambulances, I passed this ordeal,” she mourned, “you will not wonder that my heart is sore.”44
Late that afternoon a thunderstorm blew up, and so did the sounds of another battle. Pope’s ragged and angry men were retreating along country roads to the west when they encountered Stonewall Jackson’s forces. Jackson’s men challenged the Unionists to make a stand near the tiny hamlet of Chantilly. It was a brief battle, fought furiously in the rain, and two popular Union generals, Isaac Stevéns and Philip Kearny, were lost here. Though it was a small victory for the South, it heightened the already serious demoralization of the United States troops.
This “cavalry charge in a cornfield,” as a curious bystander described it, inevitably meant yet more ambulances, more stunned and bleeding men, more need and fewer supplies to relieve it.45 Barton had caught a catnap by huddling in a waterlogged tent among baskets and boxes, unable to completely lie down. After sleeping for two hours, she sprang again to action after removing the matted grass and leaves from her hair and wringing the muddy water from her skirts. She spent the next day climbing from the wheel hub to the brake of every ambulance, determined to see that no man faced the long trip to the hospital without some water or a small portion of food.46
Rebel scouts appeared more frequently now among the rain-glistening trees. An officer rode up to Clara and asked her if she could ride a horse bareback. “Then you can risk another hour,” he shouted to her affirmative reply. Should the Confederates close in, Barton knew, she would have to ride an unfamiliar horse cross-country through enemy lines to reach Washington. Fortunately this emergency did not arise. At breakneck speed Barton and Welles loaded the last man on the train about five o’clock Tuesday afternoon, then jumped aboard themselves, escaping just as a band of rebel cavalrymen galloped up to the station. Barton peered out from the boxcar as the engine puffed away and saw them setting fire to the little station, which had sheltered the helpless. “Two hours later,” she told Vira, “and Fairfax Station is no more.”47
In the days that followed, the carnage she had witnessed seemed almost too much for Clara to comprehend. The well-known scenes of Washington life, the fashion-conscious patina and nonchalance—even gaiety—appeared brutal and yet steeped in a familiarity that made the desperate days with the wounded only a horrible fantasy. She slept and wrote letters, including some for public consumption, and though she described events, she could not bring herself to retell the grisly details. “My heart is too sore today to recount to you the scenes of suffering I have witnessed,” she told her friends. “Some future day, when their wounds and mine are less fresh, I will find strength to tell you.”48
If Barton felt any small pleasure or pride in her recent experience it was in the knowledge that she had labored to her capacity and that her courage and energy had been tried and not found wanting. Four months earlier she had thought she “would not…run if left under fire.” She had faced sniper fire and the threat of capture at Fairfax Station, and an eyewitness later asserted that her willingness to stay until the last man was aboard the train was “one of the most courageous acts of the war.”49 She had proved her value to the army, to the surgeons, and most importantly, to herself. Now she would tackle her work with a new energy, conditioned by an understanding of the tremendous need for her services and the confidence that she had the strength, as well as the desire, to meet it.
Barton had come to believe in “the folly or wickedness of remaining quietly at home” while the army was in the field, and she regretted to the end of her life that social mores had kept her from the field for over a year. “I said that I struggled with my sense of propriety,” she told friends nearly twenty years afterward, “and I say it with humiliation and shame. I am ashamed that I thought of such a thing.”50 She rushed off again almost immediately, therefore, following the army to Hammond Hospital in Point Lookout, Maryland. Her young cousin Leander Poor was amazed to find her “just as usual,” fired with enthusiasm, even after the experience she had undergone during the previous fortnight. “It has
