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  Patrick was worried. “It isn’t safe here,” he’d said to his men when they tethered their horses. “We’re not on high ground and there’s no embankment to shield us.” To their backs was the thick underbrush known as the Wilderness.

  So he was not surprised when at 5:30 in the evening, rebels came running out of the brush with their chilling cutthroat yell. “It’s that bastard Jackson,” Patrick yelled to his men. “He was on the left flank yesterday. He marched his men through the trees to surprise us!”

  Patrick’s men released their horses and leaped into their saddles. “Stand and fight!” Patrick yelled at retreating men, his sword forward. He fired his pistol with his left hand and swung his sword at rebels with his right. “Fight! Kill these bastards!” Patrick yelled. Men fell around him, but his courage seemed to be a shield for him. By late evening the Union Army had retreated more than one mile to the outskirts of Chancellorsville, but the momentum of the fight was over and both sides settled in for the night. All but Patrick.

  “Horses. I hear horses,” Patrick called to his men in a low voice. Leaping to his feet, Patrick signaled his men to mount their horses in anticipation of battle. In an instant, the regiment’s Colt revolvers were cocked and ready. Once the Confederate scout troops were visible in the moonlight, Patrick motioned with his gun and yelled, “Go!” The startled rebels pulled up and both sides fired their sidearms, to no effect. The rebel leader raised his hand and motioned his troops sharply back toward the Confederate lines.

  “My God, it’s Stonewall Jackson,” Patrick called out. The bearded Confederate leader in the gold-braided forage cap was riding off into the distance, but the face of Stonewall Jackson was well known to soldiers on both sides. This, Patrick suddenly felt, was his chance to be a hero. He would dispatch Jackson and everyone would celebrate his bravery and skill.

  Patrick did not realize that a Confederate scout had remained behind, his mission to cover the retreat. The rebel scout quickly spotted Patrick and rode directly toward the Union officer from behind, drawing his pistol. Patrick heard the horse galloping up on his left side and a musket ball grazed his horse’s neck. He turned to see a long-barreled revolver pointed at him. He leveled his own in return. Just as the rebel fired again, Patrick’s gelding, blood running down its neck, reared up on his hind legs. The Confederate’s ball pierced Patrick’s thigh, hitting the bone. Paused high above the rebel, Patrick fired directly at the man’s left ear. He was dead in an instant.

  Patrick tried to push down on his stirrups to keep his balance, but his leg gave way. He and his horse slammed to the ground, his wounded leg trapped under the horse’s belly, leaving him unable to move. As his horse struggled, Patrick realized it had broken its leg in the fall. Patrick let out a deep-throated scream that pierced the blackness of the night. The sharp pain dragged his consciousness from him.

  Patrick’s men rode up several long minutes later. The sound of their horses’ hooves and the shaking of the ground jolted Patrick back to wakefulness. “Get this horse off me! My leg is broken,” Patrick screamed. One of his troops shot the horse in the head so they could lift it without the animal flailing and further hurting their captain.

  Two men lifted the horse’s shoulder and two lifted the hindquarters to free Patrick. Blood was pooled on the ground around his twisted left leg. The young captain was unable to move.

  “We chased them near to the rebels’ line,” announced one soldier. “They got fired on by their own men! I saw Stonewall Jackson slide off his saddle!”

  “Are you sure?” Patrick asked, listening despite his pain.

  “Yes, sir. It had to be him.”

  “I’ll be damned. Let’s get out of here before they come back after us.”

  As his men loaded him across the saddle of a horse, spots of light flashed in Patrick’s eyes and shots of pain made him lightheaded. He fought to stay alert until he reached a doctor, but he lost his struggle. With his battered leg bouncing against the side of the horse, Patrick would briefly awaken and then pass out again from the pain of broken bones grinding against flesh. It took more than half an hour for the eight men to reach the tent marked by a yellow flag with a green H. Medics in dirty, bloodstained uniforms jerked Patrick off the horse, laid him on a stretcher and carried him to a cot in the tent. Surrounded by agony and chaos from the daylong battle, he was ignored until morning.

  Soaked in blood and sweat, Patrick survived the longest night of his life. His broken leg flopped this way and that when he moved it an inch and it lacerated him with pain. There was no chance to sleep, surrounded by the shrill sounds in the tent and from the yard, both filled with wounded. Some soldiers suffered in silent fortitude while others cried out or groaned pitifully. “Let me die!” one man shouted in agony. “Momma, Momma, Momma,” was repeated until a medic gagged the soldier. Nurses went from bed to bed offering shots of whiskey, but it wasn’t enough. Where are the doctors? Patrick fumed. He lay on his cot staring into the darkness, certain this was what living in Hell must be like. Helpless. Not a leg to stand on was the only humor that pierced his cocoon of suffering.

  Sometime after dawn, Patrick was approached by a nurse, who said only, “The doctor is coming.” The field surgeon arrived soon after, triaging the wounded. Those with gunshot wounds to the abdomen or chest were left to die. A fractured hip was always fatal. With a fractured femur, Patrick’s odds of dying were three to one. If the bullet and wadding from the shot remained in the wound, it increased the infection risk. Amputation was the operation for all soldiers with this injury.

  “I am dying of thirst and I hurt like hell. All I have had all night is a sip from a whiskey bottle,” Patrick complained while the doctor inspected his left leg, which bent out at an awkward angle.

  The doctor ignored his complaint and stood up straight. “Captain, we will transport you to a hospital across the Rappahannock toward Warrentown to amputate your leg.”

  “I don’t want it cut off,” Patrick roared. “I have a war to fight. I have a life to make.”

  “It is your leg or your life, Captain. We have no treatment for the infection that usually develops.”

  Patrick’s anger was impotent in his helpless condition. His leg was splinted and he was transported in a horse-drawn covered ambulance wagon designed to carry as many as ten men at a time. The opiate given him after boarding the ambulance was especially effective because he had lost so much blood. His mind was rambling. Damn, if my horse hadn’t reared up the ball would have hit my chest. I wonder if Jackson really was shot? I’m glad Katherine can’t see me helpless. Patrick fell into a drug-induced, fitful sleep.

  A sudden halt of the ambulance threw Patrick forward, so his piercing yell announced his arrival at Warrentown. When he came to he was staring at the ceiling of a farmhouse-turned-hospital instead of the roof of the ambulance. A plump, middle-aged woman appeared and quickly looked over Patrick’s leg. “Here’s whiskey,” she said curtly as she held up a large amber bottle. She pulled out the cork stopper, brought the bottle to Patrick’s lips, and tilted it up. As soon as the biting alcohol entered his mouth, Patrick’s throat closed and he spewed it right back out, certain he was about to vomit. “Don’t be wasteful, Captain. We haven’t much to spare. Try again.” Patrick swallowed the next two mouthfuls, and before he could say a word she was gone. He lay back and gratefully let the whiskey soothe him.

  Patrick was scared. He had never considered he might die of injury. Too tough, too lucky. But the field doctor said he might die. He had never associated the dead soldiers around him with his own death. That was their fault—he knew he was smarter and tougher than any rebel. But now, death filled his mind. He dwelled on his father’s death and the fear he would never see Katherine again. A night of constant pain, dehydration, blood loss, and whiskey gave him intermittent sleep and vivid dreams.

  His whiskey-laced brain returned to his trip home six months ago, when his father was dying in January 1863. It was the first time he and Katherine had been togeth
er since their picnic in 1861.

  Patrick and Katherine sat facing each other on the couch in front of the fireplace of Patrick’s parents’ home. “I see my father lying helpless with a broken hip on that icy bridge. It is a dreadful image. He was so strong, so smart, and always in charge. For him to be mortally injured by a horse accident is just unimaginable. When we broke horses, none could throw him. He always taught me to jump free if a horse was going down.”

  “The wooden bridge was very icy, Patrick. With his broken hip, Jeffrey couldn’t get up or move off the bridge. He shot the injured horse so it wouldn’t kick him with its flailing legs. The horse fell into the icy creek below. I am sure it all happened very fast.”

  “Maybe the horse suffered the least. My father is unable to get out of bed. Skin sores that are infected. He was the one I was fighting for in this war.” Tears ran down Patrick’s cheeks.

  “I can cry with you, my darling. You know my mother is gone, but I’ve never told you how painful it was. I was only thirteen.” Katherine told Patrick all of it: the draining sores, the putrid smells, the weight loss, the weakness. “Her own body ate her alive.”

  Patrick locked on Katherine’s deep blue eyes, a film of tears dulling her sparkle. Her auburn hair and those blue eyes stirred his passions. A familiar churning in his stomach unnerved his calm—the same churning he had when he fantasized about being with her. Involuntarily his eyes left hers and shifted to his desire.

  Katherine felt his passionate gaze burn into her breasts. For two years he was her last thought as she put her head on her pillow. How many nights did she lay awake with desire? Should she? Could she bear two more years of longing? What if he were killed and their love went unfulfilled? Her proud refusal would become a lifetime regret. A much worse guilt than giving herself to him before marriage.

  She slid her shoulder-high, short-sleeved bodice off her right arm and then off her left. Her camisole fell off with her bodice. She wore no corset. Her breasts were bared and Patrick thought she was like an alabaster statuette, but her mouth was open and she was breathing heavily. He realized this was his dream. She was seducing him. Sliding across the couch, Patrick’s open mouth met hers and their tongues touched. The crackling of the fireplace was the only sound in the room until both began moaning softly. When Patrick returned to war they were engaged.

  “Hey, wake up, Captain!” Doctor Thomas Franklin shook Patrick vigorously by his shoulder. “Wake up.” As Patrick turned his head to see the surgeon, Franklin continued. “It’s like this, Captain. You have a broken bone in the thigh and have lost a lot of blood. I’m going to amputate your leg. Do you understand me, Captain?”

  “No! You cannot amputate my leg!” Patrick ignored his pain and lifted himself on his elbows to look the surgeon in the eye. He was shocked to realize the man was no older than he. It further eroded his confidence.

  “You have no choice,” Franklin answered rather weakly. He didn’t want to admit he knew no other operation. Six months out of medical school, he had learned all he knew about surgery in the field of battle. He went to medical school from the farm at the age of nineteen, having quit school after eighth grade. He grew to like surgery when they castrated calves. His father paid twenty-five dollars, nearly all their savings, to pay for his son’s admittance to a medical school in St. Louis. The course of study was nine months long and Franklin never saw a patient nor an operation.

  “I do have a choice. It is my leg. I am from a prominent family in Philadelphia and if you don’t listen to me, I’ll have you court-martialed. Just take the ball out!”

  The finality of Patrick’s decision scared the young doctor. No patient ever countered his orders. “Yes, sir. I understand. That is all that I will do.” He spun around and hurried back the way he had come, calling over his shoulder to give the patient some laudanum.

  Franklin briskly moved out of the farmhouse to his operating theater. His operating table was a door set on four sawhorses under the branches of a large oak tree. Four dressers, his aides, restrained a patient when the anesthetic powers of whiskey were insufficient. Ether, administered by a physician colleague of Franklin’s, was in short supply and reserved for officers.

  “Two of you,” Franklin nearly shouted, “go out back and bring a body to me.” The tool shed behind the house was a morgue for the dead waiting to be buried. As two dressers hurried off, Franklin said to his anesthetist, “I will need you for this operation, but I have to practice on a corpse. Go get some coffee.”

  Franklin was inexperienced and barely competent—which was the standard for the Union Army—but determined to improve his skills. He frequently operated on the dead to learn anatomy and improve his technique. While the dressers laid a stiff corpse on the operating table, Franklin pulled his table of four blood-stained tools—a forceps, scalpel, tissue clamp, and saw—closer to him. Franklin cleaned these by wiping the fresh blood off on his apron, which he donned over his uniform.

  He made an incision in the thigh of the corpse. No worry about blood in this operation, he thought with a smile. Slicing the fat and muscle with the scalpel, he opened the leg so he could feel with his left thumb and index finger for the femur bone. A strong band of tissue resisted him. He cut into that. “Hold this open for me,” Franklin said to a dresser, who used his bare hands to pull the wound edges apart. I’ve never quite had this view, Franklin thought with some excitement. Exploring the inside of the leg he found the main nerves and the femoral artery. “I must avoid this artery or he’ll bleed to death,” Franklin commented to the dresser. He memorized the relationships of the anatomical structures.

  Finally Franklin stood and wiped off his tools on his pant leg. “Okay, boys, take the stiff back and bring out the live one. Tell the anesthetist to finish his coffee. It’s time for me to take out this conceited captain’s musket ball, though he’ll probably just get an infection and lose the leg anyway.”

  Patrick’s drugged sleep was rudely interrupted by four men lifting him from his cot to a stretcher. Crying out in pain, Patrick was told by one of the dressers, “Shut up. You’re about to get some ether. Lucky you’re an officer.” The four stretcher-bearers delivered him to Franklin, waiting under the shade of the old oak tree.

  Franklin was sweating before he even cut into Patrick. Swirls of smoke drifted into the tree as the ash of his cigar grew while he worked. Following the track of the musket ball by sticking his bare index finger into the leg, he felt wadding. He ripped open the muscle and motioned to the dresser to spread the wound, but his hands were slick with blood and he slipped once before he got it open. Franklin spied the wadding and grabbed it with a forceps. “Gotcha,” he exclaimed in triumph as he removed it. With the knife he cut away more muscle and groped around the broken bone for the musket ball. “Ouch, dammit.” He spit out the words around his cigar as he cut his finger on a spike of the broken bone. As he quickly withdrew his hand, the musket ball came with it. He held it up as if he had secured it on purpose. “Finished.” Standing, he pulled his cigar from his mouth, knocked off the ash, and pointed to the wound. “Plug it,” he ordered.

  The dresser packed the wound open with linens soaked in chlorine. A farmer’s wife, a friend of Franklin’s mother in Missouri, had told him this cleaned the sores of her twelve children, so he used it in the dressings of all his patients.

  Patrick’s lower leg was wrapped first with linen, then with rope and finally with plaster around the rope and linen. The ends of the rope were extended beyond Patrick’s foot and tied to a hook on which weights were hung to pull on the leg. The assembly, known as Buck’s traction, gave some stability to the broken bone fragments and helped hold the leg still.

  Franklin spit out bits of tobacco. “Now we’ll see if God likes this arrogant asshole.”

  Chapter Six

  THE GENERAL AND THE CAPTAIN

  After escaping the Union ambush, General Stonewall Jackson and his soldiers, galloping toward rebel lines, had surprised some North Carolina infantrymen, wh
o could not identify the riders in the darkness and opened fire. Jackson instinctively turned toward the fire and raised both hands, palms outward. Each hand took a ball in the palm, but the truly devastating injury was a ball to his left arm, which fractured his humerus bone and severed an artery. Jackson tried desperately to stay atop his horse, but fell from his saddle into the arms of his junior officer, who broke his fall. The officer took off his own shirt, ripped it apart, and tied a tourniquet to staunch the heavy bleeding from Jackson’s arm.

  Jackson was carried on a litter to a horse-drawn wagon, which bore him two miles to a farmhouse that had been converted to a field hospital. Doctor Hunter McGuire, chief surgeon of Jackson’s Second Corps, was waiting there for Jackson. The twenty-seven year-old surgeon stood tall at six-feet two-inches, with kind eyes that nonetheless had an intense gaze. His hair was thick and dark and he wore a full moustache. McGuire had saved Jackson’s finger after the first battle of Manassas.

  McGuire knew immediately that Jackson’s only hope for survival was amputation of his injured left arm. The right hand might be of little use in the future, but it could be saved. He ordered the field medics to move Jackson straight to the kitchen, which served as the operating room. The kitchen door had been removed from its hinges and set between two tables to function as the operating table. It was night, so four medics surrounded the table, holding lanterns to illuminate the area where the surgeon worked. There were but three or four tools and no antiseptic for them or the wound. There were only two sources of hope for any operation: the surgeon’s skill and God.