A TIDY LITTLE
VILLAGE

My, but the white went quickly. None of us had any white petticoats as it was all cut up for bandages.

—NELLIE AUGINBAUGH, GETTYSBURG

Second Massachusetts?” The officer was in a hurry. His tent was being dismantled. There was a thump, and one of the canvas walls collapsed. “Here, ma’am, we’d better step outside.” He took Ida by the elbow and led her out into the hay field, where the flattened grass was wet and and the harvest spoiled.

“The hospital for the Twelfth Corps, it’s way south.” He pointed. “It’s Mr. Bushman’s property, a big barn, way down the Taneytown Road, and then you go east.” He gave Ida a sidelong glance. “In the morning maybe somebody’ll be going that way.”

“I can walk,” said Ida. “Which way is the Taneytown Road?”

“Well, this here’s Baltimore Street. You go south a little way and you come to a fork and you take the right fork, and then pretty soon there’s another fork and you go left. Then you go on about three-quarter mile, and there’s a track to the right. You turn there and pass the schoolhouse. It was a hospital, but not the one you want, missus, so you keep on and pretty soon there’s a turnoff and you go right again. From there it’s another mile or so, and after a while you’ll see Mr. George Bushman’s barn. That’s the one for the Twelfth Corps.”

“The right fork,” repeated Ida. “Then left, then right and right again. Thank you.”

“You’ll wait till morning, won’t you, missus? It’ll be dark soon and you shouldn’t be out there, not now, not all by yourself.” When Ida merely smiled and turned away, his conscience must have bothered him because he said, “You’re staying someplace, missus?”

“Oh, yes,” said Ida.

“Well, good night then, ma’am.”

The Taneytown Road was just where he had said it would be. Ida walked quickly. There was still plenty of light, but she must hurry because by the time she reached the hospital the sky would be dark.

She had no question about what she should do. Turning onto the Taneytown Road and tramping along in her sturdy boots, she felt no doubt at all. Ida was a tall, big-boned woman, and carrying the child seemed to have made her stronger. She felt well, rather than sickly like poor cousin Cornelia, back there in Philadelphia.

But Ida blessed Cornelia’s lying-in. It was providential that Ida had taken the cars from Boston to be at her cousin’s side just at this time, because no sooner had Cornelia been brought to bed than the Philadelphia paper had come out with the terrifying news of the battle. If Ida had been at home in Concord when she saw Seth’s name among the missing, she might have despaired of making the long journey south to look for him. And her mother would never have let her go.

But in Philadelphia she was her own woman. Ida had dropped the newspaper, pinned on her money belt, packed her valise, embraced Cornelia, kissed the baby and set off. Now, by hook or by crook, by horsecar and railroad and a coach from the town of Westminster, she had found her way to Gettysburg. She was here, calmly purposeful, serenely resolved to search anywhere and everywhere. She would find him, she knew she would, she was certain sure, because it was just a matter of not giving up.

Stepping down from the coach and walking along the main street of Gettysburg, Ida had perceived at once that the entire town was a hospital. She had seen litters carried into the Express Office and a dead man carted off from the Eagle Hotel. Ambulances swayed along the main street, their horses pulling up at house doors. Ida had felt the urgency all around her. Men and women were hurrying up and down the street and in and out of dwellings—on desperate errands, guessed Ida. Even a boy driving a cow along the street looked careworn and harassed.

Surely a missing man might be overlooked in this confusion, wounded perhaps and not yet recorded, his name not written down.

Ida asked the first person she met, a woman in a blood-spattered apron, where she should begin to look, but the woman merely shook her head and walked rapidly away with her tray of rolled-up lint. When Ida saw the open door of a store with all its merchandise painted on the side—DRY GOODS, NOTIONS, CARPETS, OILCLOTHS, HARDWARE, IRON NAILS—she walked in. No dry goods or carpets were visible anywhere, only boxes and barrels stamped SANITARY COMISSION.

From somewhere in the back came the shriek of nails being clawed up from the lids of boxes. Ida sought out the man with the crowbar and found him opening crates of clothing. She wondered if any of the shirts in the crates had been made by Concord women.

“Please, sir,” said Ida, “I’m trying to find my husband. Can you tell me where I should look?”

The man put down his crowbar and wiped his forehead. “Good heavens, ma’am, you look in a fair way to need a chair.” He swung one out from behind the counter and Ida politely sat down. “Well, there’s all these people’s houses you could look into, but my advice is, try the churches or maybe the courthouse first. Big places like that, they got a lot more.”

“Thank you,” said Ida, smiling at him and rising from the chair. And so, following his pointing hand, she had begun with the courthouse.

Now, walking south as she had been told to do, she looked left and right, curious about a village that only ten days ago must have been very much like her own. The town of Gettysburg was now a desperate resource in a time of crisis, a refuge for thousands of battle-wounded men. It was clear to Ida that all its citizens had dropped whatever they had been doing last June. Now in this terrible month of July they were helping out however they could with the wreckage left behind by a war that had moved on someplace else.

She hurried on in the direction of the Taneytown Road, passing a flower bed that was now a butcher’s refuse dump of sawed-off arms and legs, and a tannery that was shut up tight and a newspaper office from which no cheerful clatter of presses rattled out into the road. Only at an open shed belonging to J. H. GARLACH, CARPENTER, was normal business going on, if the making of coffins could be called normal.

Next door to Mr. Garlach, a wheelwright was hard at work mending the smashed wheel of a gun carriage. Down the road from his shop Ida could hear the clanging ring of a hammer, and soon she was walking past the dark cavern of a smithy, where the blacksmith was pounding a glowing iron tire on his forge.

She walked on, looking for the fork in the road, then stood aside for a girl in a floury apron who was running into town with a basket of new-made bread. Ida couldn’t help exclaiming, “Oh, how good it smells!”

“It’s my brick oven,” said the girl proudly. She stopped running, eager to talk. “I’ve been baking all day for a week, all the loaves I can pack in my oven at once. There were twenty-five barrels of flour in the shed when I started that first day. Now there’s only five, so Father cut the rest of the field today with his new reaping machine.”

“Oh my,” said Ida, wanting to praise her. “A reaping machine! Think of that!”