CAMPED NEAR
A SLOUGH

6 Sept. ’63

My dear Mother,

You will understand why I can’t come home now when I tell you that I have found Eben in the hospital in the Patent Office. He is suffering from a fever. He is very ill.

One of the surgeons takes particular notice of Eben. He tells me he has seen cases as severe who recovered, so I have hope, but as I say, he is very sick. His illness was contracted when his regiment encamped near a slough.

I have concluded to stay and help care for him, nothing preventing. The matron here is very strict, so I must try not to be any trouble.

As for me—now, Mother, you are not to worry, because I am first-rate. I have engaged a woman to help with my lying-in and Mrs. Broad has assisted in getting everything ready. You will remember that I helped at the time Alice came into the world, so I am familiar with what is needful. As usual I feel extremely well, only a little breathless now and then.

Y’r loving daughter Ida

There were seven other men suffering from high fever in the same alcove with Eben. Fearing contagion, the surgeons had isolated them by the width of the tall glass cases from the patients with ordinary battle wounds.

Ida was not the only family member in attendance. A mother from Georgia never left the bedside of her son until the afternoon he died. Worn and grief-stricken, she nodded a good-bye to Ida and followed the litter as it was carried down the long aisle. Sorrowfully Ida watched them go. The dead boy and Eben had belonged to opposing armies, but there was no quarrel between the mother of the one and the sister of the other.

The surgeon attending the patients in this part of the ward was the chief surgeon of the hospital. He was attentive to the men in his care and gentle with Ida, although it was clear that he didn’t know what on earth to do with a woman on the brink of giving birth.

The nurses knew precisely what to do with her. They all said the same thing. Some said it kindly—“My dear, you really must go home to your mother”—some angrily—“Don’t expect us to care for you, missus. Go on, get away from here, go home.” Ida felt unwanted, like a hen shooed away by a flapping apron.

But she did not leave the hospital. She stayed, because Eben was hovering between life and death. He lay unconscious, his fever rising and falling. Ida heard the awful panting and on his forehead her hand felt the terrible heat. She sat with him day and night, dozing in her chair, waking up in alarm and dozing off again, her head drooping on her breast.

Eben’s fever was highest in the watches of the night. But in the morning it abated a little, and Ida could go out to breathe air untainted by the odors of the sickroom. Even with the prompt care of the nurses, there were smells that entered with every new batch of wounded men—the putrid reek of a gangrenous leg, the stink of urine-soaked trousers, the rank smells of vomit and diarrhea.

Once Ida jumped to the rescue of a man who was writhing so violently that he nearly threw himself out of bed. Another time she snatched up a urinal to catch a spout in midair. She helped with the washing of filthy bodies, she mopped up puddles of blood. She knew where to find the sink and where to empty chamber pots.

The antagonism of the nurses grew less, although the matron, Mrs. Thrum, never passed Ida without hissing at her, “You should not be here, girl, you should not be here.”

In her brief respites out-of-doors under the monumental portico, Ida looked up at the half-finished framework of the Capitol dome where work was going on or watched the traffic moving east and west on F Street. Sometimes a cheerful procession of contrabands tramped along the dusty road, colored men and women who had run away from their masters. Or their mistresses, guessed Ida, southern women struggling to carry on a farm. Sometimes a wagon carried an entire black family—grandparents, mother and father, barefoot children, a baby. One woman looked ready to give birth. She looked up and exchanged a dark glance with Ida.

And sometimes Ida nearly feel asleep, leaning against the cool stone. But whenever a long train of ambulances came creaking up the street, heading for one of the other hospitals—Finlay or Douglas or Armory Square—she woke up and wondered if Seth might be lying in one of them.

Perhaps he had rejoined his regiment. Perhaps he had been wounded in another battle!