AFTERWORD

An afterword is a clumsy appendage to a work of fiction, but once again truth must be sorted out from invention.

Which soldiers are which? Seven are real. Guided by archivist Brian Sullivan, I found their faces in the picture collection of the Harvard University Archives—Charles Redington Mudge, Thomas Rodman Robeson, Henry Ropes, Henry Weld Farrar, Henry Lawrence Eustis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The regimental histories of all seven are listed in Francis Brown’s Roll of Harvard Students Who Served in the Army or Navy of the United States During the War of the Rebellion. Memoirs of the three who died at Gettysburg appear in the two volumes of Harvard Memorial Biographies.

The fictional characters—soldiers, family members, a surgeon, a nurse, an unhappy farmer and a landlady—turned up among the cartes de visile bought from collector Henry Deeks in his antiquarian bookshop in Maynard, Massachusetts. Roaming among hundreds of faces, I bought a small population of unidentified men, women and children.

The photographs of Ida Morgan, Augusta Morgan and top-hatted Otis Pike were found in histories of nineteenth-century fashion. Eben Flint’s hospital picture is one of many photographic studies of wounded soldiers in The Civil War, an Illustrated History, by Geoffrey C. Ward, with Ric Burns and Ken Burns. The likeness of chubby charmer Lily LeBeau is really a photograph of dancer Laura Le Claire found in Mr. Lincoln’s Cameraman, a collection of Mathew Brady photographs edited by Roy Meredith.

The three stereographs are from several sources. The one of dead men on the field at Gettysburg is attributed to Alexander Gardner. A copy of the Patent Office stereograph comes from the Patent Office Historical Collection of Judy, Diane and Jim Davis. (It has been slightly doctored.) A famous photograph of a doctor performing an amputation was shamelessly scissored to look like a stereograph.

The “Reference Service Slip” is a real one from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, supplied by archivist Michael Musick.

Annette Fern of the Harvard Theatre Collection unearthed several prompt books for The Marble Heart, as well as the Hasty Pudding playbill, to which a few fictional names have been added. In Mary Kelly’s scrapbook all but two of the listed names are of real men, with the actual parts they played in Hasty Pudding and their later regimental histories.

The melancholy photograph of the armless soldier was found in Bell I. Wiley’s Common Soldier of the Civil War, identified only as a private in the 147th New York. He might have been at Gettysburg, since his regiment was there. But there was another private who did indeed lose both arms in that battle. In the fighting for Culp’s Hill by the Twelfth Corps on the morning of July 3, 1863, a shell from a Union battery exploded prematurely above the 20th Connecticut, its shards mangling both arms of Private George W. Warner. Carried to the rear, Warner did not learn until he was treated at a hospital that he had lost both limbs—not just the right arm, as he had thought when wounded. (Jeffry D Wert, Gettysburg, Day Three.)

Although Mr. Tossit is fictional, his grievance is like that of farmer William Bliss, whose barn was destroyed on the Gettysburg battlefield, and whose request for financial restitution was at last denied.

Although several episodes involving actual soldiers Mudge, Robeson, Fox, Ropes, Farrar and Eustis are fictional, the words of Colonel Mudge, “It’s murder, but it’s an order,” have gone down in the history books.

There are undoubtedly many unconscious historical mistakes in this narrative, but I confess to one of which I am fully aware. By the time I learned that the hospital in the Patent Office had been closed before the battle of Gettysburg, I was too infatuated to give it up.

The tablets in Harvard’s Memorial Hall are of course real, although I have added two fictional names to one of them. I can’t help lamenting the fact that after so many years there are still no memorials to the many Harvard men who died for the Confederacy.

Ida’s experiences in the town of Gettysburg borrow graphic detail from a remarkable history of the three-day battle as it appeared to the citizens of the town—Firestorm at Gettysburg, Civilian Voices, by Jim Slade and John Alexander, and from A Vast Sea of Misery, an exhaustive study by Gregory A. Coco of the nearly 160 hospitals that were hastily set up in tents, houses and public buildings to care for the 21,000 men from both armies who were wounded in the battle of Gettysburg.

Another source book provided three of the case studies composed by my fictional Patent Office surgeon. Actually they are authentic studies reported in 1870 by Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes. They appear in One Vast Hospital: The Civil War Hospital Sites in Frederick, Maryland, after Antietam, by Terry Reimer. (The complete list of wounded patients fills nearly two hundred pages of small print, fifty names to a page.)

Many knowledgeable people informed and corrected this rash venture into history. Professor David Donald recommended the most essential reading. Christopher Morss and Paul Travers loaned dozens of books. Isabelle Plaster loaned old family volumes, Malcolm Ferguson found a rare memoir and reference librarian Jeanne Bracken was tireless in finding faraway titles.

In Gettysburg Jared Peatman twice conducted my son Andy and me around the several battlefields and on both occasions Professor Jean Potuchek offered the key to her house. By E-mail from Washington Michael Musick explained in detail how Homer Kelly would make his way into the military records of the National Archives, and Patent Office historian Kenneth Dobyns (whose name should appear in letters of gold) began by answering a few questions and went on to provide massive amounts of information, answering endless questions. Could the guns of Gettysburg be heard in Philadelphia? Where was the B&O station in Washington? His knowledgeable friend Louis Allahut kindly read the manuscript. A great many more questions were answered by Laurence Golding, a veteran reenactor who gallops across one field of battle after another.

Here at home Tom Blanding supplied helpful history about Concord during the Civil War, Diane and Herbert Haessler explained nineteenth-century medical practices and astronomer Alan Hirshfeld reported on the state of weather and moonlight in Gettysburg during the first week of July in 1863. Norman Levey kept the electronic connections working, Betty Levin and Ellen Raja knew about farming and Katherine Hall Page loaned an album of haunting nineteenth-century faces.

Much of this story is concerned with real and fictional Harvard soldiers. But I agree wholeheartedly with Homer Kelly’s disgruntled opinion that the unfulfilled life of an Illinois farmboy was as promising as those of the men whose names are inscribed on the tablets in Harvard’s Memorial Hall.