When the American wounded at the army hospital heard of the care being lavished on their Cuban comrades, they immediately accused us of neglect. We explained to them it broke our hearts to be unable to render assistance and the fault lay not with us but with their own commanders. One can only imagine the hue and cry that must have arisen, because within a few hours, the official position was entirely reversed and our assistance formally solicited.
For those acquainted with the classics, I can only tell you that Hercules’s labors in the Aegean stables had nothing on what we discovered in that US Army hospital. While we nurses turned up our sleeves and went to work with carbolic, a force of men on the Red Cross ship the State of Texas braved the surf to bring out cots, blankets, food, and bandages.
No sooner had we made those men comfortable than word came of a great engagement between our men and our Spanish foes. . . .
—Miss Katherine Carson for the St. Louis Star Ledger, July 1, 1898
* * *
Sevilla, Cuba
June 25, 1898
“You went to Harvard?”
“It’s not really as bad as you New Haven boys think.” Holt had loved it there. He’d loved the lectures, the laboratories, the learned discourse, the way you could talk about everything without ever saying anything. Most of all he’d loved being a hundred miles from home. He’d felt free, really free, for the first time since babyhood, and probably not even then.
Paul stared at him like he’d grown an extra head. “But—you’re Hold ’Em Holt. You’re a cowboy.”
“Briefly.” Holt was having trouble getting the words out. He was, he realized, extremely drunk. He tried to stand and lurched on his injured leg. He might have fallen, but Thede Miller helpfully jumped up and grabbed his arm. So helpful, Thede. Why’d he have to go and remember him?
“Briefly?” Paul spat the word out. He’d risen to his feet too.
Holt shrugged, which was a mistake. “I left Harvard. I went West.”
“But—the papers—they said—they said you’d been born on the range. You were the child of settlers killed in an Injun attack. You’d been roping steers by the time you were eight.”
By the time he was eight, Holt could read the Aeneid in the original. And his father had broken his wrist for the first time. Snapped it, like a twig.
Holt broke into Paul’s indignant litany. “The papers say a lot of things.”
Not Holt. He’d never claimed any of it. He’d just omitted. A whole lot of omitting. As if he could omit away everything he’d been before. Just a blank slate with a new name. Wasn’t that what America was all about? Individual initiative, that’s what Colonel Roosevelt had said.
Paul glared at him, his face flaring red and orange in the light of the campfire. “You lied.”
Holt rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, which refused to focus. Paul was going in and out like a funhouse mirror. “I never lied.” He just hadn’t shared. There was a difference. He thought. Maybe. “Look. It’s complicated.”
“Like our being here is complicated? No wonder you took sides with the Spaniards.” Holt’s rum-soaked brain couldn’t quite make sense of the logic. Paul seemed to be suggesting that Harvard was in league with Spain. “Why are you even here?”
Holt’s mouth felt thick and gummy. “Same reason as anyone else.” Just don’t ask him what those reasons were.
“Impersonating someone you’re not?” Paul turned abruptly away from him. “Thede. You got room in your tent now that Teddy’s gone?”
“Sure,” said Thede slowly. “But . . .”
“Good.” Paul stalked toward the tent he’d shared with Holt. “I’ll just get my things.”
“Paul . . .” Holt began, but the other man didn’t hear him.
Miller patted him tentatively on the shoulder. “Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to make trouble. Paul’ll simmer down.”
“Uh-huh,” Holt said, and sat down abruptly on the turf.
He must have passed out that way, because he woke up lying next to the remains of the campfire, soaked through with rain or sweat, it could have been either, with a filthy mouth and a filthy head and a vague feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach, the sort of dread he hadn’t felt since leaving his father’s house for Harvard. Waking up in the sure knowledge that something bad was going to happen, and, somehow, you’d brought it on yourself.
But this wasn’t Springfield. It was Cuba. Cuba and his head ached like the devil and someone was blowing reveille and the camp was a flurry of people packing up and bolting down what breakfast they could, because everyone was on the move, and Holt was going to have to move with them even if his head and his leg and his guts didn’t agree.
They moved their camp to the banks of the Aguadores River. There was a curious unreality about it, their days on the banks of the Aguadores, this strange pause in time, knowing a battle was coming, but not sure when it would come. There were times when Holt felt that they’d fallen into the pages of Robinson Crusoe, building lean-tos out of palm fronds, foraging for food. The men experimented with cookery, boiling mangoes to make a slush rather like applesauce, soaking hardtack to create a sort of gruel that could be fried up with bacon grease into something vaguely edible.
When they weren’t trying to fill their bellies, the men wrote home, some scratching out messages on empty boxes of quinine pills for want of paper.
Holt didn’t know who he would write to even if he had the paper. His father? His sisters? All the friends of his Harvard days had melted away along with his real name; since then he hadn’t stayed anywhere long enough to attach any more than the most casual acquaintance.
Except Paul.
Not that they’d been friends, really. You couldn’t befriend a fiction, could you? And that was what Paul saw in him, the imaginary person the papers had created, not the person he was, whatever that might be. Holt wasn’t sure anymore. Sometimes he felt like a paper doll, a flat facsimile of humanity, just the outline of a man.
But it was hard not to glance over at the campfire where Paul sat with Miller and the other Yale men, their voices loud as the rum flowed, listening to their camaraderie and feeling an aching emptiness at the lack of it.
Mostly, he just ached. Rain always brought on his headaches and it rained here daily, a hard downpour that lasted a few hours and then evaporated. Some men traded belongings for rum; Holt traded for coffee rations, trying to dull the growing throbbing in his skull. The beans were green and hard. Holt roasted them over his campfire and made a makeshift mortar and pestle out of a dried coconut and a stick. That earned him a brief modicum of popularity. But not with Paul.
He should—not apologize. Explain, that was it. But Holt couldn’t muster the energy. Even with the coffee, he felt slow and logy. In the mornings the men burned in a fierce heat worse than Florida; in the afternoons, the rains came and froze them. They hadn’t changed their clothes for weeks; the fabric was stiff with sweat and dirt. Holt suspected he might have a tinge of fever. But even if he didn’t, so what? What was he supposed to explain? Holt couldn’t even explain it to himself.
Impersonating someone you’re not, Paul had accused him.
They were all impersonating someone. The millionaires’ sons were playing soldier. The cowboys were playing the Wild West as imagined by Buffalo Bill, coming soon to Madison Square Garden. And Colonel Roosevelt—well, he was playing himself, and doing it to the hilt. Possibly with a touch of Pericles thrown in, and maybe just a dash of Alexander the Great, if Alexander the Great wore spectacles.
As for Holt . . . he’d been so many people. He wasn’t sure which one he was anymore. A scared boy in an opulent house. A law student convinced he could right the world. An angry young man boarding a train headed West.
And now . . . he’d thought he was here to help, to do something good. To atone. That, somehow, he could set the balance right. And go home.
Holt wasn’t sure where that thought had come from. He didn’t have a home. But the yearning was there all the same. To be a person again, have a place, a purpose. Not the home he grew up in—but someplace. Someplace that was his.
It was a moot point. Up on the hills, the Spaniards waited. The scouts reported that they could see the tops of their sombreros popping up and down as they dug trenches, fortifying their positions.
“You’d think they’d have us do something about that,” said Holt to Paul, nodding in the direction of the new Spanish fortifications. “With every trench they dig, the harder it will be. Assuming that’s where we’re headed.”
Paul glanced sideways at Holt but didn’t respond.
“Look.” It was early morning, but the ground was already steaming as the day’s heat burned off the evening damp. Holt wiped his face with his bandana. “I wasn’t trying to con you. I haven’t been that Harvard man for a long time. I suppose he’s still in there somewhere—but he’s a long way buried.”
Paul gave a stiff nod and turned away. But then he stopped, scowling back over his shoulder at Holt. “You could have just said, you know.”
Could he? Paul was gone before Holt could point out that he wouldn’t have thanked him for spoiling his illusions. Or maybe it was just that it had been easier to be that newspaper etching, flat and crisp, rather than too, too solid flesh that ached and bled and stumbled.
Holt tried not to stumble, but his left leg didn’t seem to want to hold him properly as the men lined up, ready to march. Wagons rumbled past, holding their precious Colt machine guns, but with no room for anything else. The men of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry could bring only what they could carry on their backs.
The column started and stopped and started again. The Camino Real was too narrow for more than ten men abreast, and the whole of Shafter’s army was trying to trudge their way through a road turned to sticking, sucking mud from a brief, hard rainstorm. Stop and start, stop and start. The jungle closed in around them, like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, pressing in on either side, the air so thick and oppressive that every breath was an effort. Stop and start, stop and start. Sitting, walking, sitting, walking. Men shared out their scant rations; they were marching empty, a skeleton army.
The light faded from dusk to dark, and still they walked, broken only by a pause for something like sleep in the deserted grounds of an older sugar plantation.
When reveille sounded, they choked down their breakfast as best they could, alone or in quiet groups, as they waited for orders. There was no singing, no loud conversations. There was no Ham Fish, amiably drunk. No “Bright College Years,” no glees. It was only the first of July, just a week since Las Guasimas, but there was almost no resemblance between the men, thin and tense, who hunched over their hardtack and the boisterous, laughing crew who had capered their way to the Spanish lines.
They knew what they were facing now.
Holt rather wished he didn’t. He would have preferred to have clung to his illusions about the romance of battle, Cavaliers and Roundheads facing off at Naseby. The Light Brigade charging forward with sabers raised.
They can write a lovely poem about you when you’re all rotting beneath the palm trees.
For a moment, Holt thought he saw her there, Paul’s Miss Hayes, like a wraith between the vines. His own personal oracle.
Holt rose, taking a lurching step toward her, then another—when the sky exploded in a confusion of bullets and metal fragments, right over the place where he had been sitting a moment before.
Siboney, Cuba
July 1, 1898
“No time for sitting.” Sister Bettina made shooing motions at Kit, who had just finished her shift and was frantically scribbling in a tiny pocket notebook. “We’ve got wounded coming in.”
“More?” Betsy set down the bedpan she’d been holding with a thump. Fortunately, it was empty. “There are more?”
They’d only just got their new hospital in order, all spick-and-span with the Red Cross flag flying proudly above it, just so no one would forget who was actually in charge here. They’d inherited eighty patients from the army, eighty men who hadn’t been fed or bathed for days, eighty men who were sicker than when they’d arrived, suffering from everything ranging from heatstroke and dysentery to measles. And wounds, of course. All sorts of wounds. The shell wounds were the worst.
But no typhoid. Not yet.
“There’s been a major engagement,” said Sister Bettina briefly. “Everyone’s needed. Didn’t you hear the noise?”
Betsy and Kit followed her out the door, where a scene of chaos greeted them. Men were staggering alone or in pairs down the road, clutching each other for balance, faces grimed with mud and powder smoke, their uniforms torn and bloody. Crude carts disgorged men too badly hurt to move under their own power. Orderlies were carrying men out on hastily contrived stretchers, putting them on the ground wherever they could find room, in the full glare of the afternoon sun.
“Get those men out of the sun.” With the supreme confidence of someone who had seen it all before, Miss Barton was supervising the erection of two large tents. “I want six tables in there. That will be our surgery. Cots in this one. Put plenty of straw down in each. We’ll shovel it out and replace it as needed.”
People were scurrying back and forth doing Barton’s bidding, some dispatched to fetch supplies from the ship, others putting down straw or putting up cots. Orderlies had been dragooned into dragging out cots and kettles, scrounging up blankets and bandages.
“You. Tell them on the State of Texas we need everything. These men don’t have a cot to lie on or a kettle to boil a bit of gruel in.” Barton turned toward her nursing sisters, who had already lined up, ready for service. “Sister Bettina, Sister Minnie, Sister Isabelle, Sister Blanche, you’ll assist the surgeons. Nurse Hayes! These men need feeding.”
A man pulled himself up by one arm over the edge of a wagon. “That’s Clara Barton,” he rasped. “Now we’ll get something to eat.”
A feeble cheer went up from the men.
“I’ll start the cider,” said Betsy, and ran off to find their largest kettles to make Clara Barton’s own special Red Cross Cider, a fortifying slurry of dried apples and prunes. Miss Barton swore by it.
With little time for meals in between shifts, Betsy might have taken a few stray swigs of it herself and found it . . . well, not exactly what the Ritz Paris would be serving next season, but certainly sustaining.
Gruel, cider, malted milk. As fast as she brewed it up, it was gone, and there was always another hand reaching out, another cultivated voice asking, “Please, if I could just have a drop of something . . .”
“What were they thinking?” Betsy fumed to Kit as they passed each other between tents. “They let these men march empty!”
“That’s men,” said Kit, clutching cans of condensed milk to thicken the gruel. “Can’t trust them to do the packing. They’ll bring the cannon and forget the picnic basket.”
Betsy gave a snort of laughter, which quickly faded as she reentered their open-air ward. Patients were packed as tight as they could reasonably put them, and still the wounded were coming. Just what kind of battle had this been, anyway? Not that it took a major battle to cause major harm. She knew that. She’d seen too many skirmishes in Greece not to underestimate all the ways a man could be hurt.
“I’ve got a head wound that needs special care.” It was one of the regimental doctors. What was his name? Stringfellow. It suited him. He was thin and grim, pale brown hair receding from a high forehead. “Captain Mills. Do you have room for him?”
There wasn’t room for a reasonably sized flea. “If we move this cot a few inches this way and that cot a few inches that way . . . There you go.”
“It’s those blasted Spanish snipers. They shoot for the head.” Dr. Stringfellow waved the orderlies forward, snapping at them to set him down gently. “This man requires the constant application of cold compresses to his eyes. Ice wrapped in a bit of cotton works best. Do you have ice?”
“I’ll find it,” said Betsy, but Dr. Stringfellow didn’t hear her. He was already gone, back into the fray of arriving casualties.
Night fell; lamps were lit and brought to the surgeons and still the wounded kept coming, some making their way on foot, goodness only knew how far, others piled into wagons, jolting and jostling down the road to Siboney. Betsy couldn’t feel her feet anymore. Her legs seemed to move without her volition. Up and down the ward. Spooning gruel, changing dressings, giving sips of cider to those well enough to drink it, sponging foreheads, sneaking outside to chip ice where the men wouldn’t hear it and be tormented, back inside to refresh compresses on the eyes of the worst head wounds. Moving cots to make room for more. And more.
There weren’t enough lamps to spare. The surgeons needed them. So Betsy worked by a single lantern and the light of the moon, which was brighter than any moon she had ever seen, even in Greece, where everything had seemed sharper and clearer. The moonlight bathed the ward in an unearthly glow, as if everything had turned to mother-of-pearl or suffered a sea change to something rich and strange.
Captain Mills thrashed in his bed and Betsy hurried over to his side. “Have you ever seen anything as bright as this moonlight? I hope it’s not keeping you awake.”
Captain Mills stopped thrashing. He was horribly, painfully still. “I can’t see the moonlight.”
Of course he couldn’t. He had a bullet in his head and bandages and a compress over his eyes. Betsy felt awful, like the sort of person who pulled wings off flies and kicked puppies.
“You will. Soon,” she gabbled. “I’ll—I’ll just go get more ice for you.”
And she hurried out of the tent, trying to make it look more of a brisk walk and less of a run. The men couldn’t see her breaking down. It would be bad for morale. Never ever show doubt or weakness, even if she was so tired she could barely see straight, even if her face hurt with smiling at men who couldn’t see it, even if her heart broke a little more every time someone asked for ice and she couldn’t give it.
She made it a yard away from the tent before she broke down, covering her face with her hands, her shoulders shaking as she tried to muffle the sobs that racked her body, angry, tearless sobs, sobs of rage and frustration and helplessness.
“Betsy?” It was Kit, sitting on the steps of the hospital, her pocket notebook in her lap, her pinny hideously stained and her hair straggling down, dark with sweat. Betsy suspected she looked much the same.
“What are you doing?” Betsy managed.
“Sister Minnie told me to take an hour and get some rest.”
“Then you should.” In the moonlight, Kit’s face seemed composed entirely of angles and hollows. “Really, Kit. Get some sleep.”
“I can sleep when I’m dead—or back in St. Louis.” Kit’s eyes were too bright in her too-thin face. “The stories, Betsy—the stories these men have been telling me! I have to get it all down before I forget. Or before one of those men out there does it first.”
“You mean like your friend with the bullet in his spine?” said Betsy, and wished she hadn’t. “Don’t make yourself sick, Kit.”
“I won’t.” Kit looked up at Betsy with a shadow of her old grin. “I’m a mother. We’re the toughest people on earth.”
“Hmm,” said Betsy, and realized, with horror, that she sounded just like Ava. When had she turned into Ava?
That was something to be grateful for, she supposed, that Ava wasn’t here. Although perversely, she rather wished she were. An extra pair of trained hands would mean the world.
The work was relentless, endless. The healthier men were released from the hospital so the most severe of the new cases could be brought inside in their place. Dawn brought another influx of men, swelling the number of casualties in the tents. Betsy stopped counting after four hundred.
Betsy felt like she could sleep on her feet, like a horse. She had no idea how the surgeons were still operating. At this point, she could barely tell her ankle from her elbow, much less anyone else’s. Between her rounds, Betsy brought black coffee and hard crackers to the doctors, who gulped it down without looking at it while probing for bullets and splinting shattered bones.
“Bless you,” Dr. Stringfellow said, as he put out a hand for his mug, and Betsy thought of Ethel the Coffee Angel and how she’d mocked her for it.
There was a lot she would change if she could go back.
But she couldn’t go back. She could only try to do the best she could in the moment. She felt so painfully inadequate to the task, half-asleep, matted with blood and sweat and heaven only knew what. But the men still cheered when they saw her making the rounds, and that was something, wasn’t it? “Sister,” they called her, and clung to her hand, the ones who could talk talking, trying to smile for her.
There was no talk of shifts. They needed every nurse they could spare. Betsy gulped some coffee, grimaced, and dumped a spoonful of condensed milk in it to make it taste less like burnt toast. And that’s when she saw Clara Barton hurrying past in her traveling cloak, holding a bag of supplies.
Betsy stood, swaying slightly, by the opening of her tent. “You’re going? Miss Barton?”
“General Shafter has called upon us for our assistance.” Miss Barton glowed like a girl who had just been asked to Yale prom. “His message was of the utmost urgency. He instructed us to send food, medicines, anything, and to seize wagons from the front for transportation.”
Betsy gaped at her. The army had been resolute in not wasting wagons or men on medical supplies. If General Shafter was authorizing the commandeering of carts, the situation had to be dire.
“Do you need me—do you need me to come with you? I’ve worked at the front before.” It took everything she had to make the offer.
“I need you to stay here.” Miss Barton gestured grandly at the tent, filled to the brim with wounded. “This is your ward, Nurse Hayes. Serve these men well.”
“But—” Betsy looked helplessly at Miss Barton, too tired to think straight. It was one thing to do the rounds under direction. Another entirely to be told she was in charge. She couldn’t be in charge. “What if I don’t know what to do?”
“You know what to do.” Miss Barton took Betsy’s hands in both of hers, gazing deeply into her eyes. “These men’s lives depend on you. You cannot fail.”