This young officer was the medical director at Helena, where I found over two thousand graves of Northeners. Two-thirds of these men might have been saved, could they have been sent north. The surgeon in charge of the general hospital, when asked why he did not furlough some of the men from his over-crowded hospitals, replied that he had at one time and another made out certificates of disability for furlough for nearly every man in his hospital and for hundreds who rested on the nearby hill, but when sent for the signature and approval of the medical director, they had invariably been returned, disapproved; that he had also permitted the men themselves to go with their papers, only to have them severely reproved and ordered back to hospital, and, said he, with tears in his eyes, “many of them never returned, for, broken-hearted, they have lain down by the roadside and died.” I once heard a person who had been instrumental in giving a dying boy back to his mother, that she might nurse him back to life, relate how it was done. The mother had succeeded in getting her son as far as St. Louis where his papers were to be sent. They came in the usual way to the medical director, were all wrong, of course--not made out according to army regulations and must therefore be returned to his regiment, which was somewhere with Sherman and could not be reached. The mother received the papers with that fearful word “disapproved” written upon them. There was nothing to do but to place her sick son in a St. Louis hospital, and leave him there to die; she must return to her family. She told her story with streaming eyes and a broken heart. The woman impulsively said, “Give me the papers,” and off she went to the medical director’s office. He was a man full six feet high, over fifty years of age, a head like Oliver Cromwell’s, a face stern as fate, and of the regular army. She entered his presence, seated herself, and waited to be spoken to. Soon it came with, “What do you want?” “To talk with you a moment, General,” she replied. “No time for talking.” “I will wait,” she said. He wrote a few moments, then said, “May as well hear it now as ever--what is it?” “I would like to ask you if you had a son in this volunteer service, sent up from the South as far as St. Louis, sick and like to die, and some ignorant, careless officer had made out his furlough papers wrong--” “What do you want!” “--would you not be glad, if you were away, if your poor boy could find a friend?” “What do you want, I say? This is nothing to the purpose.” “Do you not think that friend ought to do all she could to save your boy?” “What is all this nonsense?”