Under the guns : $b A woman's reminiscences of the Civil WarWittenmyer, Annie
History
Under the guns : $b A woman's reminiscences of the Civil War
Wittenmyer, Annie
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Personal narratives
“It’s horrible that sick men must be placed under fire. Why don’t the
authorities remove the sick and wounded to a safe distance?” I spoke
with some spirit.
“You forget,” said the surgeon, “that General Johnson’s army is near,
and that we are forced to draw in our lines. We would rather take the
risk of a random shell than to risk being between two contending armies
during a battle.”
That was quite another view of the matter, and now I was brought face
to face with the facts of the situation. If I visited the hospitals
I must do it under fire. I had been under fire before, but only for
an hour. To go out day after day under a rain of lead was quite a
different thing.
I went back to the Sanitary boat at the Yazoo Landing in a very
thoughtful mood. The muddy, sluggish stream was well named Yazoo,
meaning the River of Death.
That night was spent in prayer. The next morning I arose with a courage
born of faith. I seemed immortal; not a bullet had been moulded that
could hit me.
I went out to my work without a fear. My carriage was struck time and
again, and bullets whizzed past me, but never a feeling of fear crept
into my heart. I was “under the shadow of His wings, and he covered me
with His feathers.”
Mrs. General Stone, whose husband commanded the right wing of the army,
and who now lives at Mount Pleasant, Iowa, camped with her father out
on the bluffs. She invited me to leave the sluggish river with its
miasma, and come up and stay with her; and I accepted the invitation.
She had a beautiful tent put up beside her own; and as the lizards were
very abundant, the feet of our cots were put in jars of water, and we
tucked up the covers about us so as to keep them off of our beds. We
could hear their little feet scratching as they raced after each other
over the tents.
The soldiers got used to them, but somehow we women shrank from contact
with anything so nearly akin to the serpent family.
Night and day the battle went on. The shells with their burning fuses
would sail up into mid-air like stars of the first magnitude, and burst
into a shower of sparks and fragments, setting the heavens ablaze with
their scintillation, and jarring the foundations of the earth with the
thunder of their explosions.
We became so accustomed to the horrid sounds of war that the absence or
abatement of it would awaken us out of our sleep.
EXHIBITIONS OF MOTHER-LOVE.
TO WHAT LENGTHS AFFECTIONS WOULD CARRY WOMEN IN THE WAR.
War brought heavy burdens of anxiety and sorrow to the women on both
sides of the lines during the terrible struggle of 1861-1865. The
anxious waiting for news from the battle-field, the heart-breaking
scrutiny of the list of wounded and killed, cannot, with their sorrows,
be measured by words and phrases.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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