In War Time (Paperback)

IN WAR TIME - I905 - THE DEVlNNE PRESS IN WAR TIME - IN the latter part of the afternoon of a summer day in the year 1863, a little crowd gathered near the door of the military hospital on Filbert Street, in the city of Philadelphia. Like the rest of the vast camps of the sick, which added in those days to the city population some twenty-five thousand of the maimed and ill, this one has been lost, in the healing changes with which civilizing progress, no less quickly than forgiving nature, is apt to cover the traces of war. The incident which drew to the hospital gate a small crowd was common in those days. Ambulances were bringing to its portal a share of such wounded men as were fit to be removed to a distance from Gettysburg and distributed among the great hospitals of the North. A surgeon in green sash and undress army uniform stood bareheaded within the shade of the doorway. Beside the curbstone, near the ambulances, a younger man, an assistant surgeon, directed the attendants, as they bore the wounded into the building on stretchers between double lines of soldiers of the invalid. corps, who at that time did guard duty in our hospitals. The surgeon at the doorway, a tall, refinedlooking man, so erect as to seem a little stiff in figure, made occasional comments in a quiet, wellbred voice, rather monotonously free from the da cisive sharpness which habits of command are apt to produce. Break step, my men. Break step - you shake the stretcher Break step - make more room there, sergeant. Keep back the crowd. Sometimes, a man got out of the ambulance with help, and limped eagerly into the open doorway sometimes, lost to all around him, one was borne in motionless sometimes, it was aface to which death had already whispered, Come. In the lib tle hall the bearers paused, while a young surgeon asked a few brief questions, after which the sick man was given his iced lemonade, or some other refreshing drink, and taken away. Now and then an officer was carried in. This was usually some desperately wounded man, unable to be taken to his home. As these sufferers passed the surgeon in charge, he noted the scrap of uniform, or the cap, and drawing himself up saluted with excessive military m u m y . Mere the man too ill or too careless to notice this courtesy, a faint lift of the surgeons brow, some slight treachery of the features, showed that he, at least, felt that nothing less than paralysis would have prevented bim from returning the military salutation. Meanwhile, about two squares away, as Philadelphians say, a man and woman were walking somewhat rapidly toward the hospital. The man was what is known in the army as a contracbassistant surgeon, that is, a physician taken from civil life and paid at a certain rate per month to do the duty of a military surgeon. In some cases these gentlemen lived in the hospitals, and were of course expected to wear uniform, and to submit to all the usual rules of military life. Others merely attended at set hours, and included not only certain of the most able men in the profession of medicine, but also a great number of the more or less competent, glad enough of the eighty dollars a month which they received. Among these latter were many of those hapless persons who drift through life, and seize, as they are carried along, such morsels of good luck as the great tides of fortune float within reach of their feeble tentacula. Thiscontract surgeon was a man of full middle height. He stooped slightly, but the habit became oddly noticeable owing to his uniform, on which the surgeon in charge insisted during the time of the hospital visit...