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Next afternoon Sister Lazarus came to visit Ellen. She could not see how closely the nun studied her, as she complimented Ellen on her wellbeing. ‘Doing nicely, are we? Doing nicely! Thanks be to God and His Holy Mother.’
The following day Sister Lazarus again visited her, this time with Louisa and Mary in tow.
‘Mrs Lavelle, or Mrs O’Malley or whatever it is we are calling ourselves today …’ she began. ‘You and your daughters have practised a great deceit upon the Sisterhood of this house.’
Ellen started to speak, but to no avail.
Sister Lazarus, once risen, was not for lying down again. ‘It came to me at prayer – the occasion when some six years past you called to the door of this holy house. I would have uncovered you sooner but for your dilapidated state. But God is just. As He has restored you, so has He revealed you,’ she said, in the manner of those to whom God regularly reveals things.
She then gave the two younger nuns a dressing down for their concealment. They would first have to go to Reverend Mother, then prostrate themselves before the entire congregation and profess their wickedness.
‘You have betrayed the moral rectitude with which our work amongst the fallen is underpinned. Without moral rectitude we are nothing. Nothing but chaff in the wind.’
Sister Lazarus then ordered the young nuns to ‘fall on your knees in the Oratory.’ She forbade them to attend upon Ellen until ‘Reverend Mother shall make known her decision.’
Reverend Mother, a solemn, no-nonsense nun whose singsong Kerry accent long flattened by years in America, spelled it out clearly and succinctly.
Firstly to Ellen.
‘When your eyes have been given whatever restoration God may decree, you must leave here … and may God grant you forgiveness for in what jeopardy you have placed His holy work.’
A certain sadness creeping into her voice, Reverend Mother then addressed Mary and Louisa; ‘Sister Mary and Sister Veronica, you have broken trust with God and with your Sisterhood. That there can be no scandal attached to the work which we do here is the rock on which we are founded. Therefore, can neither of you remain here.’
She paused, letting the import of the banishment sink in. Then raising her Reverend Mother’s voice, pronounced the full edict of what this would entail.
‘There is now a great calamity upon this, your adopted country – a “Civil” War, they name it. For its duration, whatever length that be, I charge you to bind up the wounds of those fallen in battle. You will carry out your duties without fear or favour to either side. You will at all times remember that those who oppose each other, irrespective of uniform, are God’s creatures and created in His eternal likeness.’
Again she paused before making the final pronouncement.
‘You will be dispatched South to the battlefields and may God bestow upon you both the necessary fortitude for that work – a fortitude which, thus far, you have so inadequately failed to display.’
Ellen was bereft. What ignominy she had now visited on Mary and Louisa. To be banished. Better they had never found her, left her there to die on the dunghill of Half Moon Place. She could not speak.
They, for their part, stood beside her, heads bowed in shame, dutifully accepting their banishment.
‘Not my will but Thine,’ Ellen thought she heard Mary whisper.
The audience brought to a conclusion, Sister Lazarus ushered them out informing the young nuns that, ‘In charity, Reverend Mother has decided that you both may remain here until your mother’s treatment is complete. In the meantime you will be restricted to within convent walls and in waking hours to within the Oratory itself.’
Both Mary and Louisa nodded in silent assent, awaiting what yet further there was to come. Sister Lazarus did not hold them in suspense for long.
‘You will undertake penance and fasting as directed and converse with none other than myself, or Reverend Mother should she require it.’ Reverend Mother did not.
When Dr Thackeray’s ‘month of days’ had run its course, Ellen returned to the oculist, shepherded this time by Sister Lazarus. Little was exchanged by way of conversation between them. Sister Lazarus, Ellen guessed, no doubt praying for a miracle – that the blind might quickly see and be sent forth!
Indeed Sister Lazarus’s rigor mortis-like countenance seemed to considerably soften when Dr Thackeray, upon examination of Ellen, professed himself ‘cautiously pleased’ at her progress. Though her eyes were still impaired, she could now see more and at a greater distance, during each test through which he had put her.
‘These will improve you further,’ he said, producing a pair of spectacles of a more lightly-shaded hue than those previously stolen.
He re-dressed her eyes, advising her to ‘continue the poulticing for a further uninterrupted period of two weeks.’
Behind her, Ellen imagined Sister Lazarus’s lips move in supplication to the Almighty – that a more immediate miracle might occur.
On their homewards journey, Sister Lazarus solicitously guided Ellen, thus avoiding any mishap which might befall her … and longer extend her time at the convent.
‘God is good … God is good,’ Sister Lazarus regularly repeated to no one in particular. Ellen herself was unsure if this acclamation served purely to acknowledge the restorative powers of the Lord, or was a thanksgiving for her own resulting departure from the convent which the healing itself would precipitate.
Two weeks to the day of her visit to Dr Thackeray, Ellen, along with Mary and Louisa were quietly exited from the grounds of the Convent of St Mary Magdalen and led to Boston’s railroad station.
From there the two nuns would travel to Richmond, Virginia, and await further instructions.
At Mary and Louisa’s insistence, Ellen accompanied them, her newly constructed spectacles perched snugly on her nose. All the better with which to see the fatal tides of civil war on which they were now cast.
EIGHT (#ulink_28ab4c6c-e925-5274-9a98-026f0827f60b)
Union Army Military Field Hospital, Virginia, 1862
Manual of Military Surgery for the Surgeons of the Confederate States Army
‘… the rule in military surgery is absolute, viz: that the amputating knife should immediately follow the condemnation of the limb. These are operations of the battlefield and should be performed at the field infirmary. When this golden opportunity, before reaction, is lost, it can never be compensated for.’
Wearing Dr Thackeray’s spectacles, Ellen read carefully the surgery manual. The spectacles had been such a boon to her, not that she could overdo it, but a world previously closed had now again been opened.
She paused, thinking about her eyes before continuing. They had troubled her less than expected. Not that they were perfect. At times she found herself looking slightly to the right of people, as if they had imperceptibly shifted under her gaze.
Reading was problematic. She laughed to Mary about, ‘How childlike my reading skills have become.’ But, in general, she found the condition of her eyes to be of little hindrance to her work.
Dr Sawyer had been marvellous, procuring a continuation of Dr Thackeray’s soothing balm. He had also today located for her a pair of more recently developed shaded spectacles, an improvement on those given her in Boston.
‘Developed alongside those new-fangled rifle sights,’ he had told Ellen. He, Dr Shubael Sawyer, rather brusque of manner but an efficient practitioner of his profession, was the operating surgeon in the field hospital in which she, Louisa and Mary now found themselves.
‘Maybe this war, after all, will bring some benefit to humanity … though such benefits will weigh poorly enough when the balances are writ,’ Dr Sawyer had added.
These she now substituted for Dr Thackeray’s spectacles and continued with reading the manual …
‘Amputate with as little delay as possible after the receipt of the injury. In army practice, attempts to save a limb, which might be perfectly successful in civil life, cannot be made. Especially in the case of compound gunshot fractures of the thigh, bullet wounds of the knee joint and similar injuries to the leg, in which, at first sight, amputation may not seem necessary. Under such circumstances attempts to preserve the limb will be followed by extreme local and constitutional disturbance. Conservative surgery is here in error; in order to save life, the limb must be sacrificed.’
So there it was, in black and white. The saw saved lives.
In the time she had been here, Ellen had lain hands on everything she could read on medical practise. Not that there was much available. Good fortune had brought her current reading, The Confederate Manual of Surgery. A prize of war captured from the enemy. But there was a shortage of nurses for the many hospitals the war had occasioned. They had received some training from a Sister of Mercy who had then been moved to some duty elsewhere. She, like Mary and Louise, had had to learn quickly. It had been trial and error, mistakes made, while assisting at the regular stream of operations and mostly amputations.
‘Hips … I don’t like hips,’ Dr Sawyer said plainly to her later that afternoon. ‘Too near the trunk. We lose ninety per cent if we have to take the leg from the hip joint … and one hundred per cent if we don’t!’ It was Ellen’s first hip joint operation.
Three aides were required for such an operation. ‘Fetch the Sisters,’ Dr Sawyer ordered her. ‘The sight of blood holds no terrors for them.’
The soldier, a wan looking boy from Rhode Island, with freckled face and red hair had lost a lot of blood.
‘Pray, ladies,’ he said, when Mary and Louisa arrived, ‘that I’ll be one of the ten per cents! I ain’t seen much of life.’
They laid him out on the only available operating table – a diseased-looking church pew.
‘I hope it’s a good Catholic pew and not a Protestant one, Sister!’ the young soldier said to Mary, putting a brave face on it. She held his hand, making the Act of Contrition with him, something of which Mary was aware Dr Sawyer did not approve.
‘O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee … and I detest my sins … firmly resolve never more to offend … but to amend my life …’
When he had repeated the words firmly resolving to ‘sin no more’ Mary administered the chloroform by means of a dampened napkin. This she held cone-shaped over his mouth and nose, telling him to ‘inhale deeply’, ensuring that he also had an adequate supply of natural air while inhaling. Soon the young Rhode Islander was in a surgical sleep, though still exhibiting the ‘state of excitement’ they had come to expect in the early stages after administration of the anaesthetic.
‘Remove his uniform, Sister,’ Dr Sawyer ordered Louisa. Deftly, while Ellen restrained him, Louisa opened the top of the soldier’s tunic and with Mary’s help slipped it off. Then, she rolled up his flannel shirt to the chest. Next, Louisa unbuttoned his trousers, the left side peppered with shot and clotted with blood. She at one leg, Mary at the other, together pulled the trousers from him. The doctor waited while they addressed the matter of the boy’s undergarment. He noted that not once did either woman flinch from the indelicacy of her task.
‘Mrs Lavelle!’ was all Dr Sawyer then said.
Ellen had assisted him previously on other operations and knew what was required. Quickly, she swabbed away the matted blood from the boy’s shattered hip. She looked at the doctor for affirmation that his point of incision was now clearly visible. He nodded. Then Ellen slipped one of her hands under the boy’s buttock, the other one meeting it from the top. Her hands, stretched to their limit formed a human tourniquet. Her job, to stop all blood to the site of amputation. Thumbs meeting she pressed hard, clamping the thigh, praying to God for the strength to maintain the pressure. If everything went to plan it would be over in less than three minutes. Dr Sawyer was quick. Time being of the essence.
She closed her eyes thinking of nothing else but the exertion of her hands.
The technique the doctor would use was the oval method. This, though similar to the older, circular technique, lent itself better to amputation through the joint capsule – the cut made higher on one side of the limb than the other. Using the ebony-handled Lister amputation knife handed him by Louisa, Dr Sawyer made the incision in the Rhode Islander’s skin. Mary then retracted the skin to allow the muscle tissue to be cut. ‘An ample flap, Sister!’ the surgeon warned. An ‘ample flap’ of skin was critical after the operation, for recovering the heads of bones exposed by the saw.
‘Raspatory!’ Shubael Sawyer demanded the bone-scraper, which Louisa was about to hand him. The smashed bone, now exposed, was dissected back with this implement.
Meanwhile, Mary, checking the boy’s pulse found it had sunk too low and in a sure voice asked, ‘Ammonia?’ When the doctor nodded, she applied a quick whiff of liquor of ammonia to revive the patient. Louisa next handed the large rectangular-shaped Capital Saw to the fast-working surgeon.
Ellen turned her head away as the saw bit into the boy’s hip socket and then hacked its way through the bone.
‘Pressure, Mrs Lavelle! Pressure!’ Dr Sawyer rasped at Ellen, and she willed her thumbs and fingers to clamp even tighter around the boy’s thigh.
It was over in no time. With the tenaculum, Dr Sawyer then winkled out the main arteries, the blood dropletting from them. Ellen held on for dear life to stem its flow. Working quickly the doctor next ligated the blood vessels with surgical thread. In advance of the operation Ellen had already wound this silken thread around the tenaculum. Now Dr Sawyer slipped it from over the instrument onto each severed vessel, and tied. Only at his command to ‘release!’ did Ellen slowly uncoil her hands from what was now the remaining stump of the young soldier’s hip.
All eyes focused on the ligations – the full flow of blood now released against them. They held fast, no oozing apparent. Next was required the Gnawing Forceps to grind down the stump of bone to an acceptable smoothness. The flaps of skin, which Mary had previously retracted, she now folded back over what was left of the boy’s hip. Using curved suture needles, Shubael Sawyer knitted together the skin with surgical thread, but loosely, to allow for post-operative drainage of the severed thigh. Louisa then fanned the patient to purge his lungs of the chloroform and administered another whiff of liquor of ammonia, neither of which served to resuscitate him.
‘Brass monkey,’ the doctor ordered. Louisa never raised her eyes, immediately understanding the abbreviated form of the expression the men used to describe weather – ‘So cold it would freeze the balls off a brass monkey!’ She uncorked the chloroform and sprinkled it on the young man’s scrotum. The immediate reaction of cold caused a stir in him but not sufficient to bring him to consciousness. Louisa then administered a further, more generous sprinkling. This time the Rhode Island Red bolted upright.
‘My balls – they’re frozen!’ he shouted in disbelief. Then, remembering those present, groggily apologised, ‘I’m sorry, ladies … Ma’am,’ and made to cover his indecency. His severed limb, now on the floor parallel to the pew on which he sat, seemed to trouble him less greatly than his exposed and frozen manhood.
Later they learned that the Rhode Island Red had succumbed to his injuries.
Became one of the ninety per cent failure rate for such operations. Didn’t make the ten per cent.
NINE (#ulink_cddad66f-df9b-5995-ab6c-1eea05c0882d)
By 1862, French physicist, Jean Bernard Foucault had made scientific history by measuring the speed of light using revolving mirrors. Foucault’s compatriot Victor Hugo, with his classic novel Les Miserables, was making a different kind of history. It was left to yet another Frenchman to change forever how Americans would kill Americans.
Captain Claude-Etienne Minié had supplied the world with his own particular brand of French artistry – the minié ball. This was a one-inch-long, leaden slug, the base of which, when fired from the newly-developed rifled musket would expand into the rifle’s grooves and spiral through the air as it was projected. The result was deadly accuracy at two hundred and fifty yards. And at half a mile the minié ball could still kill. The Frenchman’s invention could travel five times further than the bullet of any other weapon.
The first time Ellen saw Hercules O’Brien he had been struck by not just one minié ball but two. ‘Science will kill us all,’ he told her, ignoring his smashed arm and the furrowed groove which ran from front to back along the left side of his blocky skull.
‘What do you mean, Sergeant O’Brien?’ she asked.
‘Well, look how Science has lepped into action in this war.’
She waited till he continued.
‘Exploding mines that go in the ground, so a man, even if he is safe from battle, cannot take a walk to a leafy glade or a cooling brook for fear he step on one and be blown to smithereens.’
Ellen thought how cruel a mind had human science to invent such an inhuman device.
‘… and there isn’t a sharpshooter but has the new telescope lens. There’s no place safe left to hide … and the Gatlings, the repeating guns,’ he explained for her benefit, ‘cut a man in two, they would … leave his legs still walking and his body gone.
‘The generals are fighting with the old tactics while the men are cut to ribbons with the new weapons. General Meagher is still calling for bayonet charges. “Let them taste steel,” he says, but all we get is Rebel lead.’
‘Stop talking,’ she ordered, ‘while I bandage this head of yours!’
Hercules O’Brien paid no heed to her. ‘I’m telling you, missus, before the century is out, Science will be the master of mankind. Science will blow up the world!’
Whatever about ‘Science blowing up the world’, Ellen had already seen the devastating results of the minié ball.
The old round musket ball used early on by the Confederates, would pierce clothing and skin but would bounce off the deeper tissues. The conical minié ball however would bore through all tissue, usually resting near the opposite side of the body to which it had entered. If it did not exit entirely, it left a trail of destruction in its wake.
Now, his head at last bandaged, she gently pushed a probing finger into the sergeant’s other wound. The human finger still more sensitive than what Science could produce. And less likely to damage arteries and nervous tissues.
She kept looking at him, talking, feeling the tension rise within him; wondering how this pint-sized man had earned the name of Hercules?
‘I’m a great big man in a little man’s body,’ he said seriously. ‘Hercules lived in ancient times and he lifted the world on his back … and sure amn’t I carrying the whole Union army on mine!’
She looked at him. His visible eye, from where she had just bandaged him, was dancing with mirth. At last her fingertip found something hard and solid.
‘I’ve found it, Sergeant O’Brien!’ she said.
‘No matter that science will kill us all, you can’t beat the human touch.’ He winked at her, the eye still working overtime.
‘Well, I will need the forceps with which to get it out,’ she countered.
The thin Moses forceps with the sharp beak soon had her gingerly withdrawing the minié ball. He never complained and when she showed him the bloodied missile, he said, ‘Thank you, ma’am. I’d like to keep it as a souvenir ’case I collect no more of them!’
‘You were lucky, Sergeant O’Brien,’ she said. ‘No splintering … and that the second one skidded from your head, rather than collided with it.’
‘Would have made no differ ma’am,’ Hercules O’Brien answered, tapping his skull. ‘Not even the damned minié ball could get in there.’
Later, she came back, asked him if he’d come across a soldier named Lavelle O’Malley, thinking by now that both Patrick and Lavelle would have enlisted. Because it seemed as if all the rest of America had.
‘No, ma’am,’ he answered, watching her. ‘Three-quarters of America is out there … and half of Ireland. What brigade is he with?’
When she couldn’t tell him he enquired, ‘Is he your husband, ma’am?’
‘He was …’ she almost said, then corrected herself. ‘Yes.’
TEN (#ulink_d4f57d9d-2a96-53fe-87ca-a2693ed13b19)
The hospital was one of many field hospitals dotted all over the countryside, wherever men might fall in battle. A once-schoolhouse, now it had rows of rough bunks lining each wall, an anteroom for amputations and an added-on storeroom for medical supplies and operating implements. A further room was used as a makeshift canteen – for those who could walk to it. A nearby cabin, abandoned to war, provided accommodation for Ellen, the two nuns, and occasionally for those who came temporarily to assist. Dr Sawyer had private accommodation some slight further distance away.
