The Surgeon of Crowthorne Read online

  Given what we now know about the setting and the circumstance of his first encounter with war, it does seem at least reasonable and credible to suppose that his madness, latent, hiding, hovering in the background, was properly triggered here. Something specific seems to have happened in Virginia’s Orange County early in May 1864, during the two days of the astonishingly bloody encounter that has since come to be called the Battle of the Wilderness. This was a fight to test the most sane of men: events took place during those two days that were quite beyond human imagination.

  It is not clear exactly why Minor went to the Wilderness – his written orders in fact called for him to proceed from New Haven to Washington and to the Medical Director’s office, where he would replace a doctor called Abbott, then working at an army divisional hospital in Alexandria. He eventually did as he was bidden – but first, and possibly on the specific orders of the Medical Director, he went eighty miles to the south-west of the Union capital into the field, where he would see, for the only time in his career, real fighting.

  The Battle of the Wilderness was the first working test of the assumption that, with the Gettysburg victory in July 1863, the tide of events in the Civil War truly had changed. The following March, President Lincoln had placed all Union forces under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant, who swiftly devised a master plan that called for nothing less than the total destruction of the Confederate Army. The dissipated and ill-organized campaigns of the weeks and months before – skirmishes here and there, towns and forts captured and recaptured – meant nothing in terms of coherent strategy: so long as the Confederate Army remained intact and ready to fight, so Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy remained. Kill the secessionist army, Grant reasoned, and you kill the secessionist cause.

  This grand strategy got formally under way in May 1864, when the great military machine that Grant had assembled for finishing off the Confederate Army began to roll southwards from the Potomac. The campaign triggered by this first sweep would eventually cut through Dixie like a scythe: Sherman would rage from Tennessee through Georgia, Savannah would be captured, the main Confederate forces would surrender at Appomattox a mere eleven months from the start of Grant’s offensive, and the final fight of the five-year war would take place in Louisiana, at Shreveport, almost exactly a year after Grant began to move.

  But the beginnings of the strategy were the most difficult, with the enemy at his least broken and most determined – and in few places in those early weeks was the battle more fiercely joined than on the campaign’s first day. General Grant’s men marched along the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and, on the afternoon of 4 May, crossed the Rapidan River into Orange County. Here they met Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia: the subsequent fight, which began with the river-crossing and ended only when Grant’s men made a flanking pass out towards Spotsylvania, cost some 27,000 lives, in just fifty hours of savagery and fire.

  There are three distinct aspects of this enormous battle that appear to make it particularly important in the story of William Minor.

  The first was the sheer and savage ferocity of the engagement and the pitiless conditions on the field where it was fought. The thousands of men who faced each other did so in a landscape that was utterly unsuited for infantry tactics. It was (and still is) a gently sloping kind of countryside, thickly covered with second-growth timber and impenetrably dense underbrush. There are tracts of swamp country, muddy and fetid, heavy with mosquitoes. In May it is dreadfully hot, and the foliage away from the swamps and seeping brooks is always tinder-dry.

  The fighting therefore was conducted not with artillery – which couldn’t see – nor with cavalry – which couldn’t ride. It had to be conducted by infantrymen with muskets – their guns charged with the dreadful flesh-tearing Minié ball, a new-fangled kind of bullet that was expanded by a powder charge in its base and inflicted huge, unsightly wounds – or hand to hand, with bayonets and sabres. And with the heat and smoke of battle came yet another terror: fire.

  The brush caught ablaze, and flames tore through the wilderness ahead of a stiff hot wind. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of men, the wounded as well as the fit, were burned to death, suffering the most terrible agonies.

  One doctor wrote how soldiers appeared to have been wounded ‘in every conceivable way, men with mutilated bodies, with shattered limbs and broken heads, men enduring their injuries with stoic patience, and men giving way to violent grief, men stoically indifferent, and men bravely rejoicing that – it is only a leg!’ Such tracks as existed were jammed with crude wagons pulling blood-soaked casualties to the dressing stations, and overworked, sweating doctors tried their best to deal with injuries of the most gruesome kind.

  A soldier from Maine wrote with appalled wonder of the fire. ‘The blaze ran sparkling and crackling up the trunks of the pines, till they stood a pillar of fire from base to topmost spray. Then they wavered and fell, throwing up showers of gleaming sparks, while over all hung the thick clouds of dark smoke, reddened beneath by the glare of flames.’ ‘Forest fires raged,’ wrote another soldier who was at the Wilderness, ‘ammunition trains exploded; the dead were roasted in the conflagration; the wounded, roused by its hot breath, dragged themselves along with their torn and mangled limbs, in the mad energy of despair, to escape the ravages of the flames; and every bush seemed hung with shreds of bloodstained clothing. It seemed as though Christian men had turned to fiends, and hell itself had usurped the place of earth.’

  The second aspect of the battle that may be important in understanding Minor’s bewildering pathology relates to one particular group who played a part in the fighting: the Irish, the same Irish of whom Minor’s London landlady later testified he appeared to be strangely frightened.

  There were around 150,000 Irish soldiers on the Union side in the struggle, many of them subsumed anonymously into the Yankee units that happened to recruit where they lived. But there was also a proud assemblage of Irishmen who fought together, as a bloc: these were the soldiers of the 2nd Brigade, the Irish Brigade, and they were braver and rougher than almost any other unit in the entire Union Army. ‘When anything absurd, forlorn, or desperate was to be attempted,’ as one English war correspondent wrote, ‘the Irish Brigade was called upon.’

  The Brigade fought at the Wilderness: men of the 28th Massachusetts and the 116th Pennsylvania were there, alongside Irishmen from New York’s legendary regiments, the 63rd, the 88th and the 69th – which still to this day leads the St Patrick’s Day Parade up the green-lined expanse of Fifth Avenue every 17 March.

  But there was a subtle difference in the mood of the Irishmen who fought with the Union troops in 1864, compared with those who had fought one or two years before. At the beginning of the war, before Emancipation had been proclaimed, the Irish were staunch in their support of the North, and equally antipathetic to a South that seemed, at least in those early days, backed by the British they so loathed. Their motives in fighting were complex

  – but once again a complexity that is important to this story. They were new immigrants from a famine-racked Ireland, and they were fighting in America not just out of gratitude to a country that had given them succour, but in order to be trained to fight back home one day, and to rid their island of the hated British once and for all. An Irish-American poem of the time made the point:

  When concord and peace to this land are restored,

  And the union’s established for ever,

  Brave sons of Hibernia, oh, sheathe not the sword: –

  You will then have a union to sever.

  The Irish were not to remain long in sympathy with all the Union aims. They were fierce rivals with American blacks, competing at the base of the social ladder for such opportunities – work, especially – as were on offer. And once the blacks were formally emancipated by Lincoln in 1863, the natural advantage that the Irish believed they had in the colour of their skins quite vanished – and with it much of their sympathy for the Union cause in the war t
hey had chosen to fight. Besides, they had been doing their sums: ‘We did not cause this war,’ one of their leaders said, ‘but vast numbers of our people have perished for it.’

  The consequence was that – especially in battles where it seemed as though the Irish troops were being used as cannon-fodder – they began to leave the fields of battle. They began to desert. And large numbers of them certainly deserted from the terrible flames and bloodshed of the Battle of the Wilderness. It was desertion (and one of the particular punishments often inflicted on those convicted of it) that stands as the third and possibly the principal reason for Minor’s subsequent fall.

  Desertion, like indiscipline and drunkenness, was a chronic problem during the Civil War: seriously so because it deprived the commanders of the manpower they badly needed. It was a problem that grew as the war itself endured – the enthusiasm of the two causes abated as the months and years went on, and the numbers of casualties grew. The total strength of the Union Army was probably 2,900,000, and that of the Confederacy 1,300,000 – and, as we have seen, they suffered swingeing casualty totals of 360,000 and 258,000 respectively. The number of men who simply dropped their guns and fled into the forest is almost equally spectacular – 287,000 from the Union side, 103,000 from the South. Of course these figures are somewhat distorted: they represent men who fled, were captured and set to fighting again, only to desert once more, and perhaps many times subsequently. But they are still gigantic numbers – 10 per cent of the Union Army, one in twelve from the Rebels.

  By the middle of the war more than 5,000 soldiers were deserting every month – some merely dropping behind during the interminable route marches, others fleeing in the face of gunfire. In May 1864 – the month when General Grant began his southern progress, and the month of the Wilderness – no fewer than 5,371 Union soldiers cut and ran. More than 170 left the field every day, both draftees and volunteers, and they may have run for any number of reasons: they may have been heartsick, homesick, depressed, bored, disillusioned, unpaid or just plain scared. Minor had not merely stumbled from the calm of Connecticut into a scene of carnage and horror: he had also come across a demonstration of man at his least impressive, fearful, depleted in spirit and cowardly.

  Army regulations of the time were rather flexible when it came to prescribing penalties for drinking – a common punishment was to make the man stand on a box for several days, with a billet of wood on his shoulder – but they were unambiguous when it came to desertion. Anyone caught and convicted of ‘the one sin which may not be pardoned in this world or the next’ would be shot. That, at least, was what was said on paper: ‘desertion is a crime punishable by death’.

  But to shoot one of your own soldiers, whatever his crime, had a practical disbenefit – it diminished your own numbers, weakened your own forces. This piece of grimly realistic arithmetic persuaded most Civil War commanders, on both sides, to devise alternative punishments for those who ran away. Only a couple of hundred men were shot, though their deaths were widely publicized in a vain effort to set an example. Many were thrown into prison, locked in solitary confinement, flogged or heavily fined.

  The rest – and most first-time offenders – were usually subjected to public humiliations of varying kinds. Some had their heads shaved, or half shaved, and were forced to wear boards with the inscription Coward. Some were sentenced by drumhead courts martial to a painful ordeal called bucking, in which the wrists were tied tightly, the arms forced over the knees and a stick secured between knees and arms – leaving the convict in an excruciating contortion, often for days at a time. (It was a punishment so harsh as to prove often decidedly counter-productive: one general who ordered a man to be bucked for straggling found that half his company deserted in protest.)

  A man could also be gagged with a bayonet, which was tied across his open mouth with twine. He could be suspended from his thumbs, made to carry a yard of rail across his shoulders, be drummed out of town, forced to ride a wooden horse, made to walk around in a barrel-shirt and no other clothes – he could even, as in one gruesome case in Tennessee, be nailed to a tree and crucified.

  Or else – and here it seemed, was the perfect combination of pain and humiliation – he could be branded. The letter ‘D’ would be seared on to his buttock, his hip or his cheek. It would be a letter one and a half inches high – the regulations were quite specific on this point – and it would either be burned on with a hot iron or cut with a razor and the wound filled with black-powder, to cause both irritation and indelibility.

  For some unknown reason the regimental drummer-boy would often be employed to administer the powder; or, in the case of the use of a branding-iron, the doctor. And this, it was said at the London trial, was what Minor had been forced to do.

  An Irish deserter, who had been convicted at drumhead of running away during the terrors of the Wilderness, was sentenced to be branded. The officers of the court – there would have been a colonel, four captains and three lieutenants – demanded in this case that the new young surgeon who had been assigned to them, this fresh-faced and genteel-looking aristocrat, this Yalie, fresh down from the hills of New England, be instructed to carry out the punishment. It would be as good a way as any, the old war-weary officers implied, to induct Minor into the rigours of war. And so the Irishman was brought to him, his arms shackled behind his back.

  He was a dirty and unkempt man in his early twenties, his dark uniform torn to rags by his frantic, desperate run through the brambles. He was exhausted and frightened. He was like an animal – a far cry from the young lad who had arrived, cocksure and full of Dublin mischief, on the West Side of Manhattan three years before. He had seen so much fighting, so much dying – and yet now the cause for which he had fought was no longer truly his cause, not since Emancipation at least. His side was winning, anyway – they wouldn’t be needing him any more, they wouldn’t miss him if he ran away.

  He wanted to be rid of his duties for the alien Americans. He wanted to go back home to Ireland. He wanted to see his family again, and be finished with this strange foreign conflict to which, in truth, he had never been more than a mercenary party. He wanted to use the soldiering skills he had learned in all those fights in Pennsylvania and Maryland and now in the fields of Virginia to fight against the British, despised occupiers of his homeland.

  But now he had made the mistake of trying to run, and five soldiers from the Provost-Marshal’s unit, on the look-out for him, had grabbed him from where he had been hiding behind the barn on a farm up in the foothills. The court martial had been assembled all too quickly and, as with all drumhead justice, the sentence was handed down in a brutally short time: he was to be flogged, thirty lashes with the cat – but only after being seared with a branding iron, the mark of desertion for ever to scar his face.

  He pleaded with the court; he pleaded with his guards. He cried, he screamed, he struggled. But the soldiers held him down, and Minor took the hot iron from a basket of glowing coals that had been hastily borrowed from the brigade farrier. He hesitated for a moment – a hesitation that betrayed his own reluctance, for was this, he wondered briefly, truly permitted under the terms of his Hippocratic code? The officers grunted for him to continue – and he pressed the glowing metal on to the Irishman’s cheek. The flesh sizzled, the blood bubbled and steamed, the prisoner screamed and screamed.

  And then it was over. The wretch was led away, holding to his injured cheek the alcohol-soaked rag that Minor had given him. Perhaps the wound would become infected, would fill with the ‘laudable pus’ that other doctors said hinted at cure. Perhaps it would fester and crust with sores. Perhaps it would blister and burst and bleed for weeks. He didn’t know.

  All that he was sure of was that the brand would be with him for the rest of his life. In America it would mark him as a coward, as shaming a punishment as the court had decreed. Back home in Ireland it would mark him as something else altogether: it would single him out as a man who had gone to America to train with the
army, and who was now back in Ireland, bent on fighting against the British authorities. He could clearly be identified, from now on, as a member of one of the Irish nationalist rebel groups – and every soldier and policeman in England and Ireland would recognize that, and would either lock him up to keep him off the streets, or would harass and harry him for every moment of his waking life.

  His future as an Irish revolutionary was, in other words, quite over. He could care little for his ruined social standing in America; but for his future and now very vulnerable position in Ireland, where he had been marked and blighted for ever by the fact of one battlefield punishment, he was now bitterly angry. He realized that as an Irish patriot and revolutionary he was now useless, unemployable, worthless in all regards.

  And in his anger he most probably felt, justly or not, that his ever more intense wrath should be directed against the man who had so betrayed his calling as a medical man, and had instead, and without objection, marked his face so savagely and incurably. He would have decided that he was and should be bitterly and eternally angry at Minor.

  So he would go home, he vowed, just as soon as this war was over; and once home he would, the moment he stepped off the boat on the docks at Queenstown or Kingstown, tell all Irish patriots the following: William Chester Minor, American, was an enemy of all good Fenian fighting men, and revenge would be exacted from him, in good time and in due course.

  This, at least, is what Minor almost certainly thought was in the mind of the man he had branded. Yes, it was later said, he had been terrified by his exposure to the battlefield, and ‘exposure in the field’ was suggested by some doctors as the cause of his ills; one story also had it that he had been present at the execution of a man – a Yale classmate, some reports had it, though none included a time or a place – and that he had been severely affected by what he had seen; but most frequently it was said he was fearful that Irishmen would abuse him shamefully, as he put it, and this was because he had been ordered to inflict so cruel a punishment on one of their number in America.