Subject:  MSR Memoranda During the War
Author:  Walt Whitman
Uploaded By:  HOST Comp Joots
Date:  3/9/2002

File:  Memoranda During the War.lit (168667 bytes) 
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Keywords:  Memoranda During the War  by Walt Whitman,  Autobiography

Memoranda During the War by Walt Whitman, 1862  

Fifty Hours Left Wounded on the Field.

-- Here is a case of a soldier I found among the crowded cots in the Patent Office. He likes to have some one to talk to, and we will listen to him. He got badly hit in his leg and side at Fredericksburgh that eventful Saturday, 13th of December. He lay the succeeding two days and nights helpless on the field, between the city and those grim terraces of batteries; his company and regiment had been compell'd to leave him to his fate. To make matters worse, it happen'd he lay with his head slightly down hill, and could not help himself. At the end of some fifty hours he was brought off, with other wounded, under a flag of truce........I ask him how the rebels treated him as he lay during those two days and nights within reach of them -- whether they came to him -- whether they abused him? He answers that several of the rebels, soldiers and others, came to him, at one time and another.

A couple of them, who were together, spoke roughly and sarcastically, but nothing worse. One middle-aged man, however, who seem'd to be moving around the field, among the dead and wounded, for benevolent purposes, came to him in a way he will never forget; treated our soldier kindly, bound up his wounds, cheer'd him, gave him a couple of biscuits, and a drink of whiskey and water; ask'd him if he could eat some beef. This good Secesh, however, did not change our soldier's position, for it might have caused the blood to burst from the wounds, clotted and stagnated. Our soldier is from Pennsylvania; has had a pretty severe time; the wounds proved to be bad ones. But he retains a good heart, and is at present on the gain......... (It is not uncommon for the men to remain on the field this way, one, two, or even four or five days.) 

Walt Whitman (1819-1892), is the Father of modern American poetry. He proclaimed his self-published book "Leaves of Grass" to be a new democratic literature. It was his life book, he published it many times, always adding more and refining the existing poems. His "Memoranda" is a series of notes he took while volunteering as a nurse in Union hospitals during the Civil War. It says as much about Whitman himself as it does about war and the horrors of war. He is able to find beauty and meaning in unexpected placed but does not leave out the "hells and damns."

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