camp Near Seneca, November 30, 1861.
If anything were needed to assure my decision regarding a
visit home, it could be found in the experience of the past two days. Yesterday
— a rainy day, by the way — I was fully occupied with questions relating to the
sick, and, in the afternoon, by a session of the Board of Claims. To-day,
field-officer of the day. It has been a bright, windy, drying day, for which we
are thankful. A tardy wisdom has at length decided to remove the division of
General Banks from its present grotesque position to the neighborhood of
Frederick City. Within easy distance, by rail, of Harper's Ferry, of Baltimore,
and Washington, the division will there be promptly available for any purpose.
It will be placed in a more healthy position. It will be within reach of
supplies. It will be so far permanent that it can make itself comfortable for a
season. How it will get there is quite another question. The rains of the past
week have made the roads almost impassable; and to move a whole division, with
its immense trains, a distance of thirty miles, over swollen watercourses and
worn-out roads, seems a hopeless undertaking. We probably commence the attempt
Tuesday morning. It is certainly a move in the right direction, and seems, to
my narrow horizon, made a month too late.
To-day a part of our sick have been sent off to the General
Hospital at Baltimore. Preparations were made yesterday by the Medical Director
to send the worst cases from the whole division.
The order to move the sick down to the canal to take the boat
came early this morning. At ten o'clock they were moving; and at five o'clock
this afternoon the boat was ready for them. The whole day they waited — two
hundred sick men, in wagons and in discomfort — on the banks of the canal. The
sight was most irritating this afternoon when I rode down there.
Just at nightfall they were huddled in, one hundred and
fifty men to one canal-boat, the rest sent back for want of room, and the boat
moved off. Wretched mismanagement, and I fear great suffering as its fruit.
In fact, the whole hospital system is a blunder, if not a
crime. It wants entire reorganization. There should be no regimental hospitals.
What can a regiment do, dragging sick men after it? How can a regiment, with
its hospital tent, take proper care of them?
The proper system would be to have hospitals attached to
divisions, all the sick, except trivial cases, sent there, and treated by
surgeons who have only that to do. Then the regiment would be free from its
greatest embarrassment in the field. Then the sick would not die, as I have
seen them do, for mere want of warmth, rest, and nursing. As a matter of
organization and unity, as an administrative question, it seems as clear as
sunlight; but we work along in a system that did well enough for an army of
fifteen thousand men scattered in barracks and garrisons in time of peace, but
is utterly inapplicable to a vast army in the field. To-day's blundering
movement was, however, bad management, even according to this false system. It
stirs one up to see it. But I won't preach on this text any more.
I hope the war will last long enough to give us an army
organized according to all the wisdom and experience of other nations, and
carefully adapted to our own wants. What a splendid creation such an army would
be! In fact, how plain it is, to any one who watches the progress of things out
here, that a soldier is an artificial mechanism, that an army is still
more so, that for a nation to neglect the art which produces its army is the
same thing as for a man to reject the exercises and discipline which promote
his vigor. Well, perhaps we shall grow wiser as we grow older; perhaps we shall
blunder in some other direction.
I am in hopes to get Colonel Andrews off to-day or tomorrow,
in canal-boat, to Washington. This last sentence is written Sunday morning, the
rest being Saturday-night reflections. The day is a dark and threatening one.
We shall have a fine march to Frederick!
I am very well indeed, and there is no news with us. Love to
all.
SOURCE: Elizabeth Amelia Dwight, Editor, Life and
Letters of Wilder Dwight: Lieut.-Col. Second Mass. Inf. Vols., p. 161-3
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