Glory, Glory, Hallelujah

Word count: 1250

Glory, Glory, Hallelujah

Leeland stared with vacant eyes at a tattered banner, its blue and gold barely visible between gaping holes, half-hidden beneath a slick of red mud and the edge of the tent canvas. The wadded-up coat beneath his head was wet and warm from the heat of his body. A fitful breeze brought tendrils of smoke wafting over the rows of sick and wounded, carrying the scent of someone’s supper or the reek of blood.

Sounds of pain filled the hospital tent. Outside, muddy boots and striped trousers huddled in a circle. A voice floated down, droning over a list of the dead.  

Arthur J. Fielding. Joseph Jameson. Isaiah Weatherfield.

In his camp, would they do the same for the poor Rebel boys who’d fallen three days before? Would his name appear in the endless columns? Would they read it out in church, mourning the boys who never made it home?

A scream, sharp and terror-filled, pulled him back with a jolt to the world of dying men.

“I’m sorry you have to hear that.”

Leeland opened his eyes. Standing against the light was a young woman, her white apron spattered with dark spots, her hair in a thick braid down her back.

“I tried to get them to set up another tent for the doctor, but they wouldn’t,” the young woman said, bending over Leeland and handing him a bit of bread. Another scream broke the quiet din of the hospital and Leeland and the young woman flinched.

“Does a body no good to hear the screams like that.”

She began to turn away and Leeland instinctively reached out to stop her with his right arm. A blast of pain blinded him, and images flashed across his eyelids.

The soul-shaking booms of artillery. Earth dug up at his feet by the shells. Eddie, holding the banner, the life winking out of his vacant eyes as he fell down, down, down…

A gentle touch on his forehead woke him from memories as the pain subsided to a dull roar.

“Can I get you anything?” the young woman asked.

Leeland shook his head slowly, careful not to move his arm, afraid to look and see what part of him was missing. “You—what’s your name?”

“Elsie.”

She was too kind, the touches of her hands too soft to be roughened by the curses and groans he heard around him.

“Elsie. You should be at home…” Leeland tried to remember the movements of his mother’s hands as she sat in the parlor making boxes for “those poor boys.” Anything to distract himself from the sudden remembrance that he was no longer a whole man.

“…making bandages,” he finished. “What are you doing here?”

“We all have to do what we can.” She smiled. “Can I do anything for you?”

“No.” Leeland closed his eyes, the smile on her face too much for him to look at.

After a moment, she left, letting a thin ray of light fall across his face. He raised his good arm and covered his eyes, hoping with the light to block out the sounds and the smells.

He could block the sounds and smells, but he couldn’t block the rabid faces charging behind his eyes, snarling like wolves freshly fed. If he had not believed in hell before, he did now.

Later, the doctor came by. He was a burly, rough man in a stained gray shirt, his pockets bristling with tools, his suspenders barely clinging to his Union-striped trousers over a bulging barrel chest. He was stained with blood all over and his heavy mustache accentuated a deep frown.

The doctor reached him and loomed over him, his heavy brows lowering over his eyes. A meaty hand reached down and grabbed Leeland’s bad shoulder, sparking a wildfire of pain that blurred his vision. The doctor’s face twisted into a disgusted expression dripping with even more hate than Leeland had seen on the battlefield. He spat.

“Rebel.”

Leeland cursed him softly as he fell back, too overwhelmed to do more.

Elsie returned in the wake of the doctor, leaving a blanket of quiet in her wake. As the wounded settled to what sleep they could in the candlelight, a group of men outside began singing.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…

Some glory, Leeland thought. It was supposed to be quick. They were supposed to add a couple of Yankee scalps to their belts and return home yelling and screaming, covered in glory.

Elsie leaned over him, the flickering lamplight forming a shifting halo around her head. She handed him a dipper of water, laced with something sweet that spread warmly through his body and began to numb his senses.

“Elsie.”

She set the dipper back into a tin of water by her side. “Yes.”

“Do you have a newspaper?”

The voices drifted in as Elsie went to fetch the paper.

Glory, glory, hallelujah…

“Is there anything in there about the 41st Regiment?”.

Elsie settled on her knees next to him. “We don’t have a 41st—”

“Confederate,” Leeland said.

Elsie’s eyes widened. She opened her mouth as if to speak.

Leeland braced himself. He would probably die anyway. What use was it to find out the fate of his comrades?

Elsie raised the paper to the light and squinted at the page. After a moment she began to read, softly, her voice rising and falling like the flicker of the light.

“In the action against the 14th and 21st Regiments, on the 3rd Instant, the 41st Regiment sustained:

Killed: Joe Curtis, Leslie Springer, Major John Sutherfield…”

Her voice went on and on softly, a soothing sound that reminded Leeland of his oldest sister reading to him when a small child.

I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps…

As the drug filled his head with cotton, images drifted back through Leeland’s mind. He could almost hear the band playing, the day his town marched out to war. The echoes of the joyful sounds as the young men spun stories around fires at night, sang songs. Then the hard edges in voices, the whispered accusations, the name flying from tongue to tongue, bitter in each mouth. Yanks. Yanks. Yanks.

Leeland interrupted Elsie’s reading. “Don’t you hate us?” His tongue moved slowly in his mouth.

The paper snapped as Elsie dropped her hands. “Do you want me to hate you?”

“We hate you,” Leeland said, drifting.

“Do you?”

It was the last thing he heard from her. A cool touch from her fingertips lingered on his forehead as her shadow moved away, and the echo of her words floated to him.

Behind his closed eyes rose a blue and gold flag, streaming bright in the sunshine over gold trim and fresh starch. Gold thread sparkling, it merged with a sea of flags, blue and red and gold, waving over a bristling field of rifles and gray coats, borne on the broad shoulders of the glory of the little southern towns, bright-eyed and wet behind the ears.

Then artillery, crashing into the morning. Officers screaming orders. Gray coats stained with blood and mud. Smoke. Lumps on the ground that turned out, hours later, to be the bodies of comrades. Lungs burning. Rifles jamming.

The flag, full of holes, stained with smoke, trampled in the mud.

Outside, the singers began their fourth chorus, the strains of the song tapering off into the countryside.

Glory, glory, hallelujah

Our God is marching on…