The drums beat louder.
Walt Whitman’s brother George was listed in a December 1862 newspaper article as among the wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg’s futile Union assault. Whitman, 43, rushed from Brooklyn expecting the worst, found him only mildly hurt. A few days later, Army officers asked Walt to accompany other wounded soldiers 50 miles north to Washington, D.C.; he began ministering to patients.
By Civil War’s end the Washington area had built or converted more than 50 facilities — churches, city hall, the U.S. Patent Office — into hospitals, tending at any time to about 50,000 Union wounded. Over the ensuing 27 months Whitman estimated he visited hospitals 600 times. He acquired basic medical training but mostly did things other than nursing: talking to soldiers, many desperately lonely; writing letters for them; playing 20 Questions; bringing ice cream.
“Reader, how can I describe to you the mute appealing look that rolls and moves from many a manly eye, from many a sick cot, following you as you walk slowly down one of these wards?” Whitman wrote in The New York Times in February 1863. “To see these, and to be incapable of responding to them, except in a few cases, (so very few compared to the whole of the suffering men,) is enough to make one's heart crack.”
Two-thirds of the 300,000 Union dead died of disease, with typhoid, diarrhea, botched amputations the most prolific killers. (“The septic sins of the time [were] most responsible for this harvest of death and suffering,” wrote medical historian George Sims.) Writing to his mother in Brooklyn, Whitman said he most often visited Armory Square Hospital, which, based on its location near steamboat and train junctions, received the worst wounded. (It recorded more deaths than any D.C.-area hospital; President Lincoln often stopped by.)
In his Times piece Whitman exemplified soliders’ sufferings by telling of J.A.H., a Plymouth, Mass., soldier (Company C, 29th Massachusetts) compelled by chronic diarrhea to leave the field, then maltreated en route to the hospital. “Poor boy! He now lay, at times out of his head, but quite silent, asking nothing of anyone, for some days, with death getting a closer and surer grip upon him—he cared not, or rather he welcomed death. His heart was broken. He felt the struggle to keep up any longer to be useless. God, the world, humanity—all had abandoned him.”
Whitman daily visited the young soldier, who eventually recovered. “The other evening, passing through the ward, he called me—he wanted to say a few words, particular. I sat down by his side on the cot, in the dimness of the long ward, with the wounded soldiers there in their beds, ranging up and down. H. told me I had saved his life. He was in the deepest earnest about it. It was one of those things that repay a soldiers' hospital missionary a thousand-fold—one of the hours he never forgets.”
Tracking Covid-19 deaths, The Washington Post provides a snapshot of the first 1,000 in the U.S. It aggregates what details it can. (Seattle: 102; New Orleans: 26; Detroit: 23; Santa Clara: 16; New York City: 238.) For more than half of victims public health officials haven’t tallied personal information (say, gender or age), but trends can be tracked: more men than women; mostly seniors; blacks dying at higher rates than whites. The Post tells a few of the dead’s stories, implies their effort’s inadequacy. (“Precious few of those names and stories may ever be widely known.”)
Those first 1,000 deaths took a month (Feb. 26-March 26). Deaths attributed to Covid-19 in the U.S. in the ensuing 17 days: 20,936.
(New York state numbers as of Sunday: 188,694 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 4.6 percent from Sunday; 758 dead, to a total of 9,385, up 8.8 percent.)
Most of the dead aren’t famous. Most are dying apart from loved ones. The Wall Street Journal writes about nurses tending to dying Covid-19 patients whose families can’t visit.
I went to college with Sandra Santos-Vizcaino. She was the daughter of a mechanic and a seamstress who moved to New York City from the Dominican Republic when she was 11. At the time not many working-class students attended the college, not to mention working-class Latinas. Sandra was unfailingly soft-spoken, sweet-natured, gentle, generous. She found her calling as a grammar school teacher, became revered at P.S. 9 in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. She died March 31, the city’s first public school teacher killed by the virus. Since, 49 more DOE employees — 22 paraprofessionals, 21 teachers — have died.
The drums beat closer.
The drums beat closer.
Interpretations of Whitman are as Byzantine as the multitudes he contained. Whitman supported the Union’s cause in the Civil War; in 1861, when he read his new poem “Beat! Beat! Drums!” in a New York tavern shortly after the Battle of Bull Run, a Southern sympathizer took such exception at what he took to be its call to Union arms that he started a fight with Whitman. (Friends interceded.) Later, the poem was collected in Drum Taps (1865), which pacifists celebrated as a potent anti-war statement.
Encountering it in CoronaWorld, its drums sound to my ear less martial than mortal.
Beat! Beat! Drums!
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying,
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds,
No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they continue?
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.
Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.
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