October 28th
After eating my meagre breakfast, and lying down, discouraged and troubled at my failure to be sent off for exchange, I gave myself up to unpleasant thoughts of the unpromising and gloomy future before me. While thus ruminating, I saw the matron of the hospital, a large, rough-faced woman, walking slowly up the centre of the ward, glancing from right to left at the wounded men lying disconsolate on their bunks, and stopping as she reached mine.
She approached me and said: “You are looking pale, and I guess have been right badly hurt.”
I replied that I suffered a good deal, and needed more to eat than was furnished me; to which she said, “I guess you get all you are entitled to.”
Soon after she proposed to cheer me up by singing to me, to which I readily assented.
To my surprise and amusement, she began the well known, thread-bare Yankee song, “Rally round the flag, boys rally round the flag.”
Its inappropriateness didn't seem to strike her, until, at the close of the first stanza, I mildly suggested that the song suited Union soldiers, and not unrepentant “Rebels” like
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myself and comrades.
I learned from her that some good
Baltimore ladies had sent a supply of clothing to the hospital for the destitute prisoners, and, as I certainly came under that head, she promised to get me a suit on my procuring an order from the
Chief Surgeon.
She is coarse and ignorant, but seems to be kind-hearted.
