Touched with fire

Lieutenant Holmes believed himself a dying man.

He was a young man and an inexperienced soldier (still a few months shy of his 21st birthday) and he was wrong about being done for, but given the nature of his most obviously severe wound (one of the two bullets that struck him that day had entered his left breast near his heart and passed through him) that belief was anything but foolish. He had additional supporting evidence of his imminent departure from this mortal coil: the blood flowing through his mouth from within. "That means the chances are against me, don't it?" He asked the regimental surgeon. ("Tell me the truth, for I really want to know," he'd assured him previously.) "Ye-es, the chances are against you..." came the reply. It was near the end of a long day in which the young L-T, himself the son of a respected Boston physician, had seen dead men, in which he'd seen men die, and he suspected it was his last day, too.

He considered - not for the first time - consuming the bottle of laudanum he had in his pocket, consigning himself to oblivion. His first impulse to do so had come immediately after he was wounded. "I felt as if a horse had kicked me and I went over," he recalled. The first sergeant had dragged him to relative safety, opened his shirt, examined the wound, and squeezed the bullet the rest of the way out from where - not having passed quite all the way through his body - it was lodged. A painful moment, and that was when he had first noticed the blood flow into his mouth, too. His thoughts (he later acknowledged some surprise at "the intensity of the mind's activeness, and its increased suggestiveness, after one has received a wound") turned to a book he'd read as a boy. Something of a war story, in fact, in which a man with similar symptoms had died "with terrible haemorrhages and great agony," and he expected no less for himself. At that point, however, Lt Holmes determined to save his medicine of last resort until the pain became unbearable. He was evacuated from the battlefield under fire, somehow made it safely to the field hospital (where bullets were striking the outer walls even as he contemplated the great beyond) - and yet still that moment hadn't arrived. "I determined to wait," he said, "till pain or sinking strength warned me of the end being near."

While awaiting it he thought cosmic thoughts on the hereafter. "Would the complex forces which made a still more complex Me resolve themselves back into simpler forms or would my angel be still winging his way onward when eternities had passed?" he wondered. It occurred to him then that as a dying man "the majority vote of the civilized world declared that with my opinions I was en route for Hell." (Though a friend who visited his bedside claimed he'd greeted him with "Well Harry, I'm dying but I'll be G. d'd if I know where I'm going.") He contemplated a deathbed recantation of whatever sins he'd committed - but decided that would be giving in to fear. If he was to die, he concluded, then "by Jove, I die like a soldier anyhow - I was shot in the breast doing my duty up to the hub - afraid? No, I am proud." (Although "God forgive me if I'm wrong," was his last thought on the topic of divine redemption at that time.)

But as sure as he thought his death near, he certainly did not welcome it - and "one of the thoughts that made it seem particularly hard to die was the recollection of several fair damsels whom I wasn't quite ready to leave," he admitted. Perhaps that was why Lieutenant Holmes didn't die that day in 1861, or on any other day of battle in which he fought during the American Civil War. Whatever the reason for his survival, he made it home to recover - a period during which his proud father (who hadn't exactly been thrilled by junior's going for a soldier in the first place) would write a friend expressing envy for his son, who he described as convalescing among enthralled admirers - "a semicircle of young Desdemonas about him listening to the often-told story which they will have again."

Lt. Holmes recovered fully. And returned to battle. And was wounded again, and recovered again - and returned to battle and was wounded yet again... After the war, he studied law at Harvard, then became a successful lawyer and later a judge. In 1902 President Theodore Roosevelt (said to have admired "The Soldier's Faith" - one of Holmes' Memorial Day speeches) appointed him to the Supreme Court, where - not one to throw in the towel - he served until 1932, then 90 years old and the oldest justice in the court's history. At the time of his death from pneumonia three years later (after having added Franklin Roosevelt to a list of presidents he'd met - a list that started with John Quincy Adams) "his personal effects included his Civil War officer's uniform still stained with his blood and 'torn with shot' as well as the carefully wrapped Minié balls that had wounded him three times in separate battles." He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery; the top line of his tombstone identifies him as a Captain and Brevet Colonel of infantry.

Yet... on that day in 1861 young Lieutenant Oliver Wendall Holmes of the 20th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers had little hope for any future at all. However, even then, before he'd garnered even a day's worth of the rewards a long history had in store for him, he could be counted among the few lucky participants in that particular battle - at least among those on the Union side.

It would be eclipsed later by much larger and far bloodier confrontations between North and South, but that day in the autumn of '61 he was one of the few Yankees to return to Maryland from a point along the Virginia side of the Potomac River known as Ball's Bluff - if not walking, at least alive and free.

In the days that followed the blue-clad corpses of other less fortunate great-grandsons of the Minute Men floated down that river past Washington on their way to sea.

(Part two here...)

Bibliography:

Touched With Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, (Chapter 5 - Under Arms: Ball's Bluff) by Silas Bent (1932)

The Children of the New Forest by Frederick Marryat (Holmes diary: "Yes already the blood was in my mouth. At once my thoughts jumped to "Children of the New Forest." (by Marryatt) which I was fond of reading as a little boy, and in which the father of one of the heroines is shot through the lungs by a robber. I remembered he died with terrible haemorrhages & great agony.")

A Soldier's Faith, the Memorial Day address Holmes delivered on May 30, 1895, at Harvard University. Excerpt: "If it is our business to fight, the book for the army is a war-song, not a hospital-sketch. It is not well for soldiers to think much about wounds. Sooner or later we shall fall; but meantime it is for us to fix our eyes upon the point to be stormed, and to get there if we can."