Under Siege! by Andrea Warren Page A

disappeared. Poor whites slept next to wealthy plantation owners, and slaves slept next to their masters.
    No one knew if they were actually safe. One night Lucy found out. She had stretched out on her bed—a wood plank covered with soft quilts—but couldn’t get to sleep. She listened to the sounds around her. Outside, shells crashed and exploded. In a nearby room a young wife was in labor and would soon give birth. Finally Lucy got up and wandered into the main hallway. Several adults sat visiting by candlelight. One of them was Dr. Lord, who had a sore leg and foot. As Lucy later recalled, he was “all bandaged and propped on a chair for comfort. He said, ‘Come here, Lucy, and lie down on this plank.’ Dr. Lord was almost helpless, but he assisted me to arrange my bed, my head being just at his feet.”
    Lucy was finally drifting off to sleep when “suddenly a shell came down on the top of the hill, buried itself about six feet in the earth, and exploded. This caused a large mass of earth to slide … catching me under it. Dr. Lord, whose leg was caught and held by it, gave the alarm that a child was buried. Mother reached me first.”
    Lucy’s frantic mother, assisted by Dr. Lord, “succeeded in getting my head out… [and] as soon as the men could get to me, they pulled me from under the mass of earth.” Lucy was terrified, screaming and choking as she hemorrhaged blood from her mouth and nose. Her mother implored the physician attending the young wife in labor to examine Lucy, and he gave assurance that she had no broken bones “but he could not then tell what my internal injuries were.”
    At this very moment, a thunderous explosion shook the cave and Lucy watched as people became “frightened, rushing into the street screaming, and thinking that the cave was falling in. Just as they reached the street,over came another shell bursting just above them, and they rushed into the cave again.”

    This photograph, taken after the war, shows an entrance to one of the caves. The cannonballs on display may have fallen nearby during the siege.
    Unbelievably, Lucy reported, “during all this excitement there was a little baby boy born … He was called William Siege Green.”

    W HEN ANOTHER SHELL STRUCK one of the cave entrances the next morning, Lucy’s mother declared that she’d had enough. “Mother instantly decided to leave the cave,” Lucy said, “and calling Rice and Mary Ann, she gathered clothing and bedding, determined to risk her life at home with Father. We left the cave about eight o’clock in the morning, havingsome distance to go to reach home. I was bent over from my injuries and could not run fast.”
    The little group finally reached its goal. “Father was horrified when he saw us,” Lucy said, “and immediately made an effort to secure us another hiding place.” Very quickly Mr. McRae located a cave closer to home and also deeper in the earth, making it safer. “A number of steps led down into this cave,” Lucy remembered. “Mother had a tent pitched outside, so that when the mortars did not have the range we could sit there and watch the shells as they came over. They were beautiful at night.”
    Shortly after the McRaes left the communal cave, the Lord family experienced another fright there when one of the entrances suddenly collapsed. Willie wrote, “My father’s powerful voice, audible above the roaring avalanche of earth as he shouted, ‘All right! Nobody hurt,’ quickly reassured us. But after these narrow escapes there was no longer a feeling of security even in the more deeply excavated portions of the cave.”
    Dr. Lord rushed the completion of the cave being dug for his family’s private use by helping with the work. He had selected a location in a hill behind one of the hospitals, reasoning that “here, under the shadow of the yellow hospital flag which … was held sacred by all gunners in modern warfare, it was believed we should be comparatively safe.” But