Wedded to War by Jocelyn Green

Dowell asked. Her son, she had told Charlotte, had also volunteered and was currently at Staten Island.
    “I’m afraid he is. I’m going to open his mouth now.” Dr. Markoe pried open the boy’s jaws. “Now look at the tongue.” He pulled it out.
    “Why, it’s blood red!” said Charlotte.
    “Dirty red, I should say,” added Mrs. Dowell. “Like a piece of raw beef you’d get at the market.”
    “Yes,” agreed Dr. Markoe. “An apt description. If you had seen him not long ago, the tongue would have been pale, swollen, smooth, watery, indented on the edges by the teeth, its papillae hardly perceptible. Patients who reach this stage very seldom recover,” he added in a low tone. “If he were to speak, you’d notice it would sound weak and feeble, as if you were hearing him from a great distance. You would also notice depression and confusion, which very often accompany chronic diarrhea.”
    “Well, I should say so! And who wouldn’t be depressed about it?” interjected Mrs. Dowell.
    “But no delirium, which seems to be the special characteristic of fevers. Of course, the abdomen is also tender. Evacuations from the bowels may occur as often as every fifteen minutes or more frequently than that. Usually it’s preceded by gripping pain. The discharges are liquid, and become darker from the presence of blood as the disease progresses. If he is eating indiscriminately, you’ll be able to see undigested food in the discharges.”
    At this Charlotte paused from scribbling in her notebook to put up a hand. “Pardon me, Dr. Markoe, but is it really necessary to tell us all of this? We won’t be making the diagnoses ourselves, after all. Just following the doctor’s orders. Correct?”
    The look in his eyes withered her. “My dear girl, if you cannot handle
hearing
of such things, how do you expect to walk among these poor men? Too weak to reach a toilet, they will need to be cleaned up, sometimes fed, their bedclothes changed. You must begin to think about it scientifically, rather than emotionally, and become accustomed to the sights, sounds, smells of the hospital.”
    She felt her cheeks ignite in shame and vowed to hold her tongue from that point on.
Eyes open, mouth shut
, she told herself.
    “Women nurses indeed,” she heard him mutter.
    Briggs moaned then, and his eyelids fluttered open. One look into his eyes, and Charlotte’s stomach churned. His eyes closed again, and she looked at Dr. Markoe for an explanation.
    “Yes, I was about to tell you about that. I have only seen it in two patients in this hospital. It’s an ulcer. It grows until it penetrates the cornea and evacuates the humors of the eye. From what I understand from other doctors, no patient has ever recovered who displayed this symptom.”
    “What can you do for him?” Concern was etched into Mrs. Dowell’s brow.
    “There is no point in any further treatment. If he were not so far along, we would have given him fresh fruits and vegetables, and given him opiates for the pain. But not now. It’s just too late.”
    Charlotte looked at the boy again, and saw him as a person, not just a medical case. A boy, without even a shadow of stubble on his face. She tried to imagine what he had looked like before he had become emaciated. Before his complexion turned muddy, before his own skin betrayed him in great brown flakes. She was sure he had been handsome, full of life and energy, and only too anxious to defend his country. She wondered if he had a sweetheart, or if his heart still belonged to his mother or sisters.How shocked they would be to learn he had died before a single battle took place.
    “Where is his mother?” she asked, frowning.
    “We’ve tried to find her.”
    “What will you tell her?”
    “Her son died bravely for a glorious cause.”
    But he wasn’t dying for a cause. He was dying alone of a preventable disease before he even shouldered a rifle.
    Charlotte couldn’t fathom the pain his mother would feel when she