angrene was practically
unknown in the Japanese hospitals. But the situation was different in
1861. Modern sanitation, surgery, antiseptic methods, chloroform and
ether are comparatively recent discoveries. Such anesthetics as the
surgeons had were poor in quality and insufficient in quantity. In the
camps fever was prevalent. Smallpox, measles and lesser diseases became
malignant and wrought terrible ravages. Tents became more dangerous than
battle-fields. What the bullet began, the hospitals completed. More men
died through disease than through leaden hail. But the noble army of
physicians and nurses wrought wonders. Think of it! Twenty-six thousand
men dead or dying on the field of Gettysburg!

Here is a page torn from the journal of one of the nurses there: "We
begin the day with the wounded and sick by washing and freshening them.
Then the surgeons and dressers make their rounds, open the wounds, apply
the remedies and replace the bandages. This is the awful hour. I put my
fingers in my ears this morning. When it is over we go back to the men
and put the ward in order once more, remaking the beds and giving clean
handkerchiefs with a little cologne or bay water upon them, so prized in
the sickening atmosphere of wounds. Then we keep going round and round,
wetting the bandages, going from cot to cot almost without stopping,
giving medicine and brandy according to orders. I am astonished at the
whole-souled and whole-bodied devotion of the surgeons. Men in every
condition of horror, shattered and shrieking, are brought in on
stretchers and dumped down anywhere." Men shattered in the thigh, and
even cases of amputation were shovelled into berths without blanket,
without thought or mercy. It could not have been otherwise. Other
hundreds and thousands were out on the field of Gettysburg bleeding to
death, and every minute was precious.

No page can ever describe the service of nurses, sisters of mercy,
chaplains, brave men and kind women, who took train and went to the
front upon news of the battle and remained there for weeks.

But while the soldier boys were striving unto blood for their
convictions, what about the people at home who loved them? How did they
carry their burdens and fulfill their task that was not less important?
Fortunately, during the war, the North was blessed with four bountiful
harvests that were rich enough, not only to support the people at home,
and the soldiers at the front, but also to furn