y, who took them to Richmond.

The process of unloading the wounded at once commenced; all the churches
and other public buildings were first seized and filled. Negroes who
could be found in town were pressed into the work, yet, with all the
help that could be obtained, it was a slow process. All night and all
the next day the work went on. The churches were filled first, then
warehouses and stores, and then private houses, until the town was
literally one immense hospital.

The surgeons were too much engaged in transferring the men from the
wagons to the houses to find time that day to dress many wounds, and
many an unfortunate soldier whose stump of an arm or leg had not been
dressed since the first day of the fighting, became the victim of
gangrene, which set in as the result of this unavoidable want of care.
No sooner were the men removed from the ambulances than surgeons and
nurses addressed themselves with all the strength that remained to them
to relieve the immediate wants of the sufferers. Never before had such
herculean labors been thrown upon so small a body of men, yet nobly did
they accomplish the task. All the buildings in town were full of wounded
men, the walks were covered with them, and long trains of ambulances
were filling the streets with more. Yet to relieve the wants of all
these thousands of suffering men not more than forty surgeons had been
sent from the field.

It was one grand funeral; men were dropping away on every side. Large
numbers of nurses were detailed as burial parties, and these plied their
work day after day with hardly time for their needed rest.

Surgeons were completely worn out, and many of them, had to be sent to
Washington, fairly broken down with their labors.

The following extract from a letter of a surgeon at Fredericksburgh to
his wife, written on the 11th, may convey something of an idea of the
experience of the medical officers during those terrible days. He says:
"We are almost worked to death; my feet are terribly swollen; yet we
cannot rest for there are so many poor fellows who are suffering. All
day yesterday I worked at the operating table. That was the fourth day
that I had worked at those terrible operations since the battle
commenced, and I have also worked at the tables two whole nights and
part of another. Oh! it is awful. It does not seem as though I could
take a knife in my hand to-day, yet there are a hundred cases of
amputations waiting for me. Poor