“What are you waiting for, Herr Doc?” Dr. Otto demanded. “I gave you an order. Get your pack, and bring your blanket. All of mine are on the sick soldiers.”
After Hadley, Marcus’s life path had been as twisted and dark as a forest trail. It had led him through New England and into New York, skirting the edges of battle while constantly afraid of being captured as a deserter or a spy or a murderer. Then the Associators had let him join their ranks, and Marcus had been able to see a few miles ahead into December and now January.
But the Associators were all returning to the comforts of home. His life was taking another strange turn, thanks to this odd little German doctor, who was plucking him out of the crowded, smoky conditions of the camp only to thrust him into the bloody world of what passed for hospitals in Washington’s army. For Marcus, it was a chance to escape even further from what had happened in his past. He remembered what Sarah Bishop had told him at Bunker Hill: that the army was going to need healers more than it needed fighters.
Still, Marcus hesitated, standing at this unexpected fork in the road.
“Go on,” Swift said, tossing Marcus’s heavy haversack to him. “Besides, if you don’t like it, you can find us at German Gerty’s tavern most days. It’s down on the Philadelphia docks. Anyone can point the way.”
* * *
—
WHEN HE LEFT the Associators’ fire, Marcus finally saw Washington’s army laid out in all its confusing squalor. Until today, he had not explored the rest of camp for fear that he might see someone from Massachusetts—but that seemed unlikely given the fact that it had a population to rival some big towns, and the layout was just as confusing. Dr. Otto seemed to know every alley and byway, however, and moved with assurance through the troops, their smoking fires, and the torn and stained flags that proudly flew at the center of each company to identify which patch of frozen ground belonged to Connecticut and which to Virginia.
“Fools,” Otto muttered, slapping away a standard for a New Jersey regiment that was snapping in the cold wind.
“Excuse me?” Marcus was struggling to keep up with the old man’s pace.
“So busy fighting each other, it is no wonder the British have been winning.” Otto noticed a soldier sitting on a fallen log, his leg blackened and oozing. “You there. Have that leg seen to by your surgeon or you will lose it, ja?”
Marcus shot a quick glance at the suppurating leg. He’d never seen anything so gruesome. What had the man done to cause such an injury?
“Burned with powder, then marched through the cold on poor rations. And no shoes!” Otto continued through the camp, his accent growing thicker with each step. “Idiocy. Sheer madness. Soon the Big Man will have no army left.”
Marcus assumed the Big Man was Washington. He had seen the general three times: once on his horse overlooking the Hudson River as Ft. Washington fell to the Hessian troops, again at Trenton when he climbed into a boat to cross the Delaware, and a third time in Princeton when Washington had nearly been shot by one of his own cannon. Washington towered over the rest of his men on foot, but on a horse, he was like one of the heroes of old.
“One army. One camp. One medical service. This is the way to win a war,” Otto muttered. “Connecticut has medicine chests, but no medicines. Maryland has medicine, but no bandages. Virginia has bandages, but no chests to store them in, so they have been ruined. Around and around we go. Madness.”
Dr. Otto stopped abruptly and Marcus ran into him, almost knocking the doctor off his feet.
“I ask you, how are we supposed to heal these men if Washington will not listen?” Otto demanded. His wig tipped to one side as if it, too, were considering the question.
Marcus shrugged. Otto sighed.
“Exactly,” he said. “We must do what we can, in spite of the lunatics.”
“That’s been my experience, sir,” Marcus said, hoping to soothe the irascible German.
Otto looked sour, but they had at last reached their destination: a large tent on the outskirts of the encampment. Beyond it was Morristown. Marcus had noted the town’s prosperity and the hum of business that surrounded it, even in the depths of war and winter.
Around the tent, men loaded boxes onto wagons and unloaded more boxes from carts coming in from the countryside. A troop of local boys was splitting an enormous pile of logs into wood for the fires. Women stirred cauldrons of steaming water filled with sodden blankets.
A tired-looking man in a bloodstained apron was sitting on an overturned bucket, smoking a pipe.
“This is my new surgeon’s mate, Dr. Cochran,” Dr. Otto said. “His name is Margalen MacChauncey Doc. It sounds Scottish, ja?”
“Scottish? No, I don’t think so, Bodo,” Dr. Cochran said with a thick burr that reminded Marcus of his grandfather MacNeil. “Where are you from, boy?”
“Mas—Philadelphia.” Marcus caught himself just in time. A slip like that could cost him his life, if someone with an active curiosity were to hear it.
“He sounds foreign to me,” Otto said in his thick accent. “Some boys from Philadelphia said he was a Yankee, but I do not know whether to believe them.”
“He might well be.” Cochran studied Marcus closely. “Yankees do have very strange names. I’ve heard some called Submit and Endeavour and Fortitude. Does he have any experience? He looks too young to know much, Bodo.”
Marcus bristled.
“He is familiar with the methods of Dr. Rush,” Otto said, “and how to empty a man’s bowels most forcefully.”
“Hmph,” Cochran replied, drawing on his pipe. “We don’t need any help with that. Not in this army.”
“The boy has heard of Dr. Sutton, too.” Dr. Otto blinked like one of the owls that roosted in their barn in Hadley.
“Is that so?” Cochran’s tone was speculative. “Well, then. Let’s see if he knows something more useful than one of Dr. Rush’s extreme cures. If your patient was complaining of rheumatism and pain in the joints, how would you induce a sweat, boy?”
More questions. Marcus would rather be back among the Associators than be grilled and scolded like a schoolboy by the army surgeons.
“I’d have him examined by a committee of medical officers, Dr. Cochran,” Marcus retorted. “And the name is Mr. Chauncey, if you please.”
Cochran bellowed with laughter.
“What do you think, Dr. Cochran? Did I not find us a suitable replacement for that frightened young man who ran off at Princeton?” Otto asked.
“Aye. He’ll do.” Cochran tamped down on the tobacco in his pipe and slipped it into his pocket. “Welcome to the army’s medical corps, Doc—or whatever your name is.”
For the second time in his short life, Marcus shed one identity and adopted another.
* * *
—
TIME PASSED DIFFERENTLY in the medical corps than it had on the farm in Hadley (where nothing seemed to change except the seasons), or in his life as a fugitive (where every day was different), or the brief period among the Associators (when time passed so quickly that you didn’t have the opportunity to think). In the army’s temporary hospital in Morristown, time passed in a never-ending stream of wounds and illnesses that flowed among tables and cots, crates of bandages, and boxes of medicines. No sooner did a new patient arrive than a former patient left. Some left in pine boxes, destined for the graveyard dug on the outskirts of town. The more fortunate were sent home to convalesce from broken limbs and gunshot wounds or cases of dysentery. Others languished on the wards, poorly fed and poorly housed, unable to die, yet equally unable to heal.
As the newest recruit, Marcus had first been posted to the part of the hospital reserved for men with minor injuries and ailments. There his jobs were menial, requiring no medical knowledge whatsoever. His duties did provide a way for him to learn the rhythms of this new environment and to develop his skills. Marcus was learning how to diagnose patients by carefully watching their restless limbs, the pace of their breathing as they dreamed, and the spots of color that often appeared in the middle of the night and indicated that infection was taking root in the body.