When one writes a book, a preface is in order. Mine shall be by way of explanation. The only apology I have to offer for writing this little personal pronoun “I” story is the very simple one that it is true. It has been said that “we never talk so well as when talking of ourselves.” Be that as it may, in telling my own story, I can tell it only in the first person. It is a story that is very dear to me, probably much more so than it will ever be to any one else. In writing it I have lived it all over, and it has been so real to me that I have seemed to be again within hospital walls, peopled by those whom I have called up from the shadows of the past. In fancy, my mother, whose name is interwoven as a golden thread throughout the fabric of the story, has been with me, and I have almost felt the “touch of a vanished hand” and heard the “sound of a voice that is still.” Page after page has been written beneath her picture on the wall, and as I have lifted my tear-blinded eyes with yearning gaze to her sweet face, the brown eyes have looked lovingly down upon me as though smiling approval upon my work. Oh, that I had undertaken it while she was yet with me!
It may be questioned that I have written from memory—or it may be a matter of surprise that I have remembered so well. While my mother lived this period in our lives was often talked of and its memory kept green. My father, being ill in the second story of the hospital, knew little or nothing of the experiences I underwent at Corinth, but was more familiar with what took place at Jackson. Five or six letters written by my mother to friends in the North have been carefully preserved. They were mostly hurriedly written and contain only brief allusions to our doings, but from them I have gathered dates and hours of arrival and departure, and by them my memory has been refreshed on several points. But for the most part I have been entirely dependent upon my own memory. I have written only of scenes and events that I remember best. Many of them are as clear to me as the happenings of yesterday, while some half-faded memories have struggled vainly for utterence and have necessarily been forever consigned to oblivion. There is a possibility that I may be mistaken in a few of my statements, but it must be remembered that it is a long and dusty bridge over which I have traveled to reach and gather them up.
As this is not a story of fiction, I have given the names of all that I remember who were in any way connected with it, in the hope that there are yet some of the number living who will read my little narrative and recognize their own part in it. Should such be the case, my joy at hearing from any or all of them could not be expressed. I have written, that there might be a record of the facts, that my sister and brothers might become familiar with them, and because I love to dwell upon the incidents of my “army life,” as I sometimes term it. Lastly, I have written that it might be as a memorial to my brave, courageous mother, who, with her own hands, ministered so tenderly to the sick and wounded with whom she was brought in close contact. Whether this ever reaches the public eye is a question. Should it be so fortunate, I ask the public to read with kindly criticism, remembering that it is the story of the child told in the language of the adult.
1862–1899. The line between the dates represents a bridge as it were of thirty-seven planks, and each plank a year. It takes but a single stroke of the pen to make the little bridge of ink representing the years; but can I measure the smiles and tears, the joys and sorrows, that are crowded into each year? Can I retrace my steps, passing on the way the graves that have opened and closed on some of earth’s best and dearest treasures, and gather from the past a few memories that the corroding cares of life and the ever onward-rushing “flood of years” have not wholly obliterated from my mind? I can but try, and in so doing I feel constrained to cry out,
But alas! this and my hungry heart-cry of
are alike vainly uttered. Having long had this in mind, I now for the first time give to the world a simple little story of the early part of my life. It is a story of the war without much war in it. My first recollections of the Civil War (which I always thought very uncivil) are of the days of ’61, after Sumter had been fired upon, when each night one of the neighbors would come into our home, and she and my parents would discuss the prospects of war, which at first though a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, was even then lowering darkly upon us. We didn’t get the newspapers daily then as we do now, but whenever one could be obtained, my mother would read the news aloud, while I lay in my trundle bed, listening and cowering with fear. Who shall say that children do not enter into the spirit of current events? I had all a child’s fear of war, and that fear hung over me, for a time, as a dark cloud, for I thought the battles would be fought at our very doors.
IN September, 1862, my father, Dr. Coridon Morrow, offered his services to his country, and was appointed Assistant Surgeon of the 43d O. V. I. His first work was at the battle of Corinth, Miss., which occurred on the 4th and 5th of October. Soon after the battle, owing to bad water and change of climate, he was taken dangerously ill, and wrote my mother an almost illegible scrawl, begging her to come to him at once. We had broken up housekeeping at our home in the village of Bainbridge, Ohio, and gone to Aberdeen, on the Ohio river, to spend the winter with relatives.