The boat had a little shelter-cabin. As we were laying mattresses on the floor, while the doctors were finding the men, the captain stopped us, refusing to let us put typhoid fever cases below the deck—on account of the crew, he said—and threatening to push off at once from the shore. Mrs. Griffin and I looked at him. I did the terrible, and she the pathetic; and he abandoned the contest. The return passage was rather an anxious one. The river is much obstructed with sunken ships and trees, and we had to feel our way, slackening speed every ten minutes. If we had been alone, it would not have mattered; but to have fifty men upon our hands unable to move was too heavy a responsibility not to make us anxious. The captain and pilot said the boat was leaking (we heard the water gurgling under our feet), and they remarked casually that the river was “four fathoms deep about there”; but we saw their motive, and were not scared. We were safe alongside the “Spaulding” by midnight; but Mr. Olmsted’s tone of voice as he said, “You don’t know how glad I am to see you,” showed how much he had been worried. And yet it was the best thing we could have done, for three, perhaps five, of the men would have been dead before morning. We transferred the deck-men (who were not very ill) at once to the “Elm City,” and kept the others on board the tug till the next morning (Sunday), when they were taken on board the “Spaulding,” all living, and likely to live. Later in the day the “Spaulding” filled up to three hundred and fifty very sick men.

No one who has not shared them can form any idea of the hurry—unless it is kept down by extreme quiet of manner—and the solid hard work caused by this sudden influx of bad cases. Dr. Grymes taught me a valuable lesson the night I was at Yorktown on the “Webster.” A man with a ghastly wound—the first I ever saw—asked for something; I turned hastily to get it, with some sort of exclamation. Dr. Grymes stopped me and said: “Never do that again; never be hurried or excited, or you are not fit to be here”; and I’ve thanked him for that lesson ever since. It is a piteous sight to see these men; no one knows what war is until they see this black side of it. We may all sentimentalize over its possibilities as we see the regiments go off, or when we hear of a battle; but it is as far from the reality as to read of pain is far from feeling it. We who are here, however, dare not let our minds, much less our imaginations, rest on suffering; while you must rely on your imagination to project you into the state of things here. . . .

I can give you no idea of the work thus accumulated into one day. But there were cheerful things in it after all. One thing I specially remember. A man very low with typhoid fever had been brought on board early in the afternoon, and begged me piteously to keep the bunk next him for his brother—his twin brother—from whom he had never been parted in his life, not even now in sickness; for his brother was sick too, and had come down on the same train. But, alas! in shipping the poor helpless fellows they had got separated. Of course I kept the next bunk empty, even taking out of it a man who had been put in during my absence; and all day long the painful look in the anxious eyes distressed me. Late at night, as the last men were coming off the “Elm City,” and I was standing at the gangway by Dr. Draper, receiving his orders as he looked at the men when they came on board, I heard him read off the name of the brother! You may be sure I asked for that man; and the pleasure of putting him beside his brother cheered even that black night.

Source: Katharine Prescott Wormeley, The Other Side of the War with the Army of the Potomac (Boston: Ticknor, 1889), 75–80.