The west wind blew the stables’ stench away from him. But a new miasma came from Arlington itself, a miasma compounded of sweat and filth and pus and suffering: the Federals had made his home into a hospital. Dwarfed by the heavy Doric columns of the porch, doctors in blue still hurried back and forth. Lee had exempted the place from the general Federal evacuation of Southern soil until the last wounded man could be moved without suffering.
Arlington’s lawns had been sadly neglected under the Northern occupation; they were uncut, unwatered, and unkempt. Here and there, not far from the mansion, fresh, raw upturnings of red Virginia earth further marred what had once been a smooth and lovely expanse. Under that freshly turned soil lay Federal soldiers slain in the Wilderness, at Bealeton, and, he supposed, in the fighting in and around Washington City. The Confederate repeaters had filled all Washington’s proper cemeteries to overflowing. Injured men who died here stayed here.
One of the hurrying Federal doctors at last caught sight of Lee. When the man recognized him, he stopped so short he almost stumbled. Then he came down the hill toward him at a trot. He saluted as if Lee commanded his own army. “Sir, I am Henry Brown, surgeon of the 1st New Jersey.” He wore captain’s bars and a haggard expression. “How may I help you? May I show you through—your home?”
“Wounded men yet remain inside, sir?” Lee asked.
“Yes, General, perhaps to the number of a hundred. The rest have either recovered sufficiently to be taken elsewhere or—” Brown jerked a thumb in the direction of the new graves.
“I cannot imagine your soldiers would wish to see me, when I am the author of their pain,” Lee said. “I would not inflict myself upon them.”
“Many of them, I think, would be pleased if you visited.” One of Brown’s eyebrows quirked upward. “As you may be aware, sir, you are held in considerable respect by the Army of the Potomac.” Lee shook his head. The surgeon persisted: “It truly would help restore their spirits, I believe.”
“Only if you are certain, sir,” Lee said, doubtful still. Brown nodded vigorously. Lee said, “Very well, then. I am relying upon your good judgment.”
He swung down from Traveller. When his staff officers saw him head for the mansion, they exclaimed and dismounted. too. They rushed after him. Charles Marshall drew his sword; Venable and Taylor took out pistols instead. “You mustn’t go alone into that nest of Yankees, sir,” Taylor protested.
“I thank you for taking thought of my safety, gentlemen, but I doubt I am thrusting myself into a desperadoes’ lair,” Lee said.
“No, indeed,” Henry Brown said indignantly.
Flanked by his aides and the surgeon, Lee strode between the two central columns up onto the porch of his old home. A startled Federal sentry at the door presented arms to him. He politely dipped his head to the man. Not long ago, the fellow would have been overjoyed to kill him. Now he remained on Confederate soil only because Lee declined to evict his wounded comrades.
The sickroom smell, almost palpable outside, grew thicker still when the sentry opened the door to let Lee go through. A surgeon probing a wound looked up in surprise. “Get on with it, goddam you,” his patient gasped. Then he too saw who stood in the doorway. “No. Wait.”
Lee looked at the thin men who lay on cots in what had been his front room. They stared back, many of them with fever-bright eyes, His name ran in a whisper from bed to bed. A young blond soldier, his right arm gone at the shoulder, heaved himself up to a sitting position. “You come to gloat?” he demanded.
Lee almost turned on his heel to walk out of Arlington then and there. But before he could move, another Federal, this one with only half a left leg, said, “Come on, Joe, you know he ain’t that way.”
“I came to see brave men,” Lee said quietly, “and to honor them for their bravery. The war is over now. We are countrymen no longer. But we need be enemies no longer, either. I would hope one day for us to be friends again, and hope that day comes speedily.”
He walked from bed to bed, chatting briefly with each man. Joe and a couple of others turned their heads away. But as Henry Brown had predicted, most of the men seemed eager to meet him, eager to talk with him. The question he heard oftenest was “Where’d you rebs get those damned repeaters?” Several men added, as Ulysses Grant had, “Wouldn’t’ve been for them, we’d’ve licked you.”
“The rifles come from North Carolina,” he said over and over, his usual answer, true but incomplete. As usual, the Federals found it hard to believe. As usual, they would have found the truth even harder.
One big, high-ceilinged room after another. Lee gave all his attention to the broken men on their canvas cots. They deserved it; they had fought as gallantly as any Southerner and kept up the fight as long as they could in the face of the AK-47s’ overwhelming firepower. Concentrating on the soldiers also kept him from noticing how Arlington itself had suffered. But the brutal fact struck home, no matter how he tried to avoid it. He’d never been good at self-deception.
The mansion—his mansion—had till recently held far more wounded Federals than now inhabited it. Their blood and other, less noble, bodily fluids stained rugs, floors, walls. Those floors and walls were also scarred and chipped from the rough use they’d taken since 1861. He’d expected nothing better.
He’d also expected much of the old furniture to be missing. Rich goods in the house of an enemy were fair game for soldiers. But he had not expected the vandalism of what remained, the destruction for destruction’s sake. Yankees had carved their initials into those bureaus and chests that were too heavy to carry off and had escaped being chopped up for firewood. Scrawls, some of them filthy, decorated the walls.
The sole relief Lee knew was that Mary was not at his side. Arlington had been her home before it was his; seeing it now would bring her only grief. The war had been cruel to her: forced from Arlington, then from White House, the family plantation on the Pamunkey—the plantation had ended up as McClellan’s base for his assault on Richmond, and White House itself burned to the ground. Now the South had victory, but at what price?
Only now did he think that he could have avenged the burning of one White House with the burning of another. He shook his head, rejecting the idea. Bandits and guerrillas made war that way; civilized nations did not.
“We must have a just and lasting peace, gentlemen,” he told the wounded Federals lying in the room where he and Mary had so often slept together. “We must.”
Maybe the vehemence in his usually gentle voice touched the soldiers. One of them said, “I expect we will, General Lee, with men like you around to help make it.”
Moved in spite of himself, Lee said, “God bless you, young man.”
“Out this door here,” Henry Brown said, pointing.
“I do know my way, doctor, I assure you,” Lee replied. Brown stammered in embarrassed confusion. Lee was embarrassed, too, at his own sarcasm. “Never mind, sir. Lead on.”
At last the ordeal was over. Lee and his staff officers walked out of Arlington to their horses, which were cropping the grass they could reach. The Federal surgeon said, “Thank you for your gracious kindness, General. The men will remember your visit for the rest of their lives, as shall I.”
“Thank you, doctor. I hope that, by your aid and that of your colleagues, those lives are long and healthy. A good afternoon to you, sir.”
Henry Brown hurried back into Arlington to resume his duties. Lee stood by Traveller for several minutes without mounting, his eyes never moving from the mansion. At last, Charles Venable asked hesitantly,” Are you all right, sir?”