Authors Note: My POW camp is an element of fiction, but is loosely based on one of the one of the most infamous camps that graced the Confederacy, Andersonville. In this story I will try to remain as close to the true history as any good historical writer should but I had to change one fact to keep the story progressing. At least in my research I found no evidence (If you know something I don’t please tell me) of hospitals on the camp ground (or none that would care for the enemy anyway)

Chapter 2

O’Malley’s eyes flooded with a bright light. He groaned and kept his eyelids tight over his green eyes. His first thought was well I think I’m alive, but where? He could not bear to force his eyes because he had a feeling in his gut that he been forced to become a Prisoner of War.

His memories were fuzzy and not much use to him. Skinning into his thoughts he tried to peace together the fragments of the slaughter that should had never happened. Where did the rebs find cavalry? He asked him self as he finely opened his eyes to be greeted the sight of a tent wall.

A tall bald surgeon moped his brow with a white sleeve that was stained with blood past victims. There was a terrible whale almost unearthly as a razor sharp saw blade was drawn across a blue-coated man’s leg and there was a sickening thud as it dropped to the dirt floor.

“Oh quit that,” barked the Surgeon in his slow drawl of Virginia. “Our soldiers wouldn’t drop a tear.”

The man made a soft “Ga” sound as his limb was placed onto a stack near the flap of the tent. O’Malley propped himself on his elbows and stared at the operation table which was coated in a thick mass of blood. Am I to stuffer the same fate my god? He asked in his mind not wanting to show fright in front of the Surgeon.

A pair of Assistant Surgeons lifted him slowly from his resting place and slid him on to the slick table. The Surgeon peered down at him through his smudged bifocals that skidded down the length of his nose a few inches. Swabbing the blade down on his white apron he said to himself more then to O’Malley, “I should be savein’ our boys not damn Yanks.”

“Wait,” called a female voice that was hidden by the lean man. “He won’t need amputation the ball went clan through one side and the other.”

“By god your right Cecelia, almost had a bloody damn murder on my hands. Didn’t I?” He said grinning widely but still reproachfully at O’Malley.

“Well come on you may have saved this sonbitch’s life but there’s more to do on him,” he snapped.

The young woman shuffled across to the table and ran a cloth dabbed with brackish lukewarm water around his dirt and sweat covered features. In another case O’Malley would have refused the comfort but the girl had long brown that fell to the length of her shoulders, he wanted to see her face and tried to think of the last time he saw a girl worth remembering.

His dead wife on their wedding night he told himself recapturing her beauty in his mind’s eye. The girl dabbed at the wounds on his exposed back and chest caused by numerous saber thrusts until the cloth was a rosy pink. Then tightly wrapped a length of fabric around the hole in his tendon from the entry and exit of the miniball.

“Thank You,” he murmured as the girl moved to attend to some Confederates who had been rushed to the nearest hospital.

“Ah that Cecelia has a way with wounds. Sometimes I wish I’d get shot,” said the Surgeon smiling erotically at the daydream.

“Maybe you will,” said O’Malley sensing the man could be trusted.

“Oh, some o’ you Yanks gots some fight left in ya ‘bout time!” “You Irish?”

“Aye.”

“Good, god knows where I be with out ya, man by the name of Killborne showed me what Maggots can do to a wound.”

“They’ll do it aright,” he said stepping down from the table as more blue clad wounded were escorted into the tent.

“Better get out there, good luck an’t easy living for Yanks ‘round ‘ear,” he said clapping him on the back.

The very face despair greeted him when he trudged outside, the camp was not really a camp at all but more like empty lot. The men were placed into the middle of space with what little they had, and lived shelters made of sticks that were driven into the red clay earth and they were spaced to form a typhoid afterward a uniform jacket was speared over the top.

The water quality in the place was no better. There was narrow trench that ran all around the camp and ground water bubbled up to the base, there was fresh water seeping into the mixture as well and O’Malley guessed the system was modeled the Roman aqueducts but must have stopped sometime ago.

He forced his way though a mud like substance made of human and animal waste alike. Beckman was huddled under one the makeshift tents playing a banjo quite contently this made O’Malley smile for a brief moment, thinking that man can find joy in anything.

“Fine day,” said Beckman is he started playing We’ll fight for uncle Sam. O’Malley joined on the second refrain:

O’re to fight for uncle, he’ll lead us onto glory-o, he’ll lead us onto glory-o to save the strips an’ stars…

Their enjoyment was cut short by a sharp voice that bellowed from a balcony on one the guardhouses that doted the camp, “I am Major Carson, I am in charge of this camp and escape will end in your death, so do not try.” “Also the long beam in front of the guard posts is known as the Deadline, you cross that you will be shot without delay.”

Beckman and O’Malley looked at each because they knew they had to get out, the only question was how.