Forty Seconds: Vicinity of Mine Run, Virginia November 29, 1863

Doc Thompson is heading out to check on the sick in their tents when stretcher-bearers bring in another casualty from Jubal Early’s lines. It’s late afternoon, with cold rain falling. Doc steps back inside the tiny shack that serves as a hospital. The bearers deposit the unconscious man onto the operating table, a door propped on sawhorses. The soldier’s whiskers are tangled and muddy. In one hand, he clutches a few acorns.

The whole army’s hungry enough to eat acorns.

“Where’d you find him?” Doc asks.

“At the river,” comes the answer. The bearers glance at the fire in the hearth.

Doc invites, “Stay a while,” but they shake their heads and shamble out. Doc steps to the doorway and calls for his assistant, Charlie, who is out in the tents.

Charlie hurries in, and they turn their attention to the wounded man. Charlie places a blanket beneath his head for a pillow. The man’s left boot is mangled into his foot; the knee is a lump of ooze, studded with shrapnel, dirt, and bits of uniform. With scissors, Charlie snips away the remnants of the trouser leg. Charlie was one of Doc’s students, back at the medical school in Richmond.

“Tell me what you see, Charlie,” Doc says, “and smell.” That’s part of the lesson, when rotting flesh is involved. You have to smell beyond the usual sweat and foulness.

They regard the ruined leg.

“Heavy loss of blood,” Charlie says, “with broken bones and contusions. Gangrene’s setting in. I’d say,” Charlie pauses, “amputation above the knee.”

“Right there,” Doc says, drawing a thumb across the soldier’s thigh. The coarse cloth of the uniform is almost frozen; the soldier’s hand, as Doc’s fingers brush it, is cold too, but the beat in the wrist is strong. Thanks to the nearby fire, color is already coming back into his face. Doc thinks of the man crawling to the chilly riverbank, trying for a drink of water. He asks, “Primary or secondary?”

“I still have trouble with that,” Charlie admits, “but I think it’s been less than twenty-four hours.”

Doc nods agreement. Secondary operations carry a far lower survival rate than those done within a day’s time of injury. He amputates only if he believes there’s reasonable chance of recovery. Why mutilate a man who’s already dying? This soldier looks able to stand it. Doc takes a quick sip of brandy from his flask. He shouldn’t, but his gout’s kicking up in both big toes. If he could get hold of some cherries, that would take care of it. Oh, cherries belong to another world.

Outside, corpses are stacked beneath tarps, neatly. That’s Charlie’s doing. Two dozen injured and sick men occupy tents at the edge of the woods. Doc will order the worst cases brought into this hut at nightfall, as many as can fit. He’ll have hot drinks prepared and fires maintained for those in the tents. Some will live, and some will die, and even after all these years of medicine and surgery and war, he can’t always tell who will survive and who won’t.

Charlie picks shrapnel from the soldier’s leg and makes the bits into a pile. Wounded men, when they recover, take delight in such souvenirs.

Doc unties the man’s neckerchief and hands it to Charlie. “Any idea who he is?”

Charlie wraps the shrapnel in the neckerchief and tucks it into the soldier’s pocket. They peer into the grimy face. Charlie says, “There’s a resemblance to the Buckners of Gordonsville. Stout, sturdy folks.”

“Are they all this wild of beard?”

“Even the women, sir. Particularly the women.”

Doc laughs and wipes his saw across his apron. “Are you a Gordonsville Buckner, son?” he asks the soldier. “He ain’t telling us, Charlie.” Doc wants another sip of brandy, but he holds off. “Come to think of it,” he says, “I’ve got cousins in Gordonsville. I’ve got...