These short pieces seem to be purpose built snip-its from the war. Whitman has created several prose peices all looking at the Civil War from different places, times, and perspectives, observing so many different people. I find these pieces so visual, with quite a few themes running through them. There is so much imagery of filth; the filth of the soldiers is explicated over and over again. “Their clothes all saturated with the clay power filling the air — stirr’d up everywhere on the dry roads and trodden fields by the regiments, swarming wagons, artillery, &c — all the men with this coating of murk and sweat and rain… baffled, humiliated, panic-struck” (732). The filth seems to go hand in hand with the chaos of the war.
There is also such a strong prescense of youth. Whitman describes the soldiers of the war as youth, and talks about their age frequently. It seems as though it is always the youth of our nation losing their lives to fight for our rights. “I am more and more surprised at the very great proportion of youngesters from fifteen to twenty-one in the army…” (738). “Most of these sick or hurt are evidently young fellows from the country … (743). “some indescribably horrid wounds in the face or head, all mutilated, sickening, torn, gouged out — some in the abdomen– some mere boys…” (747). “The Soldiers are nearly all young men…” (751). There are more and more of these quotes throughout the prose. I think the horror, for Whitman, is heightened because so many of the soldiers are mere boys, and he is witnessing all of the youth of the nation arriving filthy, and wounded, and mutilated.
Whitman makes so many of the victims of the Civil War so human. It seems that sometimes the horrors of war and the losses that are happening during a war begin to get dulled. The bodies become numbers instead of names, and the people behind the fighting are lost. Whitman tells so many stories of small, personal requests from the people whom he is caring for which makes them so human for the reader; it makes the reader much more sympathetic with the dead and dying. From the soldier who craves rice pudding to the one who wants pickels; from the amputee who munches away on a crack with not a care in the world, to the young Irish lad who came to the country just to fight, Whiman makes the reader sympathize with all of them.
Whitman’s treatment of his Civil War prose, and the work that Whitman did with these soldiers in the hospital is incredible. If one didn’t like Whitman already, he sure should now because he is a humanist to the core, caring for soldiers from both sides of the line with such a personal compassion. These snip-its not only provide the reader with an inside look at the horrors of the civil war, but also provide the reader with an inside look at Whitman as a compassionate human being.
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