By Carla Kelly 

Continuing in last week’s sentimental vein, I’m also a sucker for Civil War songs. (For you who attended high school after 1970: The Civil War was fought between northern and southern states from 1861-1865; the North won.)
    Even for the soldiers of the Indian wars (roughly 1864-1890), the Civil War was their defining event. When the guys sat around western campfires, they talked about the Civil War.
    When I worked at Fort Laramie, I dressed in clothing of the Indian Wars era, but sang Civil War songs, accompanying myself on a mandolin, and entertaining unsuspecting visitors too polite to run away.
    I especially remember “The Vacant Chair,” perhaps the most melancholy ballad ever written. Here’s the chorus:
    “We shall meet, but we shall miss him, there will be one vacant chair,
    We shall linger to caress him, as we breathe our evening prayer.”
    Feeling blue yet?  Here’s the second verse:
    “At our fireside, sad and lonely, often will the bosom swell,
    At remembrance of the story, how our noble Willie fell.
    How he strove to bear our banner, through the thickest of the fight,
    And uphold our country’s honor in the strength of manhood’s might.”
    I’d sing all the verses, and visitors would get long-faced. No wonder. The Civil War left a lot of women wearing black for years to come. Some even wore brooches containing a lock of hair of the departed loved one.
    Today, Civil War enthusiasts often reenact battles. These are fun to watch. Another entertainment is a “moonlight tour” of a battlefield. I saw one of those in Springfield, Mo., on the anniversary of the battle of Wilson’s Creek. Fought Aug. 10, 1861, Wilson’s Creek was the first significant battle west of the Mississippi River.
    The moonlight tour depicted the evening of the battle, with surgeons working away, soldiers wounded and moaning on the field, and women with lanterns looking for loved ones. It was a memorable sight.
When I was in graduate school a few years later, I came across an account of Eben Hannaford of the 6th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, who was shot through the neck at the Battle of Stone’s River, or Murfreesboro (31 Dec. 1862-2 Jan. 1863). A year later, Hannaford wrote a two-part installment in Harper’s Weekly, describing his ordeal.
    Hannaford told how he was wounded, how he got to safety, and how he was treated at the forward aid station. He eventually ended up in Hospital No. 14 in Nashville, Tenn., for several months, where life was touch and go.
    The wound was in a tricky place in his neck, and defied healing. Several times he nearly bled to death when the wound reopened. He survived, but I wondered how.
When we moved to North Dakota, I wrote a paper on the subject for the 1998 Northern Great Plains History Conference. I consulted with a practicing surgeon in Williston, and Doc Hagan, retired family practice physician who had seen hard duty with the Marines in the South Pacific in World War II.
Both men could explain the “why” of what happened. My National Archives historian buddy helped me track down the rest of Hannaford’s story. After he recovered from his wound (which my modern docs figured left him with a limited range of motion), Hannaford was eventually promoted to lieutenant in a paper-pushing job that didn’t require a return to the battlefield.
When the war ended, Eben went home to Ohio, married his sweetheart, Janet, and eventually fathered eight children. He ended up managing a publishing house in Cincinnati, and wrote the regiment’s history. Eben Hannaford died in 1905 at age 64 - not old by our terms, maybe, but not bad for a guy who shouldn’t have left Stone’s River alive.
I said in my presentation how hard it is to diagnose through the lens of years. Doc Hagan had seen a wound like Hannaford’s on Peleliu in 1944, and made the comment to me that “bullets do strange things” inside the body, no matter what medical science thinks, sometimes.
The case he saw on Peleliu proved his point. When Doc got back to the ship, he checked on his “neck wound” patient. The surgeons on the hospital ship had hunted for the bullet to his neck, and finally found it lodged near his hip. He lived, too.
Some day I’ll write a column on dumb luck. Or maybe I just did.