My next post:

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Travis~ We follow the rebels’ retreat the next morning and meet up with the them along the Williamsburg Road. Shell are flying like crazy and the smoke over the battlefield is so thick I can’t see anything properly. It gets so loud that my ears go deaf for a while, and I can only feel the vibrations of shells hitting the ground around me and not hear it. Dozens of soldiers lie dead on the ground, but I can’t identify any of them. Some are just wounded and are being taken away to the back to be picked up by hospital wagons. Tree is everywhere, pedaling lead, which means he’s shooting so fast his hands are a blur. My ears start working again, but I’d rather not hear things until the noise quiets down and the ground stops shaking and the smoke clears. The flag is hard to carry, and sometimes it caches the wind and begins to fall but I remember what I promised Tree and I keep it upright.

Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a shell comes whistling over our heads heading straight for Tree and me. Tree yells at me to get out of the way but the flag has gotten itself caught in the wind and I can’t move it. He reaches out to grab my arm but it’s too late, and the next moment I’m lying on my back on the ground with the flag still in my hands. For a moment I can’t tell what’s happening, but then I look down at my shirt and see blood seeping through the fabric.

Tree is next to me in a flash. “You all right, Travis? I told you to get out of the way, what happened?”

When I try to talk I start choking on the air so I stop. Tree is digging around in his satchel and brings out a piece of cloth that he starts to use to soak up the blood. But soon the cloth is saturated and he gets another.

“Give me the flag, Travis,” he says, taking hold of the flagstaff.

“No!” I gasp. “You said to only let it drop if I’m dead or dying, and I’m neither!”

He tries to tug it our of my hands but somehow I hold on. He gives up and says,

“All right, keep it. But I’m taking you back to the hospital wagons.”

I don’t want to go to the hospital wagons, I want to stay with Tree, but I don’t have enough breath to say that. I let him pick me up, flag and all, and we head to the back of the lines, somehow avoiding shells and bullets. The noise is enough to make my head explode, and before we get to the wagons I’m out cold.

~~~~~

When I wake up, I’m lying on straw in a wooden hospital wagon. Around me are twenty or so other soldiers, all Union, all with arms or legs wrapped in bloody bandages. Tree is gone. We’re bumping along the road, and from how rough it is we must be hitting every single rut. I’m still gripping the flag. My hands feel strange, and when I look at them I realize that they’re covered in blood and glued to the flagstaff. I couldn’t let go of it even if I wanted to. I try to raise my head to see where we are, but I can’t for some reason.

By and by the tops of buildings come into sight, and I hear people talking and shouting. Horses’ hooves clip-clop on cobblestones. We must be in a city somewhere in Virginia. The cobblestones are just as rough as the ruts in the road, and I’m jostled around, bumping into the other soldiers around me. It’s starting to get dark. The sun is behind the buildings and there are long shadows falling across my face. he city around us is noisy and crammed with people, even though I can’t see them.

Finally we stop. Several people jump down from the front of the wagon, and after a moment I hear wood scraping and a face appears over the wagon box. It’s a man’s face, with a scraggly beard, a slouch hat, and a cigar dangling between his teeth. He and three other men clamber over the side pulling stretchers behind them.

“Hey!” calls one of the soldiers near me. “Could you tell us where we are?”

“You’re in Alexandria, Virginia,” says one man. “Outside the Fairfax Street Hospital.”

They start loading the men onto stretchers and taking them out of the wagon and into what must be the hospital. I wait quietly for them to take me. As I wait I watch the sky grow darker and darker until it’s hard to see anything. Finally two of the men come up to me.

“Want me to take the flag, soldier?” one asks.

I tell him I can’t.

“Well, why not?” says the other man, the one with the cigar.

“Look at his hands,” said the first man. “They’re stuck to the flag.”

They heave me up onto the stretcher and take me out of the wagon and towards the hospital door. I get a quick chance to look around me. To my surprise, the whole street is full of wagons, not just ours. There are soldiers and doctors and stretcher bearers everywhere, yelling and tripping over things in the dark and directing each other. The two men carry me up the steps to the hospital.

Once I’m inside, I can see that the hospital is really a house that has been turned into a hospital. We come in the door and are instantly swept up in a tide of soldiers and doctor and nurses swarming in all different directions, all in a desperate hurry. People are yelling and there are several shouts of “Nurse! Nurse!” The men navigate my stretcher through the crowd and into a room off to the right that could have been a parlor before it turned into a hospital ward. The walls are blue with gold trimming, and pictures hand on the walls. Cots are crammed onto either wall, a soldier on each one. The men swing me of the stretcher and onto the one empty cot. Then they leave to get another soldier.

Oh, I didn't mean to ruin any plans of doing another soilder with Sam. In my post I just meant the "laughing and talking soldiers" that he mentioned earlier.

It's totally okay just saying. 

April-

After I have fed my siblings lunch, I bring them to our neighbor's house and then leave to help my mother. I meet her outside one of the hospital wagon/tents. We walk into a chaotic busy infirmary. There are nurses running all over the place taking care of patients.

"It's a good thing you came, April," Mother says. "We need all the help we can get."

I look through the rows of cots, trying to find one without a nurse. I stop at one cot  where a man has a broken leg. I bandage it quickly, and then go to help some other patients.

I find a boy that looks too young to be in the Union. His arm is bruised, and looks like it might be broken. I walk over to him, and ask him what his name is.

"L-Luke Anderson," he says.

"Well Luke, it looks like your arm may be broken. I'm going to put it in a splint," I tell him.

I reach to take of his hat, and he yells "NO!"

Pausing in confusion, I turn to look him in the eye. Many other patients turn and stare at him.

"I- uh, I really like this hat," he says.

I decide to let him rest for now, but I know there must be more to his story, and I vow to figure it out. 

----------------------

Sorry if I controlled Lucy/Luke too much.

Oh cool thanks for mentioning me! Let me kinda fill in some stuff --- Btw, I hate to correct y' all but Lucy is not too young because she is a drummerboy, which are usually 10-14. I did a drummerboy because there weren't any.

Also,the only reason I said it my first post, about the scuffle of the 13 age thing, was because her brother was supposed to sign up, who is younger. Obviously, he had all his papers entered before, which said he was 10. So the recruiter expected him to say he was 10 when he arrived, but since Lucy replaced him, who is older, she said she was 13.

----

Lucy ~ After the talking soldiers pass by, the other drummboys arrive.

"Ha ha!" the snicker. "So much of a rider, are you now?" said Ron.

I groan and decided not to waste my breath of defending myself.

"HAHAHAH!" They skip away, abandoning me. They either didn't know about my broken arm or just didn't care.

I drowsily get up. My cap has fallen off, but I don't bother searching for it. As I regain my balance, I come face-to-face with the man who was hiding. I gasp silently. 

He seems surprised, too.

As I look at him, he seems familiar. I'm not sure why, but he brings me back to when I helped all those slaves escape.

Before I can say something he speaks.

"Ah, it looks like that arm of yours needs a splint. Infection spreads pretty quickly."

"Oh, this?" I glance at it. "Um, yeah I probably need to see a nurse . . ."

"Well, there's a hospital up the road," he says. "What's your name?" 

"Luke," I say automatically. I've said it so much it almost feels like my real name. But then, as I stare at him, I hesitate. It feels like I can trust him. "No," I say without a deep voice, "it's Lucy." 

He raises an eyebrow. "Ah, okay then." He bends down and picks up a gray cap. "Is this yours?"

"Oh yes!" I say, grabbing it from him. "Well, um, I better go now. Thanks."

He looks at me confusedly before I finally race off in the opposite direction.

I adjust my drum so it hangs like a crossbody bag instead of around my neck. I tuck my ponytail back into my cap. 

Soon, I come across a small, tented hospital. Before I step inside, something stops me. What was I thinking? If I go inside, she'll probably want to cut away at my sleeve, and then take off my hat . . . and I'd be revealed! I could be kicked out, or even worse, put in prison. Yet, my arm won't last long if I keep like this.

I gather my courage I go inside.

---

And then what happens is from Dragonrider's post.

Travis~ The nurse, Hannah, is gentle and seems to like to hear me talk. So I tell her all about my father in the rebel army and my mother and sister back at home in Connecticut. She listens, nodding and asking questions. She can’t be much older than me. She’s got long dark hair swept back from her face and her eyes are bright green. She’s smiling the nicest smile I’ve seen a a long time. Nurses aren’t supposed to be good-looking for fear of it being a “distraction” to the patients, but this one sure is.

I think I can trust her, so I say, “They’re not going to let me go back. I’m really only sixteen. I’ll get sent back home and I’ll never get a chance to find my father.”

She doesn’t say anything, just looks at me quickly and then goes back to scrubbing. But she looks like she’s listening, so I keep talking.

“I might not make it out of here at all,” I say, looking up at her fearfully. “I might die here.”

She says gently, “You won’t.”

I ignore her. “I’ve got three sisters, miss, and the youngest one’s only five years old. I keep thinking that if I die here she won’t remember me when she’s older.”

She’s watching me closely. Her eyes are bright green and sharp as a knife. She continues to scrub. Her water gets steadily dirtier as more dirt and blood washes into it off the rag. It starts to get so grimy that I wonder whether it’s doing any good anymore.

I watch her carefully. She's intent on her task of cleaning me and thorough about it, but she’s aware of everything around her as well. Those emerald green eyes of hers are taking in the room around her, the soldiers, and probably me, too. She’s got a little smile that seems to say that there’s more to her than you think. It flusters me a little to look straight into her eyes, so I stare around at the room and gape at how elaborate it must have been before the war.

But however elegant it may have been two years ago, right now it’s a muddy, filthy, smelly mess. The air is choked with the smell of chloroform and it feels like the room’s been shut up for years. The windows are closed, keeping the hot, stuffy air inside. Patches of slick mud cover the floor. Hannah’s dress is spattered with mud and her face is streaked with it. I don’t look any better myself.

~~~

Later that day I lie on my cot waiting for the surgeon. Hannah has put the flag close by me so that I can keep a good eye on it. I won’t let it go anywhere until I can bring it back to my regiment. The hospital is overwhelmed by the number of wounded soldiers, and the doctors are working just about as fast as they can go without going crazy. Upstairs in the surgery rooms the surgeons are amputating. Several soldiers in my ward are without arms or legs, and some have lost one of each.

I can’t help worrying what will happen to me. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with me, I only know that I got hit by a shell and it’s bad enough that I can’t sit up. They could amputate my leg (though I don’t like that idea) but that wouldn’t be enough. The surgeons seem to prefer to amputate when they can and leave anything else alone. I don’t want to be left alone. If I die here I’ll never find my father and both of us might never come home.

Of course, amputation isn’t a nice prospect either. I don’t want to live the rest of my life with a limb gone. I’ve seen those saws they use to amputate. And I’ve heard that the surgeons are low on chloroform. I’m not going to let them do anything like that to me if I can help it.

The doctor comes over to my bed and gives me a quick look-over. I watch his face carefully. You can tell a lot about what people are thinking by their faces, if you watch carefully enough. But this doctor won’t let me know what he’s thinking. He looks at me kindly, smiling, and pats my shoulder a little. Then he goes away without saying a word.

I want to do something and not just lie here uselessly, but it hurts too much to move so I keep still and wait for somebody else to come by. Once one of the other wounded soldiers in the room is brought out dead that day. As soon as they bring him out on a stretcher, another soldier is brought straight in and laid down in the same bed. They have so little room and so little time and so many soldiers that the doctors work themselves crazy trying to deal with everything.

Hannah comes again with a welcome drink of water. I’m so thirsty that I drink the whole dipper and want more. She also bandages my hand, which was burned when she shell hit me. It’s not bad, but it hurts when she scrubs it and it starts burning after she’s bandaged it with a cool, clean strip of white linen.

I try to rest. I’m not really sure what I’m waiting for, anyway. I just want to get out of this place as soon as I can and find my father. It would maybe be nice to beat the rebels as well, but for now I just want my father and I to go home. And not in a coffin, either.

~~~

I hope I did Hannah well!

AAAAAHHHHHHHH

I TOTALLY MESSED THAT UP

q--q EPIC FAIL Dx

IF THIS WERE A REAL BOOK, IT'D BE BAAAAAD.  

DO RESEARCH NEXT TIME!!!! 

Wow, that thing with Hannah and Travis was uh, . . . quick. Which is totally okay!!! Just saying.

---

Lucy~ After the nurse leaves my bed, I wish I had just cut off my ponytail before I left home. My head is getting hot, and it's getting itchy under there. Near my cot, there's a small wooden standwith a pair of surgical scissors. I eye them carefully and weigh my chances.

I look around too make sure nobdoy's watching, and then I leap up and grab them. I raise them to my head . . .

"What are you doing?!" exclaims the nurse, rushing towards me.

I groan. Caught.

She leans over and whips off my cap. She gasps at my strawberry blonde braided ponytail. She looks at my face closely.

"Why, you're a gi--"

"I know," I say. "Well, you can scold me now." I scrunch down and wait for her to yell at me.

Instead, she sits down on my bed and kindly says, "Actually, I'm more interested in your story."

I shake my head and smile. "That's different." And so I begin. I tell her everything, about my history, about my family, about how my brother couldn't do it, and about how I stood up in his place.