procedures followed by hospital personnel and by some individual physi-
cians.^42 Although the war would bring about countless innovations in
medical care and medical technology, military doctors were often negli-
gent or were still committed to unorthodox or obsolete practices. And, as
Whitman recorded, the bodies of the dead were often handled uncere-
moniously, even callously. Although Drum-Taps does not dwell on such
matters, its author was attentive to the way hospitals treated their dying
soldiers. He recorded his impression of one such death, that of a soldier
endowed with “a perfect specimen of physique,” going into “convulsive
spasms,” being chloroformed by a physician, fanned by nurses, prayed
over by “a religious person,” and watched by a “crowd” of doctors, nurses,
students, and soldiers—“then welcome oblivion, painlessness, death. A
pause, the crowd drops away, a white bandage is bound around and under
the jaw, the propping pillows are removed, the limpsey head falls down,
the arms are softly placed by the side, all composed, all still,—and the
broad white sheet is thrown over everything.” Of one makeshift military
hospital he remarked, “Death is nothing here. As you step out in the
morning to wash your face you see before you on a stretcher a shapeless
extended object, and over it is thrown a dark gray blanket—it is the
corpse of some wounded or sick soldier of the reg’t, who died in the hos-
pital tent during the night.” “A Sight in Camp” does not tell how the
three anonymous soldiers—covered by brown blankets as they will soon
be covered by the brown earth—died or how they will be buried. (Many
soldiers received only temporary, makeshift burials; some bodies were
later reburied.)^43 The poem focuses solely on the three faces that, in the
persona’s mind, become sacred icons of the thousands of soldiers who
died in obscurity.
As the solitary persona sequentially removes “the ample brownish
woolen blanket, / Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all” from the
face of each dead solder, he beholds faces made beautiful by death and
studies each face to decipher the essential character of the once-living
man. (In the 1855 poem “Faces” Whitman had diagnosed the characters
of the citizens he passed on the streets by employing the techniques of
physiognomy and phrenology.) Removing the ¤rst blanket, he beholds
the face of a grizzled veteran:
Curious I halt and silent stand,
Then with light ¤ngers I from the face of the nearest the ¤rst
just lift the blanket;“Come Sweet Death!” / 177