After Chancellorsville: Library Edition

"I reckon I sympathize with you deeply Dear Walt and I wish I could be with you, if it would help you any. I would be the best nurse you ever had, I'll bet you. I would laugh and sing and read to you and if we both felt like it I could cry too, and not half try." So wrote Emma Randolph, a young woman not yet twenty, to her distant cousin, Private Walter G. Dunn of the 11th New Jersey Infantry, as he lay in a crowded, filthy hospital ward. They corresponded when Walter went off to war, but their real story began when he was carried from the smoke and carnage of Chancellorsville to a hospital in Baltimore. There, barely recovered, bloodied and dazed with ether, he aided overworked surgeons when the Gettysburg wounded poured into the city, and he regularly took up his pen to relay everyday events that became history