Work Text:
Beaufort Military Hospital
South Carolina
August 2, 1863
My dearest Cabot,
I write this letter slowly—my arm refuses to obey, and the nurse scolds me when I move too much. But I could not rest until I had tried, however feebly, to say what I must. I hope this letter reaches you before I am gone, though by the time you read it, I suspect the room will already feel quieter. I write this from my hospital bed, with sunlight cutting weakly through the shutters, and the distant hum of a world that seems to carry on as though Fort Wagner were just another hill. But for me, it was everything. It was the edge of what I could endure.
They say I am lucky. That I should have died at Fort Wagner with the men. With our men. And I find myself wondering—why did I not? They speak of how I should be grateful to be alive. That others, braver or no less willing, were not spared. I hear their names in the night— all thirty men succumbing to the hell that America has become—and I find no luck in my breath, only the hollow knowledge that I was not among them. My body remains, yes. But my soul... I cannot say where it has gone. I only know it did not follow me back from that beach.
You know the answer already. You've seen the hollow look in my eyes these last months. You've known the weight I carry better than I do myself, perhaps. I can no longer carry it, Cabot. The soul that once believed it could fight this war with honor has fled. I have been emptied out by the loss, the horror, and the guilt. I wake hearing them cry for water. I sleep and see them still storming that cursed sand, their blood staining a country that refuses to deserve them.
I am no longer brave. If ever I was, it is gone now. What remains is a shell that flinches at the sound of boots in a hallway and shudders at the wind that smells like smoke. I love them—God, how I loved them all—and it should have been enough to stay. You should have been enough to stay. You saw it before I did, didn’t you? The change. The tremble I tried to hide. The weariness behind my smile when we sat together and pretended, for just a moment, that music or wine or memory could restore something in us. But I was already retreating from the world then, I think. And now, I have finally admitted what I never wanted to speak aloud.
I am tired, Cabot. So tired.
What shames me most is not the wound that put me in this bed, but the one I carry beneath it—the knowledge that I am choosing to walk away. I think often of those who never had the choice, whose bodies lie buried beneath that cursed rampart, and I wonder by what right I continue to draw breath if I will not spend it in their service. I tell myself I’ve done my part, that no man can be asked to give more than he has, but the truth is—I am afraid. Afraid to return. Afraid to lead. Afraid to fail them again.
I have never believed myself a coward. Not when I stood at Antietam. Not even at Wagner, when death came screaming toward us in fire and iron. But now—now that I must choose to stay or go—I find that courage has left me. And worse, that I am too selfish to go searching for it. I am running, Cabot. Not for my life, but from the burden of leadership, from the grief I no longer know how to carry. I dress it up in reason, in concern for my family or a letter from home, but it is cowardice all the same
You deserved more than this from me. They deserved more, but I only gave them death. I have failed as a captain, and as well as your companion.
With this, a letter came from Father. He writes that Boston is no longer safe—that mobs have begun gathering outside Union halls, and that abolitionist names draw jeers in the streets. They are returning to Europe, where the sky is quieter and the air not thick with the scent of war and death. He asked if I would go with them.
And I said yes.
Call it cowardice. Call it selfishness. Call it survival. I do not know what it is anymore, only that I cannot bear the idea of placing one more uniform over this broken body. I cannot stand at the head of another column and wonder which boy will fall first. I cannot write another letter to a mother. I feel your disapproval before you even speak it. And still, I cannot take it back. Perhaps it is cowardice. Perhaps it is survival. I cannot rightly tell the difference anymore. I only know that I want to feel the breeze off the Europe coast again, to see a sky that does not look like smoke, and to vanish, if only for a while, into a world where my uniform does not define me.
I cannot ask you to forgive me.
But I ask it anyway.
I wanted more time with you. I wanted something after, for if you know what I am implying would only lead to graver torment than death itself. What we have I cannot risk in the political environment of now. I have nothing left to give. You still do. You always did. It is why you were stronger than I—why I followed your footsteps before anyone else's. I will miss you more than I can rightly express—more than I should, perhaps. Your voice, your steadiness, the way you always seemed to know what I meant before I said it. That absence will be the sharpest wound I carry. There will be no letters I await more than yours, should you choose to write, but solumly and truthfully I must admit that this may be the last I send to you. No letter, conversation, embrace have I had with anyone with more care, or more pain.
There are affections, as you well know, that must live in the quiet spaces between words—uncharted, unspoken, and yet no less real for their silence. In another world, perhaps one not ruled by law or lineage or the heavy hand of expectation, I might have said more plainly what my heart has always known. But we were born into a time that does not permit such freedoms. So instead, I have cherished you in the only way allowed to men like us in shared glances, in unsent letters, in the ache of what might have been.
If I do not see you before I sail, know this. You are the best part of me. You were the last reason I stayed.
With all I cannot say,
Robert