Have a deeply respectful and relaxing Memorial Day, everybody.

In December 1862, The New York Tribune listed a “First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore” as dead or wounded in the Battle of Fredericksburg. Walt Whitman, fearing the dispatch referred to his brother George, immediately traveled south to find his relative, an infantryman in the Union Army who’d written the Leaves of Grass poet numerous letters from the front. Though Whitman eventually found George alive and well, with just a small wound on his cheek, his harrowing encounters with the injured and mutilated troops convinced him to leave his home in New York and join the war effort.

Working part-time in the army paymaster’s office in Washington, D.C., he volunteered as a nurse in area military hospitals, an experience he would revisit in Specimen Days (1882), drawing on accounts he had previously published in The New York Times, the New York Weekly Graphic, and 1875’s Memoranda During the War. In one especially affecting passage from Specimen Days, he describes the fate of mortally wounded soldiers, deprived of medical treatment and often buried in unmarked graves:

"No history ever—no poem sings, no music sounds, those bravest men of all—those deeds. No formal general’s report, nor book in the library, nor column in the paper, embalms the bravest, north or south, east or west. Unnamed, unknown, remain, and still remain, the bravest soldiers. Our manliest—our boys—our hardy darlings; no picture gives them. Likely, the typic one of them (standing, no doubt, for hundreds, thousands,) crawls aside to some bush-clump, or ferny tuft, on receiving his death-shot—there sheltering a little while, soaking roots, grass and soil, with red blood—the battle advances, retreats, flits from the scene, sweeps by—and there, haply with pain and suffering (yet less, far less, than is supposed,) the last lethargy winds like a serpent round him—the eyes glaze in death—none recks—perhaps the burial-squads, in truce, a week afterwards, search not the secluded spot—and there, at last, the Bravest Soldier crumbles in mother earth, unburied and unknown."