"Indeed they are." Such a terrible part of war, and the part that grabs people's notice first. There's the marching, looting, starving part of it too. There's the politics and parades -- the parts she'd heard about and seen from her house in New Orleans. But it's the former that she learned about after joining them and witnessing it all firsthand.

"The medical tents were at the rear of the line," she says suddenly, before she can think better of it. "Sometimes the battles were so close that bullets would pierce the canvas. One time a patient was struck even as he waited for the doctor to see him. And one night--" She pauses, taking a moment to swallow. "One night I was sitting by the fire and I noticed what I thought was dirt on my skirt. But when I examined it, I found it was a bullet hole."

Christine hasn't thought about that day in a long time. She knew the dangers, but to see the evidence right there, to know how close she was to taking a bullet to the leg, well, she was rattled for a long time afterward. Yet she still stayed on, nursing the men back to health.

"I couldn't turn tail and leave when the men I was tending to had to feel those bullets. I was lucky."