Dr. August P. Gunther

August was born the third son of a middle-class doctor near Knoxville, Tennessee. His life was mired by tragedy early on, with none of his siblings living to adolescence and his mother dying in childbirth a few years after he was born. This lead to a particularly close relationship with his father Otto, who assured that August had few obstacles to a medical career of his own, to which August took naturally. A bright, but quiet, child with weak legs that had plagued him since birth, he learned to play to his strengths early and spent much of his formative years in Spartan devotion to his future profession with little time for boyhood amusements. His disposition served him well when he left home to study medicine in Pennsylvania, though it didn't provide him with an overabundance of friends.

The young doctor returned home to Tennessee after school with honors and fluency in five languages, nearly right away taking on his aged father's patients. It wasn't long after that that he met a shoemaker's daughter with soft brown eyes named Caroline Semmes and married her as quick as he could, saying to friends at the time that he'd never been more sure about something in his life than he was about her. For a lot of years they lived a good life. Caroline gave him two healthy children, a boy, Henry, and a girl, Clara. The boy grew into a fine young man without incident, and Clara was promising to be a fine young lady. But that was before the war.

In 1860, Henry was nearly of an age to attend his father's alma mater in Pennsylvania. August had privately thought that war was inevitable for years, but always he prayed that it would hold off long enough that his only son would be older and perhaps able to serve as a surgeon, if he served at all, but that was not to be. One more year, and Henry would have at least started his education. But the call went out and Henry answered. What Henry didn't figure was that his father would come along too. Neither of them supported secession before it came, nor had any generation of the Gunthers going back to the old country owned slaves or cared to. But Henry couldn't see staying out of it. Had August been a younger man, perhaps he would have felt some of that too, but all he could see ahead was a whole lot of death that didn't have to be. He figured the best a man could do was try to stop some of it.

They enlisted and trained together in the 19th Tennessee Infantry, this being before the Confederate army had a proper medical corps. But from the end of the Camp of Instruction to when Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee to Sherman, August never stood in a line of battle, but spent his time performing surgeries behind the lines, seeing to the everyday medical needs of the regiment when they were on the march. Already in his forties at the war's start, he was old enough to be the father of the vast majority of the men under his care, and was thought of like one by many of them. All the harder when he had to close their eyes, when he had to move on to the next one as cold and fast as one of the workers in one of the big northern factories. He was good at his work, but took no pleasure in it. He prayed for the war to be over, for the bloodshed to cease while his son still lived. But it was not to be. (Note: still not done, got carried away, can't stop.)