u/Syllogism19

The film seems to be largely a compilation of home movie footage with commentary written by soviet writer and propagandist Albertas Laurinčiukas. The soundtrack is a smorgasbord of unauthorized use including the Benny Hill tune.

Many of the images are beautiful, some are not. But all the footage is not likely to have been seen elsewhere. Here is the wiki of the author https://lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albertas_Laurin%C4%8Diukas

She had no military rank and no medical degree. But in 1861, this Civil War nurse began firing Union Army surgeons.

It was November in Cairo, Illinois. The mud was deep enough to pull the boots off the enlisted men.

The regimental hospital was not a hospital. It was a series of canvas tents erected in a swamp near the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Inside, men lay on bare ground. They were dying of typhoid, measles, and dysentery weeks before they ever saw a Confederate soldier.

In 1861, military medicine was an afterthought. The United States government had prepared for a short skirmish, not a continental slaughter. The medical corps was understaffed and entirely unprepared for the logistics of mass casualty care.

Mary Ann Bickerdyke walked into the tents on a Tuesday. She was forty-four years old. A widow from Galesburg who made a meager living as a botanic physician. She had arrived with five hundred dollars' worth of supplies collected by her local congregation.

The military men at the checkpoint assumed she would drop off the bandages, weep at the conditions, and go home.

She did not go home.

The first tent she entered smelled of gangrene and unwashed bodies. There were no beds. The sick were lying in the uniforms they had been wearing for months. The food was salt pork and hardtack, entirely indigestible for men suffering from severe intestinal disease.

She looked for the ward master. She found him in a separate, dry tent. The man was asleep. Beside him was a cache of fresh food, clean shirts, and medical supplies intended for the wounded.

She did not wake him gently. She took a basin of dirty water and poured it directly over his head.

At the time, the United States Sanitary Commission had advisory power only. They could inspect a Union Army hospital and write reports, but they possessed no legal authority to compel military officers to change their practices. The military chain of command was absolute. Civilian interference in a war zone was officially forbidden under Department of War regulations.

The medical officers in Cairo held the rank of Major. They wore epaulettes. They had staff. They operated under a strict bureaucratic structure that prioritized requisition forms over sanitation.

If a soldier needed a clean shirt, a form had to be routed to a quartermaster. If the quartermaster was delayed, the soldier bled into his uniform for another week. If a ward needed firewood, the request went through three different officers.

The system functioned perfectly on paper. On the ground, it was a graveyard.

When the ward master woke sputtering, she informed him his authority was over.

She walked out of the tent and began issuing orders to the enlisted men. She told them to build fires. She ordered them to boil water. She tore up the rotting tents and demanded the quartermaster release fresh canvas.

The medical officers were furious. A civilian woman was dismantling their hierarchy.

A surgeon approached her and demanded to know under whose authority she was operating. She did not stop scrubbing the floor.

"Under the authority of the Lord God Almighty," she said. "Have you anything that outranks that?"

The surgeon left. She kept working.

Over the next month, she established a washing system. When the army refused to issue laundry equipment, arguing that washing clothes was not a strategic priority, she bypassed them entirely. She wrote directly to the civilian women back in Illinois.

She asked for washing machines. Within a month, a train arrived with wooden washers and portable kettles. She hired local runaway slaves to operate them.

When the men needed fresh milk and eggs, she left the camp, traveled to local farms, and returned with a dairy cow and a flock of chickens.

She demanded clean shirts. The quartermaster told her they were locked in a warehouse and he did not have the proper authorization to open it. She found a crowbar, walked to the warehouse, and shattered the padlock.

When the quartermaster threatened the guard for letting her do it, she told the guard to tell his superiors that Mary Ann Bickerdyke had stolen the inventory.

She paid no attention to rank. If an officer was competent, she worked with him. If he was not, she removed him.

She found a senior surgeon drunk on the hospital's liquor supply. His patients were lying in their own waste. The man was a commissioned officer. She stripped him of his position on the spot and had his tent removed.

In January 1862, a surgeon ordered her out of his ward for speaking out of turn. She ignored him and kept working.

In February 1862, another officer filed a formal complaint to have her access revoked. She ignored it and kept working.

In March 1862, the medical director attempted to physically bar her from the supply tent. She pushed past him.

There was a cost to this obsession. She had two young sons back in Galesburg. She had left them in the care of neighbors. She missed their birthdays. She missed their schooling.

The letters home were short, written by lantern light while the cannons sounded in the distance. The boys grew up largely without their mother while she mothered a hundred thousand strangers.

The surgeons finally had enough. The humiliation was total. They drafted formal grievances. They routed them up the chain of command. They wanted her removed from the theater of war, permanently.

The paperwork eventually reached the desk of General Ulysses S. Grant, and later, General William T. Sherman.

They brought him the chain of command. She brought him the survival rate.

The medical director stood before General Sherman at his headquarters. He listed her infractions one by one. She was insubordinate. She was abrasive. She had no respect for military protocol. She had fired another commissioned surgeon that morning without filing a single piece of paperwork.

Sherman listened to the officer. He knew her record. He had seen the condition of the men in her care at Vicksburg and Chattanooga. He knew she walked the battlefields at midnight with a lantern, turning over the dead to ensure no living man was left behind in the mud.

The general shook his head.

"I can do nothing for you," Sherman said. "She ranks me."

The surgeon was dismissed. Bickerdyke stayed.

She followed the western armies for four years. She established three hundred field hospitals.

When the war ended in 1865, the victorious armies marched through Washington in the Grand Review. General Sherman asked her to ride at the head of the XV Corps. She rode a horse at the front of the column, wearing a simple calico dress.

When the men went home, the bureaucracy remained. Many of the soldiers she had treated found themselves disabled, unable to work, and denied their military pensions by the same bureaucratic systems she had fought in the field.

The government required sworn affidavits from officers to prove a man had been wounded in action. Many of those officers were dead.

She spent the next thirty years fighting the pension office. She traveled to Washington. She tracked down witnesses. She signed her own name to affidavits, daring the federal clerks to call her a liar. She forced the system to pay the men it had broken.

She died in 1901. Her body was returned to Galesburg. There is a bronze statue of her kneeling beside a wounded soldier in the center of town. Today, a military medical discharge requires twenty-seven pages of documentation, and the chain of command remains absolute.

Mary Ann Bickerdyke: the widow who outranked a general.

Source: Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Verified via: The American Battlefield Trust, National Archives. (Some details summarized for brevity.)

Follow The Missing Plaque for stories of American women who persevered in war and peace.

I heard about it on an archived episode of Mark Malkoff's "The Carson Podcast". According to Mark and Wil's conversation, Wil's "official" podcast used audio clips authorized by the Carson estate, which I suppose is why it was on Spotify exclusive. But the last episode was 6 years ago and I wonder if it migrated somewhere else. If I have to I'd make a throwaway Spotify account but if it is available elsewhere I'd prefer not to.