Karl Bacon (18 page)

The car once again rocked me from side to side, mile after long mile. The iron armrest dug into my side; every bump, every jolt, every joint in the rail sent sharp stabs of pain coursing through my body. I cared not. The furlough was gone. Never would I see my wife and children again. In the next big battle I would surely be killed.

I traveled in silence, wishing not to engage or be engaged in conversation, but to wallow in my own sty of disappointment, despair, and desolation. I stumbled dejectedly back through the same streets and depots I had passed through with such joy just the day before, pausing only once to send Jessie Anne a second telegram with my regrets. Burly provost guards were out by the hundreds, making sure the sullen mobs of disgruntled soldiers boarded the correct southbound trains and, once aboard, that they remained aboard.

For what cause had our thousands fallen? What noble calling had dashed young men full of life and promise to pieces, shattered like fine china on stone? Surely the officers in command of our army had failed in their duty. Surely they were guilty of gross negligence. Such repeated and callous disregard for the lives of the men under their charge could have no other explanation. It seemed even murderous—Sergeant Needham, victim of the nerveless McClellan; Harry Whitting, victim of the bungling Burnside; John Robinson, victim of the wine-bibbing and womanizing Hooker.

There stirred within me a profound sensation, the likes of which I had not experienced at any time in my life. It grew within me and spawned a severe and abiding loathing for any and all persons or circumstances that had contributed to my misery. I was powerless when the twin beasts of wrath and malice slowly and silently overcame me during my return to the front. They stole upon me like a thief in the night, but instead of taking something precious from me, they became my dearest friends, faithful and constant bedfellows. Nay, even more, it was as if these twins lived within my skin, taking constant nourishment from the soft tissue of my soul. I neither cursed them nor fought them, but rather, I believe I reveled in this new association.

A fire grew hot deep within me. Upon it a sorcerer’s cauldron, glowing red in the flames, boiled over, spewing forth sulfurous gases both putrid and noxious to anyone that happened by.

I wished for mountains of Rebel dead, enough to make Antietam’s heaps seem mere molehills, for only in killing these vermin would my travail cease. At least Jackson was dead; now just kill the rest. Kill them all and be done with it.

For innumerable evils have compassed me about:
mine iniquities have taken hold upon me,
so that I am not able to look up.
PSALM 40:12

O
n
J
une
11
^TH
,
A FEW DAYS AFTER
I
RETURNED FROM MY CAN
-celed furlough, General Couch resigned his command of the Second Corps, so thoroughly upset was he with how General Hooker had mismanaged the Chancellorsville campaign.

The cauldron simmered deep within me. “It’s amazing how easy it is for some people to just walk away when things go badly,” I said to Jim Adams. “Until now I never had any complaint with Couch.”

“Granted, Michael. But if he’s lost heart for the fight, perhaps we’re better off without him.”

I shook my head in disgust. “You or I could get shot for walking away. A general can just ask for other duty.”

“To my mind Hancock’s an even better general, and I think he’ll be a better corps commander.”

“Perhaps,” I said. The heat within subsided for a time.

The Army of the Potomac began to move. The Confederates were marching northward again, possibly to invade Maryland
or Pennsylvania as they had tried to do the previous September. The Second Corps was positioned along the Rappahannock River where it would continue to hold until the last possible moment as the rest of the army started northward. The western end of the Second Corps line near U.S. Ford was the province of the Fourteenth Connecticut Volunteers. For several days we kept sharp eyes on the Rebels to keep them from seeing what our army was doing. We had no idea what Hooker’s grand new strategy was, but even if we had known, we could not have had less confidence in it or in the man who had devised it.

Marching orders for the Seconds Corps came down on Monday, June 15
^th
. Well before dawn we silently abandoned our rifle pits along the river and withdrew toward the Warrenton Pike. In the familiar columns of four we marched a short distance back toward Falmouth, but turned off to the left onto a closely wooded road a few miles west of the town. At first this marching was not difficult. The road was firm and the morning was cool, and since ours was the only brigade using the road, we were able to make good time. But the heat began to rise, and with it the humidity, as the sun rose above the trees overspreading the road.

After several miles, we emerged from the woods and came upon the Telegraph Road. It was here that our ordeal truly began. As we turned north toward Stafford Courthouse, the Third Division was the last division of the entire army. Just as the nether end of a cow or a hog is the foulest of places to be, so it is at the tail end of a great army on the march. Nearly one hundred thousand men had tramped up the road during the last several days. Thousands of artillery pieces, caissons, ammunition chests, and endless trains of cartage vehicles, all drawn by teams of heavy draft horses and mules, had toiled along that road. The hard smooth road had been beaten to powder. A yellow-brown cloud settled upon all who passed: the sweating and panting infantryman marching in the grass and brush to the side of the pike, the
officer atop his steed bent forward over the pommel in half-sleep, beasts straining against harnesses, and teamsters driving them along with oaths and curses enough to turn the pallid air blue, and then, when voices were shouted hoarse, with whippings.

Men cast off all manner of personal items that weighed even slightly upon them, army issue or not. Each man counted the cost of replacing the thing he thought to throw aside, as well as the added discomfort of doing without, but he invariably found that his present discomfort and weariness far outstripped all else. And so blankets, coats, shelter tents, books, extra clothing, cooking pans, a myriad of small personal items, and even knapsacks were all thrown aside, sometimes with a final mournful look back as when one parts from a dear friend. The soldiers plodded on and on, mile after mile, northward instead of southward, from all appearances an army in full retreat, yet no one called it a retreat.

I fought a sustained battle with myself to retain all that I had begun the march with, thinking somehow that casting it aside would prove my own weakness and unfitness for the work ahead, that it would give others, particularly those in command, the opportunity to point a finger in my direction, “Aha! See old Palmer there? He’s done in. We’ll not see him in the fight.”

The fire within flared anew.

As the rear guard of the army, our duty was ostensibly to protect the army from surprise attack from the rear by Confederate cavalry or infantry, but there were duties that seemed to take precedence over our defensive purpose. Stragglers were prodded forward, sometimes at the point of a bayonet, less because we feared their capture by the Rebels and more because we would not let them shirk their duty. They would be in line alongside us facing the lead and doing their part when the next big battle began. Massive quantities of accoutrements that had been cast aside by the marching multitude that had gone before were
heaped into large piles and set ablaze—a great waste of good equipment and another telltale sign of an army in full retreat.

We marched a total of about twenty miles in twelve hours, and when, at about three o’clock that afternoon, we finally came upon Aquia Creek several miles upstream from the landing, what a blessed respite it was. Most of the men jumped fully clothed into the waters of that stream and bathed and splashed and cavorted. Not in a frolicking mood, I just waded into the shallows and swam a few strokes, letting the gently flowing current wash the filth and sweat away. Camp was made on the banks of the creek; a peaceful supper was had in the twilight, and the regiment rotated by companies on picket duty that night.

At three o’clock Tuesday morning, no time was given to fix coffee or breakfast. We marched as soon as we had assembled. We covered the five miles to Dumfries by seven o’clock. A short rest was granted; coffee was immediately boiled and breakfast eaten.

Major Ellis ordered the regiment to gather round. Gone were the days when, if one was standing near the rear of the assembled regiment, one often had difficulty hearing what was said by its commander and would invariably need to ask someone farther forward. Today, Major Ellis’s voice had no trouble reaching every ear with clarity. “Men of the Fourteenth Connecticut Volunteers, I have received orders directly from General Hancock. By sundown today he expects every man of the Second Corps to be north of Occoquan Creek. Adjutant Doten tells me it is only ten miles farther up this pike, so it should be easily accomplished.”

It was not. That march to Occoquan became a severe trial for the Second Corps, but severest of all for our little regiment. This day the sun burned even hotter than the day before, the air hung heavier with humidity. The Third Division was again at the rear of the long column, but this day, the Fourteenth Connecticut
was the last regiment in the division. We were the hindmost end of the entire line of march, followed only by a mounted cavalry screen. Indeed, the word
march
itself is a gross misnomer, for it implies a regular cadence and precision of stride that is entirely lacking when a large army is “on the march.” More often than not, this movement could more accurately be described as a long trek when the weather was fine, or sometimes as a pleasant walk when there was no pressing need to meet a schedule. But on this long, hot day, the “march” could only be called a stumble, an endlessly dusty and wearying stumble.

As the sun rose higher in the sky, so did the number of stragglers. Those who could stand on their feet were urged another step forward. Those who could not were loaded into ambulances, and when there were no more ambulances, the Fourteenth was expected to force them back into line with our rifle butts and bayonets, as distasteful a duty as could ever be devised.

The weary man was poked once. “Get along, now,” he was told. “Get moving!”

The man would shuffle forward some yards and falter, only to be poked again, over and over again, until an ambulance became available, or some blessed Samaritan offered cool water. Cavalry riders followed closely behind the men of the Fourteenth, driving up our own stragglers. Riders roamed the fields on either side of the road, flushing out any tired and wretched ones found hiding there. Occasionally, a shot rang out if someone tried to flee the encircling net.

With the heat of the afternoon, exhausted men fell out of line to lie down for a rest or a bite to eat in the shade of the trees and shrubs along the road. We were instantly recognized as the rear guard, since we were the only troops carrying muskets with bayonets fixed and cavalry in close support.

“Move on,” I would say whenever I approached one of these little bands. “Get up and move on.” This always elicited at least
profuse grumbling, and several times I was cursed most vehemently to my face. “The horsemen will not be so kind” was my usual response. The men would finally rise of their own accord, shuffle back onto the pike, and resume their plodding northward.

Once I came upon such a group and, predictably, all struggled to their feet breathing every manner of threat and curse—all that is, except one. The men kicked their friend and yelled his name over and over but to no avail. I came up and gave the man a stiff poke with the butt of my rifle, thinking the man was asleep, but this man would never rise again. His heart had failed in the heat of the day, and he had died by the side of the dusty road. But this man was only the first I saw mustered out in such a way. I noted dozens of fresh graves along the way where others had stopped to bury unfortunate comrades who had fallen as they marched, struck down by the sun. Why should men die like this? Could not a halt have been ordered? A half-hour rest and fresh water? It was a murderous profligacy of human lives.

The sorcerer’s brew was at full boil.

The sun seemed to stand still that day, as still as it had for Joshua when he fought the Amorites. I put one foot in front of the other, sipped sparingly from my canteen, and toiled northward with the rest of the regiment, poking and prodding others as fatigued as I was, all the while trying to husband my own waning physical resources. My head pounded in the heat, pulsing and throbbing as if the building pressure might explode from within me. Disjointed fragments of song verse rattled around inside my skull, repeating themselves over and over again in a crescendo of maddening, silent cacophony.
We shall linger to caress him while we breathe our evening prayer—better the shot, the blade, the bowl, than the crucifixion of the soul—Farewell mother, you may never press me to your heart again—For we’re a-gwine to Washington to fight for Uncle Abe.

“Just another mile or so” was whispered back down the line,
and finally, at sunset, we stumbled across the short bridge over Occoquan Creek. The regiment moved off the road to camp. I went down to the stream and sat in the cleansing, cooling flow until the gnawing emptiness in my belly forced me to climb out and return to camp. As I lit a fire to start fixing my supper, several men from a Connecticut Artillery regiment came into camp searching for friends among our number. There were handshakes all around, and the men distributed large amounts of food and coffee that they had brought. Their batteries had been stationed in the area around Occoquan since the first of the year, and they had not seen any action, so their uniforms were clean and bright, while ours were faded and dusty. The men of the two regiments talked about home and about the war. Fast friends shared how this or that mutual acquaintance had died or had been wounded in battle or had gone missing. I sat and listened to yet another retelling of these incessant tales of human waste and tragedy, and when I could bear it no longer, I excused myself and retired to a quiet place where I laid out my blanket on the ground. Beaten down as I was from the ordeals of the day, I thought as I lay down that perhaps I would not rise again; perhaps that was even to be preferred. Indeed, that night I slept like the dead.

On Wednesday, we marched again, thirteen more miles to Fairfax Courthouse, but this time the Fourteenth was moved ahead in the order of march, and we were not forced to serve as the last of the rear guard. The heat continued unabated, and I noticed several more dead men, perhaps a dozen, at the roadside as I passed. A day of rest was granted on Thursday; perhaps General Hooker thought we might all drop dead of fatigue and thus accomplish the Rebels’ work for them. Clouds rolled in during in the afternoon. Heavy evening thundershowers washed us, cooled us, and cleansed the air of the oppressive closeness that had plagued us for days.

We left Fairfax on Friday and marched west to Centreville, a distance of only about seven miles, an easy stroll compared to what we were accustomed. On Saturday, we continued on to the west, toward the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. We passed directly through the battlefield at Bull Run and could not help but notice the many scars of the earlier battles—the blasted trees, the exploded caissons, the unburied skeletons of horses and mules picked clean by carrion birds and other vermin, and here and there, the half-buried corpse of one of the fallen.

“Two routs are not enough for Fighting Joe Hooker,” I said to Jim. “He’s looking to make it three. Nothing good can happen here and he should know it.”

The Second Corps camped at Gainesville beside the Orange and Alexandria Railroad for four days. Major Ellis told us the army was in hot pursuit of Lee’s army, but the enemy had moved up the west side of the Blue Ridge, occupied Winchester, threatened Harper’s Ferry, and had passed by northward, toward southern Pennsylvania.

A large, stinking mess of frustration was stirred into the simmering pot. Why were we doing nothing? How could we be pursuing the enemy while the Second Corps, the best in the army, was in camp? Was this yet another boondoggle or was this yet another skedaddle? Either way, this was not the road to victory.

Finally, on Thursday the 25
^th
, the Second Corps left Gainesville and marched north toward the Potomac. At near midnight on Friday, we crossed over pontoon bridges at Edward’s Ferry into Maryland. We had marched a total of about thirty miles in two days. By evening on Sunday the 28
^th
, we were camped between Frederick and Sugarloaf Mountain at Monocacy Junction.