This Hallowed Ground (59 page)

The men of the Army of the Potomac did not understand any of this as the spring campaign got under way. They marched down to the crossings of the Rapidan on a spring day when the May sunlight was bright, and the wild flowers sparkled along the roadside and the dogwood blossoms lit the gloomy forests, and as the long columns moved
down to the river the sunlight glinted on musket barrels and bayonets and trundling brass cannon, and the movement of armed men looked like a vast pageant of immeasurable significance. On the plain above the river the long lines were ranked in brigade and division front, mounted officers gesturing with their swords; and one after another these long polished lines wheeled and broke into marching columns, and the unbroken stream of men in blue swept on down to the pontoon bridges and the fords, flags flying, bands making music, everyone full of hope and the tingling feeling that perhaps the final act had commenced.
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Beyond the river there was a vast stretch of dark, almost roadless second-growth timber, known locally as the Wilderness. Somewhere off beyond this forest was the Army of Northern Virginia, and the immediate task of the Army of the Potomac was to get through the forest, reach the open country beyond it, and engage the Confederates in a stand-up fight. The Wilderness itself was no place for a battle. Even the best of its roads were no better than enclosed lanes; its long stretches of forest were full of spiky little saplings and heavy underbrush, there were few clearings, and the whole country was crisscrossed with meaningless little streams that created unexpected ravines or dank fragments of bogland.

Yet it was precisely in the middle of the Wilderness that the great battle began. Lee had no intention of waiting for his enemies to get out in the open country to make their fight. He was outnumbered and outgunned, but here in the almost trackless forest these handicaps would not matter so much; and on the morning of May 5 he drove straight ahead, to find the Federals as quickly as he could and to attack them as soon as he found them. The left wing of his army collided with the right center of the Army of the Potomac a little after daybreak, and after a brief moment of skirmish-line firing the battle got under way.

Grant reacted with vigor. If the Confederates were here in the Wilderness, here he would fight them; orders for the advance were countermanded, and the great ungainly mass of the Federal army turned slowly about and went groping forward through the woodland twilight, men scrambling through almost impenetrable underbrush as they struggled to get out of marching columns into fighting lines. The Confederates were advancing along two parallel roads, the roads three or four miles apart, no place on either road visible from any spot on the other; two separate battles began as the Federals swarmed in to meet them — began, grew moment by moment, and boiled over at last into one enormous fight, with the harsh fog of powder smoke trapped under the trees and seeping out as if all the woodland were an immense boiling cauldron.

Artillery was of little use here; the guns could not be moved through the wood, and if they were moved they had no field of fire. Infantry lines broke into company and platoon units as they moved, sometimes reassembling when the undergrowth thinned, sometimes remaining broken and going forward without cohesion. Men came under heavy fire before they saw their enemies — in most places no one could see one hundred yards in any direction, and as the battle smoke thickened, visibility grew less and less. Often enough there was nothing but the sound of firing to tell men where the battle lines were, and as more and more brigades were thrown into action this sound became appalling in its weight, seeming to come from all directions at once.

It was one fight, and yet it was many separate fights, all carried on almost independently, the co-ordination that existed being little more than the instinctive responses of veteran fighting men. Opportunity and dire peril went hand in hand for each commander, and often enough they went unnoticed because almost nothing about this strange battle could actually be seen by anybody. At one stage the two halves of Lee’s army were separated, a wide gap between them, and the Army of Northern Virginia might have been destroyed if a strong Federal force could have gone through the gap. But the gap went undiscovered, and when its existence was sensed a Federal division that was sent up to take advantage of it lost its way in the dense forest, swung half around without intending to, and exposed its flank to waiting Confederates, who broke it and drove it off in retreat. On the Union left, the first Federal elements engaged were driven back, and for a time it was the Union army that was in danger of being cut in half; Hancock’s II Corps, which had had the advance, was still off to the south somewhere, hurrying up a narrow lane to get into the fight, and the Confederates had a brief chance to come through the opening before Hancock’s men could arrive. But reinforcements came up to hold them off, Hancock got his men on the scene in time, and the Confederates were driven back, outnumbered and all but disorganized.

The woods took fire, helpless wounded men were burned to death, and wood smoke mingled with the smoke from the rifles to create a choking, blinding gloom. Night came at last, and the wild tempo of battle became slower; yet some of the men who fought in the Wilderness felt that the fighting never actually stopped all night long, and there were nervous outbursts of firing at intervals all up and down the lines. Off to the rear, such batteries as had been able to get into position sent shells over at random all through the night, and there was a constant shuffling movement of troops as brigade and division commanders tried desperately to pull their fighting lines together.

The battle flamed up in full strength as soon as daylight came.
Hancock, on the Union left, held a strong advantage. Not all of Lee’s army was up: Longstreet’s corps, back at last from its long tour of duty in Tennessee, was hurrying in from the west, but it had not arrived in time to get into the first day’s firing, and A. P. Hill’s corps, which held that part of the Confederate line, had been fearfully cut up and was badly outnumbered. Hancock sent his men in at dawn, the Confederates gave ground, and before long the Federal assaulting column had reached the edge of one the Wilderness’s rare clearings, a run-down farm owned by a widow named Tapp. Here was Lee himself, with a good part of the Confederate wagon train visible not far to the rear; if this clearing could be seized and held, Lee’s right would be broken once and for all and his army would be well on the way to destruction. The Federals paused to straighten their lines and then went pounding in, flags in front, everybody cheering at the top of his voice.

Final victory was not ten minutes away, and the surging blue lines came in toward the guns … and then ran into a shattering countercharge. The head of Longstreet’s corps had come on the scene at the last crucial moment, and its tough Texas brigade — the Grenadier Guard of the Confederacy, as one historian has called it — struck like a trip hammer. Lee himself was riding in with the men, swinging his hat, his usual calm broken for once by the hot excitement of battle; he would have led the countercharge if the Texans had not compelled him to go to the rear, out of harm’s way.
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The massed Confederate artillery blazed away at point-blank range, the Federal assault came to a standstill and then broke up in a tangle of disorganized fugitives, and the victory that had seemed so near dissolved and vanished while the pitch of battle rose to a new crescendo.

Then, abruptly, the pendulum swung the other way, and before long it was the Army of the Potomac that was in trouble, with disaster looking as imminent as triumph had looked just before.

Ordered troop movements were almost impossible in the Wilderness, but somehow Longstreet managed one. The left flank of Hancock’s corps was “in the air,” after the repulse of the attack on the Tapp farm clearing; the Confederates saw it, and Longstreet swung a part of his crops around and came in from the south with a crushing flank attack … and suddenly Hancock’s line went to pieces, masses of Union troops were going back to the rear, and the Confederates had seized what might be a decisive advantage.

But Hancock was just about as good a man for moments of crisis as Pap Thomas. A north-and-south road crossed the road along which the Confederates were advancing, a mile or so to the Union rear, and along this road Hancock had his men prepare a stout log breastwork. He rallied them here, prepared a solid new battle line, and when the Confederate
drive reached the point, it was stopped and then driven back. The woods were on fire all along the front here, Longstreet’s men were almost as disorganized by their victory as the Federals had been by their defeat, Longstreet himself was badly wounded — shot by his own men, in the blind confusion, just as Stonewall Jackson had been shot at nearby Chancellorsville a year earlier — and the crisis was met and passed. By the end of the day Union and Confederate armies on this part of the field were about where they had been in the morning, except that many thousands of men on each side had been shot.

One more blow the Confederates swung before the battle ended. The extreme right of the Army of the Potomac, operating in dense woods where no regimental commander could see all of his own men, had an exposed flank. Lee found it, and at dusk the Federal right flank was driven in just as the left flank had been driven during the morning. But John Sedgwick, who was still another imperturbable Union corps commander cut to the Thomas pattern, was in charge here; and as the Rebel drive lost its impetus in the smoky darkness he brought up reserves, stabilized a new line, and got the flank securely anchored. And at last the noise died down, the firing stopped, the smoke drifted off in the night, and the two exhausted armies settled down to get what sleep they could, while the cries of wounded men in the smoldering forest (flames creeping up through the matted dead leaves and dried underbrush) made a steady, despairing murmur in the dark.

 … The fearful story of war is mostly the story of ordinary men who are called upon to suffer and endure and die to no purpose that they can easily discover; and generally the story of a great battle is no more than the story of how some thousands of these men acquit themselves. But once in a great while the terrible drama of war narrows to a very small focus: to a place in the heart and mind of one man who has been burdened with the great responsibility of making a decision and who at last, alone with himself in a darkened tent, must speak the word that will determine how history is to go.

It was this way in the Wilderness after the two days of battle were over. Here were the two armies, lying crosswise in a burned-out forest, death all around them, the scent and feel of death in the soiled air. They had done all they could, nobody had won or lost anything that amounted to very much, and the men who had to carry the muskets would go on doing whatever they were told even if they were destroyed doing it. But someone at the top must finally say what was going to happen next, and as the night of May 6 settled down this someone was U. S. Grant.

Technically, his army (Meade’s army, actually, but from now on to the end people would think of it as Grant’s) had been whipped quite as badly as Hooker’s army had been whipped at Chancellorsville, almost
on the same ground, one year earlier. It had had horrifying losses — seventeen thousand men or thereabouts shot or blown loose from their commands — its flanks had been beaten in, it had completely failed to drive Lee away from his chosen ground, and in 1863, Hooker no more roughly handled, had gone back north of the Rapidan to recruit and refit and to let Lee decide where the next fight would take place. Now it was up to Grant, and the crucial decision of all the war was his to make.

Grant thought it over, taking counsel of nobody, throughout the day of May 7. The armies stayed in each other’s presence, there was picket-line firing all day long, and although things were easy compared with what happened on the two days before nothing seemed to be settled; as far as the men in the ranks were concerned, the battle was still going on. Finally night came in once more, and after dark the divisions of the Army of the Potomac were pulled out of line and put on the road for another march. And when they moved, they all moved —
south
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In other words, the battle of the Wilderness was no defeat, simply because Grant refused to admit that it was a defeat. He would keep moving on, which was the great point he had laid down in his offhand sketch of the secret of strategy, and he would move in the direction that made continued fighting inevitable.

The army headed that night for Spotsylvania Court House, ten miles off to the southeast; a country town, like Gettysburg in that its importance derived from the fact that all the roads met there. If Grant could get his men on these road crossings before Lee’s men got there, then he would be between the Army of Northern Virginia and Richmond, and Lee would have to do the attacking — which, under the circumstances, could hardly mean anything but defeat for Lee’s army. The move failed by a very narrow margin. Lee’s advance guards got to Spotsylvania a few rods ahead of the advance guard of the Army of the Potomac, and what began as an affair of skirmishers around a country market town blew up quickly into an enormous fight that seemed to have no beginning, no end, and no visible result.

For the fight that started at Spotsylvania lasted for ten uninterrupted days, and it was even worse than the Wilderness fight had been. It was like the Wilderness in a way, in that so much of the ground was heavily wooded and the troops had to fight blindly, nobody from commanding general down to private ever being quite sure just where everybody was and what was going on. As the fight developed, Grant’s army kept on edging around to the left, trying vainly to get around the Confederate flank and interpose between the battlefield and the Confederate capital. It never quite made it, but in the ten days the two armies swung completely
around three quarters of a circle, and on May 12 they had what may have been the most vicious fight of the whole war — a headlong contest for a horseshoe-shaped arc of Confederate trench guarding the principal road crossing, with hand-to-hand fighting that lasted from dawn to dusk, in a pelting rain, over a stretch of breastworks known forever after as the Bloody Angle. Here men fought with bayonets and clubbed muskets, dead and wounded men were trodden out of sight in the sticky mud, batteries would come floundering up into close-range action and then fall silent because gun crews had been killed; and after a day of it the Union army gained a square mile of useless ground, thousands upon thousands of men had been killed, and the end of the war seemed no nearer than it had been before.