A Stillness at Appomattox (119 page)

This
battery
also
drew
a
storm
of
fire,
but
there
was
one
gun that
could
not
be
silenced
and
it
kept
firing
canister
at
deadly close
range.

Up
on
the
ridge
west
of
the
crater
the
Rebels
put
sixteen guns
in
line.
The
Federal
gunners
swept
the
ridge
with
overwhelming
fire,
but
the
Jerusalem
Plank
Road
was
sunken
and offered
a
natural
gun
pit,
and
although
ten
of
the
sixteen guns
were
wrecked,
the
six
that
remained
could
not
be
subdued.
In
addition,
the
Confederates
had
mortars
tucked away
in
hollow
ground
beyond
the
crater,
and
these
began to
toss
shell
into
the
dense
jam
of
Federal
soldiers.
¹⁹

Minute
by
minute
the
situation
grew
worse.
Potter's
men gained
ground
on
the
right
of
the
crater,
but
they
were
under
a
killing
fire
and
their
battle
line
was
slowly
pressed back.
Mixed
elements
from
half
a
dozen
different
commands crawled
forward
a
few
dozen
yards
from
the
crater
itself
in a
valiant
attempt
to
reach
and
silence
the
guns
on
the
ridge, but
the
Rebels
had
a
good
second
line
in
operation
now
and and
there
were
not
enough
men
in
this
attack
to
break
it.
On the
left
of
the
crater
Willcox's
men
could
do
nothing
but cower
in
the
captured
trench
and
keep
up
an
ineffective musketry
fire.

Meade
had
been
right:
if
the
attack
was
to
succeed
at
all it
would
succeed
in
the
first
rush.
The
first
rush
had
failed, and
the
failure
was
both
incredible
and
irretrievable.
What could
have
been
done
easily
at
five
o'clock
had
become
a matter
of
great
difficulty
by
six
o'clock
and
by
seven
it
had become
virtually
impossible.
The
fight
now
was
just
one more
dreary
repetition
of
the
old
attempt
to
capture
entrenched
positions.
Most
of
the
men
in
the
attacking
forces knew
it
perfectly
well,
and
they
hugged
the
ground.
To
all intents
and
purposes
the
battle
was
already
lost.

But
the
high
command
did
not
know
it.
Both
corps
and army
headquarters
were
helpless.
Burnside's
command
post was
a
quarter
of
a
mile
behind
the
front
and
Meade's
was half
a
mile
behind
that,
and
the
fight
was
out
of
their
hands. An
officer
might
be
sent
forward
to
get
news.
He
would spend
five
or
ten
minutes
jostling
forward
along
the
covered way,
and
take
his
look
around,
and
then
spend
another five
or
ten
minutes
getting
back.
By
the
time
his
report
had been
assimilated
and
orders
had
been
started
forward
the situation
would
have
changed
completely—above
all
other battles,
this
one
was
fluid
and
every
minute
counted—and the
new
orders
would
be
worse
than
useless.
²⁰

Burnside
might
well
have
been
up
at
the
crater
himself— Grant
said
later
that
if
he
had
commanded
a
corps
in
a
fight like
this,
that
was
where
he
would
have
been
²¹
—but
Burnside
was
a
headquarters
operator,
and
this
was
Fredericks
burg
all
over
again:
reports
coming
in
out
of
a
blinding
fog, orders
going
forward
into
the
fog,
nothing
that
was
ordered having
any
relation
to
reality,
the
men
who
wrote
the
orders never
once
seeing
the
place
where
the
orders
were
to
be executed
or
the
people
who
were
to
execute
them;
and
all Burnside
could
do
was
to
tell
all
and
sundry
to
attack
and keep
on
attacking.
Meade
might
have
gone
forward,
but
he had
announced
beforehand
that
he
could
be
reached
at
IX Corps
headquarters
and
it
seemed
to
him
now
that
it
would only
cause
more
confusion
if
he
left
that
spot.
So
he
communicated
with
Burnside
by
telegraph,
and
he
told
Warren and
Ord
to
get
their
own
troops
moving
to
help
the
attack; and
nothing
that
happened
up
around
the
tangle
of
crater and
captured
trenches
and
broken
earth
was
in
the
least
as the
officers
in
the
rear
thought
it
was.

Warren
went
to
talk
to
Burnside
about
where
the
V
Corps ought
to
go
in,
and
Burnside
suggested
that
he
go
forward and
take
a
look,
and
Warren
did
so,
and
when
he
got
back he
and
Burnside
discussed
the
situation
in
some
detail,
after which
Warren
went
over
to
his
own
headquarters
and
ordered
Ayres's
division
forward.