A Stillness at Appomattox (22 page)

There
had
never
been
a
fight
like
this
before.
Things
were clear
enough
on
the
map,
and
Grant
had
an
uncanny
way of
studying
a
map
once
and
then
carrying
it
in
his
memory, but
neither
he
nor
anyone
else
had
ever
tried
to
fight
a
battle in
a
place
where
nobody
could
see
anything
at
all.
The armies
were
visible
neither
to
their
enemies
nor
to
their own
commanders.
It
would
do
no
good
for
the
commanding general
to
ride
out
along
his
lines,
because
there
was
quite literally
no
place
where
as
many
as
a
thousand
men
could be
seen
at
one
time,
and
in
any
case
where
the
men
were fighting
the
forest
was
so
dense
that
riding
was
impossible. There
were
no
adequate
roads,
and
the
Federal
maps
were very
imperfect
anyway,
and
the
most
careful
directives
could come
down
to
a
matter
of
saying—The
enemy
is
over
there somewhere;
go
and
find
him
and
fight
him.

Warren
cantered
along
a
farm
lane
and
came
up
to
one of
his
trusted
division
commanders,
Major
General
James Wadsworth—white-haired,
crowding
sixty,
an
old
man
as ages
were
reckoned
in
the
army—and
Warren
told
him
to
get his
men
into
action
just
south
of
the
Turnpike.
Wadsworth was
a
stout
fighter,
much
admired
by
his
men;
he
was
very wealthy
and
he
was
serving
without
pay,
and
they
honored him
for
it,
and
they
remembered
how
on
the
weary
march to
Gettysburg
he
had
seized
civilians
who
stood
cheering
by the
roadside
and
had
taken
their
shoes
for
his
own
men
to wear.
He
was
quite
willing
now
to
go
in
and
fight
beside Griffin's
division,
but
he
did
not
know
where
Griffin's
division was
and
he
asked
Warren.
Warren
pulled
out
a
pocket
compass
and
studied
it—tactics
here
were
as
much
a
matter
of navigation
as
anything—and
he
told
him
to
march
straight west.
Wadsworth's
division
fell
into
line,
crossed
an
open field,
and
plunged
into
the
wood.
¹⁸

The
division
marched
quickly
into
trouble.
Either
Wads-worth
had
no
compass
or
it
was
defective,
or
perhaps
in
that incomprehensible
undergrowth
it
was
not
humanly
possible to
move
any
body
of
troops
in
a
straight
line.
In
any
case the
men
swung
round
toward
the
north,
and
instead
of
coming
in
beside
Griffin's
men
they
came
in
on
an
angle,
presenting
their
left
flank
to
the
Confederates
just
at
the
moment when
the
Confederates
were
sending
in
reinforcements
for
a counterattack.
The
noise
of
the
firing
swelled
to
a
terrible new
pitch
as
enormous
rolling
volleys
came
out
of
the
woods to
break
regiments
and
brigades
to
bits.

No
one
could
remember
anything
very
distinctly,
afterward.
Some
regiments
found
that
they
had
got
in
behind other
regiments
that
were
supposed
to
be
far
off
to
one
side. Others
knew
they
were
near
the
Rebels
only
when
they found
themselves
being
shot
at—shot
at
with
deadly
aim, they
noticed:
the
Confederates
were
hugging
the
ground
and firing
low,
and
if
they
could
not
see
much
of
their
target they
were
hitting
it
with
murderous
efficiency.

There
seemed
to
be
whole
acres
where
the
musketry
had cut
the
saplings
in
two
a
few
feet
from
the
ground,
so
that the
tops
lopped
over
drunkenly
to
make
progress
even
more impossible.
Wadsworth
tried
hard
to
swing
his
division around
to
face
the
flanking
fire,
but
it
could
not
be
done
.

Troops
could
not
be
maneuvered
in
this
ground.
Companies fought
by
themselves,
lone
squads
by
themselves
sometimes, and
the
fact
that
no
connected
battle
line
could
be
seen seemed
to
give
a
new
terror
to
the
fighting.
Some
regiments broke
and
fled,
not
because
they
were
being
punished
but because
the
crash
of
battle
suddenly
sounded
beside
or
behind
them
and
the
panic
cry:
"We're
flanked!"
was
raisedo

Beyond
Wadsworth,
Warren
had
found
his
division
of Pennsylvania
Reserves.
The
Reserves
were
famous
veterans— Meade's
own
division,
once
upon
a
time,
the
division
whose command
the
governor
of
Pennsylvania
once
offered
to George
B.
McClellan
in
the
springtime
of
the
war.
It
was
led by
a
former
army
surgeon,
Brigadier
General
Samuel
W. Crawford,
a
member
of
the
original
Fort
Sumter
garrison: "a
tall,
chesty,
glowering
man,
with
heavy
eyes,
a
big
nose and
bushy
whiskers,"
as
one
of
his
men
remembered
him, who
"wore
habitually
a
turn-out-the-guard
expression."
Crawford
tried
to
bring
his
men
in
beside
Wadsworth's,
but
he had
even
more
trouble
than
Wadsworth
had
had.
One
regiment
blundered
straight
into
the
middle
of
a
Confederate brigade
and
was
captured
almost
entire,
and
the
others stumbled
around
in
the
underbrush,
lost
all
sense
of
direction
and
contact,
and
knew
only
that
they
were
constantly being
shot
at
from
the
most
improbable
directions
by
men they
could
not
find.
It
seems
that
the
Reserves
were
just
a trifle
lukewarm
about
things,
anyway,
this
day.
Most
of
them had
refused
to
re-enlist,
and
the
division
was
fully
aware that
it
had
only
twenty-seven
more
days
to
serve
before
it would
be
sent
home.
Understandably,
this
tempered
enthusiasm:
who
wanted
to
get
shot,
so
near
the
end
of
his
time as
a
soldier?
¹⁹