A Stillness at Appomattox (73 page)

Gibbon
tried
to
bring
his
rear
brigades
up
to
help,
but orders
got
mixed
somehow
and
the
men
were
sent
in
wrong, and
in
any
case
the
Confederates
had
an
artillery
cross
fire that
made
it
impossible
for
them
to
advance,
and
one
brigade
retreated
with
no
surviving
officer
of
higher
rank
than captain.
Inside
of
twenty
minutes
Gibbon's
whole
attack
was a
flat
failure,
with
more
than
a
thousand
casualties.
A
staff officer
noted
with
admiration
that
the
beaten
men
did
not run
for
the
rear,
as
usually
happened
when
an
assault
failed. Like
Barlow's
soldiers,
they
simply
found
places
where
the ground
offered
a
little
protection
and
began
to
scrape
out foxholes
for
themselves,
keeping
up
such
fire
as
they
could, while
far
to
their
rear
the
Federal
artillery
thundered
and crashed
in
a
vain
effort
to
beat
down
the
Confederate
fire.
²³

On
Wright's
front
the
story
was
about
the
same,
except that
the
lines
of
attack
were
repelled
more
quickly.
The men
found
themselves
advancing
into
what
seemed
to
be a
semicircle
of
Rebel
trenches,
with
guns
a
mile
away
smiting
their
flanks
with
shell
while
the
everlasting
riflemen
in front
fired
as
if
they
all
owned
repeaters.
The
VI
Corps
by now
was
accounted
the
stoutest
fighting
corps
in
the
army, but
it
could
do
nothing
whatever.
Along
most
of
the
corps front
no
more
than
ten
minutes
elapsed
from
the
moment the
men
began
their
charge
to
the
moment
when
those
who had
not
been
hit
started
to
burrow
for
shelter.
Dense
thickets
and
impassable
briar
patches,
and
little
bogs
which
no man
could
cross,
broke
the
lines
into
fragments,
and
the commands
were
all
disconnected.
"And
all
the
time,"
one soldier
remembered,
"there
was
poured
from
the
rebel
lines, which
we
could
not
see,
those
volleys
of
hurtling
death."
²⁴

If
it
was
possible
for
anything
to
be
worse
than
what
was happening
to
Hancock's
and
Wright's
men,
it
was
what
was happening
to
Smith's
undermanned
brigades.
At
the
right and
left
of
his
line
Smith
had
found
the
ground
so
bad
that a
major
assault
hardly
seemed
possible,
but
in
the
center a
shallow
ravine
offered
some
protection
and
he
put
the weight
of
his
attack
there.
The
men
ran
out
of
the
sheltering
hollow
in
column
of
regiments,
with
the
12th
New Hampshire
in
front,
its
colonel
waving
a
ramrod
for
baton in
place
of
his
sword,
and
like
the
other
columns
the
men felt
that
they
were
charging
into
the
center
of
a
great
flaming crescent,
with
guns
and
musketry
hitting
them
from
three sides
at
once.

A
New
Hampshire
captain
confessed
afterward:
"To
give a
description
of
this
terrible
charge
is
simply
impossible,
and few
who
were
in
the
ranks
of
the
12th
will
ever
feel
like attempting
it.
To
those
exposed
to
the
full
force
and
fury of
that
dreadful
storm
of
lead
and
iron
that
met
the
charging column,
it
seemed
more
like
a
volcanic
blast
than
a
battle, and
was
just
about
as
destructive."
A
sergeant
said
that
the men
involuntarily
bent
forward
as
they
advanced,
as
if
they were
walking
into
a
driving
hailstorm,
and
he
related
that they
fell
"like
rows
of
blocks
or
bricks
pushed
over
by
striking
against
one
another."

One
man
remembered
that
as
he
ran
forward
he
suddenly saw
all
of
his
comrades
drop
to
the
ground,
and
he
thought that
someone
had
passed
the
order
for
everyone
to
lie
down, so
he
did
the
same.
His
company
commander
came
over,
indignant,
and
began
prodding
the
prostrate
men
with
his sword,
trying
to
get
them
to
rise
and
resume
the
charge.
He got
nowhere,
because
they
were
all
dead,
and
as
another
officer
remarked,
"nothing
but
the
judgment
trump
of
the
Almighty
would
ever
bring
those
men
upon
their
feet
again." Another
man,
marching
forward
at
the
right
of
his
company, glanced
to
his
left,
saw
no
comrades,
and
assumed
he
had fallen
a
few
paces
behind.
He
hurried
forward,
only
to
find himself
in
another
company;
everybody
else
in
his
own
line had
been
shot
down.

In
the
dust
and
the
smoke
the
men
of
this
assaulting
column
never
once
saw
their
enemies,
although
they
were charging
across
open
ground.
They
saw
nothing
but
a
line of
flashing
fire
and
billowing
smoke
that
seemed
almost
to close
behind
them
as
they
advanced,
and
the
musketry
fire was
so
unbroken
that
it
seemed
"like
one
continual
crash
of thunder."