Glory Road (10 page)

Winfield Scott Hancock had been ordered to follow French into action, and he had his men moving out of town as soon as the last of French's brigades crossed the canal. Hancock formed his division as French had done, in three successive brigade lines, he himself riding personally back and forth along the outskirts of the city to gouge the stragglers out of alleys and fence corners, driving his men in. His leading brigade dressed its ranks carefully when it mounted the high ground beyond the canal, and then it went ahead bravely, the battle-tested veterans crouching low as they walked forward.

From the open field where no man stood erect there rose a wan, scattered cheer, prostrate men shouting their greeting. Hancock's men made a fine sight coming up, and a wounded man was seen to prop himself on one elbow and swing his cap in welcome. Some of the men who had been lying down scrambled to their feet to go forward with this new charge. The Confederate gunners knocked great holes in the wide blue lines, and the stone wall blazed out as wickedly as ever. When the leading regiments tried to tear down a fence just beyond the final rise in the ground, the fire from the sunken road broke them all to bits. The men who were not shot ran back through the swirling smoke, or stumbled over to the lee of the brick house, or lay on the ground amid the dead and wounded. To the Confederates on the heights, when the smoke drifted away, it looked as if all the plain had turned blue.

Second wave now—General Thomas F. Meagher's Irish Brigade, Meagher himself magnificent in a tailored uniform coat of darkest green, silver stars embroidered on black shoulder knots, a yellow silk scarf across his breast—"a picture of unusual grace and majesty," a Pennsylvania soldier wrote. The Irishmen had only one of their green flags this day, the others having grown too tattered for use and the replacement flags not having arrived, and this one green flag was borne by the 28th Massachusetts, a regiment of Bay State Irish specially recruited for this brigade. Every man in the brigade wore in his cap a sprig of evergreen, and Meagher sent them down Hanover Street and out toward the canal, 69th New York in the lead.
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Like the others, the brigade formed beyond the canal and went swinging ahead, and the men who lay on the ground raised their heads and cheered as they saw them coming. The men tramped on, past the dead and the wounded and the beaten-out men of the other commands, and got up to that deadly, insignificant little high place in the flat plain, and the smoke rolled down on them like a killing cloud. The men could see very little and they could hear nothing at all but the unending racket of the firing. It was all but impossible for officers to pass an order in the choking, confused tumult. Now and then men got a glimpse of a few officers farther forward trying to tear down an obstructing fence. The 88th New York knelt behind another fence and opened its own fire, and the whole field was a pandemonium of smoke and flame and shouting men. Captain Condon of the 63rd New York learned that he was in command of the regiment, and when he tried to get the men together he could find only nine of them. As he was lining up this remnant of a command he saw a slightly larger fragment drifting up out of the smoke, a green flag at its head: the colonel of the 28th Massachusetts, who had a dozen men with him. The two officers shook hands and agreed that the brigade had been cut to pieces,
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and in the end they got their men back to the riverbank and found General Meagher rallying other survivors. By evening he was able to assemble 250 men out of the 1,400 the brigade had taken into action.

The plain was covered with smoke, and men on each side saw the fighting only in glimpses, and what they saw was always the same. Up in front, in that last deadly zone between fifty and one hundred yards from the stone wall, one firing line would be ci-umbling and going to pieces under the fearful Confederate fire; farther back, while this was happening, the broad blue lines of a new brigade would be coming up into view on the high ground near the canal; and back by the town, compact columns would be marching down the parallel highways, making their way toward the canal. There never seemed to be any end to it, and the Confederates lost all track of the number of separate assaults they had repelled. While the Irish officers were plucking their men out of the smoke fog, Hancock's third brigade was coming over the plain—Brigadier General John Caldwell's men, who had broken the Rebel line at Bloody Lane above the Antietam, going in now as then on the heels of the Irish.

What had been done by the Antietam could not be done here. Caldwell got part of his brigade up to the high-water mark—his valiant 5th New Hampshire, Colonel Cross and three successors all down with wounds, the regiment under its fifth commander in ten minutes; part of his 81st Pennsylvania, with the combined 61st and 64th New York beside them. They could advance no farther. The very endurance and determination of the survivors of the earlier attacks were a handicap. These men lay by the hundreds all across the front in a ragged belt two hundred yards deep, keeping up such fire as they could manage, and in the blanketing smoke they shot wildly, hitting their own comrades in the front lines.
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Meanwhile, the fire from the sunken road and from the heights came without a moment's letup. No man who stood upright in the open plain could hope to live long.

Yet there were men who wanted to try. Up to Caldwell came the slim, handsome young colonel who commanded the two New York regiments, a dandy of a man with pointed mustaches, the name of him Nelson Miles. He wanted permission to take his two regiments and make a bayonet charge straight up the road for the stone wall. It needed just one spirited dash to clear that wall, he argued, and if two regiments started, men all over the plain would jump up and follow them. But Caldwell refused. There were no supports; if the men did breach the Rebel line they could not stay there, the thing was just impossible. . . . And then Caldwell was wounded and was carried off the field, and Miles took a bullet in the throat and went to the rear with blood dripping through the fingers which he held pressed against the wound. There was nothing for the survivors to do but hug the ground and hope for the best.
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From his perch in the cupola General Couch had seen some of this —not much, for the smoke was very heavy, and from the rear one could make out little but the dim forms of blue-clad men swaying uncertainly in a terrible haze that glowed and sparked with deadly fixe. (One man who watched the attackers from the heights beyond the river found himself amazed that the heavy fire "did not absolutely sweep them from the face of the earth.") General Howard, who stood beside Couch for a time, heard him gasp as the smoke lifted briefly: "Oh, great God! See how our men, our poor fellows, are falling!"
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Couch decided that enough of them had fallen in front of the stone wall, so he told Howard to lead his division farther to the right, where the Rebel line looked a bit softer. If this impregnable line could not be stormed, perhaps it might be flanked, and Howard must try. There were plenty of troops available to follow him in if his men won any success, and Howard rode off to put his division into action.

Couch's idea was a good one, but the shape of the ground was against it. Although no one seems to have realized it at the time, it simply was not possible for an attack issuing from Fredericksburg to hit the Rebel line anywhere except along that impassable sunken road. It looked as if Howard could cross the ditch where the others had crossed and could then shift to his right until he was half a mile or more north of Marye's Heights; but when his men tried it they found that they could edge to the right only a little way before striking impassable ground. A long slough, known locally as Gordon's Marsh, ran to the north on the western side of the ditch: an unobtrusive dike which forced every Federal assault on this part of the field to drift to the left and go crashing up against the one front that could not be broken.
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Howard's men drifted and instead of flanking the stone wall they came in, at last, over the wreckage of the other two divisions, fared as they had fared, and reached the outer boundaries of human endurance on that same little rise of ground in front of the wall. Survivors hid out behind houses or face-down on the earth as the others had done, and it seemed that no one could live out in the open. Howard wrote that he had "a feeling akin to terror" whenever he had to send an aide or a mounted orderly forward with a dispatch.
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The men who lay in the open used what poor cover they could get. One officer saw three men sheltering behind a dead horse. Here and there a man would be able to get two or three rocks which he would pile up in a pitiful little barricade. Many a soldier lay behind the corpse of a comrade while he loaded and fired. In the brick house and in other houses back on the edge of town sharpshooters found vantage points from which they could fight effectively. They and the men in the field kept up a fire which now and then stung the Southerners painfully. The Confederate brigadier who commanded the troops back of the stone wall was killed, various guns in the upper pits were put out of action from time to time, and it was made risky for any Confederate to pass from one level to another of the defenses on the smoking hillside. But there was nothing in this fire that could possibly drive the defenders away. One Federal who remembered how effectively the Rebels were hidden behind the wall remarked that "no doubt for every Johnny hit a ton of lead was expended," and the men could hear their bullets spattering harmlessly on the stones and knew they were killing very few of the enemy.
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Somewhere far to the rear, beyond the deep river, insulated from reality by distance, by the trappings of command, and by sheer mental confusion, there was a guiding intelligence for this army, and to it there came dimly the news of this great fight. It sluggishly sent back repeated and unvarying orders to attack and to keep on attacking. Divisions from the III, V, and DC Corps came over to join in the fight, and always the story was the same. The men who went into action were mostly veterans, and as they marched out into the range of the Confederate gunners they were able to assay with complete accuracy the exact measure of their chances on this smoking plain; yet it is not recorded that any of them turned away or refused to go forward, and each brigade went in with a cheer, however it might be fated to come out.

A brigade from the V Corps tried to come in through an unfinished railway cut at the left. The Rebel gunners, vigilant above the battle smoke, saw the brigade coming and swung their guns over and waited for it, and when it came out on the level ground they racked it. The men who were not hit were blinded by the dirt and gravel kicked up by the flying canister, and the brigade drifted back and took refuge in a stretch of low ground near the railway and found to its horror that it was huddling in a spot which had been a sink for a Rebel camp. In the 22nd Massachusetts it was recalled that while the men cowered in this unpleasant spot the quavering voice of a very proper ex-schoolteacher in the ranks was lifted in inquiry: "Who is in command of Company H?" A sergeant growled a reply: who wanted to know, and why? And the ex-schoolteacher—primly, as if the village debating society had convened here in front of the stone wall—made his answer: "I move that we be taken out of here by some responsible officer." The regiment's historian wrote that this drew an unfeeling reply from the sergeant.
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Most of the soldiers on the plain would have seconded the motion if they could have heard it. But the high command kept putting more people in instead of taking them out, and the Rebels methodically shot them down as fast as they came in, and the rifle fire rose to an unheard-of intensity. General Caldwell, up by the brick house, wrote that it was "the hottest I have ever seen," and a private soldier said the men in an attack "stood as though they were breasting a storm of rain and sleet, their faces and bodies being only half turned to the storm, with their shoulders shrugged."
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Finally, in desperation, Couch ordered field artillery out into the open. His chief of staff protested that no battery could live in that field, and Couch agreed that that was probably true but said the gunners would have to go out there anyway: something had to be done to cut down the Confederate fire, and anyway, it was better to lose guns than men.

So the artillery went in at a gallop, clattering across the ditch and swinging into battery on the higher ground just beyond—a Rhode Island and a New York battery from the II Corps and a battery of regulars from the IX Corps. They were in trouble from the very start. Sharpshooters were hitting the regulars before they even had their guns unlimbered, and the Rebel artillerists quickly found the exact range and began exploding their shells right over the battery. Within twenty minutes the battery commander and a dozen men had been knocked out, most of the horses had been killed, and the survivors had been driven away from the guns three times. Never had they been in so hot a spot.

It was the same with the others. The Rhode Island battery lost men so fast that its skipper, Captain John G. Hazard, went back to the ditch, rounded up infantry stragglers, and brought them up to help work his guns. General Howard, who saw it all, wrote that his conduct was "equal to anything I ever saw on a field oi: battle." And presently young Lieutenant Adams, commanding the right section of this battery, limbered up one of his guns and went galloping madly forward with it until h
e was less than 150 yards away f
rom the stone wall, where he unlimbered in the open road. This looked like nothing in the world but a spectacular way to commit suicide, and three cannoneers in succession were killed at the gun's muzzle before the first charge could be rammed home. But the gun and its crew stayed there, pounding at close range at the stone wall, firing, as one of Hancock's staff reported, as coolly as if they had been firing blank cartridges on a review.
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