Glory Road (11 page)

The winter twilight came, and Couch rode forward to the brick house and found the smoke and dusk so heavy that he could not see the enemy and supposed that the enemy could not see him, although, as he wrote later, he was "aware of the fact that somebody in our front was doing a great deal of shooting." It seems that he rode from one end of his prostrate battle line to the other, chatting with Lieutenant Adams and his gunners for a while and then riding slowly to the other flank. Except for the gunners and the men who were sheltering behind the brick house, he was the only man in the field who was not lying down taking cover. At length, cool and unhurried, he rode back to town, and if there was anything about the plight of his troops which he did not know it was not because he had failed to go out and see for himself.
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And still the high command had not had enough. It kept sending fresh troops in as resolutely as a butcher pushing raw material into a mincing machine. General Andrew Humphreys from the V Corps brought forward his two untried brigades of Pennsylvanians—nine-month troops enlisted the previou
s summer, hurried down to Antie
tam just too late to get into the fighting there, somewhat looked down upon by the long-term troops, but drilled and disciplined by one of the sharpest taskmasters in the army. Humphreys was tall and slim; he had been born without nerves and was decidedly a martinet, and as he took his regiments in he left no one behind. The colonel of one outfit had detailed half a dozen of the youngest, frailest soldiers to guard the regiment's knapsacks which had been piled in a side street, but Humphreys made harsh remarks about stragglers and relentlessly drove the boys on with the rest.

He got his soldiers across the canal and formed them into two lines in the murk of the fading day, and it seemed to him that the only possible chance was to keep going without a halt. If the men ever stopped to fire they were lost, best make a straight bayonet charge out of it. He issued his orders accordingly, his rookies fixed bayonets, and forward they went. As they came up through the human debris of all the previous charges, the unwounded men on the ground reached up and tried to hold them back, telling them that it was no use to go on. It was nearly dark, the field was very muddy, and the men stumbled on through the dead and wounded and the clutching hands of the unwounded, and their lines grew disordered. A staff officer galloped up, sword swinging in the dim light, yelling to the men to close and dress their ranks; and just then a great sweep of fire lit up the entire length of the stone wall, and farther up the hill and far off to right and left there were incessant quick flashings from the Rebel cannon, and the staff officer was shot down and so was nearly half of the division. The men staggered to a halt—as close to the wall, Humphreys noted proudly, as anyone got that day, and it simply was not in them or in any men to get any closer—and they fired a ragged volley or two. Then they gave way as all the others had done and went streaming back toward the town.

The 9th Massachusetts, coming up to this inferno of & field on the heels of this repulse, saw Humphreys sitting his horse all alone, looking out across the plain, bullets cutting the air all around him, and the men spontaneously set up a cheer. They were standing in the same fire themselves, but something about the way the general was taking it pleased them, and they cheered. Humphreys looked over, surprised, waved his cap to them with a grim smile, and then went cantering forward into the deadly twilight.
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It was almost entirely dark when Rush Hawkins's brigade from the DC Corps made one final assault, coming up from the railway cut and swinging out into the open ground comparatively undamaged, and then getting the worst of it in one tremendous blast that seemed to shake whole regiments apart. The colonel of the 13th New Hampshire wrote that "with one startling crash, with one simultaneous sheet of fire and flame, they hurled on our advancing lines the whole terrible force of their infantry and artillery." Others who saw that charge said that the whole field was lit up as if by sheet lightning when the Rebels opened fire. For a few moments there was a wild melee as the broken lines swayed back and forth; some of the men, unhurt by the Rebel fire, were injured simply by being knocked down and tramped on in the unendurable confusion, and Colonel Hawkins noted that "everybody, from the smallest drummer boy on up, seemed to be shouting to the full extent of his capacity.
^:
' Part of the brigade overlapped the left of the II Corps line and was shot by Federal bullets, and finally what was left of it sagged back into the shelter of the railway cut, and it was too dark to fight any more that day.
¹⁹

Around midnight Joe Hooker had the V Corps move up to relieve the exhausted survivors of the afternoon's assaults, and a couple of brigades of regulars were sent out into the plain to form a strange belly-to-earth line of battle in the pitch-darkness in front of the stone wall. When light came the regulars found their situation extremely uncomfortable. In the darkness they had stretched out just before reaching the flat summit of that final, invisible little ridge. The ground sloped just enough so that they could not be hit by the Rebel marksmen if they lay absolutely flat. The man who sat up or even lifted his head was almost certain to get hit, for the Confederates, standing at ease behind their stone wall or being equally easy in the rifle pits and gun emplacements farther up the hill, had nothing to do and were very much on the alert. As one soldier wrote, "The Confederate gunners seemed to follow the rule of Donnybrook Fair and whenever they saw a Yankee head they tried to hit it with a solid shot or shell." A regular officer recalled that from dawn to dusk the men were "unable to eat, drink, or attend to the calls of nature, for so relentless were the enemy that not even a wounded man or our own stretcher-bearers were exempted from their fire." Not until night could the men be withdrawn. One brigade, which had accomplished nothing whatever during its all-day vigil and had not fired a shot, reported that it had suffered 140 casualties.
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The 24th New Jersey, one of the greenhorn regiments in Kimball's brigade, could find only thirty-six men when it called the roll after the fighting stopped. During the night several scores of lost men and bewildered stragglers rejoined, but the regiment was still skimpy and the men were very blue next day when word came to fall in: there was going to be another attack on that stone wall. Obediently, but without a trace of enthusiasm, the 24th fell in—under a captain, all of the field officers having fallen. The captain stood before the regiment, noted that the color-bearers had not survived the action, and called out: "Who will carry the flags?" There was a dead silence. Then two non-coms quietly stepped forward and took up the state and national colors. The captain quietly shook hands with them, and the regiment dressed its ranks. And after a bit news came that orders had been changed, the attack was off, and the men relaxed.
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The story of Fredericksburg comes down at last to a simple account of the bravery which men can display and the price that can be exacted of them because they do display it; and if the men gain anything at all by any part of it, there is a transcendental scale of values in operation somewhere which it would be nice to know about. One of Humphreys's colonels remarked that the battle had been a great defeat "owing to the heavy fire in front and an excess of enthusiasm in the rear." The correspondent of the Cincinnati
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disgustedly wired his paper: "It can hardly be in human nature for men to show more valor, or generals to manifest less judgment, than were perceptible on our side that day."
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And yet this disastrous fight, as barren of concrete results as any battle the Army of the Potomac ever fought, was nevertheless in its own tragic way a dim beacon light for the future—a dull smoky flame burning reddish-black deep in the night, a glow rather than a blaze, shedding a very patchy and imperfect light, yet nevertheless keeping the winter dark from becoming absolute.

For the significant thing about that endless succession of doomed assaults across the plain was not, after all, the fact that a stupid general ordered them, but the fact that the army which, had to make them had never once faltered.

Over and over, hour after agonizing hour, the story had been the same: up front a column of attack being hammered to a bloody wreck, in the rear a new column forming, going in with a cheer even though everyone from file closers to brigadier knew just what was going to happen. Each new column moved up and was broken and another one formed in its rear and came on without any hesitation, long ranks of polished rifle barrels gleaming in the December sunlight. Here they were, moving forward endlessly, those burnished rows of steel in which the poet of the battle hymn had seen the unanswerable writ of a fiery gospel. They were borne by an army that was uninspired and badly led, an army which by its own account of things had lost all its morale but which somehow kept coming on.

TWO

All Played Out

1. A Long Talk with Robert

The Secretary of the Navy was familiar with the omens, and on December 14 they were very bad. It was generally known in Washington that a great battle had been fought at Fredericksburg, and while the War Department had nothing whatever to say about it, Mr. Welles felt that it was giving the show away by the very manner in which it kept silent. He had found, Mr. Welles noted in his diary, that whenever the War Department had unwelcome news which it would greatly prefer not to publish, it managed to perform the purely negative act of not publishing "with a great deal of fuss and mystery, a shuffling over of papers and maps, and a far-reaching vacant gaze at something undefined and indescribable."
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This entry reflects in part the extreme irritation which Secretary Stanton and General Halleck always seemed able to arouse in Mr. Welles, who was very articulate when irritated. But it also reflects the fact that the department had very good reason for shuffling its papers and looking off into space. The country was not believed in condition to absorb any more really bad news—as hardy a patriot as Governor Morton of Indiana had recently warned Lincoln that "nothing but success, speedy and decided, will save our cause from utter destruction"
²
—and the department had the worst of news for it. What was likely to happen next was more than the Secretary of War or the general-in-chief had any idea.

General Burnside at least had his army back on his own side of the river. For a time he had nourished the wild notion of making one more great assault on the stone wall. He would lead his own IX Corps, which still loved him, in a wild charge that might puncture and destroy that defensive line which the rest of the army had been unable even to reach. This idea he had settled upon in the desolate night hours following the disastrous attacks on December 13, and his subordinate generals, after some argument about who should bell the cat, had finally been able to make him see that no one in the entire army, aside from himself, had the faintest notion that such a charge could possibly succeed. Indeed, it may be that Burnside himself felt the same way about it. General Couch, talking to him in the ruined town that evening, "could see that he wished his body was also lying in front of Marye's Heights," and the whole project may have been an unreasoned groping on Burnside's
part for a dramatic: and honor
able exit from the mess into which he had blundered.
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Dissuaded from this insane venture, Burnside ordered a retreat. Here again his subordinates disagreed with him, and Hooker and Couch argued strongly that the town at least should be held as a bridgehead to make possible a new offensive thrust later on. Their advice may have been sound, but Burnside had had all the Fredericksburg he wanted and he would not listen. On a wild, windy night two days after the battle the army went back to the eastern bank, pulling its bridges behind it, and the men assumed that they were going to go into winter quarters and began to build canvas-roofed huts for warmth and comfort.

Yet Burnside was not through. The streak of obstinacy which had kept him ordering his brigades up to Marye's Heights long after everyone else had seen that it was hopeless was still in him. He had no intention of giving up his plans for an offensive—believing, apparently correctly, that an offensive before midwinter was what the administration wanted—and he quietly began to formulate new plans while the army licked its wounds and counted up the costs of the great battle.

Put down on paper, those costs were just as dreadful as they had seemed likely to be in the heat of action. In killed, wounded, and missing the army had lost more than 12,600 men, of whom almost exactly 10 per cent had been killed in action. The great bulk of the casualties had been incurred in front of the stone wall, where more than 900 Federal corpses had been counted, and there had been nothing whatever to show for them. Confederate losses on that part of the field had been very light, and there had not been at any time the slightest chance that the Federals could break through there. In the fight made by Franklin's men near Hamilton's Crossing the terms had been more nearly equal. Confederate losses there had been at least comparable to the Union losses, and the Confederate grip on the line of higher ground had been shaken briefly, even if not seriously threatened.
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Yet if that was the most that could be said—and it was —the battle as a whole had to be written down as a dismal failure. Lee's army had lost only 5,300 men, and much the greater part of it had not been in action at all.