Glory Road (16 page)
"Finally, after we had advanced only two or three miles, we filed into a woods and details were made of men to help pull the wheeled conveyances of the army out of the mire. At this we made very little progress. They seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper, and the rain showed little inclination to cease. Sixteen horses could not move one pontoon with men to help."
17
The man from the
Times
noted that double and triple teams of horses and mules were harnessed to each pontoon, and wrote: "It was in vain. Long powerful ropes were then attached to the teams, and 150 men were put to the task on each boat. The effort was but little more successful. They would flounder through the mire for a few feet—the gang of Lilliputians with their huge-ribbed Gulliver— and then give up breathlessly."
18
A New York soldier noted that guns normally pulled by six-horse teams would remain motionless with twelve horses in harness. In some cases the teams were unhitched and long ropes were fastened to the gun carriages, and a whole regiment would be put to work to yank one gun along. When a horse or a mule collapsed in the mud, this soldier added, it was simply cut out of its harness and trodden underfoot and out of sight in the bottomless mud.
19
Another veteran recorded:
"The army was accustomed to mud in its varied forms, knee-deep, hub-deep; but to have it so despairingly deep as to check the discordant, unmusical braying of the mules, as if they feared their mouths would fill, to have it so deep that their ears, wafted above the waste of mud, were the only symbol of animal life, were depths to which the army had now descended for the first time."
20
The day wore on and the rain came down harder and colder than ever. A cannon might be inched along for a few yards with triple teams or three hundred men on the draglines; when there was a breather and it came to a halt, it would sink out of sight unless men quickly thrust logs and fence rails under it. Some guns sank so deeply that only their muzzles were visible, and no conceivable amount of mere pulling would get them out—they would have to be dug out with shovels. All around this helpless army there was a swarm of stragglers, more of them than the army had ever had before, men who had got lost or displaced in the insane traffic jams, men who had simply given up and were wandering aimlessly along, completely bewildered. A private in the 63rd Pennsylvania wrote that "the whole country was an ocean of mud, the roads were rivers of deep mire, and the heavy rain had made the ground a vast mortar bed."
21
The situation grew so bad that the men finally began to laugh—at themselves, at the army, at the incredible folly which had brought them out into this mess. One soldier remembered: "Over all the sounds might be heard the dauntless laughter of brave men who summon humor as a reinforcement to their aid and as a brace to their energies," which doubtless was one way to put it. The impression gathered from most of the accounts is that it was the thoroughly daunted laughter of men who had simply got punch-drunk. Men working with the pontoons offered to get in the boats and row to their destination. One sweating soldier remarked that the army was a funeral procession stuck in the mud, and a buddy replied that if they were indeed a funeral procession they would never get out in time for the resurrection. Luckless Burnside came spattering along once, and the teamster of a mired wagon, recalling the general's pronunciamento which had begun this march, called out with blithe impudence: "General, the auspicious moment has arrived."
22
Most of this was taking place close to the river, and the Rebels on the far side saw what was going on and got into the spirit of things, enjoying themselves hugely at the sight of so many Yankees in such a mess. They shouted all sorts of helpful advice across the stream, offered to come over and help, asked if the Yankees wanted to borrow any mules, and put up hastily lettered signs pointing out the proper road to Richmond and announcing that the Yankee army was stuck in the mud.
Night came and brought no improvement, except that the pretense of making a movement could be abandoned for a while. Many of the soldiers found the ground too soggy to permit any attempt at sleep and huddled all night about inadequate campfires. The supply wagons were heaven knew where, and the rain had soaked the men's haversacks, mining hardtack and sugar and leaving cold salt pork as the only food. Once again a vast smudge drifted across the country. An engineer officer on duty at Banks Ford wrote that the army's campfires presented "the appearance of a large sea of fire" and added that the smoke covered the entire countryside and even blanketed the Rebs on their side of the Rappahannock.
The smoke was the only Yankee creation that did cross the river. This engineer officer wrote to Burnside, earnestly urging that the enterprise be abandoned. The Confederates were waiting for them, he said; they had a plank road on their side of the river by which they could easily wheel up all the guns they needed. The Army of the Potomac, which had planned to build five bridges, would do very well to get up enough pontoons for two, "but if we could build a dozen I think it would be better to abandon the enterprise."
23
Burnside was a hard man to convince, and next morning the old orders stood: get down to the river, make bridges, go across, and lick the Rebels. The
Times
man wrote that the dawn came "struggling through an opaque envelope of mist," and recorded that the rain showed no signs of stopping. Looking out at the sodden countryside, he continued: "One might fancy that some new geologic cataclysm had overtaken the world, and that he saw around him the elemental wrecks left by another Deluge. An indescribable chaos of pontoons, wagons, and artillery encumbered the road down to the river—supply wagons upset by the roadside—artillery 'stalled' in the mud—ammunition trains mired by the way." In a brief morning's ride, he said, he had counted 150 dead horses and mules. The chaplain of the 24th Michigan wrote: "The scenes on the march defy description. Here a wagon mired and abandoned; there a team of six mules stalled, with the driver hallooing and cursing; dead mules and horses on either hand; ten, twelve, and even twenty-six horses vainly trying to drag a twelve-pounder through the mire."
24
Somehow, that morning, the high command did get a few wagons forward, and some commands received a whisky ration. In Barnes's brigade of the V Corps the officers who had charge of the issue seem to have been overgenerous, and since the whisky went down into empty stomachs—for the men had had no breakfasts—there was presently a great deal of trouble, with the whole brigade roaring drunk. There were in this brigade two regiments which did not get along too well, the 118th Pennsylvania, known as the Corn Exchange Regiment, and the 22nd Massachusetts. Just after the battle of the Antie-tam the brigade had been thrust across the Potomac in an ineffectual stab at Lee's retreating army and it had been rather badly mauled. Most of the mauling had been suffered by the Pennsylvanians (it was their first fight and they carried defective muskets), and somehow they had got the notion that the Massachusetts regiment had failed to support them as it should. This morning, in the dismal rain by the river, with all the woes of the world coming down to encompass them round about, the Pennsylvanians recalled this ancient grudge and decided to make complaint about it. In no time the two regiments were tangling, and when some of the 2nd Maine came over and tried to make peace, the argument became three-sided. Before long there was a tremendous free-for-all going on, the men dropping their rifles and going at one another with their fists, Maine and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania tangling indiscriminately, inspired by whisky and an all-inclusive, slow-burning anger which made hitting someone an absolute necessity. The thing nearly took an ugly turn when a Pennsylvania major drew a revolver and made ready to use it, but somebody knocked him down before he could shoot, and in the end the fighters drifted apart with no great damage done.
25
By noon even Burnside could see that the army was helpless, and all thought of getting across the river was abandoned. One private wrote afterward that "it was no longer a question of how to go forward, but how to get back," and that sized it up. Slowly, and with infinite difficulty, the army managed to reverse its direction and began to drag itself wearily back to the camps around Falmouth.
The home-coming was cheerless enough. Before the march began the men had been ordered to dispose of all surplus baggage and camp equipment, which meant that they had to destroy all of the improvised chairs, tables, desks, and other bits of furniture which they had made for their comfort, since there was no way to ship these things to the rear. They returned, therefore, to camps which had been systematically made bleaker and more barren than they had been before. (Here and there the regimental officers had evaded these orders. The colonel of the 9 th Massachusetts had told his men to destroy nothing, as they would probably be back soon enough—he apparently had little faith that any march of Burnside's was going to lead to anything—and when they set out on the march he left the regimental quartermaster and a detail to look out for things. As a result, the 9th still had all of its little extras.) There were occasional mix-ups and quarrels. The 6th Wisconsin found the 55th Ohio in what it considered its own camp and prepared to fight. The Ohio colonel made peace by explaining that his men had been ordered there by corps command, by inviting the Wisconsin men to share the supper which his Ohioans had just cooked, and by pointing out that the ground was roomy enough for both regiments anyhow.
26
Very few of the regiments came back as compact, well-organized bodies. They came trailing and straggling in, many of the men at the point of complete exhaustion, and it took days to get everyone reassembled. A good many soldiers, in fact, never did get back. Some of them just quietly wandered away, disgustedly leaving an army which could do no better than wade up to its thighs in winter mud, and these elusive waifs were hard to catch. The 24th Michigan found it had thirty absentees when it returned, and its lieutenant colonel was Mark Flanigan, who used to be sheriff of Wayne County, owned a sword presented by the county's deputy sheriffs, and had had much experience at catching defaulters and fugitives. Sheriff Flanigan took a military posse and backtracked up the river looking for his wandering soldiers. He returned after some days with a baker's dozen of them, plus a few civilians whom he had arrested for helping deserters to escape. He reported that the trail of the other soldiers was too dim to follow.
27
Some of the men indeed had gone beyond the reach of any sheriff. Spending forty-eight hours in the cold rain and mud without warm food or dry clothing was just as hard on the ordinary human constitution in 1863 as it would be now, and there was a dreadful toll of sickness and deaths as a result of this march. In some cases men who became too exhausted to walk back to camp simply lay down in the swampy fields and died, their bodies remaining by the roadside for days afterward. Many more managed to get back to camp but went off to the hospital tents with pneumonia or other maladies. Altogether, it is probable that this mud march killed and disabled as many soldiers as were lost in some of the army's regular battles. The men settled back into camp with gloom thick and heavy. A diarist in the 3rd Michigan wrote: "I never knew so much discontent in the army before. A great many say that they 'don't care whether school keeps or not,' for they think there is a destructive fate hovering over our army."
28
There exists an informal history of one of the New York regiments in this army, a book in which the military career of every member of the regiment is briefly summarized. The regiment had an eventful career and suffered numerous losses, and after many of the names in its roster are entries like "Killed in
the Wilderness," "Died in Ander
sonville Prison," and so on. But the commonest one of the lot is the simple "Died at Falmouth."
29
The Wisconsin officer who said that this winter was the army's Valley Forge was hardly exaggerating.
Yet there was a hard indestructible core in the army somewhere, a grimly humorous acceptance of the worst that could happen. A staff officer in the II Corps, which did not make the mud march, wrote that during the week following this disaster the roads around Falmouth were covered with disorderly wandering parties of returning soldiers, bedraggled, unhappy-looking, weapons and uniforms encased in mud, faces lean and glum and unshaven, the men looking like the tattered ends of some Falstaff s army that had come completely unraveled. The staff officer encountered such a group one day: twenty men, or thereabouts, plodding through the mud. The sight offended him, and he barked out the starchy demand of the staff officer: "Who
are
these men?"
He got his answer from a non-com, who spoke up as promptly and as proudly as if he were announcing the arrival for inspection of the most polished and pipeclayed regiment in the army's dandiest corps:
"Stragglers of the 17th Maine, sir!"
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3. The Third That Remained
Someone had sent to army headquarters a boned turkey as a gift for the commanding general, and Robert, the faithful retainer, who alternately cooked for the general and soothed his tired spirit with a rare and complete selflessness, was serving it up for lunch. General Burnside seemed to have regained his poise. During the mud march, as he confessed to a friend, the strain had driven him almost frantic. Now the mud march was over, and that part of the army which maintained its organization had extricated itself from the villainous roads and was back in its camps. The general was more easy, and today he had guests at the luncheon table.
