Glory Road (49 page)

One shell exploded directly beneath a Federal gun, putting the entire gun crew out of action, and an artillery officer remarked with approval that men ran in and put the gun back in action before the wounded were removed. Another shellburst put twenty-seven men out of action—a fantastic toll for one shell, in those days—and an Ohio private noted later that the ground around one battery was hit by 115 separate projectiles. The Federal gunners fired furiously in reply. Northeast of Culp's Hill they pulverized a Rebel artillery battalion, smashing guns and killing men and, in the end, knocking the props out from under the murderous bombardment of Cemetery Hill.
⁷

On Sickles's front General Hunt kept piling battery after battery in from the artillery reserve, and the guns took position just behind the peach orchard along a little country lane and got into a tremendous fight with Longstreet's gunners. For a time they followed the old tactics that had been worked out at Antietam, twenty or thirty guns concentrating at a time on one Rebel battery, shifting to another when they had put the first out of action. One gunner reported that they silenced five batteries in succession. But they were not having things all their own way, and the Confederate fire was heavy, especially in the peach orchard, where shell and solid shot took a frightful toll. A New York battery there found itself fighting two enemy batteries at once, one section dueling with one while the other two fought the other. The Rebels had the exact range. Supporting Yankee infantry hugged the ground behind fences and mounds of earth, trees were stripped and broken, men and horses were mangled, and the battery commander wrote that he was in "as sharp an artillery fight as I ever witnessed."
⁸

Then the high quaver of the Rebel yell went up from field and wood and the infantry came out—John B. Hood's famous division, charging in from the southwest, driving straight for the Devil's Den, forcing its way through ravines and thickets and sweeping over the rocky little hill and around into the valley between Devil's Den and the Round Tops.

The two guns and one regiment which Birney had put in this valley put up a prodigious fight, but they had to give ground, and the defenders of Devil's Den itself were swamped. This was miserable ground for a fight, the rocks and gullies breaking up formations so that there seemed to be no connected lines of any kind. Men fought by regiments and by companies and squads, a choking haze of smoke lying close to the ground. The Rebels got in among the guns and captured three of them, and Birney sent off desperate appeals for help. Colonel de Trobriand, who was in the wheat field and the wood beside it, had to send two of his regiments over to help, and he was left holding part of his line with the 5th Michigan deployed as skirmishers, volleying away against a host of Rebels who found shelter in a muddy little ravine that ran across his front. He said later that if the Confederates had jumped up and charged then his whole brigade would have been demolished. Even as it was, his line was visibly melting away, and it seemed to him that each of his men was fighting as if "the destiny of the Republic was attached to the desperate vigor of his efforts." He wedged the 17th Maine in behind a little stone wall, and to the left the terrible uproar of firing and shouting men came closer and closer and he knew that Devil's Den was being lost.
⁰

Sickles took a brigade away from Humphreys and sent it pounding over double-quick, but the line had been stretched too thin. The brigade came in just as fragments of the battle line were breaking to the rear. De Trobriand's Maine regiment was flanked out from behind its wall, his Michigan skirmish line collapsed, and at last the whole left of Birney's line gave way in wild confusion. The men who had been defending the valley below the Round Tops were driven back, yelling Confederates came charging through, and a solid Rebel brigade swung off and went plunging straight ahead for Little Round Top, upon which at that moment there was no one in Union blue except a few men in a signal detachment.

Here was unrelieved and final disaster, coming on fast and yelling like fiends, for if the Rebels ever got Little Round Top the whole of Cemetery Ridge would have to be abandoned and the battle would be lost once and for all. Up on the hill with the signal men was General Warren, and he spotted the danger just in time and hurried off for help. Just north of the hill he met George Sykes bringing his corps down to reinforce the left as Meade had ordered—George Sykes, stiff and crusty and very much old-army, looking always a little tired and out of sorts, uninspired and uninspiring, but all soldier for all of that. Sykes was sending two brigades down into the flat land along Plum Run to reinforce Birney, and at Warren's request he shot another brigade straight south to defend Little Round Top.

This was the brigade of Colonel Strong Vincent, who had sat in the moonlight a couple of nights earlier to reflect that a man could do worse than die on Pennsylvania soil under the old flag. Vincent got to the southern slope of the hill and swung his four regiments into line just as the Confederates came lunging up the valley. The Confederates clambered up over the boulders to finish things, the Federals squatted behind the boulders and met them with fire, the valley was filled with smoke and flame and a great deafening clamor, and the Rebels shifted their strength to break in the flanks of this new Yankee line.
¹⁰

At the extreme left of Vincent's line was the 20th Maine led by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, who had been college professor and minister of the gospel before the war and who was becoming a good deal of a soldier. Vincent went to the southern end of the hill with him, pointed down the slope, and told him to take his 350 men down there and hold the ground at all hazards, and the 20th ran down the hill and collided with a powerful flanking column that bent the left half of the regiment back at a ninety-degree angle and threatened to overwhelm the whole outfit by sheer weight. Chamberlain had to space his men several paces apart to keep the Rebels from getting around his left, and when the first wild rush was beaten back the Rebels settled down among the logs and trees and rocks for the sharpest fire fight this Maine regiment was ever in. The reeking smoke filled the air, the Yankee line swayed and staggered as if the weight of the attack were a tangible force that shoved men off balance, and the valley rang with rifle fire, with the clang of metal ramrods in hot musket barrels, with the yells and cries of Northerners and Southerners caught up in a great fury of combat.

Far behind him Chamberlain heard a new burst of shooting and yelling, which for all he knew might mean that the' other end of Vincent's line had caved in. Nearly half of the 20th was down, ammunition was almost gone, here and there the colonel could see men preparing to swing their muskets as clubs when the next Rebel assault was driven home. In sheer desperation—for that next assault would inevitably crush the entire line—Chamberlain ordered his men to fix bayonets and charge.

No one could hear a shouted order in that terrible racket, but somehow the word was passed along the line, by gesture and by example, and the men glanced right and left, nerving themselves for the shock. A young lieutenant suddenly waved his sword, yelled: "Come on! Come on, boys!" and ran toward the Confederate line, which was barely thirty yards away. The color guard followed him, streamers of smoke eddying about the shaken flags. There was a moment of hesitation, and then with a wild cry the whole regiment charged in a long, ragged line.

Perhaps it worked because it was so unexpected. The Confederates fell into confusion as the charge hit them—Chamberlain remembered one Rebel officer firing a pistol with one hand while he held out his sword in token of surrender with the other—and the whole first line broke and ran. The second line collapsed a moment later, the Maine regiment swung up over the slope of Big Round Top, and Chamberlain at last had trouble getting his men to halt and adjust their line, the men crying that they were "on the road to Richmond." They sent upward of four hundred prisoners to the rear.
¹¹

Yet if that wildly improbable counterattack had saved the army's flank, it had saved it only for the moment. This was a day on which crisis followed crisis. While they were hitting the 20th Maine the Confederates were also working around the right of Vincent's line. They made better progress here, and the right-flank regiment, 16th Michigan, was broken and driven back. Vincent ran down into the melee to rally his men and the Rebels shot him dead, and once more the way was open for Confederate conquest of Little Round Top.

General Warren was still on hand, watching, and he saw this new disaster and once again rode madly off for help. The first regiment he met was the 140th New York, part of General Stephen Weed's brigade in Sykes's corps, and while he was still fifty yards away Warren began shouting to Colonel Patrick O'Rorke to bring his men up the hill as fast as they could run. O'Rorke protested that he was under orders to follow the rest of the brigade somewhere else, but Warren replied: "Never mind that, Paddy! Bring them up on the double-quick—don't stop for aligning! I'll take the responsibility!" And because Warren was known to be intimate with Meade, O'Rorke assumed that he could square things, so he took the 140th up on Little Round Top at a dead run.

He had no time whatever to spare. The Rebels who had broken the Michigan regiment were coming up the hill. O'Rorke jumped off his horse, tossed the reins to his orderly, called out: "This way, boys!" and ran down the slope toward the enemy, his men at his heels. It was as strange a counterattack as the army ever saw. The men went in with unloaded weapons. They did not stop to fix bayonets, they did not even club their empty muskets: they simply ran straight at their foes, and the only weight their charge had was the weight of their running bodies. Perhaps the mere appearance of fresh troops was enough for the moment. The Confederates wavered and drew back, and the 140th went into line beside Vincent's brigade, and in a few minutes the rest of Weed's brigade was on the hill with them.
¹²

So was a battery of six three-inch rifles, whose sweating gunners had practically carried their guns to the hilltop piece by piece since there was nothing resembling a road up this rocky height. This battery began to fire on Rebel reinforcements in the valley—the gun muzzles could not be depressed enough to hit the men on the sides of Little Round Top itself—and from the Rebel line in front and from a host of sharpshooters in Devil's Den a new fury of rifle fire hit the Federals. General Weed was killed as he gave some order to the battery commander, and when that officer bent over him to examine his wound a sharpshooter got him too, and he fell dead on top of the general, and all of the hill with its steep slopes and its rocks and its tangled underbrush was smoking and crackling like a volcano.

In front of the Round Tops everything was coming loose. The Devil's Den line had long since dissolved, the wheat field was gone, and all of the uneven half mile between Round Top Valley and the peach orchard was smoke and flying bullets and wild shouting. Two of Sykes's brigades came in to hold the ground between the peach orchard and the wheat field, and their division commander, General Barnes, lined them up and made a few patriotic and inspirational remarks, while the men cheered bravely. (So says the record, at any rate. One of the private soldiers involved wrote that the general told them: "Boys, I want you to put in a few licks for Pennsylvania. The Bucktails will go in on your left. Forward!")
¹³

For a time these brigades made progress, and Hancock sent a whole division in to retake the wheat field and drive the Rebel line back on its supports—the ghost of the old Irish Brigade storming along beside red-bearded Colonel Cross and his soldiers, the men who had broken the Rebel line at Antietam and swarmed nearly to the stone wall at Fredericksburg and held on in the great last-ditch fight at Chancellorsville. These men got into woods and hollows south of the wheat field, and Sykes's division of regulars came in on their left, and it seemed briefly that the whole position had been stabilized.

Then Longstreet sent in a fresh division, and the Rebels caught the peach-orchard angle from three sides at once, just as Meade had foreseen. In from the west came Gene
ral Barksdale and his Mississip
pians—the same general and the same troops who had held the Fredericksburg water front against the bridgebuilders—and they charged straight through a picket fence, knocking it down by sheer impact, and they shot and stabbed at a Pennsylvania regiment that was dug in behind it, and after a flurry of hand-to-hand fighting under the shattered peach trees the Union defenders turned and ran and the peach orchard was gone.

With this position lost, there was no way on earth to save Birney's line. (It was "Birney's" line only by courtesy now, the reinforcements far outnumbering the original defenders, all the units so mixed up that nobody quite knew where anybody else was.) The Rebels who had broken in the angle drove straight on toward Little Round Top, and they took the entire line in flank, destroying one segment after another. The artillery which General Hunt had lined up behind the peach orchard enfiladed the charging Rebels and killed them by platoons, but these Southerners were tough and they kept on going, and one after another the brigades which had restored Birney's line found that the Rebels were coming in on their right rear.

The volunteer brigades Sykes had sent in discovered it first. They faced south, and a color-bearer rode up to his brigade commander and said: "Colonel, I'll be damned if I don't think we are faced the wrong way. The Rebs are up there in the woods behind us, on the right." The colonel investigated and found that the man was right, and sent an aide back to tell the division commander. The aide ran into a host of armed Rebels right where division headquarters was supposed to be, and the whole Union line seemed to have vanished in smoke a
nd confusion. Rebel units were in
termingled with Federals, some regiments were surrounded without knowing it, the 4th Michigan saw its colonel killed with a bayonet while he was still in the saddle, and the only order or pattern in any of it was the fact that defeat and collapse progressed steadily from right to left, from the peach orchard toward Devil's Den.
¹⁴