Glory Road (56 page)

It would wait and see, and there would still be a great deal to look at, for half of the price had not yet been paid. Yet the biggest test had been passed. Meade might draw no cheers, but in his own way he had not done too badly. At Gettysburg, for the first time, the Army of the Potomac had not been crippled by the mistakes of its commanding general. It had been given a chance, and the chance had been enough. At that crisis of the war everything had come down to the naked fury of the fighting men, and the fighting men had stood up under it—along Willoughby Run and Seminary Ridge, amid the rocks and bushes by Little Round Top, on the slopes back of the peach orchard and the wheat field, in the smoky twilight around Culp's Hill and the cemetery, and in the dust of the terrible pounding near the little clump of trees. They had won a victory. It might be less of a victory than Mr. Lincoln had hoped for, but it was nevertheless a victory—and, because of it, it was no longer possible for the Confederacy to win the war. The North might still lose it, to be sure, if the soldiers or the people should lose heart, but outright defeat was no longer in the cards. Both the army and the country were in shape to win at last, and from now on it would be a question of courage and endurance.

If the army was not especially enthusiastic, no more was Meade. He was crabbed and dyspeptic, a regular-army officer who had never cared very much for the volunteer system, and less than a year ago he had remarked that most of the men in the army had not the faintest idea of what soldiering really meant. But he paid his tribute, just the same, in one sentence of a letter which he wrote to Mrs. Meade two days after the battle: "The men behaved splendidly; I really think they are becoming soldiers."
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If anyone had doubted it, there was still plenty of proof around Gettysburg. An army medical officer was telling no more than the plain truth when he wrote that the ten days immediately after the battle were "the occasion of the greatest amount of human suffering known to this nation since its birth." This country market town of two thousand inhabitants had been presented with some twenty-two thousand wounded men, and the place was swamped with them. They lay on the fields and in ditches, in the woods under trees, in barns and haystacks and homes and churches for miles around.
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The very fact that the battle had been a victory made the men's lot worse, for instead of remaining on the field where it could care for them the army had marched south in expectation of a new battle and had been able to leave behind it only a fraction of the required number of doctors and hospital attendants.

So appalling was the number of men awaiting attention that the overworked doctors had begun with a grim job of sorting out, separating the men who were bound to die from those whose lives might be saved. In one wood there was a long, pathetic row of semiconscious men who lay on the ground, moaning and twitching fitfully, completely unattended—men who had been shot through the head and whose wounds, upon hasty inspection, had been pronounced mortal and who had simply been put aside to die as quickly as they might. Not far away there was a long table where for an entire week doctors worked from dawn to twilight cutting off arms and legs, with an army wagon standing by to carry off the wreckage and hurry back for a new load. A young woman who came to Gettysburg to help nurse the wounded entered a church which had been hastily converted into a hospital and found that planks had been laid across the tops of the pews so that the entire auditorium was one vast hard bed, jammed with wounded men lying elbow to elbow: "I seemed to stand breast-high in a sea of anguish." Permeating everything in and near the town was the foul, overpowering stench of the unburied dead—an atmosphere which, as this woman said, "robbed the battlefield of its glory, the survivors of their victory, and the wounded of what little chance of life was left to them."
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Little by little order was restored, the army working hand in hand with the Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission. The one railroad leading into Gettysburg had been broken, but Herman Haupt was on the job almost before the battle ended, and as always he made things happen. He found the railroad totally inadequate, even after its breaks had been made good—a country railroad without experienced officers, with no more sidings, water tanks, turntables, or fuel than were needed for its normal traffic of three or four trains a day. It was necessary now to operate thirty trains a day, and he had locomotives and cars sent up from Alexandria. He improvised water tanks, brought in loads of fuel, got repair crews on the job with prefabricated bridges and culverts, and before long he had the railway in shape to move fifteen hundred tons of freight each way every day. The army medical service was telegraphing frantically to Baltimore for immediate shipments of alcohol, creosote, nitric acid, permanganate of potassium, tin cups, buckets, stretchers, bed sacks, and other equipment, and the Sanitary Commission made up a special train of food, tents, clothing, stoves, and bandages which reached the town three days after the battle.
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All across the northeast, in the pulpits of hundreds of churches, ministers read appeals for help. Money was needed, and food, and medicines, and the little delicacies sick men need—and, above all, "all females qualified for usefulness in this emergency." Nurses were brought in; regular-army nurses recruited by Miss Dorothea Dix, who sternly refused to accept women who were either young or pretty, considering such persons quite unsuited for work in army hospitals, and women enlisted by the Sanitary Commission, which had agents at railroad stations in the big Eastern cities to interview applicants and organize them into working units. Pennsylvania militia regiments were brought in to guard the place, and as the hospital tents were set up in the groves near the town these soldiers marched all visitors away at four every afternoon so that the nurses might not be exposed to nameless perils. The nurses found themselves far too busy to be in any danger, however. Five days after the battle ambulances were still going about the fields collecting hundreds of men whose wounds had not yet been dressed and who had had nothing to eat except such hardtack as they happened to have in their haversacks.
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As these women worked, an ancient tradition quietly died. It had always been supposed that army nursing was strictly a job either for enlisted men or for superannuated trollops who were beyond contamination. But here they were, women precisely like the wives and sisters and mothers the soldiers had left behind, up to their elbows in it and taking no harm whatever. One of them quietly wrote: "I have been for weeks the only lady in a camp of seven hundred men, and have never been treated with more deference, respect, and kindness." Uniformly, these women testified that the men they cared for were nothing less than magnificent, and in a letter to her sister a little New Jersey Quaker wrote: "More Christian fortitude was never witnessed than they exhibit, always say-Help my neighbor first, he is worse.'" After some weeks, when the emergency had passed and one group of women prepared to leave, two army bands turned out to escort them to the railroad station.
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As rapidly as the men became well enough to be moved they were sent off to permanent hospitals in Baltimore, Washington, York, and

Harrisburg, and before long six hospital trains were leaving town every day. Until the army got hold of this business the trips were pretty grim. A medical inspector who looked into matters protested with fury that "the railroad companies, who got the only profit of the battle, and who had the greatest opportunities of ameliorating the sufferings of the wounded, alone stood aloof and rendered no aid." He specified: trains were fearfully unclean, there were no attendants for the wounded, there was no water, there was not even straw for the men to lie upon—"absolutely nothing but the bare cars, filthy from the business of transporting cattle and freight." He cracked down hard, and a medical officer was detailed to accompany each train, water coolers and bedpans and medicines and bandages were provided, and at the first junction point agents of the Christian Commission were alerted to meet the trains and provide any help that might be needed. In the end, things were fairly well organized, and in three weeks sixteen thousand men were sent away.
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The Gettysburg hospitals still contained four thousand more who were too sick to be moved, but the worst of it was over.

So the wounded were taken care of. There were still the dead. Many bodies had never been buried—the gullies and rocky crannies around Devil's Den contained some horrible relics—and the rains had washed the earth away from bodies imperfectly covered, and there were many unmarked graves. Governor Andrew Curtin visited the place and appointed a local businessman as his agent to see to it that the state of Pennsylvania did what was necessary, and toward the end of July, at Curtin's request, this agent got in touch with the governors of all of the Northern states whose men had fought at Gettysburg and proposed that they get together to provide a proper cemetery. There were meetings and an exchange of letters, and by mid-August money had been raised and Pennsylvania had bought seventeen acres of land on Cemetery Hill, and the work of establishing a cemetery was under way.
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It would be a project for the states, naturally. They had thought of it first, they were putting up the money, their governors were making the arrangements, and anyway, the national government was busy with other matters. As the lifeless bodies were moved up to Cemetery Hill it was agreed that they should be grouped there by states—one plot for New Yorkers, another for Pennsylvanians, and so on down the list—and if from these honored dead each governor could take increased prestige, with visible proof that his state had done its full share, that would be so much the better, because possibly this battle had really been an affair of the separate states from the beginning.
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As host, Governor Curtin was the man of the hour, and he invited the famous orator, Edward Everett, to do the talking when the cemetery was formally dedicated. He also asked General Meade to attend if he could.

Everett could come, but he would need more time. A speech commemorating the Gettysburg dead could not be put together overnight, and Everett had certain engagements. The date originally selected was October 23, and it would not be possible for him to complete his preparations by that time: could not there be a postponement? Governor Curtin and the others agreed that there could, and the ceremonies were put off until November 19. General Meade sent his regrets, pointing out that military affairs in the state of Virginia would be taking all of his time.
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Settled, then, for the nineteenth of November, and the battlefield could be fairly well policed up by that time. There were still a few wounded men around, but by late November it should be possible to get all of them shipped off, and the air was becoming fit to breathe again. The summer wore away, the burial squads were busy, the hilltop was being nicely landscaped, and down below the Potomac the army was maneuvering back and forth, getting into small fights occasionally, losing a few men here and killing a few Rebels there, sparring the time away until a new campaign could be begun. The drafted men were coming in to fill the ranks—coming in under guard, with a roll call every two hours, because most of them had very little intention of remaining with the army if they could help it—and the veterans looked forward to their arrival with a certain unholy pleasure. Their attitude was pretty well expressed by a diarist in the 15th Massachusetts, which had been consolidated to four companies because of heavy battle losses, who wrote: "I wish the conscripts were out here now. I want to see them. I want to put some of them through the drill. I want to see them live on salt pork and hard bread. I want to see them carry their knapsacks."
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Admittedly, the draftees were not very good material, but there were men in the army who would see that they became soldiers once they got to camp.

The great day came at last, and there were troops in Gettysburg again, and bands, and special trains bringing distinguished guests, and there was a big parade through the town and up to the hill, with parade marshals in their sashes, horses shying and curvetting affectedly, much pomp and circumstance, and a famous orator with an hour-long speech in his hand. There was also Abraham Lincoln, who had been invited more or less as an afterthought—the invitation went to him on November 2, suggesting that he might honor the occasion by his presence—and Mr. Lincoln was to say a few words after Mr. Everett had made the speech. After the usual fuss and confusion the procession climbed the hill and the honored guests got up on the flag-draped speakers' stand, and eventually a certain degree of quiet was restored. A chaplain offered a prayer, and a glee club sang an ode composed especially for the occasion, and at last the orator got up to make his speech.

An oration was an oration in those days, and it had to have a certain style to it—classical allusions, a leisurely approach to the subject matter, a carefully phrased recital of the background and history of the occasion, the whole working up to a peroration which would sum everything up in memorable sentences. Mr. Everett was a master of this art form and had been hard at work for many weeks, and he stood up now in the center of the field where five thousand men had died and began his polished cadenced sentences. He recalled how the ancient Greeks commemorated their heroic dead in the days of Pericles. . . .

There were many thousands of people at this ceremony, and among them were certain wounded veterans who had come back to see all of this, and a knot of these wandered away from the crowd around the speakers' stand and strolled down along Cemetery Ridge, pausing when they reached a litde clump of trees, and there they looked off toward the west and talked quietly about what they had seen and done there.
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