Glory Road (9 page)

Into the wood went the 24th, and Stuart's gunners fired at them with cold accuracy. One man was beheaded by the first shot, and then a shell tore an arm off a file closer, and another man was mashed and still another was beheaded—all dreadfully unnerving for green soldiers. But Colonel Morrow halted them, and while unseen snipers fired at them and shell came crashing through the trees to inflict more casualties, he dressed the regiment's lines with elaborate care and coolly put the men through the manual of arms. The soldiers had been drilled within an inch of their lives that dreary fall, and now they went through all of this with regular-army precision. They were not killing any Rebels just then, but they were demonstrating to one and all that they could take it, and the veterans, some distance in the rear, looked on with dawning approval. Then the 24th went ahead again, taking great pains with its alignment, marching through that woodland like the West Point corps of cadets. General Doubleday admired them hugely but disliked the way Meredith was handling the brigade and deposed him and gave the command to Lysander Cutler, colonel of the 6th Wisconsin. The wood was cleared at last and Cutler flung a skirmish line out on the far side, and the shooting ended.

That evening the 2nd Wisconsin had the picket line, and as battle-wise veterans they quickly made a deal with the Rebels in their front by which neither side would do any shooting without giving due warning in advance, so that nobody had to stay under cover. But in the morning the Michigan regiment relieved the 2nd Wisconsin. Being very ardent and trigger-happy, they opened fire at once without waiting to be told about the agreement, and although the Wisconsin boys yelled a frantic last-minute warning, a good many Rebels were shot and a furious little fire fight raged up and down the picket lines, almost bringing on a general engagement. Toward the end of the day there came one of those odd incidents which were perfectly characteristic of that strange war, although it is hard to imagine them happening in any other war known to history. In all of this firing and sniping, a certain Confederate private and one of the Wisconsin soldiers began to develop a personal enmity toward each other, so that between shots they yelled bitter insults, and finally they got so angry that just shooting at one another would not answer. The thing went :oo deep for killing, and it had to be settled with fists. So the other soldiers called an informal truce, and the two men laid down their weapons and went out into the clearing and had a furious, emotion-releasing fist fight—these two boys who had been perfectly satisfied to try to kill each other up to the moment when their enmity became personal.

The rest of the soldiers cheered them on, agreed in the: end that the fight was a draw, and worked it out so that there was no more firing on the picket line. Rebels and Yanks got together and traded coffee for tobacco and agreed not to fight any more unless the higher-ups actually ordered an advance. The two pugilists, presumably, washed the blood off their faces, and the 24th Michigan sat down by its campfires to count its losses.

These had not actually been very heavy—a total of thirty-six, as the regiment's historian remembered it, of whom only seven were dead; the fighting in the wood and along the picket line had not been very severe after all. But somehow the way the regiment had handled itself under fire thawed out the veterans. From enlisted men up to commanding officers they agreed that these Michigan boys would do, and there was no more talk about "bounty boys" after Fredericksburg. An officer in the 6th Wisconsin wrote grandiloquently: "They showed themselves of a fibre worthy to be woven into the woof of the Iron Brigade." The enlisted men used no fancy language, but they did begin dropping into the 24th's camp at the close of day to borrow tobacco and swap yarns, just as members of friendly regiments always did, and the historian of the 24th
noted that "the
greatest cordiality ever after prevailed."
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So the great battle of Fredericksburg accomplished this much, if nothing more; it enabled a new regiment to come out of Coventry and join the brotherhood of proven fighters. In that brotherhood it would appear that the boys had plenty of company.

4. Burnished Rows of Steel

The men of the II Army Corps were veterans and they knew a bad spot when they saw it. From the moment they crossed the river they disliked the looks of this Fredericksburg setup. They had had one laugh, coming over, when the Rebels began to shell the road right where the band of a nine-month regiment had posted itself. The musicians all ran for cover except the bass drummer, who simply cowered in the dust behind his big bass drum and fancied himself secure.
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Other laughs were few. The heights west of town looked dangerous, and those heights were obviously where the high command intended the II Corps to go.

There was something eerie about the morning of the battle. Stragglers were on the prowl in alleys and back yards between the ruined looted houses, some of the men capering grotesquely in women's chemises stolen from ransacked bedroom closets. Sidewalks and gutters were littered with smashed furniture, crockery, wearing apparel, and other odds and ends carried out of homes by aimless marauders. Generals and generals' aides went cantering up and down the crowded streets, very busy, while the regiments dressed their ranks on the side streets to a thin spatter of bugle calls and shouted commands. Heavy cold mist filled the air, so that every down-street vista was like an open window into nothingness. In the air, too, palpable as the December fog itself, was the chill suspicion that cruel disaster lay just out of town to the west.

By midmorning the ranks were lined up in the proper order, and the sun burned away the fog. From the south the men could hear the crash of gunfire as Franklin's men made their unavailing assault on Jackson's lines. (On the Stafford Heights a green company cook asked what that noise was. Rebel guns, they told him. He listened and shook his head and said: "You fellers needn't think you can fool me. I've heard that noise too often in Philadelphia; they're unloading boards somewhere.")
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There was a final flurry of galloping aides with orders, and then burly General William H. French sent his skirmish line trotting across the yards and around the outbuildings on the fringe of town and out into the open plain. The Rebel outposts fired a few shots and leisurely fell back toward the chain of hills to the west. General Darius N. Couch, commanding the II Corps, climbed to the cupola of the courthouse to look things over. The main body of French's division began to march out of town, and all the cannon in the Rebel army seemed to come to life at once, flashing along the hilltops from left to right as far as the men could see.

If the army had tried, it could not have found a worse place to make an attack. Between Fredericksburg and Marye's Heights there was a hollow plain perhaps half a mile wide. The town itself was on a little plateau; leaving it and advancing toward the heights, one went down a little slope and came presently to a wide ditch carrying the spillway of a canal from a paper mill a mile to the north. There was not much water in this canal, but the ditch itself was deep and its banks were steep. A spry individual could cross it anywhere, but a formal column of attack could cross only where it was bridged, and it was bridged in just two places.

To make an attack, therefore, the troops had to come out in solid columns of fours—of all formations, the one most vulnerable to enemy fire, with the men all bunched together in a cohesive target and nobody able to use his own weapon in reply. Reaching the open, these dense helpless columns must march straight ahead for two hundred yards within easy range of the Confederate artillery, which could smite them from in front and on both flanks. (Rebel sharpshooters on the heights also had them within range.) Then the columns must cross the ditch by the two bottleneck bridges, one of which had been partly destroyed, so that the men had to walk on the stringers; and after they were across, the columns had to turn right and left and spread out into the long lines of battle, two ranks deep, by which the actual assault would be made. Fortunately lie ground rose sharply just beyond the ditch, so that the men would be under cover while they deployed. But as soon as the lines were formed they must climb the little slope and come out in the open and tramp forward for four hundred yards to reach Marye's Heights, at the foot of which there was a wide sunken road with a four-foot stone wall on the Fredericksburg side, as invulnerable a trench as the Rebels could have found in the whole state of Virginia.

In this sunken road and behind this wall Longstreet had put four ranks of riflemen, with abundant reinforcements nearby. Above them, on the hill slopes, were more infantry. Still higher, and extending far to the right and left so that they could lay down a horrible crisscross of fire, were the guns. The artillerist had not exaggerated very much: once all of these people commenced to fire, a chicken would have had a hard time getting across that plain.

French's men started off bravely enough. Nathan Kimball's brigade was in the lead, and he had a couple of new regiments which had never before been under fire. Kimball sat his horse by the roadside as these green regiments came by, noticed the white-lipped tension in the ranks, and cried out: "Cheer up, my hearties, cheer up! This is something we must all get used to! Remember, this brigade has never been whipped—don't let it get whipped today!" The rookies felt that this helped a little, but not much, and when the veteran regiments in the brigade raised a cheer the two new regiments could not quite find their voices.
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Kimball brought his two parallel columns out of town in fine order, flags gay in the breeze, weapons at the right shoulder, field officers tramping along with drawn swords and turning as they tramped to shout commands. Longstreet's gunners began hitting the marching columns before they were fairly outside the town, but they kept coming on. They got across the canal at last and swung into line and then came up over the bank, four regiments abreast, rookies and veterans together. One hundred yards behind them there was another brigade, with a third brigade coming up behind that one. The Rebel guns fired faster and faster, and the files shifted to right and left as the men closed up the gaps that were made by the shell. It was more comforting to march elbow to elbow, and as long as a man could feel his comrades immediately beside him he was willing to keep going.

From the far side of the Rappahannock, General Hunt's massed artillery opened fire furiously, striking at Longstreet's guns, trying to beat down the Rebel fire and give the infantry a chance. The earth seemed to rock and a choking mist lay on the plain. Hunt's gunners found that they could not silence the Confederate batteries. The range was long, the Southern guns were protected by earthworks, and the fuses for the long-range shell were worthless. Sometimes the missiles exploded over Federal troops instead of over Rebels; more often they simply did not explode at all. One exasperated gunner reported afterward that "as solid shot, the ordnance shrapnel was serviceable."
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About one hundred yards short of the sunken road tdere was an almost imperceptible rise in the open ground, a little swell which would not be noticed ordinarily but which today was like a high mountain ridge swept by great storms. If they lay flat on the ground just before they got to this rise, attacking troops might be protected from the fire of the Confederate infantry; but once they got on this insignificant crest, the fight had to be to a finish. There could be no more hiding—a man lying down could be shot as easily as a man standing erect—and it was precisely here, where they made a perfect target at shotgun range, that the assaulting troops must halt to deliver their own fire. An infantry attack in that war rarely implied an uninterrupted advance with the bayonet. It usually mean; getting the attackers to close quarters so that they could break the defensive line with their own fire. This little rise was where the Federals must stand to deliver the fire that would break the Rebel line—unless, indeed, it should develop that this particular Rebel line could not be broken by any weight of fire whatsoever, in which case this was where the boys would stand while they found out.

Kimball's men had lost heavily crossing the plain, but they were still in formation, and as the long brigade lines wavered to a halt on this low crest the men set up a cheer. Nobody could hear it in the tremendous tumult. The stone wall seemed to blaze from end to end with one crackling sheet of flame, the guns on the heights crashed and thundered, and if Kimball's brigade had not been whipped before, it was whipped now. The men had never run into anything like this. Standing four ranks deep behind perfect protection, the Southern riflemen could keep up an almost continuous fire. The attacking brigade got off an unsteady volley or two, a few men irresolutely stumbled forward a few steps, and then the brigade fell completely apart. Some of the men ran for the rear, some huddled behind a square brick house which stood in the middle of this last rise in the ground, and others found shelter amid a few shacks by the main highway, a couple of hundred yards to the right. Most of the men simply dropped back a few yards, lay on the ground amid the dead and wounded, kept their tattered flags flying, and maintained as much of a fire as they could.

Up came the second brigade, a double line of blue more than a quarter of a mile from end to end, swinging up over the bank by the canal and rolling forward into the battle smoke. It reached the last fiery crest and halted there to open fire, and the Rebel musketry overwhelmed it. When it broke, the third brigade came marching up to take its place, and the third brigade, too, was smashed and French's entire division had been put out of action. The survivors clung desperately to the bare ground and to moderately protected spots behind the scattered buildings, firing pluckily but without much effect. To General Couch, aloft in his cupola, peering down through the blanketing smoke, it looked as if the division had simply vanished. One of the men who cowered behind the brick house wrote afterward that although the Southern artillery was firing as fast as ever, the musketry was so continuous and so intense that he could not recall hearing the reports of any cannon.
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