Karl Bacon
Authors: An Eye for Glory: The Civil War Chronicles of a Citizen Soldier
EYE
FOR
G L O R Y
The
Civil War Chronicles
of a
Citizen Soldier
ARL
A. B
ACON
For which cause we faint not;
but though our outward man perish,
yet the inward man is renewed day by day.
For our light affliction, which is but for a moment,
worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;
While we look not at the things which are seen,
but at the things which are not seen:
for the things which are seen are temporal;
but the things which are not seen are eternal.
2 CORINTHIANS 4:16–18
CHAPTER 11
Trudge to the Rappahannock
CHAPTER 12
A Carol for Caroline Street
CHAPTER 15
Tears in the Yuletide
CHAPTER 19
The Inn at the Crossroad
CHAPTER 20
A Knock on the Head
CHAPTER 22
Northward Bound Again
CHAPTER 30
A Season in the Wilderness
CHAPTER 32
Assault at Cold Harbor
August, 1882
To My Dear Children – Sarah, Edward, and James,
You may be wondering why, at this time in my earthly pilgrimage, some twenty years since my enlistment in the Union Army, I should pen such a manuscript as this. You have asked me countless times to tell of my experiences during the Great War of Rebellion. Until this writing I have always answered with but small morsels of the story, and I never satisfied your appetite with a full and true accounting of what occurred, perhaps because I was not inclined to recount the many dark and painful memories. So many good friends, brothers in arms and in the faith, were lost, and I still mourn each one. That I survived the war, and returned to the bosom of my family, can only be attributed to the abundant mercy and grace of our Almighty Father, for I deserved no such mercy, no such grace.
The recent death of your mother, my dearest Jessie Anne, has once again caused me to consider the brevity of my own earthly existence. Although I am not yet an old man, at least so far as I think of it, I do not know when I shall be called to put off this earthly tent and receive my eternal inheritance; then who shall write of these things? You are older ‘now – Sarah has married, Edward shall shortly marry, and James has but one year of school remaining – so it seems prudent to set down on paper these remembrances of the war before the memories fade forever.
A soldier’s life is filled with long stretches of interminable boredom in camp or on the march, broken only by short periods of confusion and terror in battle. Throughout the war, I kept a series of journals in which I recorded my experiences. As I filled each
journal with notes and musings, I posted it home and your mother sent me a new one. The writing of these journals and letters helped me immeasurably, during both pleasant days and not, to pass the time in a more fruitful manner. She also preserved every letter I ever wrote to her and I kept most of her letters to me. These have served well to refresh my memory. I have included several of those letters, either in part or in their entirety, so that you might better understand how we were sustained throughout those long years. However, the more personal contents of these correspondences shall forever remain between your mother and me.
No man could wish to have three finer children. When I think that not only do you not harbor any ill will toward me, but that your love for me has remained steadfast and undiminished through all these years, I can only marvel at God’s goodness. Your mother was certainly the primary instrument of this goodness, since for such a long time, I had little to do with your rearing and did little deserving of your affection.
And so I write to you, Sarah, Edward, and James, and to your children after you, not as excuse or explanation of my actions, but rather as confession, for surely I was granted a most profound and gracious forgiveness, by yourselves, by your dear mother, and by God, for which I am sincerely thankful.
May these words also serve as a memorial, not of me and of what I did, but of the fallen, those noble men who fought “with firmness in the right, as God gave us to see the right.”
With sincerest affection
I remain your loving father,
Over the Mountain
Why art thou cast down, O my soul?
and why art thou disquieted within me?
PSALM 42:11
G
ENERAL
R
ENO’S CORPSE WAS THE FIRST
I
SAW DURING THE
war. As the hour approached midnight on Sunday, September 14
th
, 1862, the thoroughly winded green recruits, among which I was proud to be numbered, crested South Mountain at Turner’s Gap. The march from Frederick, Maryland, had been long and hot, with few breaks for coffee and rations. When, during the course of the afternoon, the men heard the din of fighting erupt, and when they saw battle smoke enshroud the long ridge ahead of them, each untested man looked about at his mates. He saw jaws clenched, faces drawn, skin pallid, and eyes wide with fear and uncertainty, countenances that mirrored his own.
With nightfall the battle clamor ebbed, then stopped altogether as the men toiled up the mountain toward the gap. All were eager to end the day with a hot cup of coffee and a peaceful night’s sleep.
An ambulance was parked in the grass next to the road. A mule hitched to the front of it stamped nervously as we passed. At the rear of the ambulance a single torch of pitch blazed and
a lone soldier stood guard, head low to his chest, stoop shouldered. He stirred at our approach, raising his head slowly, as if with great effort.
“What unit you boys with?”
“Fourteenth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry of French’s Division,” someone answered.
The sentinel stood with his back to the torchlight, his black slouch hat pulled low, casting his visage deeply in the shadow of the half moon. He appeared a faceless phantom, breathing and moving as one of the living, but when he spoke, his voice was hollow and lifeless.
“Did you hear about General Reno?” He waved at the ambulance behind him.
No one said a word.
“Major General Jesse Lee Reno — a great patriot, a soldier’s soldier, a true fighting man, not like some of these other dandies we have. We loved him like a father.” The man spat at the ground. “Now he’s dead.” The man shook an upraised fist at the darkness to the south. “My general. He’s dead and I wouldn’t believe it unless I’d seen it myself. We’d already whipped those devils, but they just shot him down as they turned to run.” The man lowered his head to his chest again, his voice a murmur. “He died with the setting of the sun.”
Still none of us had any words for him. Our feet began to shuffle forward, leaving the sentinel to resume his mournful vigil.
“The night will be long and dark,” he called to anyone within earshot. “What will become of us now?”
A few minutes later we came upon a large field. Gasps of horror arose from the column as spectral shadows flitted from place to place about the starlit meadow. But as our eyes adjusted, the shadowy figures turned out to be some of our own troops. There had been a great and bloody fight upon that mountain and
our boys had won it, but there had been many casualties, both Union and Confederate. Burial details worked by torchlight on both sides of the road, moving from one black heap to another, checking for any signs of life before tagging the body for interment. The bodies of our Federal comrades would be the first to be retrieved. If time and will allowed it, the enemy dead would also be buried, albeit in cursory fashion. Otherwise, their corpses would be left to the elements and their rotting flesh would see yet another battle, this time between the birds of the air or the beasts of the field which would carry off the choicest parts.
The regiment was ordered off the road to camp for the night in this field of death. We moved slowly among the corpses,
carefully trying not to stumble over them in the darkness or tread on any flailed appendage. Some of the men were fortunate to find enough room to spread out their rubber blankets and build campfires, but for most, the stiffening, bloating corpses of the enemy dead had to be moved aside and even stacked one upon the other to clear sufficient space. It was the first time I had seen dead bodies like that. I had been to several memorial services in our church, but the body of the deceased was always someone known to us, possibly a loved one, and the body was always laid out carefully in a simple coffin, making it easy for the viewer to imagine the person asleep rather than dead. But in that field, the pale moonlight revealed the bodies of those pitiable soldiers to be grotesquely contorted in every imaginable way, a terrible testament to the agonies suffered in the last moments of their struggles with death.
“Michael?” John Robinson, my closest and dearest friend since childhood, was by my side, as he had been during the last seven days of hard marching from Fort Ethan Allen. “Could you ever have imagined this just six weeks ago?”
“No, I never … I thought … I don’t know what I thought it would be like. War means killing, but this is so … terrible.”
John and I roamed the field in search of an unspoiled place.
“Here, this looks all right,” John said. “It’s soft and grassy and the closest body is a few yards away.”
We began to unroll our rubber blankets. “Nobody forced us into this,” John said. “We volunteered. We talked about it over and over.” John paused for a response, but I offered none. “Are we still agreed that it’s God’s will for us to be here?”
“Yes, you heard me say it. Reverend Preston was most convincing about the evils of slavery.”
“Easy to say in church on Sunday. But what about here and now?”
“I know, John. Death is suddenly so close—I’m face-to-face
with it. I can reach out and touch it, feel it reaching out to touch me.”
“Unless we crawl under a rock, staring death in the face is something we’ll have to get used to. That will be my prayer tonight, that God will calm and steady me.”
Perhaps the worst was the smell of the freshly dead. The sickly sweet odor of blood spilled upon the ground and the more powerful stench of bodies blown apart with their entrails cast to the four winds combined in a reeking aroma that, perhaps even more than sight, spoke sickening volumes of the gore all around. As I lay on my blanket, I could look only upward at the heavenly host above me, or I could close my eyes tightly shut against the hideous specter of those bodies, but I could not shut out the smell. I turned over, face downward to the earth, and tried to will myself to sleep. I buried my face in the crook of my elbow, hoping the odors of earth and grass and India rubber would crowd out the sickening odor of death. At last, I remembered the words of the psalmist and repeated them over and over until they grew into a drumbeat for my troubled heart,
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night … Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night … Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night …