Mr Lincoln's Army (33 page)

Yet it was these ineffective old smoothbores
on which all established combat tactics and theories were based. That is why
the virtues of the bayonet figured so largely in the talk of professional
soldiers of that era. Up until then the foot soldier was actually a spear
carrier in disguise, the bayonet was the decisive weapon, and an infantry
charge was just the old Macedonian phalanx in modern dress—a compact mass of
men projecting steel points ahead of them, striving to get to close quarters
where they could either impale their opponents or force them to run away. All
offensive infantry tactics were designed to enable a commander to throw that
compact, steel-tipped mass against an enemy line of battle.

But with the rifled musket it just didn't
work that way anymore. The compact mass could be torn to shreds before it got
in close. The advancing line came under killing fire four or five times as far
off as used to be the case. As one student of Civil War casualties remarked:
"There was a limit of punishment beyond which endurance would not go, and
the old Springfield rifle was capable of inflicting it."
³
Like
the machine gun in 1914, here was a weapon which upset all the old theories.
The natural result was that actual hand-to-hand work with the bayonet was a
great rarity in the Civil War, for all the fine talk of grand bayonet charges
to be found in the generals' memoirs. The bayonet was still carried and it was
still a threat, but very few men ever used it. Of some 245,000 wounds treated
by surgeons in Union hospitals, fewer than a thousand had been made by
bayonets. One reason, of course, may be that when a man did get bayoneted he
usually died on the spot; nevertheless, the figure is significant.

The Confederate General John B. Gordon, who
got into about as much truly desperate fighting as any man on either side,
wrote after the war: "I may say that very few bayonets of any kind were
actually used in battle, as far as my observation extended. The one line or the
other usually gave way under the galling fire of small arms, grape and
canister, before the bayonet could be brought into requisition. The bristling
points and the glitter of the bayonets were fearful to look upon, as they were
levelled in front of a charging line: but they were rarely reddened with
blood."
⁴
In several private soldiers' memoirs one finds the
remark that the bayonet was really most useful as a candlestick: its point
could be jabbed into the ground easily and its socket was just the right size
to hold a candle.

The rifled musket not only had a greater
range and accuracy than anything soldiers had ever used before; it made an
uncommonly nasty wound—actually, a good deal worse, in most cases, than the one
inflicted by today's rifle, and infinitely worse than that of the round ball
fired by the old smoothbore. Its muzzle velocity was high enough to give the
bullet considerable shocking power, and the bullet itself was relatively huge;
furthermore, it usually mushroomed when it hit bone or cartilage, with dreadful
effect. The ghastly number of amputations performed at all field
hospitals—veterans repeatedly told of vast, hideous piles of severed arms and
legs lying by the hospital tents in battle—did not take place because the
surgeons were unskillful, or because they knew less than modern surgeons know
about the way to treat gunshot wounds. They took place because when one of
those soft-lead rifle bullets hit a bone it usually splintered the bone so horribly
that no medical magic could save the limb.

As one army surgeon wrote long afterward,
when comparative experience with the effect of modern rifles was available: "The
shattering, splintering or splitting of a long bone by the impact of the Minie
or Enfield ball were, in many instances, both remarkable and frightful, and
early experience taught surgeons that amputation was the only means of saving
life." The same surgeon added that a wound in the abdomen inflicted by one
of these rifles was almost invariably fatal; the Minie bullet tore the
intestines as the old smoothbore ball seldom did.
⁵
The one advantage
that the Civil War soldier enjoyed over today's soldier, in respect to bullet
wounds, was that at a moderately long range the old Springfield lacked
penetrating power. There were repeated instances of soldiers being knocked down
by bullets which failed to break the skin because they were stopped by some
unimportant obstruction in the pocket—a deck of cards, a bundle of letters, or
a pocket Testament. (How many solemn homilies were delivered, in succeeding
years, by devout churchmen on that one subject: the pocket Testament that saved
a life!)

All of this meant that the soldier who got
hit was likely to be hurt pretty badly. The official casualty figures don't
quite tell the story. They show, usually, that from six to eight men were
wounded for each man killed outright, which is apt to make a modern reader (to
whom a muzzle-loader is more or less a joke, anyway) assume that the weapon was
ineffective. What the casualty figures don't show is that a substantial number
of the wounded died in hospital; usually, according to one authority, about two
thirds as many as were killed instantly. Altogether, about half of the men
wounded in any engagement were lost to the army for good: mortally wounded, or
permanently disabled. In addition, a fair number of the men reported
"missing" were dead—men who fell in dense underbrush or isolated
ravines, or men who crawled off into thickets after they were hit and were
missed by the ambulance parties and the burial details.

For example, a battle is fought and an army
reports a hundred men killed and nine hundred wounded. Of the nine hundred,
between sixty and seventy will die, while nearly four hundred will be too badly
crippled ever to return to duty. The army, therefore, has not merely suffered a
temporary loss of nine hundred men; it has lost, permanently, rather more than
five hundred men. The casualty figures for every Civil War battle, ghastly as
they are even on the surface, need to be adjusted upward if they are to tell
the true story.

If the power of the infantry rifle had been
stepped up, so had the power of the artillery. The rifled gun was just coming
in, like the rifled musket, and most generals did not quite understand what
could be done with it. Standard fieldpiece when the war began was the
twelve-pounder brass smoothbore; the famous "Napoleon" one reads so much
about in the Civil War stories. When McClellan's chief of artillery set things
up for the peninsular campaign he specified that two thirds of the army's guns
should be Napoleons. This proportion was greatly reduced later, but the brass
smoothbore remained popular right to the end. The gun fired a round ball some
four and one half inches in diameter, had an extreme range of about one mile,
but was woefully inaccurate at anything over half that distance; was liked
chiefly for close-range work, when it fired case shot—thin-walled shell filled
with a bursting charge and a hatful of lead slugs—or, by preference, canister.
The canister cartridge was a sheet-metal cylinder with a charge of powder in an
attached container at one end and a thin wooden plug at the other, and it was
filled with two or three hundred round bullets. Firing this, the Napoleon was
really a sawed-off shotgun of enormous size, and at close ranges—say up to 250
yards —the effect was murderous beyond belief. The only trouble was that the
range of the infantryman's rifle had increased so; troops could often pick off
the gunners before they got within canister range, unless the battery could be
rushed into action after a charge got under way. In addition, the Napoleon was
heavy and hard to move across broken country.

The new rifles were much better for
everything except the infighting. They had twice the Napoleon's range, and for
that day were exceedingly accurate. The commonest types were the three-inch
iron rifle and the ten- and twenty-pounder Parrotts. These were fairly light
and easy to handle, and all were muzzle-loaders. Breech-loading cannon did not
appear on Civil War battlefields, except for a few English guns the
Confederates imported, which fired queer-looking projectiles that were twisted
to fit the spiraled hexagonal tubes and raised a horrifying screech as they
sped through the air. The muzzle-loaders could be served with fair rapidity,
and generals who knew how to use them could often break up an attack before it
got well started because of their great range and power. (General Henry J.
Hunt, in charge of Union artillery at Gettysburg, insisted to the end of his
days that Pickett's historic charge would never have reached the Union line if
Hunt had been allowed to do what he proposed— keep the Federal guns out of
action during most of the preliminary bombardment in order to save their
ammunition and their gunners, and plaster the Rebel infantry with everything he
had from the moment it lined up for the charge. He was probably entirely
correct.)

The artillerist's big problem throughout the
war was with his fuses. They weren't too precise, and the gunner was never
quite sure just where a shell would burst or, for that matter, whether it would
burst at all. Federals had a big advantage over Confederates in artillery.
They had more rifled guns, which meant they could often outrange the Rebel
gunners, hitting without being hit; even more important, their fuses and
powder were of better quality, so that the Northern gunner had a much better
chance of seeing his shells strike and explode where he wanted them to.

What all of this meant—rifled muskets for the
infantry, rifled cannon for the artillery—was that the defense had a huge
advantage. Field tactics were still built around the idea of sending massed
troops smack into and over the enemy line, and all military thinking ran in
that direction. But a battle line whose flanks were anchored and which had any
kind of protection in front was, in fact, just about invulnerable to that kind
of attack. At Gaines's Mill, Fitz-John Porter, with one army corps (plus very
moderate reinforcements late in the day), stood off most of Lee's army for six
hours and came close to holding his ground for keeps. At Malvern Hill, where
the artillery had a clear field, the Rebel assaults just didn't have a chance.
Likewise, at Second Bull Run, Jackson's men behind their railway embankment
were in shape to hold their ground for the rest of the summer. The fight
Gibbon's and Doubleday's men had with Jackson's corps there earlier, with both
battle lines standing elbow to elbow and blazing away, might have been in the
grand tradition of the earlier wars, but for the 1860s it was utterly useless;
murderous enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty, but almost as out of date as
it would be today.

The
armies had begun to adjust themselves to the new state of affairs. The
skirmish line—which originally had been merely a thin cordon of scouts going
ahead to make sure the enemy didn't have any unpleasant surprises concealed in
advance of his main line-was being built up, bit by bit, into an attacking
line. An assault on a hostile position was ceasing to imply a steady, unbroken
advance by men whose one aim was to reach a hand-to-hand encounter; the old
lithographs of Civil War battles, drawn by men who weren't present, have left a
false impression. The most spirited "assault" on a hostile position
was apt to be delivered by troops who were completely motionless, hiding
behind any obstruction the ground afforded, moving forward—when they did move
forward—by short rushes, advancing small parties here and there under a cover
of protective fire, seeking to build up within effective range a firing line
heavy enough to beat down the opposing fire and persuade the enemy that it was
time for him to go. A battle line which was getting the worst of it often gave
way almost imperceptibly, the men firing and then stepping back a couple of
paces while they reloaded, the attackers moving forward in the same manner.
While this happened the line that was being beaten would leak men to the rear,
as individual soldiers here and there decided they had had enough and turned to
run.

Small inequalities in the ground—an
outcropping of rock, a sunken road, an old fence whose rails could be pulled
loose and piled along the ground to provide protection—were apt to become of
decisive importance. The great defect of the Civil War musket was that only a
contortionist could load it when he was lying down; if he fought in a prone
position, as he very often did, he needed some sort of protection so that he
could load his piece safely. The soldiers early noticed that a surprisingly
high percentage of crippling wounds occurred in the right hand and arm, exposed
when a man rammed a new charge down his muzzle-loader. When regular
entrenchments were dug, so that men were fully protected while they loaded and
fired, direct assault became practically impossible—as Grant finally realized
at Cold Harbor.

It was because a frontal attack was so easily
repulsed that the flanking movement was so important. In front, a brigade might
have the direct fire power of fifteen hundred rifles; caught end-on, at either
extremity of its line, it had a fire power of exactly two, and so was utterly
helpless unless it could shift its position fast. Where a whole army could be
flanked, the way incautious Pope let Longstreet flank him at Bull Run, the inevitable
result was complete defeat; in any battle line, a gap between regiments or
brigades was a sure invitation to disaster. Impregnable as his position was at
Fredericksburg, Jackson had a few bad moments when Meade found an open place
between two brigades; if Meade could have been supported, old Stonewall might
have had serious trouble. Pickett's great complaint after Gettysburg was that
he had to make his assault with no protection for his flanks: the Federals
curled around the ends of his line and tore the heart out of him.