Mr Lincoln's Army (45 page)

Not far from the Pry house Mansfield's corps
had turned in for the night. The men had been there since the afternoon of the
day before, and they had their pup tents up and were feeling snug; but along
toward midnight Mansfield came riding up from the Pry house to corps
headquarters and the outfit was summoned to move—no drums and no bugles, just
officers going down the regimental streets from tent to tent, quietly rousing
the men and telling them to pack up. The sleepy soldiers made up their blanket
rolls, took their muskets, and went off in the darkness, crossing the Antietam
where Hooker had crossed in the afternoon, and following the guides he had sent
back, old Mansfield riding at the head. They stumbled along, blind as moles in
the drizzling night, holding their canteens and bayonets as they went, to keep
them from jingling, following the obscure roads while the sky to the left was
periodically lit by the mock lightning of the fitful cannonade.

They tramped for several miles and finally
were halted on somebody's farm to the north and east of where Hooker's men
were posted. General Mansfield spread a blanket for himself on the grass in a
fence corner next to a field where the 10th Maine had turned in. The Maine boys
were wakeful and did a lot of chattering—the march in the rain had roused them,
and the thought of what was coming in the morning made it hard to go back to
sleep—and the old general got up once and went over to shush them. They recalled
that he was nice about it and not at all like a major general: just told them
that if they had to talk they might as well do it in a whisper so that their
comrades could get a little rest. And at last, long after midnight, there was
quiet and the army slept a little.

How far they had marched, those soldiers—down
the lanes and cross-lots over the cornfields to get into position, and from the
distant corners of the country before that; they were marching, really, out of
one era and into another, leaving much behind them, going ahead to much that
they did not know about. For some of them there were just a few steps left:
from the rumpled grass of a bed in a pasture down to a fence or a thicket where
there would be an appointment with a flying bullet or shell fragment, the
miraculous and infinitely complicated trajectory of the man meeting the flat,
whining trajectory of the bullet without fail. And while they slept the lazy,
rainy breeze drifted through the East Wood and the West Wood and the cornfield,
and riffled over the copings of the stone bridge to the south, touching them
for the last time before dead men made them famous. The flags were all furled
and the bugles stilled, and the hot metal of the guns on the ridges had cooled,
and the army was asleep—tenting tonight on the old camp ground, with never a
song to cheer because the voices that might sing it were all stilled on this
most crowded and most lonely of fields. And whatever it may be that nerves men
to die for a flag or a phrase or a man or an inexpressible dream was drowsing
with them, ready to wake with the dawn.

SIX

Never
Call
Retreat

1.
Toward the Dunker Church

The
morning came in like the beginning of the Last Day, gray and dark and tensely
expectant. Mist lay on the ground, heavy as a fog in the hollow places, and the
groves and valleys were drenched in immense shadows. For a brief time there was
an ominous hush on the rolling fields, where the rival pickets crouched behind
bushes and fence corners, peering watchfully forward under damp hatbrims.
Little by little things began to be visible. The outlines of trees and farm
buildings slowly came into focus against blurred backgrounds; the pickets grew
more wary and alert, and when one of them saw movement in the half-light he
raised his musket and fired. The two armies, lying so close in the rainy night,
had been no more than half asleep; once aroused, they began to fight instinctively,
as if knowing that the very moment of waking must lead to the fatal embrace of
battle.

The random picket-firing increased as the
light grew, and the advanced batteries were drawn into it. On the high ground
around the Dunker church Stonewall Jackson had massed his artillery, and the
gunners were astir early. As soon as they could see any details on the ridges
to the north they sprang to their places and fired, and the men who were still
in bivouac could feel the earth beneath them tremble faintly with the jar of
the firing. Farther west, half a mile from the dusty line of the Hagerstown
road, Jeb Stuart's horse artillery was drawn up on a wooded hill. When
Jackson's guns opened, these guns began firing, too, and to the north and east
the Yankee gunners returned the fire. Long before six o'clock the air shook
with the rolling, rocking crash of gunfire.

Joe Hooker was up promptly, riding to the
front before the light came. The men of his army corps had slept in a sheltered
valley which ran eastward from the Hagerstown road, a mile or more north of the
Dunker church, and Hooker went south through the bivouac, coming out on a
wooded ridge and studying the landscape in the misty twilight. In front of him
there was a broad field, sloping gentiy down to a hollow where there were an
orchard, a patchwork of kitchen gardens and fences, and a big stone house, the
home of a prosperous farmer named Miller. On the far side of the hollow, where
the ground began to rise again, Mr. Miller had built a stout post-and-rail
fence, going due east from the Hagerstown road to the edge of that pleasant
grove which the generals were noting on their maps as the East Wood; and south
of the fence, filling all of the ground between the road and the wood, was Mr.
Miller's thriving cornfield
—the
cornfield,
forever, after that morning. Beyond the cornfield and a little less than a mile
from his present position Hooker could just see the white block of the Dunker
church, framed by the dark growth of the West Wood. The high ground marked by
that church was his objective; if it could be seized and held, Lee's whole army
would have to retreat.

Hooker
was an army politician and a devious man, approaching his ultimate goal—command
of the Army of the Potomac—by roundabout ways which he discussed with nobody;
but as a fighter he was direct and straightforward, and it was direct,
straightforward fighting that was called for this morning. His army corps was
camped due north of the Dunker church plateau; it would get there in the
obvious way—by marching straight south, with Doubleday's division going along
the Hagerstown road, Ricketts's division going through the East Wood, and
Meade's Pennsylvanians going in between them. Each division would be massed so
that reinforcements from the rear ranks could be hurried up to the front line
quickly. Mansfield's corps was not far away and could be called on if Hooker's
men needed help. Neither Hooker nor anyone else knew how many Rebels might be
waiting in the cornfield and the wood. This was one of the things the advancing
battle lines would have to find out for themselves. Meanwhile, it was time to
get moving.

It was still early, and the gray light of the
dawn was still dim. The army was awake, the men coming reluctantly out of sleep
to the sound of the guns, knowing that this fight was going to be worse than
anything they had ever been in before. Aroused by the cannon, the men reacted
in their different ways. The 1st Minnesota, still safely behind the lines near
McClellan's headquarters, noted the mist and the cloudy sky and profanely gave
thanks that they would at least be fighting in the shade this day. (They were
wrong, as it turned out; in another hour or two the mist would vanish and there
would be a scorching sun all day.) Abner Doubleday found the men of his
division hard to rouse; they took up their muskets and fell into ranks
sluggishly, and they did not even grumble when they were marched off without
time to boil coffee. Over in Mansfield's corps there was less of a rush and the
men cooked sketchy breakfasts. There were many new regiments in this corps, and
the veterans—quietly handing valuables and trinkets to members of the ambulance
corps and other non-combat details for safekeeping—noticed with grim amusement
that most of the straw-feet were too nervous to eat. In the 27th Indiana men
stood up by their campfires to jeer and curse at one desperate soldier whose
nerves had given way, out on the picket line, and who was running madly for the
rear, oblivious of the taunts and laughter—a man whose legs had simply taken
control of him. From one end of the army to the other, bivouacs were littered
with discarded decks of cards. Card games were held sinful in that generation,
and most men who were about to fight preferred not to have these tangible
evidences of evil on their persons when they went out to face death.
¹

The men of Hooker's army corps left their
bivouac and in heavy columns made their way through the timber to the ridge
which was to be their jumping-off point. Some of the columns could be seen by
the distant Confederate gunners, and the shells came over faster—the men had
hardly started when one of Stuart's guns put a shell right in the middle of the
6th Wisconsin, knocking out thirteen men and bringing the column to a halt
while stretcher-bearers ran in to carry off the wounded. The 90th and 107th
Pennsylvania, moving up toward the outer fringe of the East Wood, also came
within Stuart's range and had losses; and men were maimed for life who saw no
more of the battle than a peaceful field and a sandy lane in the wood in the
early light of dawn. As they reached the ridge the leading elements of the
divisional columns sent out skirmish lines, and in the broad hollow of the
Miller farm the sporadic pop-pop of picket firing became much heavier while the
skirmish lines went down the slope-each man in the line separated from his
fellows by half a dozen paces, holding his musket as if he were a quail hunter
with a shotgun, moving ahead step by step, dropping to one knee to shoot when
he found a target, pausing to reload, and then moving on again, feeling the
army's way into the danger zone.

Rebel skirmishers held the Miller farm in
some strength, and there were many more along the fence by the cornfield. The
sound of the musket fire suddenly rose to a long, echoing crash that ran from
the highway to the East Wood and back again. The Confederate batteries to the
south and off to the right stepped up the pace, and the shells came over
faster. Beyond the hollow ground the green cornfield swayed and moved, although
there was no wind. The glint of bayonets could be seen here and there amid the
leafage, and long, tearing volleys came out of the corn, while wreaths of
yellowish-white smoke drifted up above it as if the whole field were steaming.
More men were hurt, and the Yankee skirmishers halted and took cover.

There was a pause, while the battle lines
waited under fire. Then there was a great rush and a pounding of hoofs as
Hooker's corps artillery dashed up into line—six batteries coming up at a mad
gallop, gun carriages bouncing wildly with spinning wheels, drivers lashing the
six-horse teams, officers riding on ahead and turning to signal with flashing
swords when they reached the chosen firing line. In some of these batteries
orders for field maneuvers were given by bugle, and the high thin notes could
be heard above all the racket, the teams wheeling in a spatter of rising
dust—veteran artillery horses knew what the bugle calls meant as well as the
men did, and would obey without waiting to be told. In a few minutes three
dozen guns were lined up on the slope, limbers a dozen yards to the rear,
teamsters taking the horses back into the wood, gun crews busy with ramrod and
handspike. The guns began to plaster the cornfield unmercifully, and the air
above the field was filled with clods of dirt and flying cornstalks and
knapsacks and broken muskets as the canister ripped the standing grain.