Mr Lincoln's Army (46 page)

Far off to the left, beyond the Antietam,
McClellan's long-range rifles came into action, hammering hard at the Rebel
guns by the Dunker church and reaching out to plow the cornfield with a
terrible cross fire of shell and solid shot; and the waiting Federal infantry
hugged the ground, half dazed by the tremendous waves of noise. Hooker
exaggerated a little, but only a little, when he wrote afterward that "every
stalk in the northern and greater part of the field was cut as closely as could
have been done with a knife"; and he exaggerated not at all when he wrote
that in all the war he never looked upon "a more bloody, dismal
battlefield." The Confederates in the northern part of the cornfield went
down in rows, scores at a time. Then after a while the great thunder of the
guns died down a little and the Yankee infantry went forward.

It all looks very simple and orderly on
the map, where the advance of the I Corps is represented by a straight line
following neat little arrows, three divisions moving snugly abreast and
everyone present presumably knowing at all times just what was going on and
what the score was. But in reality there was nothing simple or orderly about
any part of it. Instead there was an appalling confusion of shattering sound,
an unending chaos of violence and heat and intense combat, with fields and
thickets wrapped in shifting layers of blinding smoke so that no man could know
and understand any more of what was happening than the part he could see
immediately around him. There was no solid connected battle line neatly ranked
in clear light; there was a whole series of battle lines swaying haphazardly in
an infernal choking fog, with brigades and regiments standing by themselves and
fighting their enemies where they found them, attack and counterattack taking
place in every conceivable direction and in no recognizable time sequence,
Northerners and Southerners wrestling back and forth in the cornfield in one
tremendous free-for-all. The black powder used in those days left heavy masses
of smoke which stayed on the ground or hung at waist level in long tattered
sheets until the wind blew it away, and this smoke deposited a black, greasy
film on sweaty skins, so that men who had been fighting hard looked grotesque,
as if they had been ineptly made up for a minstrel show.

The
fighting surged back and forth from the East Wood to the highway and beyond,
and the most any general could do was push new troops in from the rear where
they seemed to be needed—or, at times, rally soldiers who were coming
disorganized out of action and send them back in again: what was happening up
front was beyond anyone's control and depended entirely on the men themselves.
And a wild, primitive madness seemed to descend on the men who fought in the
cornfield: they went beyond the limits of sanity and endurance at times, Northerners
and Southerners alike, until it seems that they tore at each other for the
sheer sake of fighting. The men who fought there are all dead now, and it may
be that we misinterpret the sketchy accounts which they left of the combat; yet
from the diaries and the reports and the histories we get glimpses of what
might well have been the most savage and consuming fighting American soldiers
ever engaged in.

General Ricketts sent his men in through the
East Wood—New York regiments, mostly, with a few from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts—and
they fought step by step through the thickets and over the rocky ledges and
fallen trees in the misty light of early morning, slowly driving the tenacious
Confederates out and swinging around unconsciously until they faced toward the
west, so that as they came out of the wood they went into the cornfield, with
Stuart's cannon hitting them hard from the western hills. They pulled
themselves together on the edge of the cornfield, getting an enfilade fire on
a Confederate brigade there and sending it flying; then they advanced again,
and as they moved the regiments were separated, each one automatically
adjusting its lines to face whatever formation of Rebels might be in front of
it. When they got deeper into the field the opposition became heavier, until at
last whole brigades were shaken by the deadly, racking volleys—the most
terrible fire, one veteran wrote, that they ever had to endure. Rifles were
splintered and broken in men's hands, canteens and haversacks were riddled,
platoons and companies seemed to dissolve. They closed ranks as well as they
could amid the cornstalks, sweating officers gesturing with swords and yelling
orders no one could hear in the overpowering racket, and they kept pushing on.
They attacked and they were counterattacked; they drove certain Rebels and were
themselves driven in turn; at times they exchanged stand-up volleys at
incredibly close ranges, wrecking their enemies and seeing their own lines
wrecked, while the smoke settled thicker and thicker and they fought in utter
blindness.

At last they went back, straggling through
the East Wood to reform in the rear—a full third of the division shot down and
half of the survivors hopelessly scattered. The 12th Massachusetts—the
kid-glove boys from Boston who had brought a great song to the war and carried
a noble flag of white and blue and gold presented by the ladies of Beacon
Hill—took 334 men into action and lost 220 of them, and when it tried to rally
behind the wood fewer than three dozen men were still with the colors. Duryee's
brigade of four regiments found hardly a hundred men to form a line when it
finished its retreat. For the time being, except for a few valiant fragments
which hung on at the edge of the wood, the entire division was out of the
fight.

Meade's Pennsylvanians had gone into the
cornfield at the center of the line, and their story is just about the same:
advance and retreat, charge and countercharge, victory and retreat all
blended. Once the center brigade broke under a driving Rebel charge and went
streaming toward the rear. Meade came thundering up with the battle fury on
him, yanked the 8th Reserve Regiment back into line, hurried it off to a
vantage point by Mr. Miller's fence. A Georgia regiment, lying unseen in the
corn, let fly with a volley from a distance of thirty feet, knocking out half
the regiment at one sweep. The Pennsylvania color-bearer went down with a foot
shot off, struggled to his knees, jabbing his flagstaff into the ground, and
struck wildly at a comrade who tried to take the colors away from him. A
charging Georgian shot him dead and was himself killed by a Pennsylvania
lieutenant; and there were wild tumult and heavy smoke and crazy shouting all
around, with the entire war narrowed to the focus of this single combat
between Pennsylvanians and Georgians. Then the Pennsylvanians broke and ran
again—to be stopped, incomprehensibly, a few yards in the rear by a boyish
private who stood on a little hillock and kept swinging his hat, shouting:
"Rally, boys, rally! Die like men, don't run like dogs!"

Strangely, on that desperate field where men
were madly heroic and full of abject panic by turns, this lone private stopped
the retreat. What was left of the regiment fell in beside him. Fugitives from
other regiments in the shattered brigade fell in with them, and Meade—who had
gone galloping away to bring up a battery to plug the gap—came back and got the
uncertain line straightened out, while canister from the new battery uprooted
green cornstalks and tore the bodies of Rebels who crouched low on the powdery
ground. Then presently the brigade went forward again.
²

Over by the turnpike the Black Hat Brigade
charged around the Miller farm buildings, driving out the Confederate
skirmishers but breaking apart somewhat as the men surged past dwelling and outhouses
under heavy fire. There is a glimpse of a young Wisconsin officer standing by a
gap in a fence, waving his sword and crying: "Company E! On the right, by
file, into line!" Then a bullet hit him in his open mouth and he toppled
over dead in mid-shout; and the brigade got by the obstructions and went into
the cornfield near the highway. Here it seemed to be every man for himself.
There was Rebel infantry west of the road, pouring in a tremendous fire; some
of the men formed a new line facing west, lying down behind the turnpike fence
to fight back. Gibbon sent a couple of regiments across the road to deal with
this flank attack, and a moment later Doubleday sent four New York regiments
over there to help; part of his division was going south through the cornfield
and part of it was struggling desperately in the fields and woods to the west,
and shells and bullets were coming in from all directions at once. Men said
afterward that the bullets seemed to be as thick as hail in a great storm.
Formations were lost, regiments and brigades were jumbled up together, and as
the men advanced they bent their heads as if they were walking into a driving
rain. And under all the deafening tumult there was a soft, unceasing
clip-snip-clip of bullets shearing off the leaves and stalks of corn. Near the
highway some officer was yelling the obvious—"This fire is
murderous!"—and then, at last, the sweating mob of soldiers came out by a
fence at the southern edge of the cornfield, and as they did so a long line of
Confederates arose from the plowed ground in front of them and the high sound
of rifle fire rose to a new intensity.

A terrible frenzy of battle descended on the
fighting line. Men were possessed by a hysterical excitement, shouting
furiously, bursting out in shrill insane laughter, crowding up to the fence to
fire at the Rebel line. A survivor of this attack, recalling the merciless fire
that greeted the men at the line of the fence, wrote: "Men, I cannot say
fell—they were knocked out of ranks by the dozen." Cartridges were torn
with nervous haste. Muskets became foul from much firing, so that men took
stones to hammer their ramrods down. Wanting to fire faster than ever before,
they found they could not—a nightmare slowness was upon them as the black
powder caked in hot rifle barrels. Some soldiers threw their pieces away and
took up the rifles of dead men.

All along the fence the men were jostling
together, with soldiers in the rear ranks passing loaded rifles forward to the
men in front; battle flags waved in sweeping, smoke-fringed arcs, color-bearers
swinging the flag staffs frantically, as if the mere fluttering of the colors
would help bring victory. Brigades and regiments were all helter-skelter—
Pennsylvanians and New Yorkers were jammed in with men from Wisconsin and
Massachusetts, everyone was cheering hoarsely, new elements were coming up from
the rear to add to the crush along the fence, the noise of battle was one great
unending roar louder than anything the men had ever heard before. And at last,
as if by common impulse, the whole crowd swarmed forward over the fence and
started up the open field toward the Dunker church—very near now, its
whitewashed walls all splotched and patchy from flying bullets. The Confederate
line, terribly thinned by rifle fire, broke in wild flight. Some of the
Southerners tried to escape over the turnpike fences and were left
spread-eagled on the rails as the Federals shot them; others fell back into the
wood around the church. The Northerners raised a great new shout and went ahead
on the run, with victory in sight.
³

Then, dramatically, from the wood around the
church a new Confederate battle line emerged, trotting forward with the shrill
yip-yip-yip of the Rebel yell—John B. Hood's division, swinging into action
with an irresistible counterattack.

Hood's men had been pulled out of the front
lines late the night before, after their brush with the Pennsylvanians in the
East Wood. They had been on short rations for days, and early this morning the
commissary department finally caught up with them, delivering ample supplies of
bread and meat. The division had been in the act of cooking the first solid
meal in a week when word came back that they were needed up front without a
moment's delay—the Yankees had broken the line and would have the battle won
unless somebody did something about it. So the Texans and Mississippians left
their half-cooked breakfasts, grabbed their rifles, and came storming out into
the open, mad clean through: and here, within easy range, were the

Yankees
who were the cause of it all, the Yankees on whom the overmastering anger of
hungry men could be vented.

Hood's men drew up and delivered a volley
which, said a Federal survivor, "was like a scythe ranting through our
line." It hit the Federals head-on and stopped them. There was a brief
pause, and then the Northern soldiers turned and made for the rear on the run,
back over the fence and into the raddled cornfield and down the long slope,
Hood's men following them with triumphant, jeering shouts, while three brigades
from D. H. Hill's command came in from below the East Wood and added their own
weight to the pursuit.

Down in the open ground by the Miller house
the flight was checked. General Gibbon had brought up old Battery B, and its
six brass smoothbores were drawn up in a barnyard west of the road. The Rebels
were advancing on both sides of the pike, converging on the barnyard—the
Federals west of the road had had to retire when the cornfield was lost—and the
guns became a strong point where the beaten soldiers could make a stand again.
Some of the fugitives fell in behind the battery, kneeling and firing out
between the guns. Gibbon got two of his regiments drawn up farther west, a
little ahead of the guns and facing east; General Patrick brought his four New
York regiments up amid the crush; and the charging Confederates came out of the
corn from the south and east, smashing straight at the battery, firing as they
came.