Mr Lincoln's Army (48 page)

So once more there was a bitter fight in the
cornfield, with the Federals coming in from the north and the east; and Hood,
as he had foreseen, was compelled to withdraw, with half of his men shot down.
As Gordon's lines went in Hooker got a bullet in the foot and rode to the rear,
dripping blood, and command of this part of the battle passed temporarily to
Mansfield's senior division commander, General Alpheus S. Williams, who rode
about the field with the unlighted stub of a cigar gripped in his teeth and who
was called "Pop" by his troops—sure sign that they liked him. The
retreating Rebels made a desperate fight of it. One of Crawford's men asserted
that "on all other fields, from the beginning to the end of our long
service, we never had to face their equals," and the 27th Indiana came to
a halt in the middle of the smoky field, standing erect in close order and
firing as fast as it could handle its muskets, which finally became too hot to
be used. One Hoosier, badly wounded, laid down his rifle and went a few yards
to the rear, where he sat down, opened his clothing, and examined his wound.
After studying it, he mused aloud: "Well, I guess I'm hurt about as bad as
I can be. I believe I'll go back and give 'em some more." So he picked up
a discarded musket and returned to the firing line.

The regiment shot up all its ammunition, a
hundred rounds per man, and sent details around the field to loot the cartridge
boxes of the dead and wounded. In this fight the 27th lost a good non-com
—Corporal Barton W. Mitchell, who had caused the battle in the first place by
finding Lee's lost order; he went down with a wound that kept him out of action
for months. His company commander, Captain Kopp, to whom he had first taken the
lost order, was killed.

At last the 2nd Massachusetts came in on the
right, its colonel jubilantly waving a captured Texas battle flag, and the
Confederate defense began to crumble. Crawford's men came out of the East Wood
at last, rookies and veterans all yelling and firing as they came, and the
Rebels gave way and went back, running south and west across the turnpike and
into the West Wood. Once more the cornfield, for whatever it was worth, belonged
to the Union. Gordon's and Crawford's men tried to get across the turnpike and
pursue, but nobody had ever yet cleaned up on the Rebel strength to the west of
this highway—Mansfield had sent a brigade over there when he first took his
corps into action, but the regiments had been put in clumsily and had been
driven off—and the Federal advance was halted along the rail fence, and that
dusty country highway once more became a lane of death.

Half a mile farther east things were
going better. General George Sears Greene, a relative of Revolutionary War hero
Nathanael Greene, had the rest of Mansfield's troops—a battle-worn division of
some seventeen hundred men—and these had cut through the eastern fringe of the
East Wood and had gone driving straight for the Dunker church. Some of the
Confederates who had been driven out of the cornfield rallied and hit them in
the flank as they got past the timber, some of Hill's men gouged at their other
flank, and Lee brought reinforcements over from the right of his line to make a
stand in front of the church. The Northerners had a hard time of ft for a
while, coming under fire from three directions, and when the Confederates came
in with a counterattack the outlook was bad; but just in time a Rhode Island
battery came galloping up, the infantry broke ranks to let the guns through,
and the counterattack was smashed with canister and rifle fire. Then one of
Crawford's rookie regiments—125th Pennsylvania, seven hundred strong, a giant
of a regiment for that field-came up, separated from its brigade and slightly
lost but anxious to get into the nearest fight; and Greene's division ran on
past the guns and got into the West Wood around the Dunker church, forming a
solid line on the far side of that battle-scarred building. Here was victory,
if someone could just bring up reinforcements.

But the reinforcements didn't show up. This
spearhead had got clear through the Confederate line. The high ground around
the church, objective of all the morning's fighting, had been seized at last.
But Greene had lost a third of his men, more than two hundred of the
Pennsylvania straw-feet were down, and the survivors could do no more than hang
on where they were, the Rebels keeping them under a steady fire. Completely
wrecked, Hooker's army corps was trying to round up its stragglers and
reassemble on the hills a mile to the north. The rest of Mansfield's corps was
in position around the Miller barnyard and along the western edge of the
cornfield, solidly posted but too busy to send any help. Greene's boys had
reached the goal, but they couldn't do anything with it now that they had it.
The fire that was being played upon their lines was not strong enough to drive
them out, but it was too strong to advance against; and off to the southeast
they could make out the movement of marching bodies of men, as if heavy
Confederate reinforcements were corning up. The right wing of McClellan's army
was beaten out, with this one advanced detachment huddling under the trees to
mark high tide.

2.
The Heaviest Fire of the War

It
may be that life is not man's most precious possession, after all. Certainly
men can be induced to give it away very freely at times, and the terms hardly
seem to make sense unless there is something about the whole business that we don't
understand. Lives are spent for very insignificant things which benefit the
dead not at all—a few rods of ground in a cornfield, for instance, or temporary
ownership of a little hill or a piece of windy pasture; and now and then they
are simply wasted outright, with nobody gaining anything at all. And we talk
glibly about the accidents of battle and the mistakes of generalship without
figuring out just which end of the stick the man who died was holding. As, for
instance:

By seven-thirty in the morning a dim sense
that something had gone wrong had reached McClellan's headquarters. The signal
flags had been wigwagging ever since it was light enough to see them, and at
one time McClellan came out of his tent, smiling and saying, "All goes
well—Hooker is driving them." But all had not gone well thereafter, and
presently white-haired old General Sumner was ordered to take his corps across
the creek and get into action. Sumner moved promptly, and before long, from Mr.
Pry's yard, McClellan could see the three parallel lines of John Sedgwick's
division threading their way up the farther hillsides, heading for the East
Wood.

Sumner
rode with Sedgwick, letting the two remaining divisions of his corps follow as
best they could. He was strictiy the Indian fighter of the Western plains this
morning, putting himself in the front rank of the column of attack, ready for a
straight cut-and-thrust onslaught on the Rebel lines. He knew almost nothing
about what had happened so far—had the impression, even, that the right wing of
the army had gained a victory and that he was being sent in to make it
complete. But when he got to the East Wood the omens under the shattered trees
were sinister. The place was packed with wounded men, and there were far too
many able-bodied soldiers wandering around trying to help them. (One of
Sedgwick's colonels wrote sagely: "When good Samaritans so abound it is a
strong indication that the discipline of the troops in front is not good and
that the battle is not going so as to encourage the half-hearted.")
¹
And when the division came out on the far side of the wood, facing west, the
picture looked even worse. Sumner could see smoke and hear gunfire off to the
right, where tenacious Rebels and Northerners still disputed possession of the
Miller barnyard and adjacent pastures, and some firing seemed to be going on to
the south by the Dunker church; but in front, as far as Sumner could see, there
was nothing at all except for the ghastly debris that filled the cornfield.
From the sketchy evidence he had, Sumner concluded that two whole army corps
had ceased to exist: the right wing of the army was gone, except for scattered
fragments, and he had this end of the battle all to himself.

The
plan of attack which he decided on was very simple. If he was now beyond the
Federal flank, then he must be beyond the Rebel flank as well: so he would move
straight west, at right angles to the earlier lines of attack, advancing until
he was in rear of Lee's left. Then he would wheel to his own left and sweep
down the ridge behind Lee's line, crumpling the Army of Northern Virginia into
McClellan's net. He had Sedgwick form his division in three lines, a brigade
to each line, five thousand men altogether, and he started out across the
cornfield full of confidence: if Sedgwick's men got into any trouble they could
cut their way out, and besides, two other divisions were following.

Sumner supposed they were following, at any
rate. They had been told to do so. But he was the cavalry colonel, riding in
the front line as he led his men to the charge, not the corps commander staying
back to make sure that everybody understood what he was to do and did it; and
his second division was even now going astray, swinging about for an attack on
the high ground southeast of the Dunker church, half a mile or more away from
Sumner's target. The third division had not even started, staff work having
been fouled up. Worst of all, Sedgwick's division was formed for a head-on
attack and nothing else. The three brigade lines were so close together that
maneuvering would be almost impossible, and if the division should be hit in
the flanks there would be great trouble.

The five thousand enlisted men who would have
to foot the bill if anything went wrong were not thinking of possible errors in
tactics as they moved forward. They were veterans and they were rated with the
best troops in the army, but the march so far had been rather unnerving. They
had come up through all the backwash of battle, seeing many wounded, hearing
many discouraging remarks by demoralized stragglers; they had seen ambulances
jolting to the rear from advanced operating stations, carrying men who held the
stumps of their amputated limbs erect in a desperate effort to ease the pain of
the rough ride. When they formed line at the edge of the wood, even the veteran
19th Massachusetts had been so visibly nervous that its colonel had put the men
through the manual of arms for a few minutes to steady their nerves. (This was
another of the old fancy-Dan regiments; in the beginning it had elected not
merely its officers but its enlisted men as well, just like a club, and when it
left Boston in 1861 it had two complete baggage wagons for each company, four
for regimental headquarters and four for the commissary—enough, as one member
said, for an army corps, by later standards. It had learned much since those
days.)

The division went west across the cornfield,
the lines wavering as the men stepped carefully to avoid the dead and wounded,
and it came under artillery fire. Stuart's horse artillery had moved south to a
hill behind the West Wood, firing over the treetops, and the division was so
wide and solid that the gunners could not miss—a shot that carried over the
first battle line was sure to hit the second or the third. (One veteran wrote
disgustedly afterward: "We were as easy to hit as the town of
Sharpsburg.")
²
The men could see the shells coming, but they
had learned by now that it was useless to duck and dodge, and they went
straight ahead, bending their heads a little as if they were walking into a
high wind. From the rear they made a handsome sight —long lines carefully
aligned, battle flags fluttering, little white smoke clouds breaking out
overhead here and there as shells exploded, green wood ahead of them: very nice
to look at, so long as you could look from a distance. Far away, near
McClellan's headquarters, staff officers swung their telescopes on the moving
lines and remarked to one another that this was going to do it—that division
could not be stopped.

Out of the cornfield and over the turnpike
they went, past narrow fields and into the West Wood, that long belt of trees
which ran north and south from below the Dunker church to a spot opposite Mr.
Miller's barnyard. The trees gave protection from the shells, and the only
Rebels in sight were skirmishers who faded back and disappeared as the
division came on. The wood was open enough so that the brigade lines were
maintained without much difficulty, and in a few minutes the leading brigade
came out on the far side, facing open fields that rose slowly to an irregular
ridge several hundred yards off. Stuart's guns were up there, and a few thin
lines of infantry, but nothing very solid. The division was halted, with nobody
able to see anything much except the men in the leading brigade. Sumner's idea
might be right: he was on the flank, and all he had to do now was get his
cumbersome battle lines out into the open, chase the last Rebels off that
ridge, perform a left wheel, and march down toward Sharpsburg.

But it wasn't going to be that way. The left
of Lee's line had been mangled quite as badly as the right of McClellan's, but
in the precise nick of time Lee had sent up strong reinforcements—McLaws's division
and Walker's, with Jackson's indomitable lieutenant, Jubal Early, bringing in
his own brigade and such other stray elements as he could collect. And all of
these, totaling more men than Sumner had with him, were now poised to attack
just where it would hurt most—from the left.