Mr Lincoln's Army (49 page)

The blow came with demoralizing suddenness,
and for most of the men it was completely invisible, and there was nothing
whatever they could do about it. One minute Sumner was sitting his horse amid
the leading brigade, watching the firing that was coming from the Rebels on the
ridge, sizing up the situation; the next minute there was a great uproar of
musketry and screaming men in the wood to the left, the air was full of
bullets, an unexpected host of new Rebels was going into line on the ridge in
front, guns were appearing from nowhere and going into battery there, and there
was complete and unmerciful hell to pay.

It hit the rear ranks first. One-armed
General Howard had four Pennsylvania regiments in the third brigade—all the men
came from Philadelphia, and the outfit was known as the "Philadelphia
Brigade" —and these men, who had been standing at ease in the wood,
abruptly found themselves under a deadly fire from behind. Regiments broke, men
scrambled for cover, officers shouted frantically; the enemy was out of sight,
dense smoke was seeping in through the trees, the air was alive with bullets,
fugitives were running every which way. Howard—never an inspirational leader,
but a solid citizen who was never scared, either—went riding along the line
trying to get the men realigned, which was hard because nobody knew which way
the men ought to be faced in order to fight effectively. Sumner galloped up,
shouted something, and galloped off again. In the unceasing racket Howard could
not hear a word he said; an aide yelled in his ear that Sumner had been
shouting: "My God, Howard! You must get out of here!"—an idea which
by now had seized every man in the brigade. The 72nd Pennsylvania, at the far
left, gave way completely, its frantic stragglers adding to the confusion. Some
detachments were faced by the rear rank and started off, but that didn't seem
to work —more often than not the men found themselves marching straight into a
consuming fire; and presently the whole brigade simply dissolved and the men
ran back out of the wood and into an open field, a disordered mob rather than a
brigade of troops. In the field they were caught by artillery, the Rebels
having wheeled up guns to sweep the open ground, and the rout of the brigade
became complete. In something less than ten minutes the brigade had lost more
than five hundred men and had hardly been able to fire a shot in reply.

Up front it was a little better, but not
much. A savage Rebel charge came in from the open field, and the 15th
Massachusetts took it head-on, exchanging volleys at a scant fifteen yards. One
soldier in this regiment later wrote that "the loss of life was fearful;
we had never seen anything like it." The 34th New York, which was at the
left end of the front line, tried to move over to help and somehow got squarely
in between two Confederate lines and took a horrible fire from front and rear
at the same time, losing half of its men in a few minutes. General Sedgwick
hurried back to his second brigade, trying to get a regiment or two wheeled
around for flank protection, but it was simply impossible—there just was no
room to maneuver in all that crush even if the Rebel fire had permitted it,
which it didn't. Sedgwick got a wound in the arm and an aide urged him to go to
the rear. He refused, saying that the wound was a nuisance and nothing more;
then another bullet lifted him out of the saddle with a wound that kept him in
hospital for five months. (He made a bad patient, it seems. Impatient with
hospital routine, he jokingly said that if he ever got hit again he hoped the
bullet would finish him off—anything was better than a hospital. Cracks like
that are bad luck for soldiers: Uncle John got his wish at Spotsylvania
Courthouse in 1864, when a Rebel sharpshooter hit him under the eye and killed
him.)

Minutes seemed like hours in the uproar under
the smoky trees. The sound of rifle fire rose higher and higher as more Rebel
brigades got into action. Over and over, in official reports and in regimental
histories, one finds Federals giving the same account of it—the heaviest,
deadliest fire they ever saw in the entire war.
³
The rear brigade
was gone and the second brigade was going. General Dana, commanding the second
brigade, managed to get parts of the 42nd New York and the 7th Michigan swung
around to meet the fire from the left, but they couldn't hold on. When Howard's
brigade went to pieces the Rebels came in from the rear and the two regiments
were overwhelmed, with a few platoons managing to keep some sort of formation
as they backed off to the north.

The
colonel of the 59th New York rode back and forth with a flag, bawling:
"Rally on the colors!" His men grouped themselves around him and
tried to return a heavy fire that came out of the wood in front; and in the
smoke and the confusion they volleyed into the backs of the 15th Massachusetts,
and there was a terrible shouting and cursing amid all the din. Then a
Confederate regiment worked its way around and fired into the 59th from the
rear, and the New Yorkers lost nearly two thirds of their numbers. Young
Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes of the 20th Massachusetts went down with his
second wound of the war; and somehow, amazingly, that wandering rookie
regiment from General Samuel Crawford's brigade, the greenhorn 125th
Pennsylvania, showed up and fell into line beside the battered 34th New York,
where it fought manfully. (Nobody ever knew quite how it got there; it had been
fighting with Greene's boys south of the Dunker church, and in some incomprehensible
manner it had got detached and in all the fury of this infighting had managed
to get into the middle of Sedgwick's front line. Those rookies seemed to have a
genius for wandering into fights, and they were packing a whole year's
experience into one desperate morning.)

If the time seemed endless, it was really
very short. Just fifteen minutes after the first shot had been fired, the last
of the division retreated. From first to last, the division had not had a
chance; it was attacked from three sides at once—front, left, and rear—and the
collapse ran from rear rank to front rank. It left more than twenty-one hundred
men dead or wounded in the West Wood, and a good half of its units had never
been able to fire a shot; some of those that did fought facing by the rear
rank. Confederate losses in this fight had been negligible; the sacrifice of
Sedgwick's division had accomplished nothing whatever.

A few regiments got out in good order. The
20th Massachusetts proudly recorded that it left the West Wood at a walk, in
column of fours, muskets at right shoulder; and the 1st Minnesota, which had
been lucky—it had lost only a fourth of its men—went out beside it, similarly
formed. These and a few other unbroken units were lined up perpendicular to the
Hagerstown pike, a few hundred yards north of the spot where the division had
crossed the road on its way in, and they laid down a strong fire when the
triumphant Rebels came out of the wood to finish the rout. The Rebel lines
swept into the cornfield—one more charge across that cornfield!—where wounded
men cursed wearily and pressed their faces against the dirt, hoping that
pounding feet and bursting shells and low-flying bullets would not hurt them
further as they lay there helpless—and for a few minutes it looked as if this
counterattack might destroy the whole right wing of McClellan's army and end
the battle then and there. But the remnant of Sedgwick's division gave ground
stubbornly and at a price, Gordon's tired brigade from Mansfield's corps came
in to help, a good deal of rifle fire was still coming out of the East Wood,
and an enormous line of fieldpieces was waiting on the slope north of the
cornfield. For the last time that day the cornfield was swept by murderous
fire, and the Confederates slowed down, halted, and went back to the shelter of
the West Wood, while the beaten Federals withdrew to the ridge in rear of the
guns, leaving a fringe of pickets and skirmishers behind.

And while this area north of the Dunker
church was smoldering and fitfully exploding all the rest of the day with
long-range rifle and artillery fire, there was no more real fighting here.
There had been enough, in all conscience. In a square of ground measuring very
little more than one thousand yards on a side—cornfield, barnyard, orchard,
East and West Woods, and the fields by the turnpike—nearly twelve thousand men
were lying on the ground, dead or wounded. It had not taken long to put them
there, either. The fighting began with daylight—around five-thirty or six
o'clock. It was now nine-thirty; four hours, at the most, from the time
Hooker's batteries began to rake the cornfield to the end of the last Rebel
countercharge. They fought with muzzle-loaders in those days, the men who got
off two shots a minute were doing well, and it took, as one might say, a real
effort to kill a man then. But considering their handicaps, they did pretty
well.

When the beaten elements of Sedgwick's
division crept north to safety, Sumner rode east to see about the rest of his
army corps. The old man had done his best, and after that first desperate
"My God, Howard! You must get out of here!" he had been as cool in
all that fire as if he had been on parade, riding his horse at a walk amid the
broken ranks of panicky soldiers, doing the little that could be done to pull
fighting lines together, calming men by his stout refusal to recognize personal
danger. But his best had been tragically inadequate: good enough to serve in
the moment of disaster, but not good enough to keep the disaster from happening.
He had been given an entire army corps, the biggest one in the army, eighteen
thousand men in all; and he had left two thirds of it behind when he made his
big attack. The one division which went astray and the other which was late in
starting—these two, banked up beside Sedgwick's men, might well have broken
Lee's flank beyond all hope of repair and the war would have been won by noon.
The old man thought about them and went back to see about them after his attack
had failed.

(Back by the Pry house sat McClellan, getting
the messages of triumph and disaster from the wigwagging signal flags, studying
the far-off slopes through his telescope, sending his aides here and there,
watching the battle that he had planned, but not laying his own hand upon it: climax
of the war taking place before his eyes, climax of his own personal fate, life
or death for many thousands of young men depending on this day's battle.
McClellan, quiet, composed, thoughtful, almost detached, listening with an
inner ear for the still voice of caution and doubt, letting the battle go on
without him.)

Yet the thing could still be done, and
perhaps Old Winkey was the man to do it. Brigadier General William H. French,
who had the second of Sumner's divisions, was red-faced and bluff, with a fantastic
habit of bringing both eyes tightly shut spasmodically as he talked-thus
"Old Winkey" or "Old Blinky" to his men. (One buck private,
in the early days of the war, accosted by French about something or other
while the division was on the march, had given way to laughter at all of this
blinking. Since French was a hot-tempered man, the private had been hung by the
thumbs from the nearest tree and left there to reflect on the sober respect
that is due a general, until the following division cut him down.) French took
his division across the Antietam in the wake of Sedgwick, under the impression
that he was to strike for the Rebel line to the south of the Dunker church. As
he brought his men up the hills west of the creek he had on his right hand a
pillar of flame—the farmhouse of one Mumma, a solid citizen who had given the
land where the Dunker church was built, his dwelling set ablaze that morning by
D. H. Hill's outposts, who feared it might become a strong point for Yankee
sharpshooters.

The
division halted briefly to perfect its alignment, and about the time the last
of Sedgwick's fugitives got back to the northern hills French had everything
ready and the men started up out of the creek valley. The sun came out and the
light was bright; ahead was the Roulette farm, a pleasant cluster of buildings
on a broad knoll, surrounded by an orchard, shade trees, and a well-kept lawn.
As the line reached this high place the officers back at headquarters got another
look at the deceitful pageantry of war: broad, orderly lines of infantry going
on in the sunlight, tiny puff balls of smoke appearing around the house as the
Rebel skirmishers went into action, battle flags making high lights of gay
color, officers posturing on their horses with glinting swords, a battery of
artillery riding up fast and unlimbering dramatically; all very fine and
bloodless-looking, just like the colored lithographs. Then the battle line
divided as the men went by the Roulette house, the Federals combing belated
Southern skirmishers out of stables and springhouse at bayonet point. Regimental
surgeons, following close behind, moved into the big barn under the brow of a
hill and prepared their operating tables, while orderlies spread out straw for
wounded men to lie on. They would have plenty of work to do presently.

As the lines closed up beyond the farmhouse,
with sharper rifle fire coming down from the crest of a rise in front, some of
the men went through a yard where there was a long row of beehives; and just
then a round shot from some Southern gun smashed through the length of these
hives, and the air, which was already full of bullets, was now abuzz and
humming with angry bees. The rookie 132nd Pennsylvania got the worst of it, and
for a moment the bees almost broke up the battle. The green soldiers were
marching into the rifle fire bravely enough, but the bees were more than they
could take and the regiment went all to pieces as the men leaped and ran and
slapped and swore. It took the united efforts of General Kimball, the brigade
commander, his staff and the regimental officers to get the boys out of the
yard and back in ranks again. To the end of their days the soldiers of the
132nd remembered the fight with the bees in the Roulette farmyard.