The Last Full Measure (23 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
An insouciant attitude toward death was highly esteemed among the officer class of both sides, and there are many examples of sangfroid in the face of extreme danger. Indeed some, such as George Custer, relished testing their staff officers in “an almost sadistic imposition of the leader’s courage on others,” by leading staff parades that exposed them to fire. Any who flinched were subjected to his withering scorn. Union cavalry general Alfred
Torbert also insisted on dragging his staff on tours of the front line (his chief medical officer was killed on one such outing), and on the Confederate side, D. H. Hill liked to “treat” his staff to enemy attention.
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Grant (without any of the theatrics of a Custer, Torbert, or Hill) also displayed conspicuous coolness when he and his staff came under fire at Shiloh. Leander Stillwell saw him, “on horseback, of course, accompanied by his staff, and was evidently making a personal examination of his lines. He went by us in a gallop, riding between us and the battery, at the head of his staff. The battery was then broadly engaged, shot and shell were whizzing overhead, and cutting off the limbs of trees, but Grant rode through the storm with perfect indifference, seemingly paying no more attention to the missiles than if they had been paper wads.”
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Although occasionally tarnished by ego and showing off, these displays also had a practical purpose—to get men to fight, either by encouraging them into willing emulation or shaming them into begrudging imitation. Confederate major general Richard Taylor (president Zachary Taylor’s son and a very gifted tactician), commanding raw troops who were being hammered by shot and shell as they cowered within their breastworks during an attempted relief of the siege of Vicksburg, realized that it was “absolutely necessary to give the men some morale; and, mounting the breastwork, I made a cigarette, struck fire with my briquet [cigarette lighter] and walked up and down, smoking. Near the line was a low tree with spreading branches, which a young officer, Bradford by name, proposed to climb, as to have a better view. I gave him my field glass, and this plucky youngster sat in his tree as quietly as in a chimney corner, though the branches were cut away [by bullets]. These examples … gave confidence to the men, who began to expose themselves.”
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But there was often a price to pay. A Union officer, desperately trying to halt the retreat after the defeat at Chickamauga, “would walk deliberately up to the rail pile and stand erect and
exposed till his men rallied to him. For hours he did this,” until he was killed.
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And with a higher chance of being killed compared with that which his men faced, an officer had to come to terms with it—one way or another. Fatalism helped. Hilary A. Herbert, colonel of the Eighth Alabama (wounded at the Wilderness and after the war, secretary of the navy), was asked if he dwelled much on the shortened odds of being killed due to his prominence on the field:
Yes, very frequently. But why do you ask?
Well, I thought from [the] fact that you never say anything about it, and then for the manner in which you expose yourself … recklessly, that you had an idea that you were in no danger of being killed.
O, no … I know that the probabilities are that a colonel of an infantry regiment … who does his duty, will in all probability be either killed or seriously wounded. I have … simply made up my mind that I must take my chances.… That is all there is to it.
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Another motivation was of a very different order: simple ambition. Throughout the history of warfare the god of battle has flipped his coin: death on the tail, promotion on the face. During the terrible fighting for the “Bloody Angle” of the Mule Shoe salient during the battle of Spotsylvania, Brigadier General Abner M. Perrin of Jubal Early’s corps roundly declared, “I shall come out of this fight a live major general or a dead brigadier.” He was killed in a hail of bullets.
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Style was important. There are many accounts of what might be called a rhetorical flourish in the face of death, like that of a Louisiana captain: artilleryman Robert Stiles described how the officer, whose left arm was taken off at the shoulder by a shell, swung his horse around in order to spare his men the sight of the ghastly wound, and called
out jauntily, “Keep it up boys, I’ll be back in a moment.” He then, considerately, fell dead from his horse when out of sight.
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But for some, neither stoicism nor ambition nor the obligations of rank could overcome the fear of death. At Spotsylvania a Union officer was spotted lurking behind a log. He “took a cartridge out of his vest pocket, tore the paper with his strong white teeth, spilled the powder into his right palm, spat on it, and then, first casting a quick glance around to see if he was observed, he rubbed the moistened powder on his face and hands and then dust-coated the war paint. Instantly he was transformed from a trembling coward who lurked behind a tree into an exhausted brave taking a little well-earned repose.”
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“Men go to war to kill or to get killed … and should expect no tenderness,” declared General William Tecumseh Sherman. For senior officers there was another intimacy with death in battle—they were responsible for unleashing it. Some were utterly hardened (at least superficially) to the carnage for which they were responsible. Sherman, for example, could recognize, in a detached way, the horror of battle. After the first battle of Bull Run (Manassas), he said, “For the first time I saw the carnage of battle, men lying in every conceivable shape, and mangled in a horrible way; but this did not make a particular impression on me,” for he knew that the “very object of war is to produce results by death and slaughter.”
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During the Atlanta campaign he even affected a jaunty callousness, saying: “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash.”
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Ulysses Grant was not insensitive to the death he orchestrated but suppressed the pity, perhaps out of self-preservation. After the bloody battle of Champion’s Hill (1863) during the Vicksburg campaign, he recorded: “While a battle is raging one can see his enemy mowed down by the thousand, or the ten thousand, with great composure; but after the battle these scenes are
distressing, and one is naturally disposed to do as much to alleviate the suffering of an enemy as a friend.”
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But he had to harden his heart, recognizing that the side “that never counted its dead” would achieve the ultimate victory. On the Confederate side, Lee could be deeply affected by the death he visited on his men, as shown by his anguished reaction after the failure of the Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimball assault on the third day of Gettysburg. On the other hand, Stonewall Jackson adopted a Cromwellian sternness as far as the deaths of his own men were concerned. He was doing God’s work, and that absolved him from all responsibility: “He places no value on human life,” George Pickett wrote of Jackson, “caring for nothing so much as fighting, unless it be praying.”
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Jackson once looked upon a line of his own dead as unaffected as if he were at a review. “Not a muscle quivered,” Confederate artillerist Robert Stiles records. “He was the ideal of concentration—imperturbable, resistless.”
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To an officer who had protested that the attack Jackson had just ordered was suicidal and “my regiment would be exterminated,” Jackson snapped back: “Colonel, do your duty. I have made every arrangement to care for the wounded and bury the dead.”
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Other generals were undone by their tender hearts. George McClellan suffered the tortures of the damned: “I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield, with its mangled corpses and poor suffering wounded! Victory has no charms for me while purchased at such cost. I shall be only too glad when all is over.”
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And on another occasion: “Every poor fellow that is killed or wounded almost haunts me! … I have honestly done my best to save as many lives as possible.”
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His concern for minimizing casualties endeared him to his men, if not to his political masters, who had a war to win and needed sterner stuff with which to do it.
AND HOW DID
ordinary soldiers view death on the battlefield? Two concepts fought with each other. On the one hand was the idea of death as noble, heroic, and redeemed by sacrifice, with the body itself lying, as though as evidence, in peaceful repose. On the other hand, there was the irredeemable and meaningless waste, the bodies mutilated beyond any possibility of sentimental embalming. It was, of course, a religious age, perhaps more fundamentally in the South (whose army was periodically swept with fervent bouts of revivalism) than the North. For both sides, religion provided most, though by no means all, the solace that acted as an inoculation against the horror. (Many others found that booze did more to reconcile them to mortality than religion ever could.)
The first contact with violent death was like a smack across the face. On the second day’s fighting at Shiloh, a Union soldier recorded the shock:
The first dead soldier we saw had fallen in the road; our artillery had crushed and mangled his limbs, and ground him into the mire. He lay a bloody, loathsome mass, the scraps of his blue uniform furnishing the only distinguishable evidence that a hero there had died. At this sight I saw many a manly fellow gulp down his heart.… Near him lay a slender rebel boy—his face in the mud, his brown hair floating in a muddy pool. Soon a dead Major, then a Colonel, then the lamented Wallace [General W. H. L. Wallace, who died from his wounds three days later], yet alive, were passed in quick and sickening succession. The gray gloaming of the misty morning gave a ghostly pallor to the faces of the dead. The disordered hair, dripping from the night’s rain, the distorted and passion-marked faces, the stony, glaring eyes, the blue lips, the glistening teeth.… Never, perhaps, did raw men go into battle under
such discouraging auspices as did this division. There was everything to depress, nothing to inspirit, and yet determination was written upon their pale faces.
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Death could come with stunning swiftness. Leander Stillwell would never forget “how awfully I felt on seeing for the first time a man killed in battle … I stared at his body, perfectly horrified! Only a few seconds ago that man was alive and well, and now he was lying on the ground, done for, forever!”
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Stillwell was transfixed by how swiftly the human could be transformed into a mere object. The writer William Dean Howells also describes the existential shock of what might be called the “absoluteness” of the battlefield dead. It was a spiritual gutting: “At the sight of these dead men whom other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of his lifetime, that never came back again: the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.”
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Union cavalryman Charles Weller reflected on the battle of Chickamauga with despair: “What at the present time is a man’s life worth! Comparatively nothing[;] he falls and is forgotten except by his immediate friends.” A soldier of the Sixth Iowa mirrored Weller’s sentiment; war forced him to “estimate life at its true value—nothing.”
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There were two main ways of combating this emptiness. One was to invest death with religious and patriotic significance; it was transformed from something final or meaningless into an act consecrated by patriotic nobility and Christian sacrifice. The dead passed over to a better world, not only released from the tawdriness of temporal existence but blessedly rewarded in the afterlife. Stonewall Jackson’s last words are a lyrical evocation of that premise: “Let us cross the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”
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A devout Confederate at Gettysburg was hit during the last gasp of the battle, and one of his comrades describes how “a terrific fire burst, thundering, flashing, crashing [and] there
lay our noble comrade … limb thrice broken, the body gashed with wounds, the top of the skull blown off and the brain actually fallen out.” But no matter how appalling this was, it could be redeemed because a “chariot and horses of fire had caught [him] up into Heaven.”
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A nurse wrote to the mother of a deceased soldier that he “had been conscious of his death and … not afraid but willing to die … he is better off.”
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The age revered the cult of dying well—the
ars moriendi
. Much popular literature and art was devoted to it, and inevitably a good deal was of the maudlin tie-a-yellow-ribbon variety. Joseph Hopkins Twichell, a Union soldier, was no stay-at-home bleeding heart. He had seen “a hideous nightmare … too piteous for speech … as if the universe would stop with the horror of it,” during the Peninsular campaign of 1862, but turned to the plangent sentimentality of the period to deal with it:
They’re left behind!
Our steps are turned away:
We forward march, but these forever stay
Halted, till trumpets wake the final day:—
Good-bye! Good-bye!