THE WILDERNESS
It might have been guessed from the first,” said Cleave. “Only,
fortunately or unfortunately, mankind never makes such guesses. Given,
with all our talk to the contrary, North and South, a common stock,
with common qualities, common intensities of purpose; then given the
division of the whole into two parts, two thirds of the mass on that
side of the line, one third on this; then, in addition, push to the
larger side manufacturing towns and the control of the sea—and it
ought not to have taken an eagle’s vision to see on which side the
dice would fall.”
Allan pondered it. “There have been times from the beginning—from
First Manassas on—when we lacked little of winning. A very little more
several times and they would have cried, Peace!”
“That is true. It wasn’t impossible, impossible as it looked. It only
wasn’t at all probable.”
“And it is less probable now?”
“It is not at all probable now.”
The two moved on in silence, Cleave riding Dundee, Allan walking
beside him. They were in one of the glades of the Wilderness, the
Sixty-fifth bivouacking at hand, Cleave going to brigade headquarters
and the scout joining him from some by-path. It was sunset, and a pink
light touched the Wilderness. “We have come to a definite turn,” said
Cleave, “or rather, we came to it at Gettysburg,—Gettysburg and
Vicksburg.” He looked about him. “A year ago, we were in this
Wilderness. I had a cloud upon me that I did not know would ever be
lifted—a cloud upon me and a sore heart.” He lifted his hat and rode
bareheaded. “But the light upon this Wilderness was more rosy then
than now.”
Night fell. Far and wide rolled the Wilderness. An odour rose from the
dwarf pine and oak and sweet gum and cedar, from the earth and its
carpet of the leaves of old years, from the dogwood, the pink azalea,
and the purple judas-tree, from rotting logs and orange and red fungi,
from small marshy bottoms where the frogs were croaking, from the dry,
out-worn “poison fields,” from dust and from mould,—a subtle odour,
new as to-day, old as sandalwood cut in the East ten thousand years
ago. Far and wide stretched the Wilderness. Its ravines were not deep,
its hills were not high, but it had a vastness as of the desert,
where, neither, are the ravines deep nor the hills high. The stars
rimmed it, and a low whispering wind went from cedar covert to
sweet-gum copse, from pine to oak, from dogwood to judas-tree. It
lifted the dust from the narrow, trampled, hidden roads and powdered
with it the wayside growth. It murmured past the Tabernacle Church,
and the burned house of Chancellorsville, and Dowdall’s Tavern and the
old Wilderness Tavern, by Catherine Furnace and along the old Turnpike
and the Plank Road. It bore with it the usual sounds of the Wilderness
by night and it bore also, this May as last May, the hum of great
armies, not roused yet, not furiously battling, but murmurous—a
dreamy, not unrestful sound adding itself to the region’s natural
voice.
A group of officers, sitting by the embers of a camp-fire, listened to
the two voices, and watched the pale light along the northern horizon.
“It’s like the lights of a distant city over there.”
“A hundred and forty thousand men make a city.... Not so distant
either.”
“Grant! I never met him in the old Mexican days,—nor afterwards. He
went pretty far down. But I have met a man or two who knew him, and
they liked him—a bulldog, reticent, tenacious kind of person—”
“Very good soldierly qualities—especially when backed by one hundred
and forty thousand men with promise of all reinforcements
needed!—Heigho!”
“He had a kind of rough chivalry, also,—consideration, simplicity.
Sincere, too—” He stirred the embers with his scabbard point. “Well!
we’ve got a job before us now.”
“We’ve won, once before, in this place.”
“The fourth of May! Last fourth of May it was Stonewall Jackson—lying
over there by Dowdall’s Tavern—with just a week to live. Stuart—”
“It’s come to a question of figures. If they can keep on doubling us
in number, if they can add and add reinforcements and we cannot, if
they have made up their minds to stand all the killing necessary,
then, with a determined general, it is not impossible that after years
of trying they may get between us and Richmond.”
“They may eventually. I don’t think they will do it this campaign.”
“No. I reckon not—”
The group fell silent, looking out upon the waves of wooded land and
the light on the horizon. “I was through here,” said one at last, “ten
years ago. I was riding with a farmer—a young man—and I remember that
I said it was like a region that had gone to sleep in its cradle and
never waked up, and he said that that was what was the matter with
it—that nothing ever happened here! I wonder—”
“Don’t wonder. What’s the use?”
“It’s a strange world!”
“Strange! That’s the thing about the universe I think of most at
night—how _queer_ it is!”
“Unity! That’s what they teach—all the philosophers! And yet a unity
that tears its own flesh—”
“Sometimes unity does that very thing. I’ve seen a man do it.”
“Yes, when he was distraught!”
“That’s what I say. You can nearly go mad at night, thinking how mad
we all are!”
“Don’t think. At least not now. You can’t afford it.”
“I agree with Cary. There’s a time to think and a time not to think.
The less the soldier thinks the better.”
“Think!” said Fauquier Cary. “No one ever thinks in war. The soldier
looks at his enemy, and then he looks at his murdering piece, and then
instinctively he discovers the best position—or what seems to him the
best position—from which to fire it. And then he reloads, and he looks
again at the enemy, and instinct does the job for him once more—and so
on, _ad infinitum_. But he never _thinks_.” He rose and stood, warming
his one hand. “If he did that, you know, there’d be no war!”
“And would that be a good thing?”
“It depends,” said Cary, “on what you call a good thing.—Listen! Jeb
Stuart and his cavalry, moving on the old Turnpike—”
The grey soldiers, too, had their camp-fires. The light of these
flared, to the eyes of the blue, on the southern horizon. Here
likewise was the effect of the lights of a city—a smaller city, a city
of sixty thousand. But when you were actually back of the pickets, in
the camps, it was not like a city. It was only dusky lights here and
there in the midst of shadows, only camp-fires in the Wilderness. The
grey men scattered around them, resting after rapid marching, were in
an eve-of-battle mood. Eve-of-battle mood meant tenseness, sudden
jocularity, sudden silences, a kind of added affectionateness between
brothers and intimates, often masked by brusqueness, a surreptitious
consideration, a curious, involuntary “in honour preferring one
another.” Even among the still at this hour very busy people, the
generals cogitating orders, the aides and couriers standing waiting or
setting out with their messages, the ordnance train people, the movers
of guns from one point to another, the ambulance folk, the drivers of
belated wagons, the cavalry patrols, eve-of-battle feeling was
apparent. But it was most in force in the resting army. Eve-of-battle
mood had many ingredients. Among them was to be found in the cup of
many the ingredient of fear. Men hid it, but it was there. It fell on
the heart at intervals, fell like a cold finger tap, like the icy drop
of water falling at intervals, hour after hour, on the brow of the
tortured in an old dungeon. When the battle was here it would
disappear; always the amount of it lessened in constant ratio to the
approach of the firing. The first volley—except in the case of the
coward—dissipated it quite. With some the drop was heavier and more
insistent than with others, but there were few, indeed, who had not at
some time felt that cold and penetrating touch. It was only a thing of
intervals; it came and went, and between its comings one was gay
enough. There had long ago ceased the fear of what it could do to one.
It was not pleasant—neither was sea-sickness—but the voyage would be
made. The Army of Northern Virginia knew that it was going to fight.
The world knows that it fought as have fought few armies.
A company lying upon the earth in a field of cedars began to sing.
“We’re tenting to-night on the old camp-ground!
Give us a song to cheer—”
“That’s too mournful!” said a neighbouring company. “Tell the
Louisianians to sing the ‘Marseillaise.’”
“Many are the hearts that are weary to-night!
Wishing for the war to cease;
Many are the hearts that are looking for the right,
To see the dawn of peace.
“Tenting to-night, tenting to-night,
Tenting on the old camp-ground....”
As always, eve-of-battle, there was going on a certain redding up.
Those who had haversacks plunged deep within them, gathered certain
trifles together and tied them into a small bundle with a pencilled
direction. Diaries were brought up very neatly and carefully to date.
Entries closed with “Battle to-morrow!” or with “This time to-morrow
night much will have happened”; or sometimes with such things as “Made
up my quarrel with Wilson to-day”; or “Returned the book I borrowed
from Selden”; or “Read a psalm and a chapter to-day”; or “Wrote home.”
Eve-of-battle saw many letters written. There was a habit, too, of
destroying letters received and garnered. Here and there a man sat
upon a log and tore into little bits old, treasured sheets. The flecks
lay like snow upon the earth of the Wilderness.
“We’re tired of war on the old camp-ground
Many are dead and gone....
“We’re tenting to-night on the old camp-ground,...
Tenting to-night, tenting to-night.
Tenting to-night on the old camp-ground.”
All the spirit of this army was graver than it had been a year ago,
than it had been six months ago. During the past winter a strong
religious fervour had swept it. This evening, in the Wilderness, in
many a command there was prayer and singing of hymns. Swaths of earth,
black copses of cedar and gum, divided one congregation from another.
One was singing while another prayed; the hymns were different, but
the wide night had room for all—for the hymns and for “Tenting
to-night,” and for the “Marseillaise” which now Hays’s Louisianians
were singing. All blended into something piteous, something old and
touching, and of a dim nobility. The pickets out in the deep night
listened.
“Just as I am, without one plea
Save that thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bid’st me come to thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come!”
A soldier, standing picket and hearing the singing behind a dusky wave
of earth, had his doubts. “If we really come to him—if the Yankees
over there really came to him—if we both came, why,—there _wouldn’t be
any battle to-morrow_.... Seeing that he said, ‘Love your enemy’—which
if everybody did presently there’d be no enemy—no more than an icicle
in the sun.” He sighed and shifted his musket. “They think they mean
what they’re singing, but they don’t—”
Relieved, he sought his mess and the corner of leaves and boughs in
which they meant to sleep. Before lying down he spoke to the man next
him. “John, I’ve got a letter and a little bit of package here that I
want you to keep. I am going to be killed to-morrow.”
“No, you ain’t!”
“Yes, I am. I am positively certain of it. I am going to be killed
about noon.”
“You’ve just got one of those darned presentiments, and half the time
they don’t come to nothing!”
“This one will. You take the letter and the little bit of package. I
am going to be killed to-morrow, about noon.” And he was killed.
Night grew old. The flare of the cities sank away; tattoo beat, then,
after a little, taps. The Wilderness lay awake. She communed with her
own heart. But the men whom she harboured slept. Night passed, the
stars paled, pure and cool and fresh came on the dawn—wild roses in
the east, in a field of forget-me-not blue. Shrill and sweet, near and
remote, a thousand bugles blew reveille in the Wilderness.
Ewell and A.P. Hill moved westward, deeper into the Wilderness.
Longstreet, marching from the south side of the James, was not yet up,
though known to be approaching. About breakfast time an artillery
officer came upon a small fire, and bending over it, stiffly, being
wooden-legged, General Ewell, a first-rate cook and proud of it. He
insisted on giving the other a cup of coffee.
“Is there any objection, sir,” said the officer, after drinking, “to
our knowing what are orders?”
“No, sir,—none at all,—just the orders I like! To go right down the
Plank Road and strike the enemy wherever I find him!”
He found him, in the person of the Fifth Corps, near Locust Grove, at
the noon hour. The battle of the Wilderness began,—a vast infantry
battle, fought in thick woods, woods so thick that in those coverts of
dwarf pine and oak artillery could not be used, so thick that an
officer could not see his whole line, so thick that the approach of
troops was often known only by the noise of their movement through the
scrub, or, as night came down, by the light from the mouths of the
muskets. This was the battle of the first day, and it was long and
sanguinary and indecisive. Corps of Ewell and Hill—corps of Hancock
and Warren and Sedgwick fought it. Ewell gained and held an advantage,
but Wilcox and Heth of Hill’s had a desperate, exhausting struggle
with Hancock’s men. Poague’s battalion of artillery strove to help,
but artillery in the Wilderness could do little. Six divisions charged
Heth and Wilcox. They held their own, but they barely held it. When
darkness fell and the thunders were stilled there came a promise that
during the night they should be relieved. Resting upon it, they built
a rude breastwork, and then, worn out, dropped upon the earth and
slept.
Lee sent a courier on a swift horse to meet Longstreet and order a
night march. At one o’clock of a starlit night the latter took the
road, and at daylight of the sixth he came to Parker’s Store, on the
edge of the Wilderness, three miles behind Hill’s line of battle, and
as he came he heard the roar of battle upon this front.
Hancock fell in the grey light on Heth and Wilcox. The Wilderness
echoed the musketry and the shouting. It was a furious onslaught, for
a time a furious answer—and then Wilcox’s line, exhausted, decimated,
broke and rolled in confusion down the Orange Plank Road. When the men
reached Poague’s artillery they made a wavering stand. The guns,
crashing into battle, did what they might to help. But Hancock’s
shouting lines came on. A furious musketry fire burst in the face of
the guns, a leaden rain hard pelting from just across the road, the
drops falling thick and fast among the guns and the gunners and a
company of mounted officers behind. The grey infantry, exposed to
volley after volley, broke again; all the place became a troubled grey
sea, cross-waves and confusion.
Lee rode out from the group of officers. “Rally, men, rally!” he
cried. “General Longstreet is coming!”
_O Marse Robert! O Marse Robert!_
The boisterous rain came and came again from the coverts of the
Wilderness. Hancock’s men shouted loudly. They saw the grey overthrow.
“Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” they shouted.
Lee rose in his stirrups. “Rally, Army of Northern Virginia!—”
“_Longstreet! Longstreet!_”
Double-column and double-time, Longstreet came down the Plank Road.
Deploying, Kershaw came into line under fire to the right. Deploying,
Field swung across on the left. “Charge, Kershaw!” ordered Longstreet.
Kershaw charged, and flung back the shouting blue advance; Field, on
the left, advancing at a run, swept past the smoking guns and Lee,
sitting Traveller. Gregg’s Texans were in front. “General Lee! General
Lee!” they shouted. Lee lifted his hat, and then he spurred grey
Traveller and kept beside the Texans.
“He’s going in with them!” exclaimed an aide. “He mustn’t do that!”
Gregg turned his head. “General Lee, you mustn’t go with us! We can’t
allow that, sir!”
Now the men saw, too. “Do you mean—No, no! that won’t do! _General Lee
to the rear!_”
“But, men—”
There rose a cry. “We won’t go on unless you go back! _General Lee to
the rear!_”
A man took hold of Traveller’s bridle and turned him.
On dashed the Texans—eight hundred of them. They went now through open
field, now through pines. They struck Webb’s brigade of Hancock’s
corps. Blue and grey, there sprang a roar of musketry. Four hundred of
the eight hundred fell, lay dead or wounded; then with a loud and long
cry there swept to the aid of Gregg, Benning’s Texans, Georgia, and
Alabama. Law and Benning and Gregg pushed back the blue.
For hours it was the tug of war. Blue and grey they swayed and swung
and the Wilderness howled with the conflict. Smoke mounted. The firing
waxed until sound was no more discrete but continuous. Although it was
not night the Wilderness grew dark. And beneath the solid roof of
smoke and sound men lay gasping on mother earth, dyeing the grass with
their blood, plucking with their fingers at strengthless stems,
putting out their tongues where there was no moisture, biting the
dust. In the sick brain, to and fro, went the words “_This is the
end_,” and “_Why? O God, why?_”
The blue left rested south of the Plank Road. With four brigades under
Mahone, Longstreet began a turning movement. It succeeded. Mahone
struck the blue, flank and rear, while Longstreet hurled other troops
against their front. The blue line crumpled up, surged in confusion
back upon the Brock Road. The noise grew heavier, the Wilderness
darker.
And then occurred one of those things called coincidences. One year
ago a very great general had been given death in the Wilderness by a
mistaken volley from his own men. Now on this day in the Wilderness a
general, not so great, but able, and necessary that day to the grey
fortunes, rode with a brigade which he was about to place in line,
through the wood alongside the Plank Road. The wood was thick and the
road wound. Longstreet, with him Generals Jenkins and Kershaw, pressed
forward through the oak scrub, torn and veiled with smoke, and now in
many places afire. All the air was now so thick, it was hard in that
wild place to tell friend from foe. As had done Lane’s North
Carolinians last year, so this year did Mahone’s men. They saw or felt
the approach of a column, whose colour they could not see; some
command parallel with the moving troops chanced just then to deliver
fire; Mahone’s men thought that the shots came from the approaching
body, hardly outlined as it was in the murk. They answered with a
volley. Jenkins was killed, and Longstreet severely wounded.
“What are you doing? What are you doing?” shouted Kershaw; and at last
grey understood that it was grey.
Says the artillery officer, Robert Stiles, who has been quoted before:
“I observed an excited gathering some distance back of the lines, and,
pressing toward it, I heard that General Longstreet had just been shot
down and was being put into an ambulance. I could not learn anything
definite as to the character of his wound, but only that it was
serious—some said that he was dead. When the ambulance moved off, I
followed it for a little way.... The members of his staff surrounded
the vehicle, some riding in front, some on one side and some on the
other, and some behind. One, I remember, stood upon the rear step of
the ambulance, seeming to desire to be as near him as possible. I
never on any occasion during the four years of the war saw a group of
officers and gentlemen more deeply distressed. They were literally
bowed down with grief. All of them were in tears. One, by whose side I
rode for some distance, was himself severely hurt, but he made no
allusion to his wound, and I do not believe that he felt it.... I rode
up to the ambulance and looked in. They had taken off Longstreet’s hat
and coat and boots. The blood had paled out of his face, and its
somewhat gross aspect was gone. I noticed how white and dome-like his
great forehead looked and, with scarcely less reverent admiration, how
spotless white his socks, and his fine gauze undervest, save where the
black red gore from his breast and shoulder had stained it.... His
eyelids frayed apart till I could see a delicate line of blue between
them, and then he very quietly moved his unwounded arm, and with his
thumb and two fingers carefully lifted the saturated undershirt from
his chest, holding it up a moment, and heaved a deep sigh.”
The grey attack, disorganized by Longstreet’s fall, hung in the wind,
until Lee came up and led it on. But time had been lost, and though
much was done, it was not that which might have been done. The blue
were behind long lines of log breastworks on the Brock Road. Again and
again the grey beat against these. At times they took this work or
that, but could not hold it. Along the front of one command the
breastwork caught fire. The blue fought to put it out, but could not;
flame and smoke made a barrier alike to grey or blue. On the Plank
Road, Burnside fell upon Law’s Alabamians and a Florida brigade, but
Heth came up and with Alabama and Florida thrust back Burnside. At
sunset, though the sun could not be seen in the Wilderness, Ewell
flung Gordon with Pegram and Hays against the Federal right. The
assault was well planned and determined to desperation. The blue right
was driven as had been the blue left in the morning. The sun sank,
black night came, and the battle closed. There lay in the Wilderness
perhaps two thousand dead in grey and five thousand wounded. There lay
in the Wilderness more than two thousand dead in blue and twelve
thousand wounded. There were three thousand in blue captured or
missing. There were fifteen hundred grey prisoners.
Night was not so black in all parts of the Wilderness. In parts it was
fearfully red. The Wilderness was afire. Pine and oak scrub and the
dry leaves beneath and the sedge in open places,—they flared like tow.
They flared where the battle had been fought; they flared where were
the wounded. Here and there in the Wilderness arose a horrible crying.
Volunteers and volunteers, blue and grey, companies of volunteers,
plunged into the smoke, among the red tongues. They did what the fire
would let them do. They brought out many and many and many. But an
unknown number of hundreds were burned to death.
All day the seventh they skirmished. The night of the seventh the
blue, weary of the Wilderness, moved with swiftness southeast toward
Spottsylvania Court-House. “Get so between him and Richmond,” said
Grant, as at Dalton Sherman was saying, “Get so between him and
Atlanta.” But as Johnston moved on inner lines and with more swiftness
than Sherman, so Lee moved on inner lines and with more swiftness than
Grant. Flexible as a Toledo blade was the grey army. With the noise of
the blue column on the Brock Road sprang almost simultaneously the
sound of the grey column moving cross-country and then by the Shady
Grove Road. Grant, bent on “swinging past” Lee, came to Spottsylvania
in the bright morning light of the eighth of May, to find Jeb Stuart
drawn across the Brock Road; behind him the First Corps.