COLD HARBOUR
These were the moves of the following two weeks. Six days, from the
day of the Bloody Angle to the eighteenth of May, the two armies
stayed as they were, save for slight, shifting, wary movements, as of
two opposed Indians in the brush. On the eighteenth, the blue
attacked—again the salient. Ewell, with thirty guns, broke and
scattered the assault. On the nineteenth, the “sidling” process
recommenced. On this day Ewell came into contact with the Federal
left, and in the engagement that ensued both sides lost heavily. The
night of the twentieth, the Army of the Potomac, Hancock leading,
started for the North Anna. The morning of the twenty-first, the Army
of Northern Virginia struck, by the Telegraph Road, for the same
stream. It had the inner line, and it got there first. At noon the
twenty-second it began to cross the river. That night Lee and his men
rested on the southern bank. Morning of the twenty-third showed on the
opposite shore the head of the blue column.
The blue crossed at Jericho Ford, and by the Chesterfield Bridge, not
without conflict and trouble. It won over, but over in two distinctly
separated wings, and that which separated them was Robert Edward Lee
and the Army of Northern Virginia. Here was now another V, the point
now upon the river, unassailable, the sides entrenched, the blue army
split in twain. Followed two days of unavailing attempts to find a way
to crush the V. Then, on the night of the twenty-sixth, the blue,
having fairly effectively hidden its intention, “sidled” again. The
Army of the Potomac left the North Anna, taking the road for the
Pamunkey which it crossed at Hanover. The V at once became a column
and followed.
The two antagonists were now approaching old and famed war grounds. On
the twenty-eighth, grey cavalry and blue cavalry—Sheridan against Fitz
Lee and Wade Hampton—crashed together at Hawes’s Shop. That night Army
of the Potomac, Army of Northern Virginia, watched each the other’s
camp-fires on the banks of the Totopotomoy. In the morning Grant
started for the Chickahominy, but when he reached Cold Harbour it was
to find Lee between him and the river.
Two days the two foes rested. There had been giant marching through
giant heat, constant watching, much fighting. The country that was
difficult in the days of McClellan was not less so in the days of
Grant. Marsh and swamp and thicket and hidden roads, and now all
desolate from years of war.... The first of June passed, the second of
June passed, with skirmishes and engagements that once the country
would have stood a-tiptoe to hear of. Now they were nothing. The third
of June the battle of Cold Harbour crashed into history....
The dawn came up, crowned with pale violets, majestical and still.
Upon the old woods, the old marshes, hung a mist, cool and silvery.
There came a sweet cry of birds in the grey tree-tops. Lee’s long grey
lines, concave to the foe, stretched from Alexander’s Bridge on the
Chickahominy to the upper Totopotomoy. On the low earthworks hung the
gossamers, dewy bright. Grant held the Sydnor’s Sawmill, Bethesda
Church, and Old Cold Harbour line, roughly paralleling the other. But
he was north of Lee; Lee was again between him and Richmond—Richmond
so near now, so very near! Richmond was there before him—no room now
for “swinging past,” and the lion was there, too, in the path.
Grant attacked in column. Deep and narrow-fronted, he thrust against
the grey earthworks like a giant mill-race rather than a wide ocean,
like one solid catapult rather than a mailed fist at every door.
Twenty deep, the Second and Sixth Corps poured into the depression
that was the grey centre. Second and Sixth came on with a shout, and
the grey answered with a shout and with every musket and cannon.
Following the Second and Sixth the Eighteenth, phalanxed, dashed
itself against a salient held by Kershaw.... The battle of Cold
Harbour was the briefest, the direst! Death swung a scythe against the
three corps. They were in the gulf of the grey, and Fate came upon
them from three sides. In effect, it was all over in a very few
minutes.... The shattered three corps fell back to what cover they
could find. Here they fired ineffectively from this shelter and from
that. Before them, between them and the Army of Northern Virginia,
stretched the plain of their dead and dying, and both lay upon it like
leaves in autumn. Orders came that the three corps should again
attack. The more advanced commands obeyed by opening fire from behind
what shelter they had found or could contrive, but there was no other
movement. Put out a hand and the wind began to whistle and the air
over that plain to grow dark with lead! Grant sent a third order.
_Corps of Hancock, Smith, and Wright to advance to the charge along
the whole line._ Corps commanders repeated the order to division
commanders; division commanders repeated it to the brigadiers, but
that was all. The three corps stood still. Statements, differing as to
wording but tallying in meaning, travelled from grade to grade, back
to Headquarters. “It is totally impossible, and the men know it. They
are not to be blamed.”
By noon even Grant, who rarely knew when he was beaten, knew that he
was beaten here. The firing sank away. “The dead and dying lay in
front of the Confederate lines in triangles, of which the apexes were
the bravest men who came nearest to the breastworks under the
withering, deadly fire.” Dead and wounded and missing, ten thousand
men in blue felt the full force of that hour. Stubborn to the end, it
was two days before Grant would send a flag of truce and ask
permission to bury his dead and gather the wounded who had not raved
themselves to death. “Cold Harbour!” he said, much later in his life;
“Cold Harbour is, I think, the only battle I ever fought that I would
not fight over again under the circumstances!”
“In the opinion of a majority of its survivors,” comments a Federal
general, “the battle of Cold Harbour never should have been fought. It
was the dreary, dismal, bloody, ineffective close of the
Lieutenant-General’s first campaign with the Army of the Potomac, and
corresponded in all its essential features with what had preceded it.
The wide and winding path through the tangled Wilderness and the pines
of Spottsylvania, which that army had cut from the Rapidan to the
Chickahominy, had been strewn with the bodies of thousands of brave
men, the majority of them wearing the Union blue.”
The Campaign of the Thirty Days was ended. Fifty-four thousand men was
the loss of the blue; something over half that number the loss of the
grey. Eighty thousand men lay dead, or writhing in war-hospitals, or
sat bowed in war-prisons. From the Atlantic to the Far West the
current of human being in these States was troubled. There grew a
sickness of feeling. The sun seemed to warm less strongly and the moon
to shine less calmly. As always in war, the best and bravest from the
first were taking flight; many and many of the good and brave were
left, but they began to be conscious of a loneliness. “_All, all are
gone—the old, familiar faces!_” And over the land sounded the mourning
of homes—the mourning of the mothers and daughters of men. In the
South life sank a minor third. The chords resounded still, but the
wrists that struck were growing weak. _Largo ... Largo._
For a week Army of Northern Virginia, Army of the Potomac, stood
opposed on the old lines. They entrenched and entrenched, working by
night; they made much and deadly use of sharpshooters, they engaged in
artillery duels, in alarums and excursions. On both sides life in the
trenches was very frightful. They were so crowded, and the
sharpshooters would not let you sleep. The water was bad, and little
of it, and on the grey side, at least, there was hunger. The sun in
heaven burned like a fiery furnace. Far and wide, through the tangled
country, lay the unburied bodies of men and horses. Sickness
appeared,—malaria, dysentery. Hour after hour, day after day, you lay
in the quivering heat, in the unshaded trench. Put out arm or
head—some sharpshooter’s finger pulled a trigger.
In these days there began in the Valley of Virginia a movement of
vandalism under Hunter who had succeeded Sigel. On the fifth of June,
Lee sent thither Breckinridge with a small force. On the twelfth, with
his calm, reasoned audacity, acting under the shadow of Grant’s
continually reinforced army, he detached Jubal Early, sent him with
Stonewall Jackson’s old Second Corps, by way of Charlottesville to the
old hunting-grounds of the Second Corps, to the Valley of Virginia.
The night of the twelfth of June, Grant lifted his tents and pushed to
the eastward away from Richmond, then to the south, to Wilcox Landing
below Malvern Hill, on the James. Here, where the river was seven
hundred yards in width, fifty feet in depth, he built a very great
bridge of boats, and here the Army of the Potomac crossed to the south
side of the James. Grant turned his face toward Petersburg, twenty
miles from Richmond.
The forces of the North were now where McClellan had wished to place
them, using the great waterway of the Chesapeake and the James,
something more than two years ago. They were in a position to mate.
The Federal Government had worked the problem by the Rule of False.
At dawn of the thirteenth, Lee left the lines of Cold Harbour and,
passing the Chickahominy, bivouacked that night between White Oak
Swamp and Malvern Hill. The next day and the next the Army of Northern
Virginia crossed the James by pontoon at Drewry’s Bluff, and pressed
south to the Appomattox and the old town of Petersburg. Here was
Beauregard, and here, on the fifteenth, Butler, by Grant’s orders, had
launched an attack from Bermuda Hundred, heroically repulsed by the
small grey force at Petersburg. Now on the sixteenth and the
seventeenth came Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, entering the
lines of Petersburg while drum and fife played “Dixie.” Of the Army of
the Potomac the Second and Ninth Corps were up and in position, the
Fifth upon the road. Face to face again were Hector and Achilles, Army
of Northern Virginia, Army of the Potomac, but the first again held
the inner line. South of Richmond as north of Richmond, Grant found
Lee between him and Richmond.
There was a garden behind the kinsman’s house in Richmond. Cleave and
Judith, coming from the house, found it empty this afternoon save for
its roses and its birds. A high wall, ivy-covered, cloistered it from
the street. Beneath the tulip tree was a bench and they sat themselves
down here. He leaned his head back against the bark and closed his
eyes. It was several days before the lifting of the warring pieces
across the river. With the Second Corps he was on his way to the
Valley. “I did not know,” he said, “that I was so tired. I have not
slept for two nights.”
“Sleep now. I will sit here, just as quietly—”
He smiled. “It is very likely that I would do that, is it not?”
Bending his head, he took her hands and pressed his forehead upon
them. “Judith—Judith—Judith—”
The birds sang, the roses bloomed. From the south came a dull booming,
the cannon of Beauregard and of Butler, distant, continuous, like surf
on breakers. The two paid it no especial attention. Life had been set
now for a long while to such an accompaniment. There was something at
least as old as strife, and that was love; as old and as strong and as
perpetually renewed.
The shadows lengthened on the grass. There came a sound of bugles
blowing. The lovers turned and clung and kissed, then in the violet
light their hands fell apart. Cleave rose. “They are singing, ‘Come
away!’” he said.
There were stars in a wreath now upon the collar of his coat. She
touched them, smiling through tears. “_General Cleave_.... It comes
late but it comes well.... Oh, my general, my general!”
“Little enough of the Stonewall Brigade remains,” he said. “For the
most part what was not killed and was not captured at Spottsylvania
has been gathered into Terry’s brigade, and goes, too, to the Valley.
But the Sixty-fifth goes with me and the Golden Brigade. The Golden
Brigade cares for me because I am Warwick Cary’s kinsman.”
“Not alone for that,” she said, “but for that also ... Oh, my
father—my father!”
From the street outside the garden wall came a sound of marching feet.
Above the ivy showed, passing, the bayonet points. It was sunset and
the west was crimson. Swallows circled above the house and the gold
cups of the tulip tree. The marching feet went on, and the gleaming
bayonet points. There came a flag, half visible above the ivy, silken,
powder-darkened, battle-scarred. Cleave raised his hand in salute. The
flag went by, the sound of the marching feet continued. High in the
tree, against the rosy sky, a bird with a lyric throat began to sing,
piercing sweet and clear.
“Judith,” said Cleave, “before I go, there is a thing I want to tell
you. Two days ago I was riding by A.P. Hill’s lines. There was a
marshy place, on the edge of which the men were raising a breastwork.
Judith, I am certain that I saw Stafford. He has done as I did—done
what was and is the simple, the natural thing to do. Whether under his
own name or another, he is there, heaping breastworks as a private
soldier.”
“He could not do as you did! You went clear and clean, and he—”
“I do not know that there is ever any sharp line of difference. It is
a matter of degree. I have come,” said Cleave simply, “to understand
myself less and other people more. I did not show that I recognized
him, for I could not tell if he would wish it ... I thought that you
should know. It is not a time now for enmities.”
“God knows that that is true,” said Judith, weeping.