brought us to the banks of the Potomac and in view of a pontoon bridge.
That river was a Rubicon. On the other side of it lay the debatable
land, the region of bloody battle, and the bridge which, like a dark
line of fate lay across the water in the glow of twilight, seemed the
final decision of our destiny. We had dreamed that we were to be
employed in garrison duty to relieve older and more experienced troops.
Now we knew that we must take our share, raw as we were, in the toil
and peril of the coming campaign. Soldiers never know their destination
on the march. Even the officers, unless they be corps or division
commanders, are usually as much in the dark as the humblest privates,
and the river, with its pontoon bridge was a revelation to our veteran
friends as well as to ourselves. We listened to their comments with
hushed attention. "Well, here we are once more; here is the river and
there are the pontoons, and we are going over into Virginia again. The
inhabitants of the land are all rebels, and yet the last time we were
over there our generals were mighty tender toward them. No foraging was
allowed, and we submitted tamely; we spared the inhabitants. But this
time, may the gods do so to us and more also if we spare them!"
There was something of the Cromwellian spirit among these Yankees, and
in spite of the provost guard, they made good their threat.
The crossing of that river in the morning marked a new stage in the
making of the regiment. We entered upon our first real discipline, and
it was that of the march. Our tramp through Maryland, which had seemed
so severe, was really child's play. Now we were part of a great
campaigning host, a mere unit in the moving mass in which we must
perforce keep our place. The discipline of the march may seem very
simple, and it is in fact, simpler in some ways than people suppose who
have formed their ideas from what they have seen in city parades. The
tactics of the march are elementary. The soldier must know how to keep
his place in a column of fours; the regiment must be able instantly to
form in line. That is about all. On the march there is no attempt at
keeping step; there is far less apparent order than in a political
parade. Each man carries his gun as he pleases, only so that he
interferes with no one else. Yet, with loose order and apparent freedom
there is really severest restraint. The ranks must be kept closed up;
to lag, even when you are most weary is a fault; to drop out of your
place and "straggle" is a crime. A man is but a cog in the wheels of a
remorseless machine, and he must move with it. The march is an art
which some otherwise well-drilled troops are slow in acquiring. A
regiment of infantry is seldom allowed the road. When an army is moving
through a hostile country, the roads are monopolised by the artillery
and the supply and ammunition trains; foot soldiers must take to the
fields, find a way over ploughed ground or meadow, through fences,
through brush, through woods, across bridgeless streams. In spite of
obstacles the column must press on keeping its formation intact, and
keep closed up. This is no simple matter.
Battle is one trial of a soldier's quality; the march is another
scarcely less severe. It tries endurance. Did you ever walk twenty
miles in a day? It is not a long walk, and it may be delightful. But if
you have had to carry even a light satchel or a fish-basket with your
wading-boots, you know how the trifling load tells before the day is
over; how you try it first in one position, then in another, and each
seems worse than the last. Now suppose yourself loaded with knapsack
containing your half of a shelter tent, your blanket, and a few other
necessaries; haversack filled with three days' rations; cartridge-box
with from forty to sixty rounds of ammunition; canteen of water, heavy
musket and bayonet--fifty or sixty pounds in all. Your twenty miles
will equal forty without the load; yes, more than that, even if you
could walk at will and choose the easiest paths, which is precisely
what the soldier cannot do. You must stumble over stony places, and
push through briers, and wallow through swampy ground, or toil through
soft fields; now and then you must wade a brook up to your knees or
deeper, and for the next hour your shoes will weigh a pound more than
they ought and gather mud and absorb gravel. Perhaps the regiment may
take the high-road for a time, and the dust, beaten small and deep by
preceding hoofs and wheels will enshroud you in a horrible cloud from
which there is no escape, and penetrate every crevice of your clothing,
and fill your eyes and ears and mouth and nostrils, and blind and choke
you.
There is no martial music to cheer you on; only the monotonous command,
"Close up, men!" You lose consciousness of your soul, you know only
that you have a body. Even that seems not to belong to you, it seems a
badly oiled machine, part of a greater machine. And, then, on hot days
the thirst! Your canteen will soon be exhausted; you will look with
longing eyes at every stagnant puddle, and when a brook is reached--I
have then seen men break through all restraint and madly dash at the
water in spite of the drawn swords of officers vainly struggling to
keep the ranks whole. As the day wanes the weariness amounts to agony.
Every bone aches, every nerve is unstrung; strong men lose their
self-control, sometimes almost their manhood.
The moods of men on the march are a curious study. Perhaps early in the
day the whole line will break into song, especially if the route
happens to be through an inhabited town. The Maryland villages used to
ring with
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul goes marching on."
Then silence will fall on every one as the burden begins to tell. Not a
word will be spoken until some one breaks out with an oath, and then,
all up and down the line, every man who ever swears will answer and the
air will be blue with blasphemy.
War takes no account of Sabbaths. We often marched day after day until
we fairly lost track of time and you might hear a dialogue like the
following:
"Bill, what day is this?"
"Why, don't you know? This is Sunday."
"By George! is that so? Well, there's no rest for the wicked!"
And then the men would begin to talk about home, and somehow over the
rudeness of war and the weariness of the march a breath of hallowed air
would seem to waft itself, and the far-off sound of Sabbath bells would
seem to steal, and the dim faces of distant loved ones would rise
before us, until the spell would perhaps be broken by another chorus of
profanity.
By force of stern necessity we became a good marching regiment long
before we had half learned tactical drill, and the discipline did
several important things for us. Our marching was not peaceful; it was
through a hostile country. The enemy's cavalry hung about our flanks
and rear and the sound of cannon was frequent. We had as yet no
fighting but we were constantly threatened, and that helped the
discipline. It taught us unceasing vigilance and the need of perpetual
readiness; it also tried the nerves of our officers. The unfit ones
began to drop off. First our lieutenant-colonel, then our major was
smitten with what the men called "cannon fever." Their health failed
suddenly, their resignations were offered and accepted and we were well
rid of them. The captain of Company A, who now became major, was a fine
type of the class of men by whom our volunteer army was mainly
officered. He was a plain citizen who had been superintendent in a
manufactory, and his military knowledge was only such as could be
gained in a militia company. He had however, a strong soldierly
instinct, and better still, his personal character compelled respect.
Familiar in manner with no "airs," yet always dignified and firm;
modest, yet as we found when the test came, unflinchingly brave; with
keen natural intelligence, quick to grasp a situation and prompt in
action he proved that good officers are born, not made. His awkwardness
on horseback afforded amusement only for a little while. In a few weeks
he rode like a cavalryman, and every fresh trial of his quality raised
him in our esteem and affection.
The weeding process worked among the men in a different way. The old
and weak and physically unfit broke down. Some of them died; a number
of them were discharged from the service. At the end of a month we had
lost more officers and as many men as a smartly-contested battle would
have cost us, and instead of being weaker we were distinctly stronger
for it. The law of the survival of the fittest was beginning to work.
In another way the weeding process proceeded. Every army requires a
great many non-combatants as its servants. There must be waggoners,
clerks at headquarters, ambulance drivers, hospital attendants,
"detailed men" of many sorts, and each regiment has to furnish its
quota of these. When, therefore, an order would come to detail a man,
perhaps for ambulance driver, the colonel would send it down to a
captain with the hint, "Detail the worst dead beat in your company."
Sometimes these non-combatant positions were sought by those who had no
stomach for the fight, and thus, in different ways, our thinned ranks
became cleaner.
We learned other things by the discipline of the march. We learned to
live as soldiers must. Life in a well-ordered camp and camp life in the
field are vastly different. The army lived in shelter tents. These were
simply pieces of cotton cloth about six feet square, and each man
carried one piece on his knapsack. Two or three buttoned together and
stretched over such poles or sticks as could be found, or over muskets
set in the ground when nothing else could be had, formed our
habitation. We literally carried our houses on our backs. We slept on
the ground, or rather, we learned not to sleep on the ground. Pine
branches made a luxurious bed, but anything served--dried grass, boughs
of saplings, even corn stalks, though they were worse than
boarding-house mattresses. I have slept on unthreshed wheat--anything
to keep the body from direct contact with the ground, which, even in
summer chills one through before morning. Then, wood for fires must be
had. Through the hill country of Virginia we used the fences. When the
welcome halt was called at evening and arms stacked, it was a sight to
see eight or nine hundred men joining with wild cheers in a mad charge
on the nearest rail fence. Sometimes our colonel would draw us up in
line and give the word, so that all might have an even chance, and
then, after a brisk scrimmage the fence would disappear as if by magic.
Dry rails made the best of camp-fires, but the skill which men
developed at fire-making was wonderful. We had few axes beside the
dozen carried by the pioneer corps, whose duty it was to clear
obstructions from the road; we had to break up our rails or break down
branches as best we could. Our jack-knives did yeoman service. Often
green wood alone was available; and I have actually seen fires kindled
in the midst of pouring rain with nothing but such apparently
impossible materials as green pine saplings.
Two men from each company were detailed as cooks. They were seldom
favourites with the men. On the march, and, finally, almost altogether
their services were dispensed with. We preferred to do our own cooking,
especially when it came to the coffee. Coffee was our chief comfort and
our main necessity. We carried it in the haversack, in a little bag
with a partition: on one side ground coffee, on the other, the smaller
side, a little brown sugar; and we made it generously and drank it
strong. Coffee, hardtack, and salt pork were the standard marching
rations.
It was curious to notice how men treated the rations question. Three
days' supply at a time was dealt out to us. Some of the men would make
way with their stock in two days, and then go begging among their
comrades. Upon others excessive weariness acted as a stay upon
appetite, and the three days' rations would be more than enough. I
think these were the men who stood the hardship of the march best.
After supper came sleep, the sleep of exhaustion; and then, at
day-break, the reveille, roll-call, hasty breakfast (like the supper,
of hardtack, pork, and coffee). Then canteens were filled from the
nearest available water, knapsacks packed, and precisely at sunrise the
column would be formed and the march begun. The rule was, march two
hours, rest ten minutes; except at noon, when twenty minutes' rest was
allowed.
At these rests the men would lie down wherever they happened to be, and
think the hard ground blessed and the time too short. Sometimes, though
this was later, during the battle season we had night marches, and as
illustrating the result of the discipline of the march even upon new
troops, I have seen men, when halt was called at night, lie down in the
dusty road and fall instantly fast asleep; but at the low-spoken order,
"Fall in, men!" they would as instantly rise, and, before they were
fully awake step into their proper places in the line. Under the
discipline of the march, in three months' time we had learned lessons
which the best-trained city militia regiments never learn and which
made us veterans in comparison with them.
If you ask how we learned, I can only answer that we did as we saw the
old troops about us doing. And it is but justice to our colonel to say
that he knew the duties of the march, and especially those of the camp,
and was strict to the point of severity, with the officers especially.
An army of a hundred thousand men on the march would be a wonderful
sight if one could see it, but the columns stretch too far to be
visible all at once. They reach for miles, and woods or hills or
valleys hide them. But occasionally we had impressive views from some
height into the country below, over which the endless lines moved like
vast serpents, and sometimes we had curious surprises. I remember how
one day our regiment took an unfrequented road and we seemed to be
alone. No other troops were in sight, and all day long we speculated
upon our destination. Some thought we were being sent back to
Washington for garrison duty; others that we were detached for some
special, perhaps perilous, service. There were all sorts of surmises,
but finally night came, and we camped on the hillside of a long and
deep valley. We lighted our fires, and, in apparent response other
fires began to twinkle from the hills beyond and beside us and from
down in the valley, and, as it grew darker the fires increased in
numbers and in brightness until, in every direction, as far as the eye
could see, the lonely woods seemed changed as if by magic into a vast
city. We were in the very midst of the great army; we had been marching
with it all day.
Our first battle was that of Fredericksburg, and we went into it under
every disadvantage. Our showy colonel was absent on sick-leave, our
only field officer was our yet untried major; in fact, not a single one
of our officers had ever been really under fire and, beside our
imperfection in drill, we were wretchedly armed. In the haste to put us
into the field we had been supplied with Harper's Ferry smooth-bore
muskets,--antiquated weapons utterly unfit for modern warfare. We knew
they were useless except at short range; we suspected that some of them
would prove more dangerous to ourselves than to the enemy. The men
despised them, and called them "stuffed clubs;" but they saved us from
being sacrificed.
I was never prouder of my regiment than at the moment when we were
ordered to the front. We had been for hours exposed to a long-range
artillery fire, and one regiment after another of the brigade had been
sent forward until we were left alone. We knew the helplessness of our
inexperience and the uselessness of our old guns; yet when the command
came there was no faltering. The men marched away with cheerful
readiness, and in better line than we could often show on parade. But
ere we reached the battle's bloody edge we were ordered back again. The
commander of the brigade protested. He said that, armed and officered
as we were, it would be sheer murder to send us in.
And so it happened that we saw that awful battle from afar, though for
two days we endured one of the most trying of the ordeals which come to
soldiers. We had to lie still and be shot at. Few indeed are hit by
long-range artillery fire, but every catastrophe seems doubly dreadful
because you see it all and can do nothing but wonder if it will be your
turn next. You fall into a dolefully speculative mood and into watching
for the sound of the howling shells. You can tell if one is coming your
way, but never just how near. Sometimes a shot will strike close in
front and cover you with a shower of gravel, or a shell will explode
over your head and rend the air with demoniac shrieks of flying
fragments. Death seems even nearer and more horrible than in close
battle where you can do as well as suffer.
The panorama of that battle was a never-to-be-forgotten sight. From the
amphitheatre of hills on either side the river a hundred cannon roared.
The space between seemed filled with a chorus of demons. In the lulls
of this pandemonium, for miles along the line, the mournful, far-away
skirmish fire echoed constantly, and ever and anon on that tragic
Saturday, away at our right we could hear the shouts of charging men
coming like a fateful wail across the field, and then the steady roll
of the Confederate file fire from the deadly stone wall against which
fourteen brigades were successively and vainly hurled. And every
charging shout meant that men for duty's sake, but hopelessly, were
meeting death by hundreds.
Incidents of that battle will always dwell in my memory. There I saw a
soldier's death for the first time. We were in line with other troops
well up toward the front. Beyond, in the open fields the skirmishers
were at work. We could see little of them save the puffs of smoke from
their rifles. A man came over from a neighbouring regiment to speak to
a friend near me. As he stood talking, a bullet from the skirmish line
struck him in the breast and he fell at our feet. I can feel the shock
that went through me even now.
Tragedy is scarcely ever without its by-play of comedy. We were for a
time lying at rest behind a low, bare ridge which slightly protected us
from the enemy's fire. Suddenly a rabbit started up from a little clump
of bushes. Three or four soldiers instantly sprang after him. Presently
the rabbit neared the ridge and ran to the top of it but his pursuers,
now in full chase forgot all danger and followed. And the picture in my
mind is that of the rabbit and his reckless hunters darkly silhouetted
upon the summit of the ridge and punctuated here and there with the
sudden white cloud of a bursting shell. I think the rabbit escaped; the
men, I know came off unharmed.
We had had no breakfast, and when the enemy's fire lulled several of
the men tried to do a little cooking. A comrade near me was busily
engaged in frying a piece of pork in a pan extemporised from an old
canteen. Suddenly the batteries reopened; several stacks of muskets
were struck, with the effect of making them look like a nest of snakes.
Our commander said, "Some of you men might as well move up nearer the
ridge where there is better protection." I could see that my friend of
the frying-pan was growing anxious. He looked at his pork and then at
the shelter. It was hard to abandon his breakfast; but life was growing
dearer every moment, and with sudden impulse he left all and ran for
refuge. How big Corporal J----, lying near me, laughed as he rescued
and appropriated the burning pork! The man did not hear the last of
that frying-pan incident for months; yet he was a brave fellow, and
afterwards did his duty nobly in the face of far greater danger than
any we saw that day.
Men will do queer things in battle. I knew of a regiment sent to
support a battery when the enemy was about to charge. The men went to
their post at the double quick with fixed bayonets, and just in front
of the battery they were ordered to lie down so that the guns might
fire over their heads. As they did so one man accidentally pricked
another with his bayonet and the fellow, enraged, struck at him. They
dared not stand up to fight for fear of having their heads blown off by
the battery close behind and therefore, on their knees, under the guns
they had it out in a fisticuff duel before the officers could interfere
and stop them.
We lost only a few men at Fredericksburg but we gained a great
experience. The battle took place in December and after it the army
went into winter quarters. A field officer from one of the old
regiments of the brigade was detailed to command us in the protracted
absence of our colonel. He knew our defects. We needed drill. He gave
it to us without stint and worked us as we had never been worked
before--company and skirmish drill in the morning, battalion drill all
the afternoon, so that after the evening dress parade we were as weary
as bricklayers. Nothing escaped his notice; he made you feel that his
eyes were on you personally and his orders came in a sharp, explosive
tone that made men jump. After an hour's hard work on the drill ground,
some of us would grow careless, and then that rasping voice would
startle the whole battalion. "Why don't that man hold that gun
_properly_?" and a half dozen muskets would straighten up with a
jerk.
Under our own colonel the discipline of the regiment had been excessive
in unimportant details and lax in essentials. All this was changed. We
felt ourselves ruled with an iron hand, yet with just discrimination,
so that while we stood in awe of our new commander we learned to like
him greatly; the more so when we found that he liked us, and in a
lurid, unrepeatable epigram expressed his opinion of what might have
been made of us if he could have had us from the first. Then, too, he
looked carefully after our comfort and our necessities. Some rascally
quartermaster had nearly starved us with bad rations. He quickly
stopped that. Moreover, to our great satisfaction, new rifles for the
regiment arrived. We gladly bade good-bye to our old "stuffed clubs,"
and we had occasional target practice with our new and effective
weapons. A fresh spirit came into us; we imagined ourselves fit for
anything.
Yet the regiment was really like a great boy who begins to think
himself a man. The weeding process was still incomplete and
progressing. Captains and lieutenants disappeared one by one. Some who
were otherwise competent had broken down in health; others had been
proved unfit. Their places were filled by promotions, mainly of
non-commissioned officers.
Our experience was precisely that of almost every volunteer regiment in
the army. After the first twelve months' service the line was usually
transformed. Serjeants and corporals, men who had been appointed
because of fitness rather than chosen because of popularity or
influence came into command as company officers. In much less than a
year not a single one of our original field officers remained, and only
three of the ten original captains of companies.
As to the men in general, the weeding process showed some results
worthy of record. It proved that very few men over forty years of age
were fit for war, either physically or morally, and that boys from
eighteen to twenty made excellent soldiers. It was not simply that the
young fellows were more reckless, but they never worried about coming
danger. They were more cheerful; they fretted less over privations;
they actually endured hardships better than older and stronger men. Our
losses among the boys were chiefly in battle; our losses among the old
men were mainly by sickness and physical exhaustion. Doubtless it might
be different with a body of men carefully selected and gradually inured
to a soldier's life; but in our volunteer regiments, hastily enlisted
and composed of men whose habit of life was suddenly changed, the facts
as observed in our experience would, I think, always hold good.