sometimes dangerous and often trying, especially to the
non-commissioned officers on whom special responsibility rested; yet in
pleasant weather at least, it was a welcome change from the dull
routine of camp. It was also an essential part of our education.
Pickets are the antennæ of an army. In the face of the enemy the
antennæ become formidable as skirmishers. A picket line, in case of
need is quickly transformed into a skirmish line. Nothing teaches
vigilance, the use of independent judgment, prompt action in emergency,
and at the same time strict subordination, like outpost or skirmish
work. We had some exciting and some amusing experiences.
One night the line ran through a swamp. It was moonlight, and in the
small hours toward morning things looked weird and ghostly. In visiting
my sentries I came to one of our boys, a mere stripling, whom I found
in a state of high excitement. "Serjeant", he said, "I wish I could be
relieved; I'm afraid to stay here." I asked him what the trouble was
and he answered, "There's a wolf out there," pointing to a dismal clump
of bushes. "I saw him come out of the woods and go across the swamp
into those bushes. He was close to me. I do wish I could be relieved;
I'm afraid to stay here alone!"
I knew it was a trick of the imagination, or possibly a stray fox, and
told him so; but it was of no use. The poor fellow's terror was
pitiful. Yet that same boy was afterward as bold as a lion when bullets
were flying thick and men were falling about him.
Toward the end of January there were rumours in the air. They furnished
food for camp gossip, and were beginning to leave us sceptical, when
orders came suddenly, and we found ourselves one gray morning actually
on the move--where or why we knew not, though it was clear that no
ordinary enterprise was at hand; for the whole army was in motion, and
in all our experience, never had a march been so forced. It was hurry,
hurry, almost at a trot, with rests so infrequent and so short that
men, from sheer inability to keep the pace began to drop out of the
ranks. The roads were good, but the sky was overcast and when, early in
the evening we halted and pitched our shelter tents for the night, the
weather was threatening. Before morning a cold, northeast storm had set
in; all day long the icy rain poured down. The Virginia roads were
speedily melting into muddy creeks. The movement of artillery or
pontoons was fast becoming an impossibility; but at nightfall a
desperate attempt was made. Our regiment was among the unfortunates
detailed to extricate the ponderous pontoon train from its muddy
fetters. Imagine a bridge of boats loaded upon waggons, each great
flat-bottomed boat about twenty feet long, and alternating with the
boats, waggon-trucks loaded with bridge timbers, six or eight horses to
each of these unwieldy vehicles, and the whole train hopelessly mired
in a rough wood road; wheels sunk to the hubs, horses floundering
helplessly, some of them half dead with their terrible work; the night
dark, the half-frozen rain pouring pitilessly--and then perhaps you may
picture the task which was ours. Muskets, equipments, even overcoats
were left at our tents. We were marched about a mile to the place where
the pontoons were stalled; ropes were made fast to the waggons and,
with a hundred men to each, we dragged them one after another out of
the woods into open ground. There they sank more hopelessly than ever.
The force of men had to be doubled. We could have drawn them far more
easily without wheels; but at last, when it was nearly midnight they
were all ranged upon solid ground on a little knoll.
As to ourselves, we were drenched with the rain, bruised with our
falls, half frozen with the cold, and plastered with mud from head to
foot. And in this plight we were kept standing idly for a bitter hour,
waiting for another division of the pontoon train. But it never came,
and finally we were permitted to return to our tents where we found
everything, even our blankets soaked with the merciless rain.
The work and exposure had been horrible. I remember, as we marched back
to camp seeing one poor fellow, a member of a veteran regiment, who had
apparently gone crazy under the strain; he was screaming and swearing
wildly, while his comrades vainly strove to calm him.
By morning the failure of the enterprise, which was an attempt to
surprise the enemy, was evident. The retreat of the army through the
mud and the rain which followed was an experience the horror of which
none that shared it can forget. The elements were the foes which
prevailed against us then, and the demoralisation of the army was worse
than any we ever saw inflicted by battle with mortals. Many men died
from exposure and exhaustion. This was the famous "mud march."
Winter passed quickly after this, and with the spring came preparation
for a new campaign. Our jaunty colonel had recovered his health and
returned to duty; the list of field officers was completed by the
appointment of a new lieutenant-colonel. All that we knew of him was
that he had served with distinction upon General Hancock's staff. He
was eccentric in manner, evidently unpractised in the handling of an
infantry regiment, and we took to him none too kindly at first. But
when we came to know him his high character, his resourcefulness and
his noble courage won our admiration and our profound respect. He was
destined soon to become the commander of the regiment.
The last step, the most important of all, in the making of the regiment
was now before us. At the first Fredericksburg we had endured the trial
of battle partially and passively. The more real and active experience
was now before us. We were members of Sedgwick's Corps, whose brilliant
capture of the Fredericksburg heights turned the tide of disaster at
the battle of Chancellorsville and failed to pluck victory from defeat
only because of the unaccountable inertness of the commander of the
Union forces. Our regiment was one of those chosen to form part of one
of the storming columns. It may seem strange that new troops should be
selected for such perilous and difficult duty, yet this was often done.
The new regiments were strong in numbers; they had not been decimated
by battle and disease; and though less reliable than older battalions,
when no complicated manoeuvres were required, when the only thing was
to go straight forward against a fire from the front their wild _élan_
sometimes accomplished wonders. They were seldom spared in close battle;
it was a way, though a costly one, to break them in and make soldiers
of them. The heaviest losses often fell upon them.
Placed between two other regiments of the brigade, in a sunken road
where we were sheltered from the enemy's fire, we anxiously awaited the
signal for the assault. We could see something of the work before us.
Nearly a mile of open field lay between us and the base of the hills
whose crests were crowned with the Confederate earthworks, and every
foot of that open ground was swept by their fire. It must be crossed
before the storming column could reach the heaviest part of its task
and begin the real assault upon those deadly hills. All along at our
right, away up into the streets of Frederick a mile or more away other
columns were stationed at intervals, some of them facing stronger
defences than those against which our attack was to be directed.
At noon precisely, the signal guns boomed out and we sprang to the
charge. From the very first our colonel blundered. He failed to obey
his orders; he led us wildly in a wrong direction under the very guns
of one of our own batteries. The hills in front of us flamed and roared
with hostile fire and our men were beginning to fall, but this
disturbed us less than the confusing orders which sent us now this way,
now that. It seemed as though the regiment was doomed to disgrace, if
not to destruction. Then it was that we discovered the heroic character
of our lieutenant-colonel. Ignoring his incompetent and now helpless
superior, he calmly assumed command and there, in the face of the
enemy's fierce fire halted us, re-formed our disordered line and led us
forward once more. There was no lack of courage in the men; they were
willing to do all that could be asked of them. Throughout the remainder
of that deadly though glorious charge the regiment proved that all it
needed was what it had at last found--a true leader. We gained the
crest of the hills along with the rest of the column. Our first real
battle was fought. We had come through it, not indeed faultlessly--few
new regiments ever do that--but so that we could look with reverence
upon our torn flag, and view our sadly thinned ranks with sorrow but
without shame. Not perfectly, yet not unworthily we had endured the
ordeal of battle.
In seven months the regiment, which left home little better than a mob
save for the character of its members and the spirit which animated it,
had become a battalion of seasoned and well-officered soldiers fit to
take its place in a brigade of veterans. We had learned to wear the
armour so hastily put on. We had fitted ourselves to it.
If the story of the making of this regiment is worth the telling, that
is not because it is in any way exceptional but because it is typical.
Some regiments were more fortunate than ours in their first commanders;
some met the test of battle sooner. Details vary, yet the process
through which we went is a fair example of that by which hundreds of
thousands of peaceful American citizens were transformed into the
soldiers of one of the most formidable armies of history. The process
was not ideal; it was in many ways illogical, unmilitary and wasteful;
yet its results have seldom been surpassed.
The Household of the Hundred Thousand
The site of the old home camp, the first mustering ground of many
regiments, is now covered with pretty suburban homes about which I
sometimes think, the ghosts of war times must play at midnight.
For us young fellows it was a rude beginning of real life when we found
ourselves inside the great board fence and line of sentries which
enclosed the rows of rough, wooden barracks. The members of our own
company were indeed mostly neighbours, their faces were familiar, we
had grown up together; yet never before had we been thrown into such
intimate association. It is one thing to meet a man every day on the
street or even at work; it is quite another to be compelled to bunk
with him and take your breakfast out of the same camp-kettle. For the
youth who had been kept in a glass case at home this experience was
trying and often disastrous, but for the most of us it was wholesome.
We learned our own hitherto-unsuspected faults, we discovered the good
qualities of even our most faulty comrades, we saw human nature at close
range.
Even the officers could not escape the influence of this enforced
commingling. They had, indeed, separate quarters and their own mess;
they stood also on a vantage ground of almost despotic authority, for
from the moment when we were mustered into service we were subject to
the same military law which governed the regular army. But drawn as our
officers were from the same mass, knowing their men for old neighbours,
often for intimate friends, frequently for those who had been at least
their social equals they could not hold themselves far aloof, and few
of them cared to do so. They could form no separate caste and this,
perhaps, had its disadvantages; but for these there were certainly
large compensations. It became necessary for an officer to prove his
right to rank by qualities of leadership. The best officers were those
who, without sacrifice of dignity kept a lively sense of comradeship
with their men.
The work of drill began before we received either arms or uniforms, and
from the very first we managed to go through with that essential of
camp life, the evening dress parade. Then the grounds would be filled
with spectators, mostly home friends: fathers, mothers, wives, sisters
and sweethearts, bringing with them dainties to supplement what seemed
to them the hard fare of camp. We lived well and were not a little
spoiled in those days; and when we departed for the front, the mistaken
kindness of those who loved us loaded us down with all sorts of
knick-knacks for comfort and convenience. Though loath to part with
these, our first marching days made us more loath to carry them. When a
man's back becomes his only storehouse, he soon finds that riches do
not consist in the abundance of the things which he possesses. Patent
writing-cases, extra socks and mittens, "ponchos" for the shoulders,
"havelocks" for the head, etc, etc, began to strew the road, and in a
short time we were reduced to an absolutely socialistic equality in
this world's goods. Whatever differences remained were those purely
personal ones which can be discovered only by experience of each
other's ways and characters.
In a regiment of a thousand men any extensive acquaintance outside
one's own company comes slowly; yet many things served to bring us into
fellowship. There was little clannishness, every man in blue was a
comrade; yet, after all, each company was a family by itself, and in
the company little coteries collected like the eddies in a river pool.
On the march two men usually tented together. In camp, when logs or
brush were available, four could use their tent pieces to better
advantage than two or three, and the camp was thus made more compact.
Men came together as tent-mates by a process of natural or social
selection. They had been schoolmates or work-fellows in the same shop,
perhaps they were related as brothers or cousins, or they had been near
neighbours and old friends. So it was at first; but new experiences in
toil and peril were often solvents out of which new associations
crystallised. Kindred spirits found each other; more and more the
company became a greater family within which lesser and more intimate
families grew up. Sometimes there were disagreements which broke up
first arrangements; but commonly a quiet, almost unnoticed attraction
of affinity drew the final groups together in bonds seldom broken save
by death or disabling wounds or sickness. A few of these soldierly
friendships bind old men even to-day; many more are cherished by lonely
survivors as memories too sacred for common talk.
When for months you and your comrade have slept at night under one
blanket and shared each other's daily bread, even though it were but
hard-tack; when you have learned to depend on him and he upon you for
help in trouble or comfort in sickness; when together you have entered
the hell of deadly battle--after which the first question would be: "Is
Joe safe?" "Where is Sam?" "Is little Gus alive?"--when together you
have suffered hunger, thirst, heart-breaking weariness; above all,
when, huddled together in storm or cold you have had to endure long
days of dreary, monotonous, comfortless idleness then you know what it
means to live a common life with a fellow-man; and if he and you meet
the test, then you know what friendship means.
In the routine of camp life the music of drum and fife was
conspicuously audible. We were wakened at daybreak by the shrill tune
of the reveille; the last sound at night was that of the drum
perambulating the camp with "taps," commanding "lights out" and sleep;
while all day long frequent summons to varied duties came by "call" of
drum and fife. There was "sick call," which brought all the indisposed
who were able to walk into forlorn squads to be conducted by the
orderly serjeants to the surgeon's tent for treatment. Its absurdly
merry notes seemed to say:
"Come to the Doctor's
And get your castor oil."
Then "guard call," inevitable as the day, but always unwelcome. Drill
call or "assembly" meant simply our daily work. At dress parade, which
closed the day's active duties, the band discoursed its most martial
strains, and after supper we heard it once more in the pleasant tones
of "retreat," and later of "tattoo" the music of which comes most
impressively into recollection. From one camp after another the
measured minor strains would sound forth; from near and far, from camps
away beyond our sight, it would melt into distance, and then beyond the
westward woods the artillery bugles would take it up until it died away
with their mellow notes. It was the voice of the comradeship of a
mighty, invisible host.
One can readily understand how persistently, how intimately this music
of drum and fife wove itself into our lives. Some of those queer,
old-fashioned, half-melancholy, half-merry tunes sing themselves in my
memory even now.
What of the band in the day of battle? Was not martial music the
soldier's inspiration? Did we not charge to its thrilling strains? We
did nothing of the kind. There was other work for the musicians. On the
approach of battle they were always sent to the rear for duty as
stretcher-bearers and helpers in the field hospital. One pretty sure
sign that bloody work was before us was the disappearance of the band;
and the grimmest, most sickening, yet most merciful work of war was
theirs at such times.
In active campaigning, our camps were apt to be hasty, though never
disorderly bivouacs, and even if a few days' halt were made and the
camp duly formed, rest for weary and foot-sore men took precedence of
drill and, in fact, of everything not absolutely necessary. But one
thing was inevitable as day and night. This was roll-call. In storm or
sunshine, in camp or on the march, before and after battle, the first
thing in the morning and the last at night, we had to answer to our
names. The first serjeant calls the roll. He knows the list by heart,
and calls it off without book, in the dark if need be.
At first irritatingly suggestive of that more than schoolboy tutelage
which is one penalty of a soldier's life, the morning and evening
roll-call by its insistent monotony gradually grew into an accepted
item of existence, like salt pork and hard-tack. But when exposure,
toil, and battle began to thin the ranks, the roll-call gained a new
meaning; it became a none too oft-repeated personal history of our
lives, a daily bulletin of passing events and a reminder of those
already past. It told of the sick and disabled, of those fallen out by
the way, prisoners perhaps in the hands of the enemy, here and there of
one promoted, here and there of one dead. There were days when those of
us who could answer to our names did so with a feeling of solemn
thankfulness and other days when the omission, or perhaps the
inadvertent calling of a name sent a rush of sad remembrance through
the ranks.
Imagine, if you can, the roll-call at night after a day of battle!--the
mustering of the thinned company in the darkness; the suspense as the
familiar names are spoken--it may be by an unfamiliar voice, for in
battle death seemed to seek and find the serjeants; the frequent pauses
for inquiry; perhaps the answer of a comrade for one who has fallen,
perhaps a mournful silence. Oh, those silent names! For days, yes, for
weeks and months every now and then you seem to hear them at evening
roll-call, and somewhere, close beside you it may be, an unseen
presence seems to whisper: "Here!"
I think all who passed through it remember the winter of the
Fredericksburg campaign with a shudder. Preceding the battle came
freezing nights with thawing days, rain-soaked or snow-bound camps;
days when our little tents were first buried in the snow, then frozen
so stiff that when marching orders came we could scarcely strike or
fold them; then short but horrible marches through slush and mud with
our doubly-heavy half-frozen loads; scanty rations withal because of
delayed supply trains: a month of exposure, discomfort, and misery.
The like of this is, however, what soldiers must expect, and if victory
had come at the end we could have borne far worse hardship cheerfully.
But the climax was the slaughter at Fredericksburg. The sting of that
defeat was felt not as a dishonour, but as undeserved disaster. We knew
that courage and devotion such as any people might be proud of had been
uselessly sacrificed. Yet the gloom of those winter days after the
battle was not that of despair; it was the bitter prospect of
indefinitely prolonged struggle, an outlook dark indeed to men who were
soldiers not for glory but only for home and country.
The depression of that time was doubtless responsible for at least as
large a loss of life as the battle beside the river. Hardship and
exposure had bred sickness, and the mood of the hour offered feeble
resistance to death. For months the little funeral processions were
mournfully frequent; from our own brigade alone there were often two or
three in a day.
There are no funerals on the march; there are none after battle. On the
march, if a man falls out of the ranks stricken with mortal sickness or
exhaustion he is left to be picked up by the ambulance, perhaps to die
alone by the way. The column cannot halt. After battle, there are but
ghoulish burials. But in settled camp the decencies of death are rudely
observed.
The first funeral in our company was that of one of our serjeants, a
young man whom we all loved. He died shortly after Christmas-time. A
box of good things from home had lately arrived; out of the boards of
that box we managed to make a coffin for our dear comrade and the whole
company marched to his grave. But the most of our dead were buried
without coffin and funerals became too common for any but scantiest
ceremony. A drum and fife playing the Dead March, a firing squad of
three to give a parting volley over the grave, then the chaplain, then
the body of the dead soldier wrapped in his blanket and carried on a
stretcher by two men followed perhaps by half-a-dozen intimate friends,
and that was all.
In the brigade graveyard at the top of the hill which grew so dismally
in population during the winter, there were no headstones--only little
pine boards torn from empty cracker-boxes, with the name of the
departed written thereon in lead pencil or cut in with a jack-knife. I
remember several headboards hewn from cedar, the most lasting of woods,
made with great care and pains, with deep-cut inscriptions. These, you
may be sure were stronger proof of true affection than many of the
costly monuments which challenge the beholder's eye in our great
cemeteries.
It is a pathetic fact that all through the war many men who might have
recovered from the fevers and other ailments common to a soldier's life
died because homesickness had quenched their power of resistance to
disease. Indeed there were not a few deaths from homesickness pure and
simple. It is not a complaint recognised in official reports, but ask
any army surgeon and he will probably tell you some surprisingly sad
tales.
Fatal cases were, however, exceptional, though the ordinary malady was
common enough. Sometimes its manifestations were serio-comic, as for
instance in my own case.
In the midst of our worst other discomforts, we were for a time
compelled to subsist upon ancient hard-tack, which was often in such
condition that, "if you called, it would come to you;" and one day I
strolled off alone into the woods beyond the camp and sitting on a log,
gave myself to meditation. I thought of my privations, not bitterly,
but with a deliberate and curiously analytical wonder. I said to
myself: "How much more a man can stand than he would have believed
possible!" Then my thoughts wandered to my far-away home with its
simple luxuries and comforts, and that which came most vividly to mind
was the fact that once--it seemed ages ago--I had really had good,
wholesome soft bread to eat every day, and three times a day at that! I
then began to ask myself: "Would I ever again have soft bread every
day?" "Was it possible that such happiness could be mine?" And I said
to myself dolefully: "No! It is not likely. You are a soldier; you can
henceforth have only soldier's fare; you will probably fill a soldier's
grave. You will never taste soft bread again!"
Now this may seem absurd in the telling, yet God knows it was horribly
real at the time.
But this was only a passing mood with the mass of us. We were a host of
young men; life was too strong and elastic for even the depression
which followed Fredericksburg to hold us down. We found ways to amuse
ourselves.