tried to do what they could for him. They raised him up, put a blanket
under him, and propped him against a tree so that he could breathe a
little easier. By feeble motions he made them understand that he wanted
something from his pocket. They searched and found a photograph of some
loved one at home, which he eagerly grasped with both hands and held
before his dying eyes while big tears rolled down his cheeks. But he
seemed satisfied, he wanted nothing more, and my friend and his
companions moved away to a little distance where they could eat their
lunch undisturbed by the gruesome sight of the mangled dying man.
Presently a Georgian strayed into the field. He was wounded in the toe
and was making a terrible fuss about it, limping along and using his
musket for a crutch, but he stopped now and then to search the bodies
of the dead for plunder. There were such ghouls, a few of them, in both
armies. He came to the young Connecticut soldier; they could see him
snatch the picture from the dying man's hands, they heard a smothered
exclamation which sounded like, "Oh, don't!" and then they saw the
brute strike the dying man with the butt of his musket.
My friend, who was an officer, sprang to his feet, wounded as he was,
and emptied his revolver at the man, who at the first shot took refuge
behind the tree. Then the officer called for a loaded musket, and a
singular duel began, the villain behind the tree and my friend in the
open exchanging shots ineffectually, when the Georgian, reloading in
nervous haste, sprang his ramrod. It flew out of his hand and fell just
out of reach. Unwilling to expose himself he clawed for it with his
musket barrel, but in vain. At this juncture another wounded
Confederate wandered into the horrible little field. He had not seen
the prelude, he saw only a comrade in trouble, and going boldly to his
help was about to hand him his ramrod; but from a dozen mangled men
still able to handle a rifle threatening voices warned him to desist
and let the two have it out alone. A few more wild attempts to hook the
rammer toward him, and then in desperation he suddenly lunged his body
toward it. My friend says, "He looked at me sideways with a scared
look, as he reached out, but I just laughed to myself and fired. He
fell dead, and I fainted and knew no more till I found myself in the
hospital."
The road from the Wilderness leads straight to Spottsylvania. Mere
localities; lonely, obscure, faintly marked on the maps they were and
are still. Yet once, for just eight days their slumber was broken by
the reverberations of continuous gigantic battle; and scarcely another
week in modern history has borne such fruitage of sacrifice. Official
reports, which seldom err by excess, tell us that our army lost 36,000
men during those eight days. What the South lost no one knows, for
General Lee had issued a special order forbidding his officers to keep
the count. But figures after all are an inane expression of such an
immolation. These were _men_ who fell,--young men, our best. After
that week and after Cold Harbor, which quickly followed, the Army of
the Potomac, the generous host of volunteers for home and country's
sake, was never the same.
One regiment always comes to mind when Spottsylvania is named. It is
indeed only one out of many distinguished for heroic losses; but I knew
it well. Its members were fellow-citizens from my own State; the
regiment entered service at the same time with our own. We marched
together in the Sixth Army Corps; our first battles were alike; we both
left our dead on the plains below Fredericksburg and at bloody Salem
Heights.
The Fifteenth New Jersey was a choice regiment recruited from the
flower of the manhood of the northern counties, and peculiarly full of
that high sentiment which consecrated patriotism in 1862. It was
officered largely by promotions from the veteran Jersey Brigade to
which it was assigned, and after it took the field was commanded by a
very able regular army officer. A light loss at Fredericksburg, a very
severe one at Salem Church, where the regiment though as yet unseasoned
bore itself with a steadiness and gallantry that excited general
admiration, then a year of hard campaigning with but little serious
fighting, and the Wilderness was reached.
The Fifteenth entered the week of battles with four hundred and
twenty-nine men and fourteen line officers, beside field and staff. Of
those eight days in the Wilderness and at Spottsylvania only one passed
in which they met with no loss. During the fierce fighting on the
fifth and sixth of May, though holding a responsible and exposed
position, they suffered surprisingly little. On the seventh, another
small loss met them on the skirmish line. They marched out of the
Wilderness poorer by one sadly missed captain and perhaps twenty men.
The eighth brought the Jersey Brigade as the advance guard of the Sixth
Corps to Spottsylvania. At once, with no time to rest, they were
plunged into the first of that remorselessly persistent series of
terrific assaults which have made the name of "The Bloody Angle"
forever famous. This first was but a reconnaissance ordered by General
Warren to "develop that hill." For the Fifteenth it meant a charge
across a treacherous morass, through timber slashings protecting and
hiding the enemy's works, up to and over the very parapet, then back
again; and it cost them over a hundred good men. The ninth brought duty
on a perilous skirmish line, with a loss which included their
colour-serjeant, killed by the same sharpshooter who slew General
Sedgwick, the beloved commander of the Sixth Corps. The tenth, another
battle again before the Bloody Angle, and another severe loss. The
modest narrative of the regiment's historian says of May 11th:--
"There was musketry firing through the early morning, and several times
the roll of discharges rose high, but we were left in quiet for several
hours and made up our regimental reports. Then three brigades,
including our own, were ordered to hold themselves in readiness for a
charge, and were drawn up in order. During the night the enemy had made
their fortification in our front most formidable. We looked up at the
frowning works and flaunting battle-flags and felt that the attempt to
capture them would be a march to death." But the assault was postponed
and "the day was one of comparative quiet," and, for a wonder, a day of
no losses for the Fifteenth regiment.
Seven days of ceaseless battle have now reduced the regiment by nearly
one-third. Less than three hundred men remain in the ranks. It has been
moreover a week of pitiless, unbroken strain, of wearing anxiety, of
sleepless nights passed in worrying marches or in nervously exhausting
picket duty close to the lines of an alert enemy. Imagine if you can
seven days and nights with scarce a moment's respite from the crack of
cannon or the threatening rattle of musketry, seven days when you are
seldom out of sight of the swollen corpses of the dead or out of
hearing of the wails of the wounded; seven horrible days, only one of
which has gone by without seeing from half-a-dozen to a hundred of your
comrades shot down, and ask yourself how fit you would be to take part
in a desperate assault, a veritable march to death on the morrow?
Yet with this preparation and this anticipation thousands of men lay
down in the chilling rain that night to get what rest they could. An
officer whom I know well--he came home in command of the regiment--told
me that on this night he and three others, two captains and two
lieutenants, were huddled together under a shelter tent, trying to get
a little rest and escape from the pitiless storm. One of the captains,
seeing troops filing by, spoke up:
"Well, there goes the Second Corps; we are in for another light
to-morrow, and it will be a nasty one. But I feel as though I would
come out all right. I don't believe the bullet is yet moulded that will
kill me!"
The other captain replied sadly, "I don't feel that way. I do not
believe I shall be alive to-morrow night."
The two lieutenants said nothing; they only listened and thought.
Before the next night both the captains lay dead on the field, their
bodies riddled with bullets, one of the lieutenants had a leg shot off
and a shoulder shattered. The fourth of the group, who told me the
story, escaped with a bullet-hole through his coat.
The 12th of May was ushered in with a tremendous assault by the whole
of the Second Army Corps, led by Hancock. The assault was at first a
sweeping success, but inside the captured work another entrenchment was
encountered behind which the Confederates massed their forces, and then
the real combat of the day began. It is an old story; we have all heard
how the armies, locked in deadly embrace, fought hand to hand so that
several times during the day the trenches had to be cleared of the dead
to give foothold for the living, and how great oak-trees were actually
severed by riddling bullets so that they fell as if cut down by a
woodman's axe.
The morning was not far gone before all our army was engaged either
within the salient, or in attempts to relieve the pressure there by
fresh assaults on other portions of the line. In one of these the
Fifteenth regiment met its culminating sacrifice. At one side of the
Bloody Angle was an earthwork as yet untried by assault. Let us take a
peep at it. To do so we must first force our way through a belt of
dense pine thicket full of dead branches that tear clothes and flesh.
At the edge of the thicket we come upon an open space. It is perhaps
two hundred yards wide. Look across! At the farther side you see first
a row of abatis--trees felled with their branches pointing outward and
toward you, trimmed to sharpened points, and if you could examine
closely you would find many fiendish "foot-locks" cunningly made to
catch and trip any one trying to force his way through this savage
fence. Beyond the abatis and above it rises a yellow earthwork, the top
laid in logs, with the topmost log raised a few inches so that the
defenders can fire through without exposing themselves. Here and there
you see the muzzles of cannon gaping through embrasures, arranged in
angles to sweep the open field with flank fire. The horrible, the
hopeless task of the Jersey Brigade, with the Fifteenth regiment in the
lead, is to capture that earthwork. The attempt seems hopeless, but
attack, attack everywhere is the word to-day; no joint in the enemy's
harness must be left unsmitten. Spottsylvania was not a place where
only easy things were tried.
It is ten o'clock now, and within and around the Bloody Angle, at every
point but this, an inferno of strife is roaring. The order comes, the
regiment forces its way through the pine thicket, straightens its line
as it emerges, and the earthwork bursts into flame. A bold dash now
across the shot-swept open, no firing, the bayonet only, and with
thinned ranks the abatis is reached. To men who march to death it is
less formidable than it seems, desperate hands quickly tear it aside;
up now Fifteenth, what is left of you, up the bank over the logs,
inside and hand to hand, foot to foot in deadly mêlée. It is often said
that the bayonet was a mere appendage in our war. But it was freely
used at the Bloody Angle. The Fifteenth forced their way into that
earthwork at the bayonet's point, held their costly capture for a short
space, took about a hundred prisoners and a battle-flag. But too few of
them were left to stand against the gathering force poured in on the
little band from the inner line, and a battery is now sweeping down the
brigade with flank fire of grape-shot. The order comes to retire. It is
almost as perilous as the going in, and when the regiment is reformed
less than a hundred can be counted. But at nightfall others who have
remained all day among the dead and wounded, entrapped as it were,
creep in, and at roll-call next morning it is found that one hundred
and fifty-three men and four line officers remain, out of the four
hundred and forty-four who marched into the Wilderness! The muster-out
roll of that regiment carries the names of one hundred and twenty-two
men who were killed or died of their wounds in those eight days of
battle. And one hundred and sixteen of them met their death at
Spottsylvania. The heroic chaplain of the regiment says of their last
assault:--
"We were engaged a single half hour, but there are times when minutes
exceed in their awful bearing the weeks and years of ordinary
existence. Forty bodies, or nearly one-fifth of the whole regiment, lay
on the breastwork, in the ditch, or in the open space in front. Numbers
had crept away to expire in the woods, and others were carried to the
hospital, there to have their sufferings prolonged for a few more days
and then to yield their breath. The brave, the generous, the good lay
slaughtered on the ground of our charge--the most precious gifts of our
State to the sacred cause of our country."
In his "History of the Second Army Corps," General Walker says of the
havoc made in that splendid organisation by the first few months of the
last Virginia campaign:--
"More than twenty officers had been killed or wounded in command of
brigades; nearly one hundred in command of regiments; nearly seventeen
thousand men had fallen under the fire of the enemy, and among these
was an undue proportion of the choicest spirits. It was the bravest
captain, the bravest serjeant, the bravest private who went farthest
and stood longest under fire."
That was always the story, true not once but many times, and in spirit
if not in precise detail of all the battle-wasted corps of our army. As
the living image of those choice spirits comes back to memory,--and
some of them were my dear friends,--a significant picture weaves past
and present together in imagination. Shadowy forms begin to shape
themselves: they are phantoms of men in mature vigour, fitter than most
of us who survive, and readier to go farthest and stay longest under
the fire of that unending battle by which all true progress of our
national life must be conquered. And then the picture slowly fades
until only a great _vacancy_ is left!
For no one need tell us who knew these men that theirs was but brute
courage, only the product of military discipline. Seldom has conscience
been so large a factor in war, Anglo-Saxon conscience at that, which
strikes hard and gives all. The ghastly losses were no accident.
Was the sacrifice worth while? We are far enough away from it now to
look back calmly and answer solemnly, Yes!
There is a keeping of life that is its loss, and a giving of it
that is largest, truest gain. The one great inconsistency of our
Republic was wiped away, as alone it could be, in blood; one single
dangerously-dividing controversy was forever settled by that war. The
pledge of our nation's indivisibility is the precious possession of
those myriad graves, and the harbinger of our growingly beneficent
greatness among the nations of the earth is the power of sacrifice for
high principle, to which they bear their silent, their pathetic, but
ever-present testimony.
To-day, after thirty years, the fruition of the sacrifice is seen. We
behold the mighty uprising of a veritably united people in the cause of
humanity, and on the heights of Santiago we see men of the South
standing shoulder to shoulder with men of the North, mingling their
blood victoriously under the old Flag, while the world looks on with
admiration not unmixed with fear.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Song of the Rappahannock, by Ira Seymour Dodd