THE GATHERING OF A GREAT ARMY.
The Rebels began the war by firing upon Fort Sumter. You remember how
stupefying the news of its surrender. You could not at first believe
that they would fire upon the Stars and Stripes,--the flag respected and
honored everywhere on earth. When there was no longer a doubt that they
had begun hostilities, you could not have felt worse if you had heard
of the death of a very dear friend. But as you thought it over and
reflected upon the wickedness of the act, so deliberate and terrible,
you felt that you would like to see the traitors hung; not that it would
be a pleasure to see men die a felon's death, but because you loved your
country and its flag, with its heaven-born hues, its azure field of
stars! Not that the flag is anything in itself to be protected, honored,
and revered, but because it is the emblem of constitutional liberty and
freedom, the ensign of the best, freest, noblest government ever
established. It had cost suffering and blood. Kings, aristocrats,
despots, and tyrants, in the Old World and in the New hated it, but
millions of men in other lands, suffering, abused, robbed of their
rights, beheld it as their banner of hope. When you thought how it had
been struck down by traitors, when you heard that the President had
called for seventy five thousand troops, you hurrahed with all your
might, and wished that you were old enough and big enough to go and
fight the Rebels.
The drums beat in the street. You saw the soldiers hasten to take
their places in the gathering ranks. You marched beside them and kept
step with the music. The sunlight gleamed from their bayonets. Their
standards waved in the breeze, while the drum, the fife, the bugle, and
the trumpet thrilled you as never before. You marched proudly and
defiantly. You felt that you could annihilate the stoutest Rebel. You
followed the soldiers to the railroad depot and hurrahed till the train
which bore them away was out of sight.
Let us follow them to Washington, and see the gathering of a great army.
The Rebels have threatened to capture that city and make it their seat
of government, and it must be saved.
We have been a quiet, peaceable nation, and have had no great standing
armies of a half-million men. We know but little about war. The Northern
States are unprepared for war. President Buchanan's Secretary of War,
Floyd, has proved himself a thief. He has stolen several hundred
thousands of muskets, thousands of pieces of artillery, sending them
from the Northern arsenals to the South. The slaveholders have been for
many years plotting the rebellion. They are armed, and we are not. Their
arsenals are well filled, while ours are empty, because President
Buchanan was a weak old man, and kept thieves and traitors in places of
trust and power.
At the call of the President every village sends its soldiers, every
town its company. When you listened to the soul-thrilling music of the
band, and watched the long, winding train as it vanished with the troops
in the distance, you had one little glimpse of the machinery of war, as
when riding past a great manufactory you see a single pulley, or a row
of spindles through a window. You do not see the thousands of wheels,
belts, shafts,--the hundred thousand spindles, the arms of iron, fingers
of brass, and springs of steel, and the mighty wheel which gives motion
to all,--and so you have not seen the great, complicated, far-reaching,
and powerful machinery of war.
But there is activity everywhere. Drums are beating, men assembling,
soldiers marching, and hastening on in regiments. They go into camp and
sleep on the ground, wrapped in their blankets. It is a new life. They
have no napkins, no table-cloths at breakfast, dinner, or supper, no
china plates or silver forks. Each soldier has his tin plate and cup,
and makes a hearty meal of beef and bread. It is hard-baked bread. They
call it _hard-tack_, because it might be tacked upon the roof of a house
instead of shingles. They also have Cincinnati _chicken_. At home they
called it pork; fowls are scarce and pork is plenty in camp, so they
make believe it is chicken!
There is drilling by squads, companies, battalions, and by regiments.
Some stand guard around the camp by day, and others go out on picket at
night, to watch for the enemy. It is military life. Everything is done
by orders. When you become a soldier, you cannot go and come as you
please. Privates, lieutenants, captains, colonels, generals, all are
subject to the orders of their superior officers. All must obey the
general in command. You march, drill, eat, sleep, go to bed, and get up
by order. At sunrise you hear the reveille, and at nine o'clock in the
evening the tattoo. Then the candle, which has been burning in your tent
with a bayonet for a candlestick, must be put out. In the dead of night,
while sleeping soundly and dreaming of home, you hear the drum-beat. It
is the long roll. There is a rattle of musketry. The pickets are at it.
Every man springs to his feet.
"Turn out! turn out!" shouts the colonel.
"Fall in! fall in!" cries the captain.
There is confusion throughout the camp,--a trampling of feet and loud,
hurried talking. In your haste you get your boots on wrong, and buckle
your cartridge-box on bottom up. You rush out in the darkness, not
minding your steps, and are caught by the tent-ropes. You tumble
headlong, upsetting to-morrow's breakfast of beans. You take your place
in the ranks, nervous, excited, and trembling at you know not what. The
regiment rushes toward the firing, which suddenly ceases. An officer
rides up in the darkness and says it is a false alarm! You march back to
camp, cool and collected now, grumbling at the stupidity of the picket,
who saw a bush, thought it was a Rebel, fired his gun, and alarmed the
whole camp.
In the autumn of 1861 the army of the Potomac, encamped around
Washington, numbered about two hundred thousand men. Before it marches
to the battle-field, let us see how it is organized, how it looks, how
it is fed; let us get an insight into its machinery.
Go up in the balloon which you see hanging in the air across the Potomac
from Georgetown, and look down upon this great army. All the country
round is dotted with white tents,--some in the open fields, and some
half hid by the forest-trees. Looking away to the northwest you see the
right wing. Arlington is the centre, and at Alexandria is the left wing.
You see men in ranks, in files, in long lines, in masses, moving to and
fro, marching and countermarching, learning how to fight a battle. There
are thousands of wagons and horses; there are from two to three hundred
pieces of artillery. How long the line, if all were on the march! Men
marching in files are about three feet apart. A wagon with four horses
occupies fifty feet. If this army was moving on a narrow country road,
four cavalrymen riding abreast, and men in files of four, with all the
artillery, ammunition-wagons, supply-trains, ambulances, and equipment,
it would reach from Boston to Hartford, or from New York city to Albany,
a hundred and fifty miles!
To move such a multitude, to bring order out of confusion, there must be
a system, a plan, and an organization. Regiments are therefore formed
into brigades, with usually about four regiments to a brigade. Three or
four brigades compose a division, and three or four divisions make an
army corps. A corps when full numbers from twenty-five to thirty
thousand men.
When an army moves, the general commanding it issues his orders to the
generals commanding the corps; they issue their orders to the division
commanders, the division commanders to the brigadiers, they to the
colonels, and the colonels to captains, and the captains to the
companies. As the great wheel in the factory turns all the machinery, so
one mind moves the whole army. The general-in-chief must designate the
road which each corps shall take, the time when they are to march, where
they are to march to, and sometimes the hour when they must arrive at an
appointed place. The corps commanders must direct which of their
divisions shall march first, what roads they shall take, and where they
shall encamp at night. The division commanders direct what brigades
shall march first. No corps, division, or brigade commander can take any
other road than that assigned him, without producing confusion and
delay.
The army must have its food regularly. Think how much food it takes to
supply the city of Boston, or Cincinnati every day. Yet here are as many
men as there are people in those cities. There are a great many more
horses in the army than in the stables of both of those cities. All must
be fed. There must be a constant supply of beef, pork, bread, beans,
vinegar, sugar, and coffee, oats, corn, and hay.
The army must also have its supplies of clothing, its boots, shoes, and
coats. It must have its ammunition, its millions of cartridges of
different kinds; for there are a great many kinds of guns in the
regiments,--Springfield and Enfield muskets, French, Belgian, Prussian,
and Austrian guns, requiring a great many different kinds of ammunition.
There are a great many different kinds of cannon. There must be no lack
of ammunition, no mistake in its distribution. So there is the
Quartermaster's Department, the Commissary, and the Ordnance Department.
The Quartermaster moves and clothes the army, the Commissary feeds it,
and the Ordnance officer supplies it with ammunition. The
general-in-chief has a Quartermaster-General, a chief Commissary and a
chief Ordnance officer, who issue their orders to the chief officers in
their departments attached to each corps. They issue their orders to
their subordinates in the divisions, and the division officers to those
in the brigades.
Then there is a Surgeon-General, who directs all the hospital
operations, who must see that the sick and wounded are all taken care
of. There are camp surgeons, division, brigade, and regimental surgeons.
There are hospital nurses, ambulance drivers, all subject to the orders
of the surgeon. No other officer can direct them. Each department is
complete in itself.
It has cost a great deal of thought, labor, and money to construct this
great machinery. In creating it there has been much thinking, energy,
determination, and labor; and there must be constant forethought in
anticipating future wants, necessities, and contingencies, when to move,
where, and how. The army does not exist of its own accord, but by
constant, unremitting effort.
The people of the country determined that the Constitution, the Union,
and the government bequeathed by their fathers should be preserved. They
authorized the President to raise a great army. Congress voted money and
men. The President, acting as the agent of the people, and as
Commander-in-Chief, appointed men to bring all the materials together
and organize the army. Look at what was wanted to build this mighty
machine and to keep it going.
First, the hundreds of thousands of men; the thousands of horses; the
thousands of barrels of beef, pork, and flour; thousands of hogsheads of
sugar, vinegar, rice, salt, bags of coffee, and immense stores of other
things. Thousands of tons of hay, bags of oats and corn. What numbers of
men and women have been at work to get each soldier ready for the field.
He has boots, clothes, and equipments. The tanner, currier, shoemaker,
the manufacturer, with his swift-flying shuttles, the operator tending
his looms and spinning-jennies, the tailor with his sewing-machines, the
gunsmith, the harness-maker, the blacksmith,--all trades and occupations
have been employed. There are saddles, bridles, knapsacks, canteens,
dippers, plates, knives, stoves, kettles, tents, blankets, medicines,
drums, swords, pistols, guns, cannon, powder, percussion-caps, bullets,
shot, shells, wagons,--everything.
Walk leisurely through the camps, and observe the little things and the
great things, see the men on the march. Then go into the Army and Navy
Departments in Washington, in those brick buildings west of the
President's house. In those rooms are surveys, maps, plans, papers,
charts of the ocean, of the sea-coast, currents, sand-bars, shoals, the
rising and falling of tides. In the Topographical Bureau you see maps of
all sections of the country. There is the Ordnance Bureau, with all
sorts of guns, rifles, muskets, carbines, pistols, swords, shells,
rifled shot, fuses which the inventors have brought in. There are a
great many bureaus, with immense piles of papers and volumes, containing
experiments upon the strength of iron, the trials of cannon, guns,
mortars, and powder. There have been experiments to determine how much
powder shall be used, whether it shall be as fine as mustard-seed or as
coarse as lumps of sugar, and the results are all noted here. All the
appliances of science, industry, and art are brought into use to make it
the best army the world ever saw.
It is the business of the government to bring the materials together,
and the business of the generals to organize it into brigades,
divisions, and corps,--to determine the number of cavalry and batteries
of artillery, to place weak materials in their proper places, and the
strongest where they will be most needed.
The general commanding must have a plan of operations. Napoleon said
that war is like a game of chess, and that a commander must make his
game. He must think it out beforehand, and in such a manner that the
enemy will be compelled to play it in his way and be defeated. The
general-in-chief must see the end from the beginning, just as Napoleon,
sticking his map of Europe full of pins, decided that he could defeat
the Austrians at Austerlitz, the Prussians at Jena. That is genius. The
general-in-chief makes his plan on the supposition that all his orders
will be obeyed promptly, that no one will shirk responsibility, that not
one of all the vast multitude will fail to do his duty.
The night before the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon sent an order to an
officer to take possession of a little hillock, on which stood a
farm-house overlooking the plain. The officer thought it would do just
as well if he let it go till morning, but in the morning the English had
possession of the spot, and in consequence of that officer's neglect
Napoleon probably lost the great battle, his army, and his empire. Great
events often hang on little things, and in military operations it is of
the utmost importance that they should be attended to.
From the beginning to the end, unless every man does his duty, from the
general in command to the private in the ranks, there is danger of
failure.
Thus the army is organized, and thus through organization it becomes a
disciplined body. Instead of being a confused mass of men, horses,
mules, cannon, caissons, wagons, and ambulances, it is a body which can
be divided, subdivided, separated by miles of country, hurried here and
there, hurled upon the enemy, and brought together again by the stroke
of a pen, by a word, or the click of the telegraph.
When a battle is to be fought, the general-in-chief must not only have
his plan how to get the great mass of men to the field, but he must have
a plan of movement on the field. Each corps must have its position
assigned. There must be a line of battle. It is not a continuous line of
men, but there are wide spaces, perhaps miles wide, between the corps,
divisions, and brigades. Hills, ravines, streams, swamps, houses,
villages, bushes, a fence, rocks, wheat-fields, sunlight and shade, all
must be taken into account. Batteries must be placed on hills, or in
commanding positions to sweep all the country round. Infantry must be
gathered in masses in the centre or on either wing, or deployed and
separated according to circumstances. They must be sheltered. They must
be thrown here or there, as they may be needed to hold or to crush the
enemy. They are to stand still and be ploughed through by shot and
shell, or rush into the thickest of the fight, just as they may be
ordered. They are not to question the order;--
"Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die."
There are sleepless nights in the tent of the general-in-chief. When all
others except the pickets are asleep, he is examining maps and plans,
calculating distances, estimating the strength of his army, and asking
himself whether it will do to attack the enemy, or whether he shall
stand on the defensive? can this brigade be relied upon for a desperate
charge? will that division hold the enemy in check? At such times, the
good name, the valor, the bravery of the troops and of the officers who
command them is reviewed. He weighs character. He knows who are reliable
and who inefficient. He studies, examines papers, consults reports,
makes calculations, sits abstractedly, walks nervously, and lies down to
dream it all over again and again.
The welfare of the country, thousands of lives, and perhaps the destiny
of the nation, is in his hands. How shall he arrange his corps? ought
the troops to be massed in the centre, or shall he concentrate them on
the wings? shall he feel of the enemy with a division or two, or rush
upon him like an avalanche? Can the enemy outflank him, or get upon his
rear? What if the Rebels should pounce upon his ammunition and
supply-trains? What is the position of the enemy? How large is his
force? How many batteries has he? How much cavalry? What do the scouts
report? Are the scouts to be believed? One says the enemy is retreating,
another that he is advancing. What are the probabilities? A thousand
questions arise which must be answered. The prospect of success must be
carefully calculated. Human life must be thrown remorselessly into the
scale. All the sorrows and the tears of wives, mothers, fathers,
brothers, and sisters far away, who will mourn for the dead, must be
forgotten. He must shut up all tender thoughts, and become an iron man.
Ah! it is not so fine a thing to be a general, perhaps, as you have
imagined!
It is an incomplete, imperfect, and unsatisfactory look which you have
taken of the machinery of a great army. But you can see that a very
small thing may upset the best-laid plan of any commander. The cowardice
of a regiment, the failure of an officer to do his duty, to be at a
place at an appointed moment, the miscarriage of orders, a hundred
things which you can think of, may turn a victory into a defeat. You can
see that a great battle must be a grand and terrible affair; but though
you may use all your powers of imagination in endeavoring to picture the
positions of the troops,--how they look, how they act, how they stand
amid the terrible storm, braying death, how they rush into the thickest
fire, how they fall like the sere leaves of autumn,--you will fail in
your conceptions of the conflict. You must see it, and be in it, to know
what it is.