Part 6 (1/2)
An incident ill.u.s.trating this feeling was taking place up in the front just about the time we were hearing the news of the General's narrow escape.
As the Texan Brigade of Longstreet's Corps, just come up, dashed upon the heavy ranks of the Federals, they pa.s.sed General Lee with a rousing cheer. The old General, anxious and excited by the critical moment, thrilling with sympathy in their gallant bearing, started to ride in, with them, to the charge. It was told me the next day by some of the Texans, who witnessed it, that the instant the men, unaware of his presence with them before, saw the General along with them in that furious fire, they cried out in pleading tones--”Go back, General Lee.
We swear we won't go on, if you don't go back. You shall not stay here in this fire! We'll charge clear through the wilderness if you will only go back.” And they said, numbers of the men crowded about the General, and begged him, with tears, to return, and some caught hold of his feet, and some his bridle rein, and turned his horse round, and led him back a few steps,--all the time pleading with him. And then, the General seeing the feelings of his men, and that he was _actually checking the charge_ by their anxiety for him, said, ”I'll go, my men, if you will drive back those people,” and he rode off, they said, with his head down, and they saw tears rolling down his cheeks. And they said, many of the men were sobbing aloud, overcome by this touching scene. Then with one yell, and the tears on their faces, those n.o.ble fellows hurled themselves on the ma.s.ses of the enemy like a thunderbolt. Not only did they stop the advance, but their resistless fury swept all before it and they followed the broken Federals half a mile. They redeemed their promise to General Lee. Eight hundred of them went in, four hundred, only, came out. They covered with glory that day, not only themselves, who did such deeds, but their leader, who could inspire such feelings at such a moment in the hearts of these men. Half their number fell in that splendid charge, but--they saved the line, and they gloriously redeemed their promise to General Lee--”We'll do all you want, if you will only get out of fire.”
I cannot think of anything stronger than to say that--This General, and these soldiers, were worthy of each other. There is no higher praise!
As the Brigades of Field's division, that followed the Texans, went in, a little incident took place, which ill.u.s.trated the irrepressible spirit of fun which would break out everywhere, and which we often laughed at afterwards. General Anderson's Brigade was ahead, followed hard by Benning's Brigade, gallant Georgians all, and led by Brigadiers, of whom nothing better can be said, than that they were worthy to lead them.
Among the men General Anderson had somehow got the soubriquet of ”Tige”
and General Benning enjoyed the equally respectful name of ”Old Rock.”
On this occasion, Anderson was ahead, and as he moved out of sight into the woods, his men began to yell and shout like everything. One of Anderson's men, wounded, blood dropping from his elbow and running down his face, was coming out, when he met General Benning, at the head of his column, pus.h.i.+ng in as hard as he could go. As this fellow pa.s.sed him, taking advantage of his wound to have a little joke, he pointed to the woods in front and called out to the General, ”Hurry up 'Old Rock,'
'Tige' has treed a pretty big c.o.o.n he's got up there; you'd better hurry up or you won't get a smell.” The brave old Benning, already hurrying himself nearly to death, flashed around on the daring speaker, and saw at once the streaming blood--”Confound that fellow's impudence,” said the disgusted General. ”I wish he wasn't wounded, if I wouldn't fix him.” The fellow well knew that he could say what he pleased to anybody with that blood-covered face.
I think it was about eleven or twelve o'clock we heard that General Longstreet was badly wounded, and soon after he was brought to the rear, near our guns. With several of the others I went out and had some words with the men who were taking him out. To our grief, we heard them say, that his wound was very dangerous, probably fatal. He had fallen, up there in the woods, on the battle front, fighting his corps, in the full tide of victory. He had broken and doubled up Hanc.o.c.k's Corps, and driven it, with great slaughter back upon their works at the Brock road, and in such rout and confusion, that, as he said, he thought he had another ”Bull Run” on them. And if he could have forced on that a.s.sault, and gotten fixed on the Brock road, it is thought that Grant's army would have been in great peril. But, just in the thick of it, he was mistaken, while out in front in the woods, for the enemy, and shot, by his own men. His fall was in almost every particular just like ”Stonewall” Jackson's, in that same wilderness, one year before. Both were shot by their own men, at a critical moment, in the midst of brilliant success, and in both cases their fall saved the enemy from irretrievable disaster. Longstreet's fall checked the attack, which after an inevitable delay of some hours, was resumed. But the enemy seeing his danger had time to recover, and make disposition to meet it.
=”Windrows” of Federal Dead=
Again, at four o'clock, after this interval of comparative quiet, the thunder of battle crashed and rolled. General Lee, himself, fought Longstreet's Corps. The attack was fierce, obstinate, and fearfully b.l.o.o.d.y. Wilkinson, of the Army of the Potomac, an eye-witness of this charge, says, in his book, ”Recollections of a Private Soldier”: ”The Confederate fire resembled the fury of h.e.l.l in its intensity, and was deadly accurate” and that ”the story of this fight could afterwards be read by the windrows of dead men.” As to its effect he also says: ”We could not check the Confederate advance and they forced us back, and back, and back. The charging Confederates broke through the left of the Ninth Corps and would have cut the army in twain, if not caught on the flank, and driven back. Ma.s.sed for the attack on the Sixth Corps, they were skillfully launched, and ably led, and they struck with terrific violence against Shaler's and Seymour's Brigades, which were routed, with a loss of four thousand prisoners. The Confederates came within an ace of routing the Sixth Corps. Both their a.s.saults along our line were dangerously near being successful.” Such was the description of a brave enemy, an eye-witness of this a.s.sault. At last, as dark fell, the fire slackened and died out.
The Battle of the Wilderness was done. Grant was pinned into the thickets, hardly able to stand Lee's attack, no thoroughfare to the front and twenty odd thousand of his men dead, wounded and gone. That was about the situation when dark fell on the 6th of May!
That night we drew off some distance to the right, and lay down, supperless, on the ground around our guns; it was very dark and cloudy and soon began to rain. There had been too much powder burnt around there during the last two days for it to stay clear. And so, as it always did, just after heavy firing, the clouds poured down water through the dark night. Lying out exposed on the untented ground, with only one blanket to cover with, we got soaking wet, and stayed so.
The comfortless night gave way, at last, to a comfortless day--May 7th--gloomy, lowering, and raining, off and on, till late in the evening. During the morning, a little desultory firing was heard in front, and then all was quiet and still. We knew enough to know that Grant's push was over at this point. Some of us had gone up to look at the ground over which Longstreet had driven the enemy yesterday. We knew that the Federal troops could never be gotten back over that awful, corpse-covered ground to attack the men who had driven them. We knew we had to fight somewhere else, but where? By and by, talk began to circulate among the men that Spottsylvania, or around near Fredericksburg, might be the place. Of one thing we were all satisfied, that we would know soon enough.
In this waiting and excited state of mind, the long, long, rainy day wore on, and dark fell again. We had managed to conjure up some very lonesome looking fires out of the wet wood lying about (fence rails were not attainable here in the wilderness), and were engaged in a hot dispute about where the next fighting was to be, which warmed and dried us more than the fires did, when ”the winter of our discontent” was made ”glorious summer,” so to speak, by the news that the wagons had got up, and they were going to issue rations. Tom Armistead made this startling announcement in as bland, and matter of course a tone as if he were in the habit of giving us something to eat _every_ day, which he was not, by a great deal. Tom was the dearest fellow in the world, and the best Commissary in the army, and we all loved him. Many a time when, in the confusion of campaign, the wagon was empty, or was snowed in by an avalanche of wagons, far in the rear, he could be seen struggling up to the front with a bag of crackers, sugar, meat, anything that he had been able to lay hands on, across his horse, so that the boys should not starve entirely. Hunting us up through the woods, or along the battle line, he would ride in among us with his load, and a beaming face, that told how glad he was to have something for us. And when, as too often it was, the whole Commissary business was ”_dead busted_,” our afflicted Commissary would tell us there was nothing, with such a rueful visage, that it made us sorry we did not have something to give him, and made us feel our own emptiness all the more, that it seemed to afflict him so.
The present rations were quickly distributed, and as quickly devoured, and not a man was foundered by over-eating! Then we sat around the fires and discussed the news that had been gathered from various sources.
CHAPTER III
BATTLES OF SPOTTSYLVANIA COURT HOUSE
It was just ten o'clock and each man was looking around for the dryest spot to spread his blanket on, when a courier rode up, with pressing orders for us to get instantly on the march. In a few moments, we were tramping rapidly through the darkness, on a road that led, we knew not whither. We were, as we found out afterwards, leading the great race, that General Lee was making for Spottsylvania Court House to head off Grant in his efforts to get out of the Wilderness in his ”push for Richmond.” We were with the vanguard of the skillful movement, by which Longstreet's Corps was marched entirely around Grant's left flank, to seize the strong line of the hills around Spottsylvania Court House and hold it till the other two Corps could come to our aid.
We marched all night, a hard, forced march over muddy roads, through the damp, close night. Soon after the start from our bivouac, a brigade of infantry had filed into the road ahead of us, and we could hear, behind us on the road, though we could not see for the darkness, the sound of other troops marching. The Brigade ahead of us, we soon found, to our gratification, to be Barksdale's Mississippi Brigade, now under command of General Humphreys, since the gallant Barksdale fell at the head of his storming columns at Gettysburg. This was the Brigade to which we had belonged in the earlier organization of the artillery. It was a magnificent body of men, one of the most thorough fighting corps in the army, as they had showed a hundred times, on the bloodiest fields, and were soon, and often to show again. There was a very strong mutual attachment between the First Richmond Howitzers and Barksdale's Brigade, and we were much pleased to be with them on this march. We mingled with them, as we sped rapidly along, and exchanged greetings, and our several experiences since we had been separated.
The morning of the 8th of May broke, foggy and lowering, and found us still moving swiftly along. The infantry halting for a rest, we pa.s.sed on ahead, and for some time were marching by ourselves. I well recall the impressions of the scene around us on that early morning march. Our battery seemed all alone on a quiet country road. The birds were singing around us, and it seemed, to us, so sweet! Everybody was impressed by the music of those birds. As the old soldiers will remember, the note of a bird was a sound we rarely heard. The feathered songsters, no doubt, were frightened away, and it was often remarked, that we never saw birds in the neighborhood of camp. So we specially enjoyed the treat of hearing them, now and here, in their own quiet woods, where they had never been disturbed. All was quiet and still and peaceful as any rural scene could be. It seemed to us wondrous sweet and beautiful! All the men were strangely impressed by it. They talked of it to one another. It made our hearts soft, it brought to the mind of many of those weary, war-worn soldiers, other quiet rural scenes, where lay their homes and dear ones, and to which this scene made their hearts go back, in tender memory, and loving imagination. All the eyes did not stay dry as we pa.s.sed along that road. We talked of this scene many a time long afterwards. And I expect some of the old ”Howitzers” still remember that quiet Spottsylvania country road, winding through the woods, on that early Sunday morning, when the birds sang to us, as we hurried on to battle.
Well! the morning wore on, and so did we. By and by, the sun came out through the fog and clouds, and began to make it hot for us. The dampness of the earth made this an easy job. The sun got higher and hotter every minute. The way that close, sultry heat did _roast_ us was pitiful. We would have ”larded the lean earth as we walked along,”
except that hard bones and muscles of gaunt men didn't _yield_ any ”lard” to speak of. The _breakfast_ hour was not observed, _i. e._, not with any ceremony. ”Cracker nibbling on the fly” was all the visible reminder of that time-honored custom. We were not there to eat, but, to get to Spottsylvania Court House; and _steps_ were more to that purpose than _steaks_, so we omitted the steaks, and put in the steps; and we put them in very fast, and were putting in a great many of them, it appeared to us. At last, just about twelve o'clock our road wound down to a stream, which I think was the _Po_, one of the head waters of the Mattaponi River, and then, we went up a very long hill, a bank, surmounted by a rail fence on the left side of the road, and the woods on the other.
=Stuart's Four Thousand Cavalry=
Just as we got to the top (our Battery happened just then to be ahead of all the troops, and was the first of the columns to reach the spot), the road came up to the level of the land on the left, which enabled us to see, what, though close by us, had been concealed by the high roadside bank. A farm gate opened into a field, around a farmhouse and outbuildings, and there, covering that field was the whole of Fitz Lee's Division of Stuart's cavalry. These heroic fellows had for two days been fighting Warren's corps of Federal infantry, which General Grant had sent to seize this very line on which _we_ had now arrived. They had fought, mostly dismounted, from hill to hill, from fence to fence, from tree to tree; and so obstinate was their resistance, and so skillful the dispositions of the matchless Stuart, that some thirty thousand men had been forced to take about twenty-six hours to get seven or eight miles, by about forty-five hundred cavalry. But, it was incomparable cavalry, and J. E. B. Stuart was handling it. It was some credit to that Corps to have marched any at all! Thanks to the superb conduct of the cavalry, General Lee's movement had succeeded! We had beaten the Federal column, and were here, before them, on this much-coveted line, and meant to hold it, too.
I note here in pa.s.sing, that this Spottsylvania business was a ”white day” for the cavalry. When the army came to know of what the cavalry had done, and _how they had done it_, there was a general outburst of admiration,--the recognition that brave men give to the brave. Stuart and his men were written higher than ever on the honor roll, and the whole army was ready to take off its hat to salute the cavalry.
And, from that day, there was a marked change in the way the army thought and spoke of the cavalry; it took a distinctly different and higher position in the respect of the Army, for it had revealed itself in a new light; it had shown itself signally possessed of the quality, that the infantry and artillery naturally admired most of all others--_obstinacy_ in fight.