The Court Martial of Robert E. Lee by Douglas Savage

Author:Douglas Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781589799400
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing

Chapter Twelve

Wednesday Morning, 16 December 1863

I had never seen fighting like that.... There was no cheering on the part of the men, but a stubborn determination to obey orders....And then the next brigade coming up in succession would do its duty and melt like snow coming down on a warm morning.

General Darius N. Couch, USA, Fredericksburg

The general paced the floor. Robert Lee's breath fogged the frosted window at the end of the hallway. The warm embers in the bedrooms' small hearths did not warm the hall. He stood with a heavy housecoat closed over his long woolies. Mother Lee still slept as did his daughters and Martha Williams an hour before dawn.

General Lee stood shivering in his carpet slippers. He had slept fitfully and finally awoke at 4 o'clock.

All night long, his mind had walked along Antietam Creek. Lying in bed, behind his eyelids he had seen and smelled the carnage recalled by Henry Douglas, Stonewall's aide: "It was a dreadful scene, a veritable field of blood. The dead and dying lay as thick over it as harvest sheaves. The pitiable cries for water and appeals for help were much more horrible to listen to than the deadliest sounds of battle."

In his tortured memory where midnight demons haunted the rest he craved, Lee had felt for his troops what his nephew, General Fitz Lee, would remember of Sharpsburg: "The picture of the private soldier of Lee's army at Sharpsburg as he stood in the iron hail: If he stopped one of the enemy's bullets, he would be buried where the battle raged, in an unknown grave and be forgotten—except by comrades, and possibly by a poor old mother who was praying in her Southern home for the safe return of her soldier boy."

Beside Antietam Creek 15 months ago, even General McClellan had known that there was something special about Sharpsburg, something that would make the ancient gods of war turn away. While the battle raged at Burnside Bridge, McClellan telegraphed President Lincoln: "We are in the midst of the most terrible battle of the war, perhaps of history." Major Orrin Crane of the 7th Ohio regiment would remember of Lee's Confederates that "the enemy fell like grass before the mower." General Lee had dreamed of that bloody reaper.

Major General "Fighting Joe" Hooker of McClellan's I Corps had looked into the sea of teenage blood in the Cornfield: "The slain lay in rows precisely as they had stood in the ranks a few moments before. It was never my fortune to witness a more bloody, dismal battlefield."

General Lee grimaced. In his exhausted mind, he could see the enemy charge his lines before evaporating into clouds of sulfur. Longstreet remembered the Yankees dropping, dropping, dropping into bloody heaps before the Rebel cannon "like the steady dripping of rain from the eaves of a house."

In the cold hallway, Robert Lee shivered with a small convulsion of red-stained memory. He thought of the twilight meeting on the dreadful battlefield among his field commanders. General

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.