Traveller by Richard Adams

Author:Richard Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watership Down Enterprises
Published: 2014-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

XII

Early spring, 1863. The unusually long, hard winter is at last drawing to an end. Since the beginning of February, General Burnside has been relieved of his command of the Army of the Potomac, to be succeeded by General Hooker, an ebullient character known as “Fighting Joe.” The battle of Fredericksburg, fought on December 13, 1862, has proved a costly error on the part of Burnside, whose attempt to storm the Confederate defensive front resulted in total failure and a casualty list of 12,500 against Lee’s 5,000.

The entire Union high command have now developed a certain feeling of inferiority to Lee as an adversary. “They are so skillful in strategy,” confessed General Meade, after the Maryland campaign, of the Army of Northern Virginia. Yet in their apprehension the Federals are overestimating not Lee’s personal ability—as to that they are accurate enough—but the sheer resources at his disposal. While the enlisted plowboys and clerks in his ranks are ready to follow him anywhere and to fight like tigers, his commissariat remains perhaps the most incapable in the history of modern warfare. His men are half-starved. His horses are starved, and he now suffers a crippling and endemic shortage of remounts that will continue throughout the next two years. To him, the battle of Fredericksburg has been a disappointment—no true victory—for he lacks all means to follow it up or to pursue the Federals across the Rappahannock. Merely to inflict heavy losses upon an enemy whose manpower resources are so great confers little advantage beyond that of reputation. He cannot afford his own casualties. His only course is to prepare and wait, knowing that General Hooker is reorganizing the Army of the Potomac for a fresh offensive. General Stuart and his cavalry keep continual watch upon the river for any sign of a Federal crossing in force.

Fifty miles away, in Richmond, the Confederate government has shown unrealistic incompetence. Congress spends its time in disputing niceties of political principle inappropriate to the situation of a country engaged in a desperate struggle for survival. No adequate system has been devised for making good the depletion of an army originally raised in the initial fervor of voluntary enlistment. Conscription has been adopted with reluctance. Meanwhile, inflation has progressively reduced the value of the currency and the economy has entered a spiraling decline. While General Lee, rallying from a pericardial attack probably due in large part to hardship and stress, constructs earthworks and looks out with grim realism upon the falling Rappahannock and the enemy massing beyond it, his political masters bicker in an ideological Cloud-Cuckoo-land. As April draws to a close, Lee, with some 57,000 men, faces General Hooker’s army of 132,000, re-equipped and ready for renewed battle.

Scurvy has begun to appear. But so has the spring, the young leaves burgeoning among miles of spindly virgin forest and half-cleared, second-growth brush. Colonel Northrop, the Confederate Commissary General, may be useless, but nature is not. Foraging parties from the Confederate lines are sent out to gather

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