Mr. Lincoln's Army by Bruce Catton

Author:Bruce Catton [Catton, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877), Military, Wars & Conflicts (Other)
ISBN: 9781504024181
Google: PVuMCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-11-03T03:13:11+00:00

2. The Heaviest Fire of the War

It may be that life is not man’s most precious possession, after all. Certainly men can be induced to give it away very freely at times, and the terms hardly seem to make sense unless there is something about the whole business that we don’t understand. Lives are spent for very insignificant things which benefit the dead not at all—a few rods of ground in a cornfield, for instance, or temporary ownership of a little hill or a piece of windy pasture; and now and then they are simply wasted outright, with nobody gaining anything at all. And we talk glibly about the accidents of battle and the mistakes of generalship without figuring out just which end of the stick the man who died was holding. As, for instance:

By seven-thirty in the morning a dim sense that something had gone wrong had reached McClellan’s headquarters. The signal flags had been wigwagging ever since it was light enough to see them, and at one time McClellan came out of his tent, smiling and saying, “All goes well—Hooker is driving them.” But all had not gone well thereafter, and presently white-haired old General Sumner was ordered to take his corps across the creek and get into action. Sumner moved promptly, and before long, from Mr. Pry’s yard, McClellan could see the three parallel lines of John Sedgwick’s division threading their way up the farther hillsides, heading for the East Wood.

Sumner rode with Sedgwick, letting the two remaining divisions of his corps follow as best they could. He was strictly the Indian fighter of the Western plains this morning, putting himself in the front rank of the column of attack, ready for a straight cut-and-thrust onslaught on the Rebel lines. He knew almost nothing about what had happened so far—had the impression, even, that the right wing of the army had gained a victory and that he was being sent in to make it complete. But when he got to the East Wood the omens under the shattered trees were sinister. The place was packed with wounded men, and there were far too many able-bodied soldiers wandering around trying to help them. (One of Sedgwick’s colonels wrote sagely: “When good Samaritans so abound it is a strong indication that the discipline of the troops in front is not good and that the battle is not going so as to encourage the half-hearted.”)1 And when the division came out on the far side of the wood, facing west, the picture looked even worse. Sumner could see smoke and hear gunfire off to the right, where tenacious Rebels and Northerners still disputed possession of the Miller barnyard and adjacent pastures, and some firing seemed to be going on to the south by the Dunker church; but in front, as far as Sumner could see, there was nothing at all except for the ghastly debris that filled the cornfield. From the sketchy evidence he had, Sumner concluded that two whole

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