We Look Like Men of War by William R. Forstchen

Author:William R. Forstchen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Published: 2001-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

We camped on the far side of the river and the following morning started out again, moving up closer to where the fighting was. After several hours of marching on a road that was all churned into dust, we came into a place called Prince George’s Courthouse, which was four or five miles away from where the siege lines were around Petersburg.

We were entering into the rear area of the Army of the Potomac and it was like there was an entire city on the move around us, which I guess in a way it was. Long afterwards, when I took to studying up on the army and that battle, I learned that there were over a hundred thousand men with the Union army, and that’s even after we lost over sixty thousand in the last month and a half of fighting. That’s the main reason why General Meade, who was the officer under General Grant, agreed to have colored regiments: they’d simply been losing soldiers faster than they could replace them.

Our regiment was down to around five hundred men at this point, what with disease and our first battle losses, so if you did a little figuring it came out that we were equal to the losses of about three hours of fighting on a typical day. The army was bleeding rivers of blood. I guess so was the secess army, and when you added it all up there were a lot of hospitals and graveyards just plum overflowing.

Now, to keep this army going there were a lot of supplies and such needed. We saw a bit of this when guarding the bridge and supplies up at White House, but now we were only four or five miles to the rear and we saw a whole lot more. Wagon trains of supplies, which just stretched for miles, came rolling through this little village, and another whole line of wagons was moving back up to the James River to pick up more that were being unloaded from dozens of steamboats. There were wagons stuffed with ammunition, food, clothes, blankets, medicine, saddles, horseshoes, hay, oats, shoes, newspapers from Washington and New York, hats, tents and even whiskey, which had a really big guard around that wagon and all of them looked mighty pleased with their job.

We stayed there for a couple of more days while General Sheridan’s cavalry continued on by. I heard that the general himself came up to Colonel Russell and said we were fine soldiers and that we’d done well in the fight in the swamp. The colonel made sure word of that was passed around and everyone was pleased, because Sheridan was known to be a hard-fighting man. Now, we started to worry a bit that we would be stuck behind the lines again and just stand around all day guarding supplies, watching the wagons roll back and forth and listening to the battle which boomed away off in the distance. I kept thinking of what Mr.

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