by Bruce Catton
They overtook their skirmish line, at last, and there seemed to be a substantial number of Confederates in front of them. The firing grew heavier, and it turned into regular volley firing, and a rank fog came in as the battle smoke was trapped under the low branches. To right and left and in front the dark woodland began to glow fitfully with savage, pulsating spurts of reddish light.
Keeping their formation as well as they could, the men stumbled on. They could see nothing of what lay in front of them, but the firing grew heavier every minute. The Rebels obviously meant to make a regular fight of it; the firing line was a mile wide, and everyone was shooting desperately into a gloom where moving figures were glimpsed only at rare intervals. Griffin wheeled his two guns a little farther along the road—there was no way to get them off into the woods because nothing on wheels could possibly leave the highway—and they fired straight down the Turnpike, and what had begun as an affair of the skirmishers developed into a full-dress battle.
Griffin sent men back with the news. It was very hard for him to tell what was going on more than a few rods from where he stood, but it seemed obvious that he had had a head-on collision with a Rebel assaulting column fully as big as his own, and the high command had better know about it right away. Meade got the word in his headquarters in a field near Wilderness Tayern, and it seemed to him that Lee must have left a rear guard here to hold the road while he took his main army farther south. He prepared to get other troops up to help Griffin push the rear guard out of the way, and he sent an officer spurring back toward Germanna Ford to tell Grant about it.11
In a few minutes Grant came up. He talked with Meade and Warren, and listened to the firing, which kept getting heavier and heavier, and word was sent out to stop the movement south: if Lee really wanted to fight here the whole Army of the Potomac would accommodate him. Sedgwick had better bring his men up as fast as he could and Hancock must start back from his thrust below the Plank Road.
Grant’s people pitched his headquarters tents in a little meadow in the southwest angle of the crossroads and Grant himself rode up on a knoll just south of this meadow. He dismounted, sat on a stump, lighted a cigar, drew out a pocketknife, picked up a twig, and began to whittle. A staff officer remembered that Grant was all dressed up this morning, wearing his best uniform with the frock coat unbuttoned, a sash about his waist, sword at his side; he was wearing tan cotton-thread gloves which he forgot to remove, and his work with the twigs and the pocketknife began to snag the fingertips of these gloves and before long they were ruined.12 Grant was sitting here quietly, whittling like a Yankee, and as he smoked without ceasing he issued the orders that would feed more and more troops into this fight.
The fight kept growing bigger. Griffin’s men were advancing but it was very slow going, and as the rising wind whipped wisps and streamers of powder smoke through the treetops the advance came to a halt. The Confederates were being reinforced, although hardly any of the Federals had seen any of them. They knew of their presence only as the firing grew stronger, and as bursts of rifle fire came from farther and farther to the right and left.
The smoke intensified the forest gloom and made it opaque. Splinters and tiny branches came down as the bullets clipped through the trees, and only in the rate clearings could any man get a glimpse of his enemies. A Maine regiment came up to a little field, and the bullets were hitting the dried soil and raising little spurts of dust as if the first big drops of a heavy rain were falling.13 The dry underbrush and matted duff underfoot began to take fire, here and there, so that malicious little flames ran along the battleground.
It was like fighting blindfolded. Here they were, in a woodland so dense that even in peacetime maneuvers a division would have been unable to keep its alignment; now there did not seem to be any alignment at all, and what was supposed to be a battle line was nothing more than a sprawling, invisible series of groups and individuals, each one firing into the woods and the smoke as if it was the Wilderness itself that was the enemy and not the men in it. A company or a regiment would crouch in the underbrush and fire manfully, taking losses but holding firm; then a sudden swell of firing would be heard off to one side or toward the rear, and for all anyone knew the rest of the army had run away and the Rebels were taking over, and men would begin to retreat, firing as they went, looking for some place where they could feel that they were part of an ordered line.
The battalions of Regulars in Griffin’s division were ordered forward, and they found the undergrowth all but literally impassable. One company commander reported afterward that in order to get forward at all he had to back through the vines, creepers, and bushes, breaking a trail so that his company could follow in single file. When a more open space was reached the men would form company front, but in a few moments they would have to return to single file. Inevitably, men lost touch with their comrades, whole regiments disintegrated, and scores of men blundered into the Confederate lines and were made prisoner. There were regiments which could not even learn the direction from which the musketry that was destroying them was coming. Nothing whatever could be seen but trees and brush and blinding smoke. As one man said, it was “a battle of invisibles with invisibles.”14
So the line crumbled and came back, and the wild noise of battle was a high-pitched, nerve-racking tumult, and at last Griffin found his men back where they had started from, Rebels on both flanks and things getting worse instead of better. Griffin knew that some of Sedgwick’s men had been ordered up on his right and some of Warren’s men on his left, but they seemed to have gone astray somewhere and as far as he could learn his division was all alone. He got his line stabilized somehow, and put his men to work improvising breastworks, and then he went back to headquarters, an angry man all fuming. He galloped up to Meade on the knoll where Grant was whittling and he threw himself from his horse and bitterly denounced the generals who were supposed to be helping him but whose troops were not appearing.
Griffin swore and shouted and then hurried back to his troops. Grant had heard him, and he was not used to brigadiers who publicly and profanely denounced their superiors, and as Griffin stormed off Grant—who somehow had not quite caught his name—went over to Meade and asked: “Who is this General Gregg? You ought to put him under arrest.”
For once in his life Meade was calm and not irascible. He stood facing Grant, towering head and shoulders over him, and he murmured gently: “His name’s Griffin, not Gregg, and that’s only his way of talking”; and as he spoke he leaned forward and buttoned up Grant’s uniform coat for him, for all the world like a kindly father getting his son ready for school.15 Then Grant went back to his stump and his twigs and his cigars, and couriers dashed off with orders, and in the trackless forest the support troops shouldered their muskets and tried to go forward through the midday twilight.
It was becoming increasingly obvious that this was no rear guard the Federals were fighting. (As a matter of fact, it was Confederate General Ewell’s whole army corps: far from looking for a battleground to the south, Lee was making his fight right here, and if the Federals got one foot of Wilderness ground they were going to have to pay for it.) One of Sedgwick’s divisions went stumbling up a cow track in the woods, and at what seemed to be a suitable place the men tried to form a proper battle line and go on to close quarters. But the trees and the undergrowth were too thick. A battle line could not advance, could not even be formed, and at last the separate regiments went blindly forward in column, giving up the formation in which they could fight for a formation in which they could at least move. They reached ground that had been fought over, and around them was the pungent smoke of a forest fire, and they plowed through burnt-over spaces where their feet kicked sparks and smoke puffs out of the matted ground. Dead men lay in these cinders, their bodies charred and partly consumed, and a fearful stench lay in the air.16
There was no enemy to be seen anywhere. A brigadier made his way to his division commander and asked where he should put his men. “Move,” s
aid the commander grandly, “to the sound of the heaviest firing.” This was no help at all, because as far as the brigadier could tell the firing came from everywhere, and the only way to find the Rebel battle line was to blunder into it. The smoke became heavier and heavier as the men advanced, and the sound of rifle fire and shouting men and crackling flames grew louder, and the bullets came faster and more deadly. A Wisconsin soldier wrote that the men in his regiment, quite unable to see where they were going or whom they were shooting at, simply knelt in the twilight and “fired by ear-sight.”
There was a high wind, and it whipped the little flames in the underbrush into big flames, and its roar in the treetops mingled with the roar of battle as if some unimaginable tempest were lashing this dark forest. Men who fought were aware that all about them wounded men were pathetically trying to drag themselves along the ground away from the fires.
In one place the soldiers came to a swampy ravine, all overgrown with scrub pines. The ravine was not a hundred yards wide, but the farther bank was completely invisible. There were Rebels there in plenty, as the men could easily tell; some of them were shooting, and others were using axes to cut trees for breastworks, and the wild racket told just what was going on, but from first to last there was no one to be seen. So the men of the VI Corps piled up logs and scooped up earth for breastworks of their own and hung on in the twilight, trading death with enemies they never saw, and at times the noise of musketry all about them swelled up to a clamor such as they had never heard before in any of their battles. There was no sound of artillery, because guns could not be advanced or fired in this jungle—Griffin had long since lost the two guns he had pushed along the open Turnpike—but thousands upon thousands of men were firing their muskets as fast as they could load, until the whole Wilderness seemed to throb with the endless concussion.17
These VI Corps men were coming up on the north side of the Turnpike. South of it, Warren was hurrying about through the woods, trying to get his other divisions up on Griffin’s left. Grant was still sitting on his stump on the little knoll behind the lines, but his staff officers were ranging far and fast through the tangle, and the orders they carried were infusing something of the bearded little general’s relentless drive all down the army’s chain of command. Nobody had planned to fight here but here was where the fight was, and if in the past the Army of the Potomac had never quite managed to get all of its men into action that fault was not going to be repeated now.
There had never been a fight like this before. Things were clear enough on the map, and Grant had an uncanny way of studying a map once and then carrying it in his memory, but neither he nor anyone else had ever tried to fight a battle in a place where nobody could see anything at all. The armies were visible neither to their enemies nor to their own commanders. It would do no good for the commanding general to ride out along his lines, because there was quite literally no place where as many as a thousand men could be seen at one time, and in any case where the men were fighting the forest was so dense that riding was impossible. There were no adequate roads, and the Federal maps were very imperfect anyway, and the most careful directives could come down to a matter of saying—The enemy is over there somewhere; go and find him and fight him.
Warren cantered along a farm lane and came up to one of his trusted division commanders, Major General James Wadsworth—white-haired, crowding sixty, an old man as ages were reckoned in the army—and Warren told him to get his men into action just south of the Turnpike. Wadsworth was a stout fighter, much admired by his men; he was very wealthy and he was serving without pay, and they honored him for it, and they remembered how on the weary march to Gettysburg he had seized civilians who stood cheering by the roadside and had taken their shoes for his own men to wear. He was quite willing now to go in and fight beside Griffin’s division, but he did not know where Griffin’s division was and he asked Warren. Warren pulled out a pocket compass and studied it—tactics here were as much a matter of navigation as anything—and he told him to march straight west. Wadsworth’s division fell into line, crossed an open field, and plunged into the wood.18
The division marched quickly into trouble. Either Wadsworth had no compass or it was defective, or perhaps in that incomprehensible undergrowth it was not humanly possible to move any body of troops in a straight line. In any case the men swung round toward the north, and instead of coming in beside Griffin’s men they came in on an angle, presenting their left flank to the Confederates just at the moment when the Confederates were sending in reinforcements for a counterattack. The noise of the firing swelled to a terrible new pitch as enormous rolling volleys came out of the woods to break regiments and brigades to bits.
No one could remember anything very distinctly, afterward. Some regiments found that they had got in behind other regiments that were supposed to be far off to one side. Others knew they were near the Rebels only when they found themselves being shot at—shot at with deadly aim, they noticed: the Confederates were hugging the ground and firing low, and if they could not see much of their target they were hitting it with murderous efficiency.
There seemed to be whole acres where the musketry had cut the saplings in two a few feet from the ground, so that the tops lopped over drunkenly to make progress even more impossible. Wadsworth tried hard to swing his division around to face the flanking fire, but it could not be done. Troops could not be maneuvered in this ground. Companies fought by themselves, lone squads by themselves sometimes, and the fact that no connected battle line could be seen seemed to give a new terror to the fighting. Some regiments broke and fled, not because they were being punished but because the crash of battle suddenly sounded beside or behind them and the panic cry: “We’re flanked!” was raised.
Beyond Wadsworth, Warren had found his division of Pennsylvania Reserves. The Reserves were famous veterans—Meade’s own division, once upon a time, the division whose command the governor of Pennsylvania once offered to George B. McClellan in the springtime of the war. It was led by a former army surgeon, Brigadier General Samuel W. Crawford, a member of the original Fort Sumter garrison: “a tall, chesty, glowering man, with heavy eyes, a big nose and bushy whiskers,” as one of his men remembered him, who “wore habitually a turn-out-the-guard expression.” Crawford tried to bring his men in beside Wadsworth’s, but he had even more trouble than Wadsworth had had. One regiment blundered straight into the middle of a Confederate brigade and was captured almost entire, and the others stumbled around in the underbrush, lost all sense of direction and contact, and knew only that they were constantly being shot at from the most improbable directions by men they could not find. It seems that the Reserves were just a trifle lukewarm about things, anyway, this day. Most of them had refused to re-enlist, and the division was fully aware that it had only twenty-seven more days to serve before it would be sent home. Understandably, this tempered enthusiasm: who wanted to get shot, so near the end of his time as a soldier? 19
The whole Wilderness seemed to be boiling and smoking, with dense clouds going up to blot out the sunlight. From the rear, Warren pushed the rest of his corps into the fight, and there is no coherent story to be told about any of it: it was all violent confusion, with occasional revealing glimpses to be had in the infernal clogged mist.
The Iron Brigade went forward and was routed, and for once in their history the men of this famous command ran for the rear, all organization lost—to be rallied, somehow, half a mile back, just in time to fix bayonets and check the rout of another brigade which came streaming back over them. A New York regiment crossed a weedy little field, got into more of a fight than it could handle, and ran back to the other side of the field, leaving many wounded men in the open space. The woods were on fire, and the flames were driven by the wind across the dried growth in the field where the wounded men lay, and the New Yorkers looked on in paralyzed horror as the flames reached these helpless men and ignited the paper cartridges in the boxes at their waists. (One man remembered how the noise
of these exploding cartridges—which made dreadful wounds in the sides of the wounded men—made quite a cheerful-sounding pop-pop-pop which could be heard despite all of the surrounding din.) For a moment the fighting around this field ceased, and Northerners and Southerners alike went out into the open to try to drag the men to safety.
The smoke blew down across the field, and all around to right and left there was the unending sound of rifle fire, and the log breastworks the Confederates had built took fire and sent heavy yellowish white smoke billowing out in choking clouds, and the living and dead bodies that lay under it were burned beyond recognition.20 And all of this was a part of the fight to see which side could hold its ground astride the Orange Turnpike.
This was one battle. Two miles to the south of it, along the Plank Road, there was a wholly separate battle, just as desperate, drawing men in as the first battle had done, a battle which for a time was a fight by the Army of the Potomac for simple survival.
Key point here was the place where the Plank and Brock roads crossed. A thin line of cavalry had been patrolling the Plank Road, and while Griffin’s men were going into action along the Turnpike this cavalry found Confederate infantry pressing up the Plank Road. The infantry began to seem very numerous and determined, and it drove the Yankee cavalry away, and if the Confederates could seize the crossroads the Federal army would be cut in half, with Hancock’s corps isolated off to the south, the rest of the army fighting west of Wilderness Tavern, and the Rebels planted squarely in between. So the cavalry sent couriers riding frantically off to headquarters, men who rode with crumpled envelopes held in their teeth, one hand for the reins and the other for the carbine.