by Bruce Catton
This much the staff officers could do, and at some point or other in the predawn grayness they called a halt, and they gestured brightly toward the fog ahead and said that the enemy was off there somewhere, although they confessed freely that they did not know how the enemy’s works were built or how many enemies were in them or what the ground in front of the enemy’s position might be like. Barlow had a mental picture of a crude map which an officer in the 16th Massachusetts had scratched on a kitchen wall for him, an hour or two earlier, and he tried to keep that in mind. Then the staff officers went away, and Barlow was on his own, and he ordered his men forward and the big assault was on.
Not all of the men knew that they were actually beginning an attack. So hazy were the arrangements that some of them supposed they were simply making a routine change of position, and at the rear of the divisional column there were officers’ servants, camp cooks, and so on, leading mules loaded down with spare tents, cooking equipment, and provisions. Out in front of the blind column the 66th New York had been deployed in a dense skirmish line, and presently this line rolled over the Rebel pickets, coming in out of the milky obscurity so suddenly that the pickets had no time to sound the alarm. The pickets were disarmed and sent to the rear and the division plodded on.14
It broke through a thicket and approached a little ridge, and the men thought this ridge was the Rebel line and they raised a sudden cheer and everybody broke into a run. As they ran, the troops lost all formation and became a dense, crowding mass. They passed over the ridge, finding no Confederates on it, and swept down across a broad hollow, the dim light slowly growing brighter, and in the hollow they ran into the heavy abatis their foes had prepared for them. They sprang on this entanglement and tore it apart hand by hand, working in frenzied haste, and the Confederate line was not a hundred yards beyond. The racket had roused the defenders, and the trenches began to spit flame as the men who stood in them opened fire.15
As the Federals ran forward there was a careening rush just behind the Confederate line, and the twenty-two missing guns came back over the muddy ground on a spattering gallop. The Confederate command in the salient had sniffed trouble during the night and had sent desperate appeals for the return of these guns, and now they were coming up to the rear of the trench line just as the Northerners were coming up to the front of it. If the guns had been in position, the piled-up division that was coming up the slope would have given them the kind of target gunners dream about, and Barlow’s men would have been murdered, but the Yankees’ luck was in and the guns did not quite make it.
Two or three guns did manage to swing into the gun pits and fire a round or two—one shell went sailing over the combat men and smashed into one of the misguided headquarters details that were stupidly coming along in the rear, dismembering a pack mule and filling the air with frying pans, sides of bacon, and other matters—but it was too late. The massed Federals went flooding over the trenches as if a dam had been broken, stabbing with their bayonets and cheering to split their throats, and the whole end of the salient was broken in. Twenty of the guns and three or four thousand Confederate infantrymen were captured en masse, and the yelling soldiers went streaming on into the foggy woods and ravines beyond the trenches.16
They were on their way—somewhere, no one knew where, impelled by a rush that was both powerful and fragile. The ground was rough and the trees and thickets were obscure in the wet hazy light, and no one knew a thing except that the Rebel line had been smashed and that the thing to do was probably to keep on running. The different regiments and brigades were as thoroughly scrambled as if the whole division had been tossed in a giant’s blanket. What ran down the open space inside the Mule Shoe was not the hard spearhead of an army corps but simply an excited mob, wholly confused and without any vestige of organization or control. It would be an irresistible flood tide up to the moment when it ran into something solid. Then it would turn into foam and the wave would recede.
Midway down the Mule Shoe the something solid appeared—an ably led division of Confederate veterans bent on driving the Yankees back to where they came from. Lee himself was among them, getting them set for a counterattack, trying to lead it himself until the Southern Army’s sure instinct for self-preservation forced him to the rear. These Southerners formed a battle line and tilted their muskets down and came charging up the salient, and they hit the disorganized Yankees and sent them running. There were wild moments of confused fighting in the misty woods and up across the little fields and hollows, and then the Federals came pelting back to the captured trenches. Here they stopped running and turned around and dug in to hold onto what they had gained, while the high command sent fresh troops up from the rear to exploit the break that had been made.
For half a mile or more, all along the toe of the salient, the men of the II Corps held the Confederate trenches. These were wide and deep, with so many traverses built back from them that they were like a series of adjoining cellars, and their walls were made of piled logs and banked-up earth, the ground at the bottom all muddy and covered with inches of filthy rain water. In this long jagged ditch the Federals suddenly went on the defensive, while the Rebels came storming out of the woods to wrest the line away from them.17
Practically all of Hancock’s corps was up now, and there was not room for nearly all of the men to get on the firing line. In places they were jammed forty ranks deep, outside of the trenches, trying to crowd their way forward so that they could shoot Confederates. They had seized the captured guns and swung them around, but there were no gunners among them and few of the infantrymen knew much about handling cannon. One man remembered how they loaded these weapons with any bits of metal they could find, including broken muskets, and fired them helter-skelter, endangering themselves about as much as their enemies. An Irish private was gleefully fitting a primer into the breech of one of the guns, and a comrade tried to tell him that the weapon was elevated for extreme long range, so that it would shoot far above the oncoming Rebels. “Never fear!” yelled the Irishman, jerking the lanyard and firing the piece. “It’s bound to come down on somebody’s head!” 18
The Federals were here in overwhelming numbers, and their very numbers were a handicap. Barlow tried desperately to get the men reformed, so that an organized attack could be resumed. There was no point in trying to go down the open ground in the middle of the salient. The recipe for victory now was to organize an advance that would sweep along the trench lines to right and left, flanking the Confederate defenders and widening the breach until it was past mending. But as fast as Barlow could get a few elements sorted out and put into line a new mass of reinforcements would come lopping in from the rear, and the line would vanish.
Things had happened too fast. What sketchy planning there had been was based on the theory that a great deal of sheer muscle would be needed to break the Rebel line. What actually happened, however, was that the line broke at the first touch, and what was needed immediately thereafter was quick footwork rather than brute strength. But the muscle was still coming in and there was no way to stop it and footwork was quite out of the question. There was nothing for it now but for everybody to get together and shove.
Both sides were shoving at once, and in the same place, and the result was the wildest, bitterest in-fighting of the entire war.
In effect each side was making a charge and repelling a charge at the same moment and with the same troops. The Confederates were fighting with a last-ditch fury. Far to their rear Lee was building a new trench line across the throat of the salient. It would be an all-day job and until the line was finished the men up front must at any cost whatever either drive the Yankees out or at least keep them from coming in any deeper. That meant close-range fighting carried out without any letup. The battle front was a mile wide by now, with Burnside’s men fighting their way through the woods on the east and Wright sending his VI Corps in on the west, and in no place along this front were the rival firing lines more than a few yards apart.
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It began to rain again, and the men in the trenches stood to their knees in bloodstained water, and the ground outside the trenches, trampled by massed thousands of men, turned into a stiff gumbo in which bodies of dead and wounded men were trodden out of sight. From the rear Barlow could see an immense mass of Federals lying flat in this muck, twenty or thirty ranks jammed together in a formless crowd, the men in the rear passing loaded muskets forward to the men in front. An orderly brought Barlow his horse and the general galloped back to Hancock to beg that no more men be sent forward.
Never before on earth had so many muskets been fired so fast on so narrow a front and at such close range. About all that kept the two armies from completely annihilating each other was the fact that most men were firing too rapidly to aim. A whole grove of trees behind the Rebel line was killed by shots that flew too high, and the logs of the breastworks were splintered and, a Confederate officer said expressively, “whipped into basket-stuff.” Bodies of dead and wounded men were hit over and over again until they simply fell apart and became unrecognizable remnants of bloody flesh rather than corpses. There were big charges and little charges, with bayonet fighting when the men came to close quarters, and at times Union and Confederate flags waved side by side on the parapets, with bullets shredding them into tattered streamers.19
A few hundred yards to the east of the blunt tip of the salient there was a place where the Rebel trench line made a little bend to the south, and right at this bend a spirited Confederate counterattack regained part of the breastworks. On the Yankee side of the works there was a ditch, and as the Southerners retook their trench, men of the VI Corps came charging in and occupied the ditch, and for a distance here the rival battle lines were literally face to face with only the log breastwork between them.
Men fired at one another through chinks in the logs, or stabbed through the chinks with their bayonets, or reached over the top to swing clubbed muskets. Where the Vermont Brigade was fighting, men were seen to spring on top of the logs and fire down on their enemies as fast as their comrades could pass loaded muskets up to them. Each man would get off a few rounds before he was shot, and usually when one of these men fell someone else would clamber up to take his place. Dead men fell on top of wounded men, and unhurt men coming up to fight would step on the hideous writhing pile-up.20
Emory Upton had his thinned brigade in beside the Vermonters. He was riding his horse back and forth just behind the firing line, the only mounted man in sight, going unhurt by some miracle—every man on his staff was either killed or wounded. He was proud of the way his men were fighting, but he felt that they would do even better if they had the help of some artillery, and he sent back for a section of guns. In a few moments two brass fieldpieces from a regular battery came splashing madly up through the rain, wheeling about to unlimber within literal whites-of-their-eyes range—artillery charging entrenched infantry, as if all roles were reversed in this mad war.
The gunners sent double charges of canister plowing through the Confederate ranks, and at this close range the effect was fantastic. Inspired by it, the gunners laid hands on their pieces and ran them forward until they touched the very parapet, and then they resumed firing and kept it up as long as the guns could be manned, which was not very long. When the guns at last fell silent they could not be removed because all of the horses were dead, and of the twenty-four men who came on the field with them only two were on their feet unwounded.21
There had been hand-to-hand fighting before, but it invariably reached a quick climax and then ended, one side or the other breaking and running away. Here nobody broke and nobody ran. The fighting did not stop for a moment, and the unendurable moment of climax hung taut in the air and became fixed, a permanent part of some insane new order of things. Some regiments sent details a dozen paces to the rear to clean muskets; men were firing so continuously that their weapons became foul with burnt powder and could not be loaded. Amazingly enough, as the day wore on exhausted men from time to time would stagger a few feet away from the firing line, drop unhurt in the mud, and fall sound asleep. Now and then men had to stop fighting and lift the bodies of dead and wounded comrades out of the wet ditch and drop them in the mud outside. There were so many bodies they interfered with the fighting.22
This was the Bloody Angle, the place where a trench made a little bend, and where the two armies might have clasped hands as they fought; and it was precisely here that the war came down to its darkest cockpit. It could never be any worse than this because men could not possibly imagine or do anything worse. This fighting was not planned or ordered or directed. It was formless, monstrous, something no general could will. It grew out of what these men were and what the war had taught them—cruel knowledge of killing, wild brief contempt for death, furious unspeakable ferocity that could transcend every limitation of whipped nerves and beaten flesh. There was a frenzy on both armies, and as they grappled in the driving rain with the smoke and the wild shouting and the great shock of gunfire all about them this one muddy ditch with a log wall running down the middle became the center of the whole world. Nothing mattered except to possess it utterly or to clog it breast-high with corpses.
There was no victory in all of this and there was no defeat. There was just fighting, as if that had become an end in itself. A Massachusetts soldier wrote that the firing continued “just so long as we could see a man,” and a Pennsylvanian agreed that “all day long it was one continuous assault.” A man in the Iron Brigade probably spoke for every man in the army when he called this fight at the Bloody Angle “the most terrible twenty-four hours of our service in the war.” An officer in the VI Corps, trying to describe the fight afterward, wrote that he had only confused memories of “bloodshed surpassing all former experiences, a desperation in the struggle never before witnessed.” Trying to sum up, he concluded: “I never expect to be fully believed when I tell what I saw of the horrors of Spotsylvania, because I should be loath to believe it myself were the case reversed.” 23
The fighting went on all day long and it continued after dark—there were men on the firing line who said they had fired more than four hundred cartridges apiece, from start to finish. Finally, somewhere around midnight, it died out. The Confederates had at last finished the cutoff line at the base of the salient, and they slipped quietly back to it, and in the darkness the entire salient disappeared. The exhausted Federals got a drugged sleep in the rain, and in the morning they went cautiously forward to take a look at the ground they had won.
There was nothing remarkable about it, except that the region around the Bloody Angle offered the most horrible sights of the war. In places, the trenches held corpses piled four and five deep, and sometimes at the bottom of such a pile a living wounded man would be found. The firing had been so intense that many bodies had been hit over and over again and were mutilated beyond any chance of identification. One of Wright’s staff officers remembered that once during the previous day he had ordered some guns up to an advanced position, and he could not remember having heard anything from them thereafter, so he went out to look. The two guns, he found, had reached the designated position, and each piece and caisson was wheeled halfway around, but the guns had never got into battery. A burst of Rebel fire had caught them in mid-turn and every man and horse had been killed, “and they lay as if waiting the resurrection.” 24
Clearly, the ground that had been won was not worth what it cost, either from an esthetic or a military standpoint. The Rebel line had been broken but it had been mended again, and the armies were just about where they were before. The Federals had gained a square mile of quite useless territory at the price of nearly 7,000 casualties. Rebel losses, to be sure, had been heavier, but that was cold comfort. The big push had been made and it had not quite worked.
Yet perhaps all of that did not really matter. Something inexorable was moving, and old words like victory and defeat had lost their meaning. The slouchy little man with the stubbly red beard meant to keep going,
and the entire war was one continuous battle now, and if one blow failed another one would immediately be struck. The day after the Bloody Angle fight new orders came down, and that night Warren drew his V Corps out of its place at the extreme right of the Federal line and marched it around in an enormous circle, behind the rest of the army, to a place on the extreme left. It was a cruel march, for the rain was still falling and the roads were knee-deep in mud, and the soldiers were as nearly dead with fatigue as living men can be, so that when Warren reached his destination in the morning he had only about 1,000 men with him. But the laggards came up later and there was a hard, wearing, inconclusive fight, and the next day there was another fight, and the army kept sidling around to its left, forcing Lee’s army to shift to meet it.25
A week went by, with a battle of some sort fought every day, and the Union army which had been directly west of Spotsylvania Court House on May 8 was directly east of it on May 19, and every unit in the army had fought as it never had fought before. There had not been an hour, day or night, in all that time when there had not been firing somewhere along the front. Every day the wagons went back to Fredericksburg with wounded men, and every day other wagons came up to the front with supplies so that the endless fighting might continue.