Living Hell
Page 14
Soldiers gained little helpful insight from practitioners of the infant neurological sciences. Earlier, we witnessed Dr. Weir Mitchell addressing nerve complications resulting from physical injuries. But if no major bodily damage had occurred, Mitchell and his colleagues scathingly denounced seeming debility as deliberate “malingering.” They had no understanding of the somatic symptoms of distress, condemning “feigned epilepsies, paralyses, and the like —.” Line officers showed similar skepticism about wounds they could not see. General Horace Porter, aide-de-camp to General Grant in the 1864–65 campaigns, observed that, for some time after combat, men “would start at the slightest sound, and dodge at the flight of a bird or a pebble tossed at them.” Yet, this evidence of mental distress failed to make him sympathetic to those who could not bear the strain. Writing after the war, he announced that only braggarts and weaklings broke; he characterized the more delicate members of his own class witheringly as milksops, “leading an unambitious, namby-pamby life, surrounded by all the safeguards of civilization.” To his mind, they needed a dose of the Victorian medicine for stunted “manliness”—time roughing it in the wilderness to advance muscular development of body and brain.4
Soldiers’ reluctance to be stigmatized by confessing to emotional upset makes it hard to quantify Civil War mental wounds. A lack of bureaucratic precision in describing individual cases compounds the problem. For example, in desertion cases the exact cause often went unexamined, so we cannot know if a subject suffered from mental wounds or had other motives for running. We do know that huge numbers deserted, especially as the destructive fighting ground on. At least 105,000 Rebels and 279,000 Yankees officially absconded, and probably many more did so who were never cataloged. Thirty-four thousand deserted from hospitals, suggesting they were fleeing mental traumas. But we lack certainty. Bounty jumpers or other criminals hiding behind the uniform frequently ran off; other deserters suffered from nostalgia perhaps unrelated to combat experience; still more responded to a call from home to protect a starving family. Further complicating matters, the services often failed to distinguish between men simply AWOL, perhaps wandering around stunned after a battle, and those who lit out for good. We cannot always discover the severity and longevity of mental anguish in given cases. But we can say that thousands suffered mental wounds, some clearing up quickly, others lingering and possibly healing over time, while some combat traumas never receded.5
Exact numbers do not matter because we want primarily to paint a human, rather than a statistical, portrait of the causes and consequences of mental injuries. To accomplish this in a complex and fluid diorama of combat, we should continue our model of accompanying the troops as they struggle down the road into battle, the emotional sky clouding for many of them. Even before we reach the field, we recognize signs of stress. Mary Livermore, a civilian who observed Northern soldiers en route to the front, said rookies displayed “boisterous enthusiasm,” perhaps to allay nervousness, but men who had been under fire moved along “in a grim silence that was most oppressive.” We might extrapolate that, as they approached the front, they recalled past encounters. For example, Louisiana soldier Will Pinkney, who went to war “devil-may-care, hearty, laughing, mischief loving,” after fighting in the defense of New Orleans, where the garrison came to feel inadequately reinforced, became “woe begone, subdued, care worn, and sad!”6
As the sounds of distant battle swell, we notice the columns of marching men thinning down. Their ranks shrink partly through straggling due to the physical stress we examined in chapter two, with exhausted men dropping by the roadside. But some soldiers “skulk” away to dodge the coming fight. A consensus existed among veterans that the men who “played off” before an engagement could deplete a unit of half its strength. Edward Wightman, 9th New York, explained that the “beat,” as a skulker was known, “is always missing in a fight. The beats of a regiment sometimes number one half.” They hung around the rear of armies until fighting ended, often mingling with resigned, long-term stragglers too physically or mentally destitute ever to become proper soldiers again, yet afraid to disappear for good. Skulkers and stragglers (at some point the men and terms merge) often could not face battle because they had been there too often. The herds of displaced men milling in the rear area constituted an unfortunate consequence of placing quickly assembled and partly trained citizen armies in the field: “That was one of the features of the war due to the disordered, anomalous condition of things,” recalled Confederate Philip D. Stephenson, 13th Arkansas, a veteran of the western theater.7
Soldiers labeled skulkers “coffee coolers,” because men who stayed in rank got peremptory orders to move out and had to drink their coffee scalding, whereas coffee coolers lingered back, taking their time. Provost guards routinely forced men back into line at bayonet point, scaring many into the woods where pursuit became harder. Frank Wilkeson, 11th New York Battery, observed coffee coolers in Virginia during the latter stages of the war: “These men had dropped out of their commands as they approached the battle line, and had hidden in the woods. There were hundreds of them in the army at Cold Harbor. There were hundreds of them around Petersburg.” Some men who had “lost their character” felt emboldened through desperation to act like banditti, preying on civilians in the wake of marching columns, stealing food and searching for liquor to drown their misery. Northern journalist Whitelaw Reid described Frederick, Maryland, plagued by malingerers on the eve of Gettysburg: “the town is full of stragglers, and the liquor shops are in full blast … drunken soldiers are making night hideous; all over the town they are trying to steal horses or sneak into unwatched private residences or are filling the air with the blasphemy of their drunken brawls.”8
Generals railed against demoralized behavior. But enlisted men by no means accounted for all the booze swigged. Officers, who maintained their own liquor supplies, drank to stand the strain of responsibility and the constant personal exposure demanded by their combat role. According to regimental chaplain Joseph H. Twichell, Colonel George Hall of the 71st New York needed his drinks to start the morning: “Early in the day before he is braced up, he is as one deprived of a back-bone.” Julius Gieseke, a lieutenant in the 4th Texas, complained that on the march his “Colonel stayed behind and tanked up considerably.” Braxton Bragg arrested Generals George B. Crittenden and William Henry Carroll for drunkenness on the eve of Shiloh. Colonel William Dewey, 15th Iowa, approaching the same battle, would “wheel his horse around,” away from observation, “and take some consolation through the neck of a pint bottle,” reported Corporal C. F. Boyd. At Fredericksburg, Generals Orlando B. Wilcox and Samuel D. Sturgis became too inebriated to lead their troops. During the 1864 Virginia battles, General Thomas F. Meagher frequently became drunk as a “beast,” sending his servant to find liquor, “& keeping his bed wet & filthy!” complained General Marsena Rudolph Patrick, the Army of the Potomac’s top policeman.9
Tobacco, less immediately damaging to the constitution, served as another tonic for nervousness. Billy Yank happily traded food and coffee to Johnny Reb for good Southern chewing and smoking tobacco. The seemingly immovable General Ulysses S. Grant chain-smoked cigars (and would die of throat cancer). Major Sam Byers, 5th Iowa, observed the general in action outside Vicksburg, May 16, 1863, where he appeared “Calm as a Statue.” Byers speculated that “possibly smoking so much tranquilized his nerves a little, and aided in producing calmness.” Grant, he surmised drily, “was calm everywhere, but he also smoked everywhere.”10
As the troops moved into combat positions, each stage of their deployment induced stress and nervous depletion. While the men waited, drawn up in firing lines, they faced a grueling physical and emotional test. Robbed of motion, they became subject to all manner of misgivings. Colonel Ardant Du Picq, a contemporary French soldier, noted that the physical strain and mental anguish that preceded “going in” drained away morale. Joseph E. Crowell, 13th New Jersey, felt the same. Every man got scared during a fight, he recall
ed, “But the worst part of it is just before you go in—when you’re waiting to go in.” At Antietam, the apprehension felt so palpable that “a peculiar atmosphere of impending disaster surrounded us that was indescribable.”11
World War I troops experienced an equivalent situation waiting to go over the top in a big push. In both conflicts, being stationary under shellfire and unable to answer back intensified the anguish. The physical concussion and emotional terror of incoming rounds produced shell shock. Lieutenant William Nathaniel Wood, 19th Virginia, swore that, of “all mean things, the climax is reached when compelled to receive the fury of cannonading with no opportunity to inflict damage.” Foreshadowing the Great War, prolonged trench warfare in 1864–65 provoked an acute sense of impotence. Soldiers before Petersburg in 1864 described trench work as promoting chronic tension through ceaseless vigilance, enforced immobility without rest, and a general apprehension that never went away. Cannonading could paralyze men, robbing them of volition. Private Wilbur Fisk, 2nd Vermont, described the effect of shelling on New Jersey men waiting in line at Fredericksburg: they “did not run, but their regiment became so completely broken up that but little could be expected of them.” They hugged the ground, trembling, “too demoralized in the knees to be capable of effective service.”12
For some volunteers, just one exposure to the experience of exploding shells proved too much. At the Battle of Cumberland Gap, 1862, a shell burst tossed Daniel Cupp, a Union rookie from Tazewell, Tennessee, into the air. He ran off and, afraid to go home, never went there again. Captain Jacob Roemer, 2nd New York Artillery, recorded that a lieutenant of the 34th New York Light Artillery lost his wits under artillery fire at Second Manassas. He crawled quivering under a bush and had to be removed gibbering from the field. A New Jersey boy, lightly wounded physically at Fredericksburg, nevertheless had waking nightmares according to his nurse, Louisa May Alcott: “often clutching my arm, to drag me from the vicinity of a bursting shell, or covering up his head to screen himself from a shower of [canister] shot.” Billy Vaught, of the Washington Artillery (C.S.A.), got caught in a shrapnel blast at Marietta, Georgia, June 18, 1864. Suffering deafness and neuralgia, he went home to recover but never returned. Shell shock had morphed into PTSD.13
As an engagement developed and regiments became embroiled in musketry, stress from the uproar increased exponentially. Captain John William DeForest, 12th Connecticut, wrote vividly of the “incessant spattering and fiery spitting of musketry, with whistling and humming of bullets; and constant through all, the demoniacal yell advancing like the howl of an infernal tide. Bedlam, pandemonium, all the maniacs of earth and all the fiends of hell, seemed to have combined in riot amidst the crashings of storm and volcano.” Men hyperventilated, and for many, the strain progressed to an irregular cardiac condition known as “soldier’s heart.” The thousands affected experienced “fits of fluttering cardiac action” and “cardiac irritability,” with pulse rate fluctuations as high as 120–150, severe shortness of breath, even coughing up of blood. We can tell that many soldiers on the firing line succumbed to extreme emotion from the number of dropped muskets loaded multiple times without being discharged. Of 27,500 single-shot shoulder weapons gleaned from the field after Gettysburg, 12,000 had two unused loads in the barrel, 6,000 had three to ten rounds, one was stuffed with twenty-three. In other words, at least 18,000 men, in a highly distracted mental state, loaded and over-loaded their weapons, oblivious of never having fired them.14
As fierce fighting continued, men broke and ran. To prevent this, noncoms took station behind the ranks, backed by officers and sometimes cavalry, all authorized to bring down terrified bolters. In orders to his cavalry division during the Gettysburg campaign, General Jeb Stuart flatly stated: “let the artful dodger on the battlefield receive the retributive bullet of his gallant comrade.” Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 20th Massachusetts, stood behind his men at Fair Oaks in June 1862, swearing he would shoot any runners. He attributed his company’s steadiness to his stand. Yet men still contrived to bolt, “skulking” behind trees, rocks, in barns, and other shelters. A Richmond Weekly Dispatch correspondent wrote from Sharpsburg, September 26, 1862: “Candor compels me to say that the straggling and desertion from our army far surpasses anything I had ever supposed possible.”15
Fearful men tried to disguise their weakness. In the spring 1864 Wilderness fighting, Private Frank Wilkeson, 11th New York Battery, watched a colonel rubbing gunpowder on his face to appear combat blackened: “Instantly he was transformed from a trembling coward who lurked behind a tree into an exhausted brave taking a well-earned repose.” Desperate men pretended to be injured. Private Joseph Dimmit Thompson, 38th Tennessee, told his wife that at Shiloh “some of our Company disgraced themselves by falling back, pretending to be very lame.”16
Not just new recruits or “fresh fish” shied away when the elephant trampled. Only in myth do soldiers get used to combat and always stay steady under fire after surviving their first exposure. An exceedingly trying episode could break any man at any time. An American army report commissioned in World War II explains: “Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure.” Confederate John Dooley, 1st Virginia, concurred: “I must confess that the terrors of the battlefield grew not less as we advanced in the war.” He thought this held true for most soldiers, “For, in every battle they see so many new forms of death, see so many frightful and novel kinds of mutilation, see such varying fortunes in the tide of strife, and appreciate so highly their deliverance from destruction, that their dread of incurring like fearful peril unnerves them for each succeeding conflict.” A private named Barrail, Washington Artillery (C.S.A.), fought through the Army of Tennessee’s many campaigns until, in 1864, at Dalton, Georgia, he lost his nerve. Unable to carry on serving the guns, he crept under a caisson. A comrade wrote: “he seemed crushed.”17
Sometimes, a whole company or more would head for the rear. At Perryville, Terrill’s 33rd Union Brigade caved, officers without swords and men without guns stampeding for the rear. Troops coming up in support “just fell down on our faces, and let the cowardly herd pass over us,” wrote Captain Wilberforce Nevin, 79th Pennsylvania. Such disasters usually occurred when an unexpected or overwhelming threat suddenly changed the course of action for the worse, creating mass panic and demolishing the discipline that normally held troops together. The catalyst might be a flanking movement or an unusually fierce frontal assault. Terror in such cases became infectious. Wilbur Fisk admitted he bolted along with others during the May 1864 Virginia fighting. He grew tired, hungry, and spooked when a dead friend fell on him. He felt “shamelessly demoralized,” admitting, “My patriotism was well nigh used up, and so was I, till I had some refreshments.” The last remark reminds us that many soldiers returned to their units after regaining their self-possession.18
Running could be a reaction to feeling asked to do too much: the demand appeared unreasonable. At Second Bull Run, N. K. Nichols and others in the 101st New York fought well until ordered to assault artillery: “they marched us up to Reb battery and we skidaddled then I fell out and kept out all day. Laid in the wood all night with 5 or 6 others.” At times, we appear to witness a collective attack of PTSD. Colonel D. K. McRae’s Confederate infantry broke at Antietam, burrowing into haystacks, traumatized by memories of being flanked at South Mountain. Collapsing morale could be a response to feeling betrayed, deliberately sacrificed by one’s own generals. At Kennesaw Mountain, the 34th and 86th Illinois seemingly heard they would make only a feint and that the generals had scheduled the major attack elsewhere. Upon realizing they must in fact assault the heart of the Rebel position, the shock induced collective paralysis. They wandered the field aimlessly, clutching pots and pans. The enemy, recognizing a mass eclipse of the senses, held their fire. Union officer David Hunter Strother felt that, in such instances, an active imagination often caused loss of courage. “
Men will coolly face a visible danger, who will stampede and disgrace themselves on some false report or fancied terror.”19
One of the most notorious instances of troops degenerating into an hysterical mob took place at Shiloh where a spirited early morning Rebel attack caught Union troops still in camp and unawares. As Northern soldiers fled their tents, retreat became rout, terror infecting a large portion of the army. A demoralized crowd of thousands huddled on the riverbank, struggling to get on the steamers trying to land fresh troops. On one boat, Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce, 9th Indiana, noted that “this abominable mob had to be kept off her with bayonets.” Northern war correspondent Henry Villard counted “an immense panic-stricken, uncontrollable mob” of some 7,000 to 10,000 men, including field officers, “all apparently bereft of soldierly spirit.” Mass despair gripped them, stealing their will to fight. General Grant believed the refugees “would have been shot where they lay, without resistance, before they would have taken muskets and marched to the front to protect themselves.”20
Charging into a hail of fire got harder each time feet had to be forced forward. At Fredericksburg, December 1862, Major Abner Small, 16th Maine, “saw one soldier falter repeatedly, bowing as if before a hurricane. He would gather himself together, gain his place in the ranks, and again drop behind. Once or twice he fell to his knees, and at last sank to the ground, still gripping his musket and bowing his head.” Small refused to call the boy a coward, saying simply: “his legs would not obey him.” At Kennesaw Mountain, June 1864, Lieutenant Albert Theodore Goodloe, 35th Alabama, observed the same inability to will a physical response: “There were some with whom the sense of danger was so oppressive that they had to be literally pushed along as we advanced upon the enemy, being overcome by a dread of death, which to them was very humiliating; patriots they were nevertheless and often fought like tigers when the battle was fully joined.”21