The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  Officers benefited in other important ways. First, pocketing the pay of men killed in action was a lucrative perquisite. It was not unknown for British officers in the American War of Independence to make eight hundred pounds a year in this way (the equivalent to the annual remuneration of an infantry colonel).98 Second, with every death a rung up the ladder of promotion became vacant—and one that did not have to be paid for because the families of the fallen could not sell the dead man’s commission. A vacancy created by death was filled by seniority. Lieutenant William Scott, an American officer captured at Bunker Hill, gave a startlingly honest view on the relationship between death in battle and the reward that might accrue: “I offered to enlist upon having a Lieutenant’s Commission; which was granted. I imagined myself now in a way of Promotion: if I was killed in battle, there would be an end of me, but if my Captain was killed, I should rise in Rank, & should have a Chance to rise higher.”99

  Ironically, the killed offered all kinds of bounty to the living—a regular harvest. The common soldiers plundered the corpses on the battlefield for wallets, clothing, and boots (the secondary gleaning, which often involved bumping off the wounded, was usually carried out by civilians and camp followers). Those who went to the hospital were also invariably robbed. Major Richard Davenport of the Tenth Dragoons made this doleful report in 1759: “I am sorry I can give Mrs. Moss no other account of her husband than that he died at Münster. As to his things, whatever he had is lost. When a man goes into hospital, his wallet, with his necessaries are sent with him, but nothing ever returns. Those that recover, seldom bring anything back, but those that die are stripped of all. I have lost nine men and have not heard of anything that belonged to them. It is a common practice of a nurse, when a man is in danger, to put on a clean shirt, that he may die in it, and that it may become her perquisite.”100 And as the death rate in the hospital for the common soldier of the eighteenth century was about 40 percent, there was a good living, so to speak, to be made there.

  Actions of particularly high risk, such as “forlorn hope” attacks on the breached walls of besieged towns, were surprisingly popular among the attacking troops because they offered the very real prospect of gain either from plunder or, if you beat the odds, a vaulting boost to one’s career. It was a kind of Russian roulette in a world where advancement was hard-won and the gamblers took their chances. Sir Thomas Brotherton, a British officer during the Peninsular War, saw many of these chancers: “The volunteers [young men without the money to buy a commission] we had with the army … always recklessly exposed themselves in order to render themselves conspicuous, as their object was to get commissions given to them without purchase. The largest proportion of these volunteers were killed, but those who escaped were well rewarded for their adventurous spirit.”101 Captain Sir John Kincaid at Badajoz during the Peninsular War describes the general appetite for forlorn hopes:

  In proportion as the grand crisis approached, the anxiety of the soldiers increased, not on account of any doubt or dread as to the result, but for fear that the place should be surrendered without standing an assault; for, singular as it may appear, although there was a certainty of about one man out of every three being knocked down, there were, perhaps, not three men in the three divisions who would not rather have braved all the chances than receive it tamely from the enemy. So great was the rage for passports into eternity in our battalion on that occasion, that even the officers’ servants insisted on taking their places in the ranks.102

  Kincaid himself took a more pessimistic view of the prospects of the forlorn hope: “The advantage of being on a storming party is considered as giving the prior claim to be ‘put out of pain,’ for they receive the first fire, which is generally the best, not to mention that they are also expected to receive the earliest salutations from the beams of timber, hand-grenades, and other missiles which the garrison are generally prepared to transfer from the top of the wall, to the tops of the heads of their foremost visitors.”103

  For the common soldier yet another risk had to be faced: the ever-present threat of the ultimate sanction—execution. Officers had the jurisdiction to kill men on the spot who attempted to leave the field but very rarely exercised it, and some armies maintained enforcing units to prevent men “leaking” out of the battle. Nevertheless, it was a death that might be described as the shadow risk of combat. Not doing something could get you killed. Discipline was ferocious in most armies of the period. “Many soldiers,” stated Frederick the Great, “can be governed only with sternness and occasionally severity. If discipline fails to keep them in check they are apt to commit the crudest excesses. Since they greatly outnumber their superiors, they can be held in check only through fear.”104

  Desertion rates in all armies were high, and those who were captured, particularly those who had deserted during action, stood a very good chance of being executed. James Fergus, a Scotch-Irish Pennsylvania militiaman, made the following diary entry on May 12, 1778, during the siege of Savannah, Georgia: “Four men, two white and a mulatto and a Negro, were taken outside the lines and brought in, supposed to be deserting to the enemy. The governor, coming by at the time, was asked what should be done with them. He said, ‘Hang them up to the beam of the gate,’ by which they were standing. This was immediately done, and there they hung all day.”105

  Comrades-in-arms were enlisted to do the executions. Rifleman Harris was just a lad when he was chosen to make up a firing squad:

  A private of the 70th Regiment had deserted from that corps … he was brought to trial at Portsmouth, and sentenced by general court-martial to be shot.

  … As for myself, I felt that I would have given a good round sum (had I possessed it) to have been in any situation rather than the one in which I now found myself; and when I looked into the faces of my companions, I saw, by the pallor and anxiety depicted in each countenance, the reflection of my own feelings. When all was ready, we were moved to the front, and the culprit was brought out. He made a short speech to the parade, acknowledging the justice of his sentence, and that drinking and evil company had brought the punishment upon him.

  He behaved himself firmly and well, and did not seem at all to flinch. After being blindfolded, he was desired to kneel down behind a coffin … we immediately commenced loading.

  This was done in the deepest silence, and the next moment we were primed and ready. There was then a dreadful pause … and the drum-major, again looking towards us, gave the signal before agreed upon (a flourish of his cane) and we levelled and fired … and the poor fellow, pierced by several balls, fell heavily upon his back; and as he lay, with his arms pinioned to his sides, I observed that his hands waved for a few moments, like the fins of a fish, when in the agonies of death. The drum-major also observed the movement, and, making another signal, four of our party immediately stepped up to the prostrate body, and placing the muzzles of our pieces to the head, fired, and put him out of his misery.106

  Quite often a very sophisticated but sickeningly cruel piece of theater was played out upon the condemned. After the whole gruesome rigamarole of being marched to the place of execution (sometimes carrying their own coffins), stood by their expectant graves, and made to face their executioners, a last-minute reprieve was issued. And if it was not, it was important for the efficacy of this ultimate deterrent that there be an audience of fellow soldiers to bear witness and draw the salutary conclusion. But sometimes the whole thing backfired. The audience, in disgust, occasionally rebelled, as the American Revolutionary soldier John Plumb Martin described:

  While lying at, or near the Peekskill, a man belonging to the Cavalry was executed for desertion to the enemy, and as none of the corps to which he belonged were there, no troops were paraded, as was customary on such occasions, except a small guard. The ground on which the gallows was erected was literally covered with pebble stones. A Brigade-Major attended the execution; his duty on these occasions being the same as a High Sheriff’s in civil matters. He had, somewhere, pro
cured a ragamuffin fellow for an executioner, to preserve his own immaculate reputation from defilement. After the culprit had hung the time prescribed by law, or custom, the hangman began stripping the corpse; the clothes being his perquisite. He began by trying to pull off his boots, but for want of a boot-jack he could not readily accomplish his aim; he kept pulling and hauling at them, like a dog at a root, until the spectators, who were very numerous (the guard having gone off), growing disgusted, began to make use of the stones, by tossing several at his pretty carcass. The Brigade-Major interfering in behalf of his aid-de-camp, shared the same usage; they were both quickly obliged to “quit the field”; as they retreated the stones flew merrily. They were obliged to keep at a proper distance until the soldiers took their own time to disperse.107

  FOUR

  ALL GLORY … ALL HELL

  The American Civil War

  There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory. But, boys, it is really all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror, but if it has to come I am there.

  —William T. Sherman

  IN PURELY MILITARY terms, the War between the States had one foot in the past and one in the future: part Napoleonic and part World War I. It was a war that for the first three years of its four-year course was rooted in the tactical tradition of the black-powder warfare of the previous 150 years or so. And yet, the sheer scale on which it was fought and the advances in weapons technology it utilized—rifled muskets, conoidal bullets, repeating guns, breech-loading rifles, and rifled artillery—would shape the wars that followed.

  The increase in the rifled musket’s range and accuracy compared to its predecessor, the smoothbore musket, brought death more surely to more men than ever before. Or so the standard argument goes. In fact, such innovations did not make as much difference to the experience of combat as might at first be thought. The innovation of greater importance was the application of the power and skills of an already powerful (and soon to be preeminent) industrial state to the business of war—with all the prerequisites of business: capital, organization, manpower, and natural resources. It was this that predetermined victory, however hard fought and close run it was to be at times.

  On one level the Civil War was acted out on the thrilling stage of heroic and bloody theater; on the other, its outcome was determined by the victory of the industrial over the agrarian. Renewable resources of treasure and men, as well as courage and determination, predisposed the outcome. The North, even though hampered by shoddy military leadership during the earlier part of the war, could afford much higher losses of manpower and matériel—in absolute and proportional terms—than could the South, with its smaller population and underdeveloped manufacturing capacity. Even though in many battles fewer Confederate soldiers were killed in action or died of wounds than Federals, those who did represented a higher proportion of the fighting force. It was an actuarial reality that smashed the heart of the Confederate cause as mercilessly as a bullet or shell fragment. The South was forced into a war of attrition that eventually and inevitably ran it into the ground. And it is this aspect of the Civil War that foreshadowed the strategic architecture of the world wars of the following century. Resources provide the stage on which warriors with courage and fortitude, sacrifice and determination, play out their drama. The South had no shortage of all these martial virtues, but it was bled to death. It would lose about one-third more men killed as a proportion of those engaged than the North. And this was the bloody arithmetic that Grant understood when he sacrificed his own warriors at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor during the endgame of the war.

  Numbers, recorded quantities of the dead, estimates of expenditure, the ledger book of life expended and advantage gained: These were the mark of the age. But even in an era that had begun to revel in the mechanisms and skills of bureaucracy, record keeping (especially in the Confederacy) could be a little inexact, to put it mildly. In addition, toward the end of the war swathes of records of the South’s fighting units were destroyed. Numbers were also manipulated. Robert E. Lee became alarmed at the willingness—the almost masochistic relish, even—with which some of his commanders advertised the high casualties they sustained as though they were badges of honor. Lee was forced to issue a General Order in May 1863 discouraging such displays, for fear they gave heart to the enemy, and after the devastating losses at Gettysburg he “seems to have quite systematically and intentionally undercounted his casualties.”1 The manipulation of “body count” was not something invented in the Vietnam War. Ambrose Bierce, who fought on the Union side and wrote Gothic spooky stories about it, describes the aftermath of a battle in his story “The Coup de Grace”: “The names of the victorious dead were known and listed. The enemy’s fallen had to be content with counting. But of that they got enough; many of them were counted several times, and the total, as given afterward in the official report of the victorious commander, denoted rather a hope than a result.”2

  In the North, tallying was better, reflecting the organizational strengths of an industrializing society, strengths that would, in their own prosaic but important ways, help win the war. Even so, William F. Fox, a Union officer (who would later compile one of the great statistical books about the war, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1888), remembered the waywardness of record keeping on campaign: “After a hard-fought battle the regimental commander would, perhaps, write a letter to his wife detailing the operations of his regiment, and some of his men would send their village paper an account of the fight, but no report would be forwarded officially to head quarters. Many colonels regarded the report as an irksome and unnecessary task.”3 (Ironically, even record keeping could prove fatal. In 1893, twenty-two clerks were crushed to death when the floors of Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, which was being used to store Civil War records, collapsed.)4

  Disease, as in all previous wars, was a greater killer of soldiers than combat (it accounted for 66 percent of all fatalities in the Civil War).5 Of the approximately 2,100,000 men6 who took up arms for the North, 360,000 died (17 percent of all who served), of whom about 110,000 (5.2 percent) were either killed outright in battle (67,058) or died from wounds (43,012).7 Although the high rate of death from disease is shocking, it was an improvement on the Mexican War of 1846–48, in which seven men died of disease for every one killed in battle.8 Of the approximately 880,000 Confederates who served, about 250,000 (28 percent) died from all causes.9 Of these Fox estimates that 94,000 (10.6 percent) were killed or mortally wounded. Thomas L. Livermore, reviewing the statistical evidence in his classic study, Numbers & Losses in the Civil War in America, printed in 1900, concludes that “any summing-up of the casualties from [the Confederate] reports must necessarily be incomplete, and the number … arrived at by Colonel Fox can be accepted only as a minimum.”10 The numbers may be merely indicative, but they suggest that the South lost about 11 percent of its soldiers killed outright or died of wounds, compared with just over 7 percent for the North—a 30 percent greater killed rate for Confederate warriors.

  It needs also to be borne in mind that the numbers of men killed outright or who died of wounds expressed as a percentage of those “who took up arms” needs to be tempered by the fact that not all who wore butternut or blue were involved in combat. Obviously, the death toll rises considerably when viewed as a percentage of combatants only: a computation of quite daunting complexity.

  There is often an ambiguous attitude to the number of men killed in war. On the one hand, we are saddened, horrified even, at the price paid. But on the other, the sacrifice is intimately involved with our national mythology. It makes us intensely proud. They underwrite our sense of national worth with their blood. A great mortality is a badge of honor, as Fox puts it, “amply heroic.”

  Some historians of the Civil War point to its “unprecedented” mortality. “Numbers seemed the only way to capture what was dramatically new about this war: the very size of the cataclysm and its hu
man cost.”11 Fox states categorically that casualties were “unsurpassed in the annals of war.”

  Having complained that too many commanders in the Civil War “claimed losses for their regiments which are sadly at variance with the records [of the muster rolls of the regiments],” Fox goes on to say that to “the thoughtful, the truth will be sensational enough: the correct figures are amply heroic.” As comparison Fox cites the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, in which the “Germans took 797,950 men into France. Of this number, 28,277 were killed, or died of wounds—a loss of 3.1 per cent. In the Crimean War, the allied armies lost 3.2 per cent in killed, or deaths from wounds. In the war of 1866, the Austrian army lost 2.6 per cent from the same causes. There are no figures on record to show that, even in the Napoleonic wars, there was ever a greater percentage loss in killed.”12

  At Borodino in 1812 (“the bloodiest battle since the introduction of gunpowder”), Fox reckons that of 133,000 French troops engaged, 28,085 became casualties; of 132,000 Russians, “there is nothing to show that its loss was greater than that of its antagonist. Although the number of killed and wounded at Borodino was greater, numerically, than at Waterloo and Gettysburg, the percentage of loss was very much less.”13 It is as though Fox is determined to raise a homegrown American red badge of courage that will stand up proudly in comparison to the Old World.