by Bruce Catton
It did not really make much difference, for there was nothing the outside world could tell these soldiers anyway. The army's world was enclosed by cavalry patrols and moving skirmish lines, and in the obscurity beyond those boundaries there was the Rebel army, sometimes out of sight but never out of touch. The normal state of all previous armies—the state in which most of the soldier's time was spent—was neither marching nor fighting but quiet life in camp, barracks, or garrison. An army might march far and fight furiously, but when all of its days as an army were added up it would be found that most of them had been dull, monotonous days of inaction. But from the moment the Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan on May 5 to the end of the war, eleven months later, there was no inaction whatever.
Instead there was marching or fighting every day, and very often both together, and physical contact with the enemy was never wholly broken.10 The final grapple had begun, and the war had become a war of using up—using up men and emotions and the wild impossible dreams that had called the armies into being in the first place—and everything that Americans would ever do thereafter would be affected in one way or another by what remained after the using up was completed.
The armies were moving on parallel lines. They were never far apart, and they bumped and jostled each other as they moved, a fringe of fire running up and down the lines, with cavalry patrols fighting for the possession of lonely road crossings, artillery defending the fords and bridges at streams, infantry skirmishers colliding on plantation fields. By day and by night there was always the chance that any of these little tussles might develop into a full-scale battle.
There were many wearing night marches, and the men were very tired, and one soldier said long afterward that the very appearance of the army had changed, as if everything that had happened looked out of the faces of the marching men: "The men in the ranks did not look as they did when they entered the Wilderness: their uniforms were now torn, ragged and stained with mud; the men had grown thin and haggard; the experience of those twenty days seemed to have added twenty years to their age."
This soldier remembered that there was much straggling in these marches, and yet it was not the familiar business of sloughing off the fainthearts who always dropped out of ranks when the army moved. Now good men who wanted to keep up were dropping by the roadside because they could not take another step, and the nightly bivouacs had a strange appearance. An average company might have fifteen men present when it grounded arms for the night. Five of these would promptly be detailed for picket duty. Of the ten who remained, at least half would fall to the ground, too exhausted to collect wood or water or build campfires or do anything else. The men who remained on their feet would hunt fence rails or sticks to make a fire, and would collect canteens to get water, and in one way or another would provide a meal for the company. The sure sign that the men who lay inert and did nothing were not shirkers was the fact that these men would cook coffee and meat for them.
No night's rest was ever unbroken. There would always be picket firing, or some unexplained call to arms at midnight, and if nothing else happened there was a constant trickle of tired laggards going through the camp waking up those who slept to ask where their own regiments might be.11
If infantry and cavalry happened to bivouac together, dawn would reveal an oddity. Cavalry was always awakened by bugle calls, but the morning summons to infantry was the long roll beaten on the drums. The cavalrymen would sleep soundly through the beating of the drums but would rouse instantly when their own bugles sounded, while it was just the other way around with infantry—bugles would not awaken them, but they got up at once when the drums began to beat. Sometimes a wakeful battery would fire a few salvos in the night, and get answering salvos from an unseen Rebel battery, and the troops would remain asleep. But the same men would come out of their blankets at once, fumble for their muskets, and fall into line if a few musket shots were fired by their own pickets.12
Yet if everybody was tired, morale was good. The country the army was in now had never been touched by war and it looked clean and open and prosperous, with houses that had neither been pillaged nor abandoned and fields where good crops were growing. For all the toll taken by hard marching, a newspaper correspondent wrote that there were fewer stragglers and less grumbling than when the campaign first began, and a New York officer agreed that "the men never marched with so little complaining or so little straggling." If the white inhabitants were all stanchly secessionist, the plantation colored folk were strongly inclined in the other direction, and men's spirits rose when a teen-age colored girl stood by a fence corner waving her sunbonnet and calling out gailys
‘I’se right glad to see you, gent’men, I’se right glad to see you."
There were abundant fence rails for campfires, and army authorities made no more than a pretense of enforcing the standing rule against destroying fences. In one regiment it was remembered that when the column halted for the night, with the men eagerly spotting the wealth of rails in the nearest field, the colonel, before they broke ranks, would sternly call out: "Now, boys, I don't want to see one of you touch a rail." He would then face in the opposite direction, keeping his gaze fixed on the distant hills, resolutely seeing nothing while his men took the fences completely to pieces.13
Now and then the private soldier would encounter the aristocratic spirit of the Old Dominion in all of its pristine freshness. As the army got down to the North Anna River, a regiment was sent across at Jericho Ford,, and hostile Confederates were believed to be very near, so the regiment formed line of battle in a well-tilled garden just behind a pleasant country house. As the men fell into place in this garden, examining muskets and cartridges to see if they had been dampened by the ford, an elderly woman came out of the house to lodge a dignified protest:
"Gentlemen, why have you come? Mr. Lee is not here. You are spoiling my garden."
The men chuckled and paid little attention until the colonel finally ordered: "Boys, keep between the rows."14
The inevitable foraging on defenseless civilians seems to have been kept to a minimum. There were dairy herds in this area, however, and the men did want fresh milk, and they occasionally tried to get it for themselves. (The average soldier in those days knew how to milk a cow.) This did not always work out very well. A Massachusetts soldier explained why: "To hold a dipper with one hand and milk with the other, particularly when three other hands were endeavoring to do the same thing on the same cow, and she unwilling to stand still, required a degree of skill that few of us possessed." 15
The farmers' worst troubles probably came because both armies had by now acquired the habit of digging trenches the moment they halted. Any position where a brigade stopped might easily become the scene of a fight, and the great virtues of an entrenched position had by now become visible to everyone. It was rarely necessary for an officer to tell the men to entrench. Usually they began digging even before they started to boil their coffee.
Every division carried axes and spades in its ammunition wagons, but the men rarely waited for these to be brought forward. They would begin the work by themselves, using bayonets, sharpened pieces of wood, and any small tools they might carry with them. All of this digging did not improve the farmers' fields very much, and a Philadelphia veteran reflected on the loss that was involved. One day, he said, his division fell into line on a well-cultivated farm and put in several hours digging a long, deep trench, tearing down a barn and several outbuildings that stood in the way. No sooner was this finished than the presence of Rebel forces was reported off on the flank, so a new trench was dug at right angles to the first. By the time it was finished the enemy had changed front again, and so a third line was constructed— after which orders to move were brought in and the division marched away, leaving the luckless farmer with fields that were completely crisscrossed by deep ditches. What the farmer ever did about it the soldier was quite unable to imagine.16
The Confederates had learned about digging trench
es, too —had in fact learned it before the Federals did. It was an axiom by now that if the Rebels had half a day in any given position they would build good fieldworks, and if they were given an extra twenty-four hours they would get dug in so completely that they could not possibly be pushed out. The private soldier was getting war-wise, and if he was called on to attack an entrenched position, he could usually tell at a glance whether the attack had any chance to succeed. It was commonly said in the army that the heavy artillerists had suffered heavy losses in the Spotsylvania fight largely because the men were so green: they had advanced to attack the enemy in solid ranks, worrying about keeping their alignment and fussing over parade-ground details, and thereby had presented a target the Southern marksmen could not miss. Veteran troops would have spread themselves out, going forward in short rushes, lying down between volleys and protecting themselves as they fought.17
For a number of days the army's existence consisted of a series of attempts to get around Lee's flank so that there could be fighting after the old manner, with nobody hidden in trenches and every Rebel out in the open where he could conveniently be shot. This never quite happened, since Lee could move just as fast as Grant could move, and the Confederates knew the country better; and there was a confused, meaningless series of little fights for river crossings and road centers—little only by comparison with what had gone before, big enough for the men directly involved, in their casualty lists and their drain on energies.
As always, the pickets made close contact, and one day across a stream some Confederates asked Wisconsin soldiers why they had come down to steal the slaves of men who had done them no harm. The Westerners replied that they did not care about slavery: all that concerned them was to save the Union.
"You-all aren't Yankees," cried a Confederate. "You uns and we 'uns ought to go together in this war and let the Yankees go by themselves!"18
Strange new names were entered on the army's annals—Ox Ford and Quarles Mill and Jericho Ford, and the other crossings of the North Anna River; roads down to the Pamunkey, places like Hawes's Shop and Bethesda Church, and the rambling network of highways that led to a desolate crossroads known as Cold Harbor. In all of these places there was fighting, and before and after each fight there was a forced march, and the army neither won nor lost as it moved on. It added to its knowledge and to its losses, and it got deeper and deeper into Virginia, but it never quite got around the end of the Rebel army and the big showdown was always somewhere ahead.
The army had conquered nothing and it possessed not a foot of Virginia soil except the ground on which it actually stood. All the way back to the Rapidan, Virginia was still Confederate territory, and the men who strayed past the army lines to the rear were quite as likely to be shot or captured as if they had strayed out to the front. Rebel cavalry roamed far and wide, and it was assisted by pestiferous bands of guerillas—informal groups of semiofficial mounted men, who were peace-loving farmers half of the time and blood-thirsty raiders the rest of the time. These bands covered all of the rear, and no wagon train could pass between the army and the river bases north of Fredericksburg without a strong escort.
Grant scorned to look behind him. To keep a safe supply line open all the way back to Belle Plain and Aquia Creek on the Potomac would take too many fighting men away from the front, so he simply refused to try. When the army left Spotsylvania the bases on the Potomac were closed. For the time being a new base was opened at Port Royal, downstream from Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock. That was closer to the army, and as soon as the distance back to Port Royal became too great a new base could be opened at White House, on the Pamunkey. Later, if things went well, there could even be a base on the James River itself. Whatever happened, the army would no longer be tied to the Potomac by a long, cumbersome wagon train.
There was significance in this, for names can be important. At the beginning of the war the army had been named the Army of the Potomac, and the overtones of that name had never been forgotten. Above everything else, the army had been the shield of Washington, standing near the Potomac River to defend the capital. Now the ties had been cut. The army had left the river from which it took its name, and it was not going to see that river again while the war lasted. It was going south—going glacially, destroying itself as it destroyed other things, but moving with inevitability. Except in its name, which it wore proudly, like a battle flag prized all the more because weather has stained it and bullets have cut it, it was no longer the Army of the Potomac. The Potomac had become a backwater. Hereafter the rear was going to have to take care of itself.
That meant problems for the rear echelon, and these problems were borne largely by a strange little detachment of hopelessly crippled men who did not seem to think that mere physical disability need keep a man out of the army. These men, officially, were members of the 18th Regiment of the Veteran Reserve Corps, and they made up as unusual a fighting force as the United States ever armed and equipped for action.
Sometime earlier the authorities had meditated on the great loss of manpower involved in the discharge of wounded veterans who were still sound enough for light duty behind the lines, and they had organized a body which they called the Invalid Corps, which was recruited in army hospitals. Any wounded man who was permanently unfit for field service but who could still be moderately active might, if he chose, enlist in this Invalid Corps. Some thousands of wounded men joined up, and they were scattered all over the North—guarding prison camps and arsenals, acting as hospital guards, doing provost guard duty at draft offices, and so on. It was a sound idea, but it got off to a bad start. The name "Invalid Corps" grated on everybody, and the field troops poked a good deal of fun at it, and members of the corps asked to be sent back to the front or discharged outright rather than bear the title "Invalid." Also, the authorities in their wisdom had devised a uniform of delicate robin's-egg blue, which nobody liked. After a time, therefore, the organization was renamed the Veteran Reserve Corps and given regular army uniforms, and it settled down to do useful work.
There were different classifications within the corps. The most nearly fit men were enlisted in what was called the First Battalion, which meant that they could be used for non-combat garrison and guard duty. Below them came the Second Battalion, whose men were too crippled or enfeebled to carry mwskets or move about freely on their feet and who accordingly were designated for the lightest kind of duty.
The 18th Regiment was composed of six companies of Second Battalion men—nearly 500 men, altogether—and ordinarily they would have had no business within fifty miles of the Potomac River bases. But Grant was running things these days and he had stern ideas about making use of army manpower, and so in mid-May the 18th Regiment was put on a transport in Washington and told to guard a batch of the priceless bounty men who were being shipped down to the army.
The colonel in charge of the 18th Regiment was dubious. He pointed out that his men were supposed to be too infirm to carry muskets at all, and that they certainly could not march. However, he supposed they could fire at deserters, if they had to, and so the men were lined up and equipped as regular infantry and they got on the boat and set sail. They were not very military-looking. Some of them were crippled in such a way that they could carry their muskets only on the right shoulder and some could carry them only on the left, and some could not wear cartridge boxes and had to stuff their ammunition in their pockets. Most of them were not hearty enough to carry the regulation forty rounds anyway, and could take only five or ten.
They disembarked, finally, at Belle Plain, where they were put on guard duty. They were badly needed. There were incoming drafts of recruits to look after, and there was a steady stream of Confederate prisoners to be guarded and sent north, and there was a vast accumulation of stores to watch over and keep safe from marauding guerilla bands. Ordinarily a few regiments of front-line troops would be detached for this work, but Grant had other uses for these and there was nobody to do the job but the cripples.
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As long as they stayed at the base things were not too bad. To be sure, these disabled men had no pup tents or any other kind of shelter, and the weather was very rainy. Somebody had forgotten to supply them with any blankets, and they had no surgeon or medical stores. But they did their job, reporting proudly that they successfully guarded nearly 3,000 Rebel prisoners—two of these escaped, and one other tried it and got shot—and that all of the recruits and army stores were guarded without loss. Their real troubles began when the base was shifted to Port Royal.
By land, Port Royal was twenty-five miles away. The army liked to have its men go places under their own power if possible, and so when moving day came the regiment was lined up for inspection, to see how many men could make the march. Of the 474 men present, the doctors reported that 166 might possibly be able to do it, provided that they carried no knapsacks. (All of the officers reported themselves fit and refused to let the doctors examine them.) The rest were put on a transport to go down by water, and the shaky 166 set out on foot in a driving rainstorm.
Somehow, they made it. The column's best speed was one mile an hour. The road was infested with guerillas, and a general at Port Royal sent back an anxious message to the colonel of the 18th: Can your men fight, if the guerillas attack them? Back came the reply. "Tell the general that my men are cripples and so they can't run away." Fortunately, they did not have to fight. They plodded and staggered along, marching for fifteen minutes and then resting for ten, with officers going up and down the line pleading and coaxing all day long. After two days they finally got to Port Royal. The next morning, only 42 of the 166 were able to get on their feet and answer at roll call.