‘How many?’
‘Fifty or sixty thousand at least, general. Maybe more.’
‘Can you pry them loose?’
‘I’d have to cut a lot of red tape, sir.’
Grant smiled. ‘Cut it!’ he ordered.
The final battle plan was drawn up. It called for General Benjamin Butler to march up the James River with his army, and then to attack Richmond or Petersburg or both. The Prussian, Sigel, was to push down the Shenandoah Valley, driving Jubal Early’s Confederates ahead of him. General Banks would march on Mobile from New Orleans and Sherman would cut across Georgia, keeping General Joseph Johnston too busy to join Lee. Meanwhile the Army of the Potomac under Meade, with Grant in command, would smash into Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, entrenched on a line south of the Rapidan.
‘Our first job is to destroy Lee,’ Grant said. ‘Then Richmond will fall into our hands. Good luck, gentlemen!’
The Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan at Ely’s and Germanna Ford on the morning of May 4. It was a beautiful day, the sky bright and blue, with white fluffy clouds in clusters moving on a gentle breeze. Yellow primroses blossomed in the grass. Violets, swamp honeysuckle, dogwood in blossom daubed bright spots of color on the ever-thickening tangle of woodland into which the regiments were moving.
The Wilderness, they called it, and it was well-named. It had no definite boundaries. The thickest part extended from Chancellorsville to Mine Run, and south from the Rapidan almost as far as Spotsylvania courthouse. In Colonial days, so the story went, the trees had all been cut down to fuel the iron furnaces of the Revolutionary Army. Out of the torn earth and leveled forest had sprung a new, thicker second growth, mostly pine; but pine which grew so closely together that all the lower limbs of the trees had interwoven, strangling themselves and leaving dry, spiky, wicked tangles. Into this tangle grew scrub oak and bramble, beech, cedar and other kinds of underbrush. The result was an often impassable barrier of greenery. In swampy places – and there were many – willow and alder saplings stood as close as the bars of a birdcage, woven together by wild vines. The ground itself was gullied, pitted, ravined. Throughout the area ran serpentine wood trails which forked without purpose and ended without warning. Here and there stood infrequent clearings and one or two farms.
The soldiers moved into the Wilderness and disappeared as completely as if they had been swallowed by the sea. The officers kept track of their men only because most of them, it seemed, were singing ‘ John Brown’s Body’. Grant’s idea was to get his wagon train – seventy miles long if filing down one road – out of this tangled jungle before Lee left his trenches. He sought a fight in the open, but Robert E. Lee did not oblige. He threw his columns into the Wilderness against ‘those people’ – the phrase he had always used to describe his opponents – almost a year to the day that he had outgeneraled ‘Fighting Joe’ Hooker and lost his ‘right arm’, Stonewall Jackson.
What followed was a two-day battle, fought blind. Someone said later that it was like a hand-to-hand fight between two blindfolded giants, each finding the other as much by accident as by design. As the battle spread north and south of the turnpike, troops of both sides disappeared into the jungle gloom of the twisted forest. Fighting became piecemeal, fragmented. Officers guessed at the progress of the battle by the sound of musketry or cannon. Here and there, the woods caught fire and wounded men died horribly in the crackling underbrush. In some places, companies advanced or retreated in single file, never knowing whether friend or enemy might lie ahead of them or on both sides. At the end of two inconclusive days of fighting, both sides were so well entrenched than an attack by either would have been nothing short of suicide.
But after this battle there was one difference, and that difference was the stocky little, cigar-smoking, hands-in-pockets officer who now led the Federal Army. As the exhausted troops began posting their guards around the bivouacs on the smoking battlefield, and counted their dead – fifteen thousand plus on the Federal side, more than eleven thousand on the other – an electric rumor passed through them. Instead of retreating to lick his wounds, as every commander before him had done, Grant was going south! The 5th Corps had turned and gone down the road to Spotsylvania courthouse!
And south he kept on going, no matter what the cost. His weary soldiers stumbled along the unfamiliar country roads, falling into ditches, floundering in swamps, seeing mirages in their exhaustion. Imagination turned a clump of bushes into enemy cavalry lurking before a charge. Men fired jumpily at startled jackrabbits and sometimes killed a buddy.
Spotsylvania.
Men fought at the Bloody Angle hand-to-hand for twenty-four hours in driving rain. The trenches ran red with blood. A tree eighteen inches in diameter was cut down completely, so intensive was the musket fire. The flags of both armies waved at the same moment, over the same breastworks, while beneath them, Federal and Confederate alike tried to bayonet each other through the interstices of the logs. Men fought so close that the ends of their muskets touched as they fired into each other’s faces. Wounded and dying were trampled into the bloody mud by the frantic feet of the screaming, yelling, insane men fighting over them.
In the last serious fighting, on the nineteenth, General Grant formed a plan he hoped might lure Lee out of his entrenchments and end the bloody deadlock. General Hancock was to advance rapidly southwards along the line of the Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad, five miles east of Spotsylvania courthouse. The rest of the army would remain in position until Hancock was about twenty miles away. He was to be the bait. Grant hoped Lee would attempt to overtake Hancock and destroy him, giving Grant a chance to attack him in the open before he could entrench again. If Lee did not take the bait, Hancock could swing around and take a bite at the Confederate flank.
Lee countered by ordering Ewell to advance on his front and determine whether troops had been withdrawn from the Federal right. Popeye Ewell was no longer the bold captain of earlier days. He was forty-seven now and had lost a leg at Second Manassas. He was newly married too, and didn’t seem to relish the fight as he had once. Since his corps was now down to something like six thousand men – less than a division in the old days – he asked Lee’s permission to move around the Federal flank rather than take their position head-on. The whole area was a mud-trough, so he left his artillery behind. At about three in the afternoon, he launched his attack on the Federal troops covering the Fredericksburg road. The Federals were green: the men drafted into Grant’s army by the series of sweeping changes Andrew Strong had instigated when Grant told him to cut all the red tape.
Among them were some 6000 artillerymen he had drawn from garrison and fortress duties in the capital and other cushy billets far from the front line.
Anticipating just such a probe as Ewell launched, Andrew set up heavy guns in V-shaped redoubts on a bluff above the road. When the yelling Confederates came running, slithering, yelling, firing through the ceaseless gray rain, there was a moment of panic in the Federal lines, stilled by the solid boom of the heavy guns. Time and again they roared, smashing great gaps into the advancing lines, the shot whickering through the air, steaming as the hot metal was drenched by the cool rain.
‘Steady, lads!’ Andrew shouted above the din. ‘Shoot low! Roll the balls at them like skittles and knock their damned legs from under them!’
Somehow the grim humor of his words appealed to them. He saw them look over their shoulders, teeth white in grimy faces, turning back to their ramrods, their fuses, their shells. Ewell’s line was wavering.
‘All right, boys!’ he heard someone shout. ‘Let’s go down there and give it to them!’ There was a hoarse cheer from the infantrymen and he saw the lines come out of the trees and move forward past the guns.
He was opening his mouth to shout ‘Cease firing!’ when he was knocked off his feet and lay sprawled in the mud. It felt exactly as if he had been punched. He was more amazed than anything else: my God, I’ve been wounded! he thought. He felt no pain. H
e looked down and saw a tiny little L-shaped tear in his uniform jacket just above the belt. He put his hand around behind his back and felt wetness. Down below, he could hear the screams of dying men, the rackarackarackarack of rifle fire. He scrambled to his feet, cursing the wet mud that had soaked all down his side and back where he fell. One of the gunners saw him get up and gave a cheer. Andrew waved a hand at the man and looked down the hill. Ewell’s men were in full flight.
Another impasse, he thought. There has been no victory here. And yet, there had. By not winning this battle, Lee had lost it. Every time he stopped to fight, death, disease and desertion would winnow the remaining strength of the once-proud Army of Northern Virginia. There was no question of how it was going to end any more. Only when. Grant was going south, come Hell or high water. And I’ll be right there with you, Sam, Andrew thought. He started to walk to the rear and all at once his legs turned to jelly. He sat down in the mud and stared stupidly at the ground. Somewhere, vaguely, he heard them shouting for a stretcher party. Then he blacked out.
Fredericksburg was one vast hospital: every church, every public building, every store, every house from attic to cellar was full of wounded and dying. They lay in groaning rows on the sidewalks, in churchyards, in open fields. In the cannon-pocked Presbyterian church on the corner of Princess Anne and George. Streets, the wounded lay on the pews and the altar was moved so that more could be laid upon the steps. Dying men lay bleeding beneath the boxwood tree planted by George Washington’s mother, in the back yard of her house at the corner of Charles Street and Lewis. Everything was appropriated, everything: the courthouse, the Masonic Lodge, beautiful Kenmore, where Washington’s sister Betty Lewis once lived, The Rising Sun tavern, Stoner’s store. And still it was not enough. The ambulances came in seemingly endless convoys from the battlefields, bearing more wounded and still more. The surgeons, already working without rest until they dropped, could not keep up with the flow. Any man brought in mortally wounded was immediately passed over: there was no point wasting time trying to repair his shattered body. No attempt was made to save a limb: amputation was the safest and quickest means of keeping the casualty alive. Volunteer nurses collapsed from the incessant strain and anguish. Young clerks from Washington who had volunteered for half-month duty as nurses and orderlies, dropped exhausted on to the blood-drenched floors.
And over the whole town, like the vastly amplified sound of a summer beehive, rose the sounds the men made: groans, prayers, cries for water, cries for the sweet release of death, to lie like a heavy blanket in the hot, still air.
Andrew Strong was one of the lucky ones. The bullet which had knocked him down had entered his body low on the left side, clipping the very top of his pelvis, burning past the large intestine without damaging it and tearing a chunk out of his external oblique muscles.
‘You’ll probably have twinges there for the rest of your life, Colonel,’ the doctor told him. ‘Take it easy for a week, and then report back for duty.’
They had him walking in four days and out of the hospital in another: the pressure for space was enormous. Although he still felt a little tottery and every step caused a slow throb of pain in his left side, Andrew knew how lucky he was. It was easy to be killed, whether you were an officer or enlisted. In the fighting of this one bloody month of May, one major-general, Sedgwick, and four brigadier-generals had been killed. In the ten days of fighting around Spotsylvania, over four thousand Federal troops had died, and more than ten thousand were wounded. A long puckered scar and a twinge of pain were a small price to pay to have come through that. As soon as he was discharged from the field hospital, Andrew went to the provost-marshal’s office, told them who he was and got traveling papers. He still had a few days: Grant could manage without him that long. The moment the confirmation came through, Andrew headed for home. He bribed a leathery old sergeant to give him a ride in a supply wagon by promising to share a half-flask of whiskey he’d been given by one of the townspeople visiting the wards. They rode the thirty-some miles to Culpeper in a warm and companionable glow, reminiscing about earlier campaigns.
Culpeper, like Fredericksburg, was overflowing with casualties, but they were no longer the fresh-wounded of the day. Here, men who had got their wounds in the bloody thickets of the Wilderness filled the makeshift wards and thronged the busy streets. Even terribly wounded men smiled to be this far from the battlefield, tended by local women who had volunteered as nurses, eating regularly issued rations, buying such little luxuries as could be obtained. Andrew could not recall ever seeing so many men on crutches. There seemed to be hundreds of them. He walked up Main Street and across to the courthouse. The gallows outside the jail was still there. The sight of them made him wonder what had happened to Edward Maxwell. All he had been able to learn in the short while he was in Culpeper was that Maxwell had fled the town after the last invasion by the Confederates, when Lee marched north for the last time. Whether he had gone north or west, Andrew had not been able to ascertain. That, like a lot of other things, would have to wait until after the war.
At the courthouse, he shamelessly pulled rank to get a horse and carriage placed at his disposal. He was on his way to the farm within an hour. The pike was crowded with wagons and ambulances. Once a squadron of flying artillery thundered past, harness jingling, the heavy metal wheels of the guns roaring on the stony road.
He came down the hill and saw her standing in the doorway of the old house, her forearm across her forehead, the bright auburn of her hair burnished by the sinking sun. He called her name and he saw her smile. She ran towards him and he stopped the carriage and got down. She ran into his waiting arms, kissing him breathlessly, saying his name over and over.
‘What are you doing here? Where have you come from? How long can you stay? Is anything the matte?’ She let go of him all at once and stepped back, the torrent of questions stopping.
‘You’ve been hurt.’
‘A scratch.’ Andrew replied. ‘Nothing, really.’
‘Oh, my darling!’
‘Now, Jess,’ Andrew said. ‘It was nothing I tell you. That’s the way it goes, they say. If you get hit. It’s either awful, or it’s nothing.’
‘Your lovely body,’ she whispered.
He grinned. ‘It still works,’ he told her. She grinned back at him.
‘We’ll soon find out,’ she said.
Andrew patted the seat of the carriage. As they clattered down the drive to the house, she told him that it had been cleaned up and was being used as convalescent quarters for wounded men. He saw knots of them now, lounging beneath the trees, smoking, talking. The old house looked almost as it had always done.
‘I’ve been working with the doctors,’ Jessica told him. ‘They need all the help they can get. Even Aunt Betty pitches in. She can do wonders with the men’s rations. They’re happy to turn them over to her and let her work her miracles.’
They drove the carriage around to the rear of the house. Aunt Betty came out of the little cottage and her smile grew broader when she saw Andrew.
‘Well, Mahse Andrew!’ she said. ‘You got here pre-zackly de right time! You got here prezackly right. I’s bakin’ some fresh bread.’
‘I’ll put the horse up,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll see if I can’t eat the lot.’
He led the horse across to the lean-to and Jessica walked beside him, listening without speaking as he told her about the Wilderness and the fight near Spotsylvania in which he had been wounded.
‘You didn’t write much,’ she said.
‘I wanted to,’ he told her. ‘There just never seemed to be time. Grant was intent on pushing, pushing the Rebs back.’
They walked back across the yard. Soldiers sitting on the bench beneath the dying oak tree watched them indifferently. Convalescent torpor the doctors called it. While the broken body did its best to mend itself, everyday life mattered little or not at all to the wounded man. He could sit idly beneath a tree and watch the fleecy clouds scud past for ho
urs on end, chewing on a piece of grass and hardly thinking at all. It was blessed respite from the clangor of the battlefield, to which he would return soon enough.
After supper, Jessica and Andrew sat on a wooden bench in front of the house. Inside Aunt Betty was humming happily. A whippoorwill called plaintively somewhere in the dusk.
‘When will you go back?’ Jessica whispered, twining her fingers in his. ‘Not too soon?’
‘I have two days,’ he said. ‘It’s not much but it’s more than a lot of poor devils get.’
‘Two days,’ she whispered. ‘We’d better not waste any time, then.’
On Wednesday, June 1, 1864, while Ulysses S. Grant threw his valiant army against the equally valiant army of Robert E. Lee, near the half-isolated intersection of roads leading to the Pamunkey, Chickahominy and York river fords called Cold Harbor, Andrew Strong kissed Jessica McCabe good-bye and headed back to Culpeper.
She let him go without tears, without clinging. She knew he did not like good-byes. He was the kind of man who preferred to go alone to railroad stations and was uncomfortable with the kind of small talk people made while waiting for departure. But it was hard to do: you watched the loved figure recede into the distance and wondered will he come back? is this the last time? Such a precious, fragile thing to hurl into the maelstrom of scything lead and iron erupting from the mouth of cannon and musket. She had seen the things that could happen to the human body a thousand times in the hospitals. You could not altogether believe that it could be so torn and ruined and yet function somehow. Sometimes you wondered, how will I handle it if he comes home like one of these men?
Her gentle fingers had traced the raised, puckered scar in his side and she had shuddered inwardly at how close death had come. Naked in Andrew’s arms, she kissed him drowsily, her movements slow and languorous. He held her hard against him and she rolled away.
Call to Arms Page 36