A Stillness at Appomattox (100 page)

What
had
happened
was
clear
enough.
During
the
last
two months
almost
all
of
the
good
men
in
the
corps
had
been
shot. The
figures
on
Gibbon's
division
tell
the
story.
This
division crossed
the
Rapidan
on
May
5
with
a
total
of
6,799
men
in its
three
brigades.
During
May
and
June
it
had
7,970
casualties—more
men,
by
a
large
margin,
than
the
entire
number under
arms
when
the
campaign
began.
It
had
received
heavy reinforcements,
to
be
sure,
but
its
losses
for
the
two
months amounted
to
72
per
cent
of
its
original
strength
plus
all
of
the replacements.
It
saw
forty
regimental
commanders
killed
or wounded,
and,
as
Gibbon
wrote,
the
losses
showed
plainly why
it
was
that
"troops
which
at
the
commencement
of
the campaign
were
equal
to
almost
any
undertaking,
became
toward
the
end
of
it
unfit
for
almost
any."
²⁰

Gibbon's
division
had
had
it
worse
than
the
other
II
Corps divisions,
but
only
a
little
worse.
Altogether,
the
corps
had lost
nearly
20,000
men
in
less
than
two
months.
More
than a
score
of
its
brigadiers
had
been
shot,
and
approximately
a hundred
regimental
commanders.
Naturally,
the
men
who were
lost
were
the
best
men—the
officers
who
led
the
way,
the enlisted
men
who
ran
ahead
in
a
charge
and
were
the
last
to leave
when
a
position
was
given
up.
Numerically,
most
of
the losses
had
been
made
good,
but
the
new
men
were
mostly substitutes
and
bounty
jumpers,
of
whom
a
II
Corps
gunner said
contemptuously
that
Lee's
veterans
could,
if
they
chose, drown
the
lot
by
taking
bean
poles
and
pushing
them
into the
James
River.
²¹

.
.
There
had
been
that
dance
for
officers
of
the
II
Army Corps,
in
the
raw-pine
pavilion
above
the
Rapidan
on
Washington's
Birthday,
and
it
had
been
a
fine
thing
to
see;
and
it had
been
a
long
good-by
and
a
dreamy
good
night
for
the young
men
in
bright
uniforms
and
the
women
who
had
tied their
lives
to
them.
Most
of
the
men
who
danced
at
that
ball were
dead,
now;
dead,
or
dragging
themselves
about
hometown
streets
on
crutches,
or
tapping
their
way
along
with
a hickory
cane
to
find
the
way
instead
of
bright
youthful
eyes, or
in
hospitals
where
doctors
with
imperfect
knowledge
tried to
patch
them
up
enough
to
enable
them
to
hope
to
get
out of
bed
someday
and
sit
in
a
chair
by
the
window.
There
had been
a
romance
to
war
once,
or
at
least
people
said
there was,
and
each
one
of
these
men
had
seen
it,
and
they
had touched
the
edge
of
it
while
the
music
played
and
the stacked
flags
swayed
in
the
candlelight,
and
it
all
came
down to
this,
with
the
drifting
dust
of
the
battlefields
blowing from
the
imperfect
mounds
of
hastily
dug
graves.

Famous
old
fighting
units
ceased
to
exist.
At
the
end
of June
Gibbons
adjutant
published
orders
consolidating
what was
left
of
the
once
mighty
15th,
19th,
and
20th
Massachusetts—there
were
about
enough
men
left
to
make
a
slim
battalion
and
thereafter
they
would
serve
as
a
unit,
although separate
regimental
rolls
would
still
be
kept.
The
Philadelphia
Brigade
was
broken
up,
the
men
in
its
five
skeleton regiments
being
parceled
out
to
regiments
in
other
brigades. The
survivors
were
angry,
and
jeered
the
next
time
they
saw General
Gibbon,
and
one
man
in
the
106th
Pennsylvania lamented
that
he
and
his
comrades
would
no
longer
carry their
prized
regimental
flag,
which
had
been
pierced
(they had
counted
carefully)
by
thirty-nine
bullets
in
its
three years
of
service.
²²

The
II
Corps
had
been
hit
the
hardest,
but
nobody
had been
on
a
picnic.
General
Lysander
Cutler
commanded
what had
been
Wadsworth's
division
in
the
V
Corps,
and
when he
wrote
his
report
for
the
campaign
he
explained
why
the report
was
going
to
be
incomplete.
Two
regiments
had
been lost
by
expiration
of
their
terms
of
service,
he
wrote,
and one
whole
brigade
had
been
transferred
to
another
division. The
regiments
which
still
remained
with
the
division
had, when
the
campaign
began,
3,742
enlisted
men,
and
now
they had
1,324,
and
the
regiments
which
had
been
transferred had
suffered
in
proportion.
Furthermore:
"The
changes
in the
command
have
been
so
frequent,
and
the
losing
of
nearly every
original
brigade,
regimental
and
company
commander render
it
impossible
to
make
anything
like
an
accurate
report
'
²³