A Stillness at Appomattox (116 page)

Grant
was
impatient,
and
Meade
was
impatient,
and
probably
even
Burnside
was
getting
a
little
restless;
but
the
man who
was
really
excited
was
Colonel
Pleasants.
About
the time
Grant
was
saying
that
the
charge
had
better
go
ahead without
the
explosion,
Pleasants
called
Sergeant
Harry
Reese, the
mine
boss,
and
told
him
to
go
into
the
tunnel
and
see what
was
the
matter.

In
went
Reese,
on
as
nerve-racking
an
assignment
as
the war
could
produce,
groping
forward
all
bent
over
along
400 feet
of
a
dark
tunnel,
never
sure
that
the
solid
earth
ahead was
not
going
to
quake
and
heave
and
tumble
to
bury
him forever.
He
got
to
the
fuse,
traced
it,
and
found
that
the spark
had
died
at
a
place
where
one
fuse
had
been
spliced to
another.
He
started
back
to
get
a
new
fuse,
found
Lieutenant
Jacob
Douty
coming
in,
at
Pleasants's
direction,
with the
material
he
needed,
and
he
and
Douty
went
back
to
the splice
and
made
a
new
connection.
Then
he
lit
the
spark again,
and
he
and
Lieutenant
Douty
came
out
of
the
tunnel as
fast
as
they
could
travel
¹²
—and
the
sky
grew
lighter
in the
east,
so
that
ridges
and
trees
and
hillocks
became
dark shadows
outlined
against
the
dying
night,
and
the
whole Army
of
the
Potomac
stood
by
gripping
its
muskets,
waiting for
nobody
knew
just
what.

Four
forty-five:
and
at
last
it
happened.

To
the
men
who
were
waiting
in
the
front
line
it
seemed to
occur
in
slow
motion:
first
a
long,
deep
rumble,
like
sum
mer
thunder
rolling
along
a
faraway
horizon,
then
a
swaying and
swelling
of
the
ground
up
ahead,
with
the
solid
earth rising
to
form
a
rounded
hill,
everything
seeming
very
gradual
and
leisurely.
Then
the
rounded
hill
broke
apart,
and
a prodigious
spout
of
flame
and
black
smoke
went
up
toward the
sky,
and
the
air
was
full
of
enormous
clods
of
earth
as big
as
houses,
of
brass
cannon
and
detached
artillery
wheels, of
wrecked
caissons
and
fluttering
tents
and
weirdly
tumbling
human
bodies;
and
there
was
a
crash
'like
the
noise
of great
thunders,"
followed
by
other,
lesser
explosions,
and
all of
the
landscape
along
the
firing
line
had
turned
into
dust and
smoke
and
flying
debris,
choking
and
blinding
men
and threatening
to
engulf
Burnside's
whole
army
corps.

Different
men
saw
it
and
felt
it
in
different
ways.
A
soldier
in
the
36th
Massachusetts
wrote
that
"we
witnessed
a

volcano
and
experienced
an
earthquake
'
yet
an
officer
in Ferrero's
division,
standing
not
a
third
of
a
mile
away
from the
explosion,
recalled
it
as
"a
dull,
heavy
thud,
not
at
all startling
...
a
heavy,
smothered
sound,
not
nearly
so
dis
tinct
as
a
musket
shot."
A
man
in
Pleasants's
own
48th
Pennsylvania
remembered
it
as
a
"magnificent
spectacle,"
and
another
soldier
recalled
that
a
bronze
cannon
was
tossed
nearly over
to
the
Union
line.
To
one
man
the
whole
thing
looked like
"a
waterspout
as
seen
at
sea,"
another
felt
it
as
"a
heavy shaking
of
the
earth,
with
a
rumbling,
muffled
sound,"
and to
men
in
Hancock's
corps,
waiting
behind
the
artillery,
it seemed
that
the
solid
earth
went
up
"like
an
enormous
whirlwind."
¹⁸

The
gunners
had
been
waiting
a
long
time,
and
some
of them
had
their
eyes
fixed
on
the
Confederate
redoubt,
and they
jerked
their
lanyards
as
soon
as
they
saw
the
grounds begin
to
rise,
so
that
the
crash
of
their
own
guns
rocked
the air
before
the
sound
of
the
explosion
reached
them.
There was
a
tremendous
concussion
from
the
artillery,
with
more guns
being
fired
than
the
Union
army
had
fired
in
the
great artillery
duel
at
Gettysburg.
An
overwhelming
cloud
of
white smoke
from
the
guns
went
tumbling
down
into
the
ravine and
overflowed
the
farther
crest
to
mix
with
the
hanging
black dust
and
smoke
from
the
mine,
so
that
all
along
the
Yankee line
the
air
was
dark
as
midnight,
lit
by
brief
stabbing
flames as
the
shell
began
to
go
off.
¹⁴

The
troops
which
had
been
waiting
to
make
the
charge saw
a
hillside
fly
up
in
their
faces,
and
it
looked
as
if
the mass
of
earth
was
going
to
fall
on
them,
so
that
many
men turned
and
ran,
and
it
was
five
or
ten
minutes
before
the
officers
could
get
them
re-formed.
Then
the
order
for
the
charge was
sounded
and
Ledlie's
division
started
to
make
its
attack— at
which
crucial
moment
the
soldiers
realized
that
nobody had
prepared
the
way
for
them,
so
that
the
kind
of
charge which
everybody
had
counted
on
was
completely
impossible.