A Stillness at Appomattox (118 page)

Not
a
vestige
of
military
organization
remained.
Officers could
not
find
their
men
and
men
could
not
find
their
officers,
and
there
was
a
good
deal
of
rather
aimless
activity. Along
the
farther
rim
of
the
crater,
some
industrious
souls were
trying
to
prepare
a
defensive
line.
The
officer
who
had been
digging
up
the
buried
cannon
was
putting
men
to
work to
horse
them
up
to
the
rim
where
they
could
be
fired—a difficult
job,
since
the
final
feet
of
the
crater
wall
were
practically
vertical—and
he
had
other
details
hunting
about
to find
the
Rebel
gunners'
magazine.
Half-entombed
Confederates
were
still
being
dug
up,
and
a
few
files
of
dazed
prisoners
were
being
sent
to
the
rear.
A
few
officers
were
yelling themselves
hoarse,
trying
to
get
the
men
to
climb
up
out
of the
crater
and
go
on
with
the
attack,
but
hardly
anyone
was paying
any
attention
to
them.
¹⁶

This,
of
course,
was
the
kind
of
situation
which
generals in
charge
of
infantry
divisions
had
been
created
to
unscramble.
Now
was
the
moment
for
the
division
commander
to take
charge,
restore
order,
pull
the
men
out
of
the
pit,
form a
coherent
line
of
battle,
and
make
his
attack.
But
General Ledlie,
who
commanded
this
division,
was
snugly
tucked away
in
a
bombproof
400
yards
behind
the
line,
plying
himself
with
rum
borrowed
from
a
brigade
surgeon.
From
first to
last
he
never
saw
the
explosion,
the
soldiers,
the
crater,
or the
charge.
Now
and
then
reports
would
come
back
to
him, and
he
would
dispatch
a
runner
with
the
order
that
everyone
must
move
forward
to
the
crest
of
the
ridge.
Beyond that
he
did
nothing
and
was
capable
of
doing
nothing.
¹⁷
And General
Burnside,
back
in
the
fourteen-gun
battery,
serenely unaware
that
anything
was
wrong,
was
busily
ordering
fresh troops
forward.

The
fresh
troops
were
Potter's
and
Willcox's
divisions. Time
would
have
been
saved
if
these
troops
had
been
lined up
in
brigade
front
just
behind
the
front-line
trench,
but
it was
held
that
troops
moving
forward
to
the
front
ought
to go
up
through
the
covered
way—after
all,
that
was
what
the thing
had
been
built
for—and
so
two
infantry
divisions were
sent
up
a
winding
ditch
that
was
wide
enough
for
no more
than
two
or
three
men
abreast,
colliding
with
stragglers,
walking
wounded,
couriers,
and
other
persons,
and
in due
time
they
got
into
the
front-line
trench
and
scrambled up
sandbag
stairways,
bayonet
ladders,
and
what-not
and went
forward
through
the
gap
toward
the
crater.
Their
officers
steered
them
off
to
the
right
and
left,
so
that
the
empty Confederate
trenches
adjoining
the
crater
could
be
possessed, and
very
slowly
and
with
much
confusion
a
trickle
of
Federal
troops
began
to
come
up
into
line
on
each
side
of
Led-lie's
disorganized
division.
¹⁸

Meanwhile,
the
Confederates
were
rapidly
coming
to.
On the
right
and
left,
regiments
were
being
formed
so
that
they could
fire
on
the
flanks
of
the
attacking
column.
Between
the crater
and
the
ridge
there
was
a
shallow
ravine—luckily, from
the
Southern
viewpoint,
ft
was
out
of
reach
of
the
Federal
cannon—and
an
alert
Confederate
general
put
troops
in it,
and
the
fire
from
these
men
was
beginning
to
be
very heavy.
The
golden
half
hour
in
which
the
ridge
could
have been
taken
effortlessly
was
gone
forever,
and
any
advance that
was
made
now
would
be
made
only
after
a
hard
fight.

After
Potter's
and
Willcox's
men
had
moved
out
into
the empty
trenches
they
began
to
go
forward.
The
going
was very
bad.
The
ground
beyond
the
trenches
was
a
labyrinth of
bombproofs,
rifle
pits,
covered
ways,
and
support
trenches, and
in
many
places
the
advance
was
a
hoptoad
business
of jumping
into
a
hole
in
the
ground,
scrambling
out
on
the other
side,
jumping
into
another
hole,
and
then
repeating the
scramble.
The
rising
tempo
of
Confederate
musketry
did not
make
this
kind
of
progress
any
easier.

Worse
yet,
Rebel
artillery
was
coming
into
action,
with power.
A
quarter
of
a
mile
north
of
the
crater
there
was
a four-gun
battery,
and
the
Southern
gunners
who
had
decamped
when
the
mine
was
blown
up
came
back
to
these guns
and
trained
them
on
the
Yankees
who
were
trying to
advance
from
the
captured
trenches.
Federal
artillery pounded
this
battery
mercilessly,
but
it
was
well
protected by
solid
earthen
traverses
and,
although
the
shell
dug
up
the ground
all
about
until
it
looked
as
if
the
whole
area
had
been plowed,
the
guns
remained
in
action,
putting
canister
right down
the
flank
of
the
Federal
battle
line.
On
the
other
side of
the
crater
the
story
was
somewhat
the
same,
with
a
battery
posted
so
as
to
enfilade
the
Federal
line
from
the
left.