A Stillness at Appomattox (13 page)

So
the
army
had
been
made
over,
with
familiar
organizations
broken
up
and
familiar
faces
gone,
and
what
nobody could
miss
was
the
fact
that
it
was
being
made
larger
and
at the
same
time
harder
and
more
compact.
The
three
rebuilt army
corps
were
grouped
more
closely
together.
The
detached
troops
which
had
been
spending
dreary
months
guarding
the
line
of
the
railroad
back
to
Alexandria
were
all
called back
into
camp.
To
replace
them
there
appeared
an
old
familiar
figure
from
the
unhappy
past—Major
General
Ambrose E.
Burnside,
dignified
and
friendly
and
incurably
addicted
to fumbling,
short
jacket
belted
tightly
around
his
tubby
figure, bell-crowned
hat
shading
his
incomparable
whiskers.

His
IX
Corps
had
been
brought
up
to
full
strength
again
(it
now
contained
a
solid
division
of
colored
troops,
who
had gone
wild
with
enthusiasm
when
they
were
paraded
past Abraham
Lincoln
in
Washington)
and
it
was
coming
down from
its
rendezvous
at
Annapolis
to
occupy
the
line
of
the railroad.
The
corps
was
not
formally
a
part
of
the
Army
of
the Potomac.
It
was
to
act
with
the
army,
receiving
direct
orders from
the
general
in
chief;
meanwhile
it
was
on
the
railroad, and
its
arrival
meant
that
the
army
could
operate
as
a
unit, none
of
its
manpower
wasted
guarding
the
line
of
supply.

Imperceptibly,
a
new
spirit
was
appearing.
Competence and
confidence
had
arrived,
neither
one
obtrusive,
both
unmistakable.
Yet
the
soldier
lived
at
the
bottom
of
the
pool,
in a
dim
greenish
light
in
which
no
outlines
were
very
clear.
He had
seen
army
commanders
come
and
he
had
seen
them
go, and
he
was
going
to
take
very
little
for
granted.
The
only
certainty
was
that
the
campaign
ahead
was
going
to
be
very rough,
and
the
men
frankly
dreaded
it—more
on
account
of the
marching,
they
said,
than
of
the
fighting.
The
viewpoint was
aptly
expressed
in
a
letter
which
a
Pennsylvania
private wrote
at
the
end
of
April:
"If
Congressmen
at
Washington,
or the
Rebel
Congress
at
Richmond,
were
required
to
endure
the hardships
of
a
soldier's
life
during
one
campaign,
the
war would
then
end."
²⁸

Army
life
went
on,
despite
shifts
in
command.
There
were baseball
games,
as
spring
dried
the
fields—the
13th
Massachusetts
beat
the
104th
New
York
one
day
by
a
score
of
62 to
20—and
there
were
the
endless
chores
of
army
routine.
An Illinois
cavalry
regiment
came
to
camp
after
a
spell
of
provost guard
duty
in
Washington,
reporting
that
it
had
been
policing upwards
of
a
hundred
houses
of
prostitution,
and
a
trooper confessed
that
"this
work,
although
it
amused
the
men
for
a time,
and
was
arduous
to
perform,
did
not
satisfy
those
who longed
for
more
active
service."
There
were
the
age-old
attempts
to
wangle
furloughs.
An
Irish
private
one
day
went
to his
regimental
commander,
explaining
that
his
wife
was
ill and
the
children
were
not
well
and
that
it
was
necessary
for him
to
make
a
short
visit
to
his
home.
The
colonel
fixed
him with
a
beady
eye
and
said:
"Pat,
I
had
a
letter
from
your
wife this
morning
saying
she
doesn't
want
you
at
home;
that
you raise
the
devil
whenever
you
are
there,
and
that
she
hopes
I won't
grant
you
any
more
furloughs.
What
have
you
to
say
to that?"

Quite
unabashed,
the
soldier
replied
that
there
were
"two splendid
liars
in
this
room"
and
that
he
himself
was
only
one of
them:
"I
nivir
was
married
in
me
life."
²⁹

Perhaps
the
abiding
reality
this
spring
was
the
unseen
army across
the
river,
the
Army
of
Northern
Virginia.
A
fantastic sort
of
kinship
had
grown
up
in
regard
to
that
army.
There was
no
soft
sentimentality
about
it,
and
the
men
would
shoot to
kill
when
the
time
for
shooting
came.
Yet
there
was
a familiarity
and
an
understanding,
at
times
something
that verged
almost
on
liking,
based
on
solid
respect.
Whatever
else might
change,
these
armies
at
least
understood
one
another.

Physically,
they
were
not
far
apart,
and
the
pickets
often got
acquainted.
One
Federal
picket
detail,
which
was
ordered to
hold
certain
advanced
posts
by
day
but
to
pull
in
closer
to camp
at
night,
discovered
that
a
deserted
log
hut
which
it
was using
by
day
was
being
used
by
Rebel
pickets
at
night,
the Confederate
arrangement
here
being
just
the
reverse
of
the Federals'.
Two
groups
of
rival
pickets
met
at
this
hut
one morning,
the
Confederates
being
tardy
in
starting
back
to camp.
There
was
a
quick
groping
for
weapons,
a
wary
pause, then
a
conversation;
and
the
Southerners
said
that
if
the
Yanks would
give
them
a
few
minutes
to
saddle
up
they
would
get out
and
the
old
schedule
might
go
on.
It
was
so
arranged, with
a
proviso
that
each
side
thereafter
would
leave
a
good fire
burning
in
the
fireplace
for
its
enemies.
³⁰