A Stillness at Appomattox (43 page)

Just
in
time
to
avert
complete
chaos,
the
first
steamers
from Washington
came
down
the
Potomac.
These
could
not
come around
to
Fredericksburg
yet—guerillas
made
the
Rappahannock
unsafe,
and
the
Navy
was
sending
a
couple
of
light-draft
gunboats
to
see
about
it—and
they
tied
up
at
the
old Potomac
River
landings,
Aquia
Creek
and
Belle
Plain.
These landings
were
twelve
or
fifteen
miles
from
Fredericksburg, via
villainous
corduroy
roads,
which
meant
an
extra
spell
in purgatory
for
any
wounded
man
who
made
the
trip.
(A
ride in
a
springless
wagon
over
a
corduroy
road
was
about
as
bad as
anything
war
had
to
offer.)
Yet
once
a
man
was
put
aboard one
of
the
steamers
the
worst
was
over,
and
in
a
few
hours
he would
be
in
a
regular
hospital
around
Washington:
a
poor enough
place,
perhaps,
by
modern
standards,
but
paradise
itself
compared
with
lying
unfed
and
unattended
in
a
springless wagon
or
on
the
wet
gummy
floor
of
a
half-roofed
warehouse.

There
was
a
good
deal
of
a
jam
at
the
river
landings,
for the
piers
were
inadequate,
and
before
the
boats
could
take wounded
men
aboard
they
had
to
unload
their
own
cargoes, and
usually
the
narrow
makeshift
dock
that
was
to
receive
the cargo
was
crammed
with
long
lines
of
stretchers
and
a
huddied
mass
of
walking
wounded.
The
stragglers
and
malingerers
got
in
the
way
very
badly,
and
the
good
civilian
doctors who
came
down
with
the
hospital
ships
could
be
imposed
on by
these
men
as
regular
army
surgeons
could
not
have
been, so
that
transportation
needed
by
suffering
men
was
often
preempted
by
men
whose
only
trouble
was
a
desire
to
get
away from
the
zone
of
fighting.
The
army
caught
on
to
this,
eventually,
and
in
a
few
days
no
man
could
get
aboard
any
of
the steamboats
until
he
had
been
examined
by
a
hard-boiled
army doctor
who
knew
all
of
the
dodges.
¹²

The
steamers
brought
down
the
things
the
impromptu Fredericksburg
hospitals
needed—foods,
medicines,
bandages, doctors,
and
hospital
attendants—and
they
came
just
in
time to
keep
the
situation
from
becoming
completely
impossible. But
mostly
they
brought
down
supplies
for
the
army
itself. The
emphasis
was
on
the
job
ahead,
not
on
the
wreckage
that was
being
left
behind,
and
it
was
obvious
to
everybody
that the
army
was
not
going
to
stop
to
lick
its
wounds.
If
the
lot of
the
wounded
men
could
be
made
endurable,
that
would
be fine,
but
the
only
thing
that
really
mattered
was
the
fighting.

The
wounded
men
themselves
realized
this,
and
they
took a
sardonic
pleasure
in
the
sight
of
reinforcement
troops
moving
south
through
Fredericksburg.
One
day
a
heavy
artillery regiment,
fresh
from
the
Washington
barracks,
came
marching
through—muskets
polished,
uniforms
neat
and
unfaded, band
playing
in
front—and
the
wounded
men
on
the
sidewalks and
in
doorways
set
up
a
derisive
cheer.
One
man
called
out. "Go
it,
Heavies—old
Grant
’
ll
soon
cut
you
down
to
fighting weight!"
Another
man
sourly
eyed
the
band
and
cried:
"Blow —you're
blowing
your
last
blast!"
¹³

Days
after
full
steamboat
connection
with
Washington
had been
established,
a
nurse
in
a
II
Corps
hospital
in
Fredericksburg
wrote
that
the
wounded
men
were
still
getting
nothing to
eat
but
hardtack
and
coffee,
and
when
she
contemplated the
lot
of
the
average
private
she
exploded:
"O
God!
such suffering
it
never
entered
the
mind
of
man
or
woman
to
think of!"
What
she
saw
in
Fredericksburg,
she
added,
was
worse than
what
she
had
seen
in
the
hospitals
at
Gettysburg,
the sole
improvement
here
being
that
most
of
the
men
were
at least
under
cover.
¹⁴

The
men
at
the
front
were
given
no
time
to
worry
about what
happened
behind
the
lines.
For
a
long
time
they
had told
one
another
that
the
one
thing
they
wanted
(aside
from an
end
to
the
war)
was
a
fighting
general
in
command.
Now they
had
him,
and
they
were
learning
that
there
were
elements
in
the
bargain
on
which
they
had
not
counted.
The trench
lines
in
the
country
around
Spotsylvania
Court
House grew
longer
and
longer,
and
as
they
did
so
the
men
began
to see
that
the
heavy
fighting
had
hardly
so
much
as
started, and
that
what
had
begun
in
the
Wilderness
was
to
go
on
and on
with
no
end
to
it.
There
was
no
more
maneuvering
for position,
no
more
tapping
a
line
cautiously
to
find
a
soft
spot. Men
were
simply
lined
up
and
sent
forward,
and
sometimes it
was
like
the
Wilderness
fighting
all
over
again,
rival
lines colliding
drunkenly
in
the
dusk
of
pine
thickets,
no
order
or plan
to
the
battle,
armies
fighting
like
infuriated
mobs.