A Stillness at Appomattox (50 page)

Hancock
gave
the
lead
to
his
first
division,
which
was
led by
Brigadier
General
Francis
Barlow,
Barlow
had
been
a
New

York
lawyer
before
the
war,
knowing
nothing
about
military matters,
and
after
Fort
Sumter
he
had
joined
a
militia
regiment
as
a
private.
He
had
a
knack
for
leadership,
and
he
liked to
fight,
and
in
the
reshuffle
that
followed
Bull
Run
he
became
a
colonel.
He
had
been
badly
wounded
at
Antietam
and again
at
Gettysburg,
and
he
was
a
slight,
frail-looking
man with
no
color
in
his
cheeks,
a
loose-jointed
unsoldierly
air about
him
when
he
walked,
with
deadly
emotionless
eyes looking
out
of
a
clean-shaven
face,
and
when
he
spoke
his voice
seemed
thin
and
lackluster.

To
all
appearances
he
was
no
soldier
at
all,
but
the
man who
went
by
Barlow's
appearance
was
badly
deceived.
He was
hard
and
cold
and
very
much
in
earnest,
a
driving
disciplinarian
who
began
by
making
his
men
hate
him
and
ended by
winning
their
respect
because
he
always
seemed
to
know what
he
was
doing
and
because
the
spirit
of
fear
was
not
in him.
When
he
wrote
his
reports
he
often
lapsed
into
legalistic jargon:
his
troops
moved
"on
or
about"
a
certain
hour,
and after
various
experiences
they
took
"the
aforesaid
hill"
or wood
lot
or
whatever,
and
through
it
all
there
is
the
echo
of
a lawyer's
clerk
preparing
a
deposition;
but
underneath
everything
there
was
a
ferocious
fighting
man
who
drove
himself and
his
men
as
if
the
doorway
to
Hell
were
opening
close behind
them.
¹²

Barlow
got
his
men
together
in
the
dripping
night.
Upton's example
had
struck
home,
and
the
division
was
put
into
a solid
mass
one
regiment
wide
and
twenty
or
thirty
ranks
deep, everybody
elbow
to
elbow
and
each
line
right
on
the
heels
of the
line
ahead.
Orders
were
to
advance
in
complete
silence, nobody
yelling
or
touching
the
trigger
of
his
musket
until they
reached
the
Rebel
trenches.
On
Barlow's
right,
invisible in
the
inky
wet,
was
the
division
led
by
General
David
Bell Birney,
a
pale,
ascetic-looking
man
with
a
wispy
beard
and
a Puritanical
devotion
to
his
duty,
and
somewhere
back
of
these men
were
John
Gibbon
and
his
division,
with
Mott's
unhappy warriors
still
farther
to
the
rear
waiting
to
be
called
on
if
needed.
Altogether,
there
were
more
than
15,000
men grouped
together
here
in
the
leaking
dark,
their
clothing
as wet
as
if
they
had
all
fallen
in
a
river,
nothing
ahead
of
them but
the
silent
night
and
the
loom
of
indistinct
hills
and
forests
in
the
downpour.
Barlow
was
the
guide,
to
take
them
up to
the
tip
of
the
Rebel
salient.

After
much
blind
galloping
by
couriers
and
staff
officers, the
immense
mass
of
soldiers
began
to
move,
mud
clinging
to heavy
feet
at
every
step.
Barlow
had
his
compass
points straight,
and
he
set
out
confidently
enough,
with
two
staff
officers
beside
him
for
guidance.
But
as
they
moved
he
learned that
these
officers
knew
no
more
than
he
did
about
what
lay ahead
of
them.
Indeed,
they
were
complaining
bitterly
about being
sent
to
conduct
a
move
when
they
knew
nothing
whatever
about
it.
They
staggered
and
stumbled
on—by
Barlow's orders
all
horses
were
left
behind,
and
division
commander and
all
other
officers
were
tramping
along
on
foot—and
nobody
could
see
anything
and
nobody
knew
anything,
and presently
the
whole
situation
began
to
strike
General
Barlow as
very
funny
in
a
horrible
sort
of
way.

At
his
side
was
Hancock's
chief
of
staff,
and
this
man,
Barlow
wrote,
was
"a
profane
swearer"
who
as
they
plodded
on kept
making
pungent
remarks
about
the
conduct
of
the
war. As
this
officer
made
the
high
command's
utter
ignorance about
everything
connected
with
this
venture
more
and
more obvious,
Barlow
asked
him
finally,
and
in
straight-faced
jest, if
he
could
at
least
be
sure
that
there
was
not
an
open
canyon a
thousand
feet
deep
between
the
place
where
they
then were
and
the
place
where
the
Confederates
had
built
their trenches,
and
the
officer
frankly
confessed
that
he
had
no
such assurance;
upon
which
firebrand
Nelson
Miles,
one
of
Barlow's
brigadiers,
voiced
his
disgust
so
loudly
and
bitterly
that Barlow
had
to
tell
him
to
shut
up.
The
rain
stopped,
and
the sky
began
to
grow
dull
and
pale,
and
a
thick
clammy
fog floated
up
from
the
lower
ground.
The
vast
column
oozed along
down
a
slanting
field,
and
Barlow
at
last
told
the
staff people:
"For
Heaven's
sake,
at
least
face
us
in
the
right
direction,
so
that
we
shall
not
march
away
from
the
enemy
and have
to
go
round
the
world
and
come
up
in
their
rear."
¹³