A Stillness at Appomattox (54 page)

This
was
the
Bloody
Angle,
the
place
where
a
trench
made a
little
bend,
and
where
the
two
armies
might
have
clasped hands
as
they
fought;
and
it
was
precisely
here
that
the
war came
down
to
its
darkest
cockpit.
It
could
never
be
any
worse than
this
because
men
could
not
possibly
imagine
or
do
anything
worse.
This
fighting
was
not
planned
or
ordered
or
directed.
It
was
formless,
monstrous,
something
no
general could
will.
It
grew
out
of
what
these
men
were
and
what
the war
had
taught
them—cruel
knowledge
of
killing,
wild
brief contempt
for
death,
furious
unspeakable
ferocity
that
could transcend
every
limitation
of
whipped
nerves
and
beaten flesh.
There
was
a
frenzy
on
both
armies,
and
as
they
grappled
in
the
driving
rain
with
the
smoke
and
the
wild
shouting and
the
great
shock
of
gunfire
all
about
them
this
one
muddy ditch
with
a
log
wall
running
down
the
middle
became
the center
of
the
whole
world.
Nothing
mattered
except
to
possess
it
utterly
or
to
clog
it
breast-high
with
corpses.

There
was
no
victory
in
all
of
this
and
there
was
no
defeat. There
was
just
fighting,
as
if
that
had
become
an
end
in
itself. A
Massachusetts
soldier
wrote
that
the
firing
continued
"just so
long
as
we
could
see
a
man,"
and
a
Pennsylvania
agreed that
"all
day
long
it
was
one
continuous
assault."
A
man
in
the Iron
Brigade
probably
spoke
for
every
man
in
the
army
when he
called
this
fight
at
the
Bloody
Angle
"the
most
terrible twenty-four
hours
of
our
service
in
the
war."
An
officer
in
the VI
Corps,
trying
to
describe
the
fight
afterward,
wrote
that
he had
only
confused
memories
of
"bloodshed
surpassing
all former
experiences,
a
desperation
in
the
struggle
never
before
witnessed."
Trying
to
sum
up,
he
concluded:
"I
never expect
to
be
fully
believed
when
I
tell
what
I
saw
of
the
horrors
of
Spotsylvania,
because
I
should
be
loath
to
believe
it myself
were
the
case
reversed."
²³

The
fighting
went
on
all
day
long
and
it
continued
after dark—there
were
men
on
the
firing
line
who
said
they
had fired
more
than
four
hundred
cartridges
apiece,
from
start
to finish.
Finally,
somewhere
around
midnight,
it
died
out.
The Confederates
had
at
last
finished
the
cutoff
line
at
the
base
of the
salient,
and
they
slipped
quietly
back
to
it,
and
in
the darkness
the
entire
salient
disappeared.
The
exhausted
Federals
got
a
drugged
sleep
in
the
rain,
and
in
the
morning
they went
cautiously
forward
to
take
a
look
at
the
ground
they had
won.

There
was
nothing
remarkable
about
it,
except
that
the region
around
the
Bloody
Angle
offered
the
most
horrible sights
of
the
war.
In
places,
the
trenches
held
corpses
piled four
and
five
deep,
and
sometimes
at
the
bottom
of
such
a pile
a
living
wounded
man
would
be
found.
The
firing
had been
so
intense
that
many
bodies
had
been
hit
over
and
over again
and
were
mutilated
beyond
any
chance
of
identification.
One
of
Wright's
staff
officers
remembered
that
once
during
the
previous
day
he
had
ordered
some
guns
up
to
an
advanced
position,
and
he
could
not
remember
having
heard anything
from
them
thereafter,
so
he
went
out
to
look.
The two
guns,
he
found,
had
reached
the
designated
position,
and each
piece
and
caisson
was
wheeled
halfway
around,
but
the guns
had
never
got
into
battery.
A
burst
of
Rebel
fire
had caught
them
in
mid-turn
and
every
man
and
horse
had
been killed,
"and
they
lay
as
if
waiting
the
resurrection."
²⁴

Clearly,
the
ground
that
had
been
won
was
not
worth
what it
cost,
either
from
an
esthetic
or
a
military
standpoint.
The Rebel
line
had
been
broken
but
it
had
been
mended
again, and
the
armies
were
just
about
where
they
were
before.
The Federals
had
gained
a
square
mile
of
quite
useless
territory at
the
price
of
nearly
7,000
casualties.
Rebel
losses,
to
be sure,
had
been
heavier,
but
that
was
cold
comfort.
The
big push
had
been
made
and
it
had
not
quite
worked.

Yet
perhaps
all
of
that
did
not
really
matter.
Something
inexorable
was
moving,
and
old
words
like
victory
and
defeat had
lost
their
meaning.
The
slouchy
little
man
with
the
stubbly
red
beard
meant
to
keep
going,
and
the
entire
war
was one
continuous
battle
now,
and
if
one
blow
failed
another one
would
immediately
be
struck.
The
day
after
the
Bloody Angle
fight
new
orders
came
down,
and
that
night
Warren drew
his
V
Corps
out
of
its
place
at
the
extreme
right
of
the Federal
line
and
marched
it
around
in
an
enormous
circle, behind
the
rest
of
the
army,
to
a
place
on
the
extreme
left. It
was
a
cruel
march,
for
the
rain
was
still
falling
and
the roads
were
knee-deep
in
mud,
and
the
soldiers
were
as
nearly dead
with
fatigue
as
living
men
can
be,
so
that
when
Warren reached
his
destination
in
the
morning
he
had
only
about 1
,000
men
with
him.
But
the
laggards
came
up
later
and there
was
a
hard,
wearing,
inconclusive
fight,
and
the
next day
there
was
another
fight,
and
the
army
kept
sidling
around to
its
left,
forcing
Lee's
army
to
shift
to
meet
it.
²⁵

A
week
went
by,
with
a
battle
of
some
sort
fought
every day,
and
the
Union
army
which
had
been
directly
west
of Spotsylvania
Court
House
on
May
8
was
directly
east
of
it on
May
19,
and
every
unit
in
the
army
had
fought
as
it
never had
fought
before.
There
had
not
been
an
hour,
day
or
night, in
all
that
time
when
there
had
not
been
firing
somewhere along
the
front.
Every
day
the
wagons
went
back
to
Fredericksburg
with
wounded
men,
and
every
day
other
wagons came
up
to
the
front
with
supplies
so
that
the
endless
fighting
might
continue.