A Stillness at Appomattox (60 page)

No
night's
rest
was
ever
unbroken.
There
would
always
be picket
firing,
or
some
unexplained
call
to
arms
at
midnight, and
if
nothing
else
happened
there
was
a
constant
trickle
of tired
laggards
going
through
the
camp
waking
up
those
who slept
to
ask
where
their
own
regiments
might
be.
¹¹

If
infantry
and
cavalry
happened
to
bivouac
together, dawn
would
reveal
an
oddity.
Cavalry
was
always
awakened by
bugle
calls,
but
the
morning
summons
to
infantry
was
the long
roll
beaten
on
the
drums.
The
cavalrymen
would
sleep soundly
through
the
beating
of
the
drums
but
would
rouse instantly
when
their
own
bugles
sounded,
while
it
was
just the
other
way
around
with
infantry—bugles
would
not
awaken them,
but
they
got
up
at
once
when
the
drums
began
to
beat. Sometimes
a
wakeful
battery
would
fire
a
few
salvos
in
the night,
and
get
answering
salvos
from
an
unseen
Rebel
battery,
and
the
troops
would
remain
asleep.
But
the
same
men would
come
out
of
their
blankets
at
once,
fumble
for
their muskets,
and
fall
into
line
if
a
few
musket
shots
were
fired by
their
own
pickets.
¹²

Yet
if
everybody
was
tired,
morale
was
good.
The
country the
army
was
in
now
had
never
been
touched
by
war
and
it looked
clean
and
open
and
prosperous,
with
houses
that
had neither
been
pillaged
nor
abandoned
and
fields
where
good crops
were
growing.
For
all
the
toll
taken
by
hard
marching, a
newspaper
correspondent
wrote
that
there
were
fewer
stragglers
and
less
grumbling
than
when
the
campaign
first
began, and
a
New
York
officer
agreed
that
"the
men
never
marched with
so
little
complaining
or
so
little
straggling."
If
the
white inhabitants
were
all
stanchly
secessionist,
the
plantation
colored
folk
were
strongly
inclined
in
the
other
direction,
and men's
spirits
rose
when
a
teen-age
colored
girl
stood
by
a fence
corner
waving
her
sunbonnet
and
calling
out
gailys

‘I’
se
right
glad
to
see
you,
gent’
men,
I’
se
right
glad
to
see you."

There
were
abundant
fence
rails
for
campfires,
and
army authorities
made
no
more
than
a
pretense
of
enforcing
the standing
rule
against
destroying
fences.
In
one
regiment
it was
remembered
that
when
the
column
halted
for
the
night, with
the
men
eagerly
spotting
the
wealth
of
rails
in
the
nearest
field,
the
colonel,
before
they
broke
ranks,
would
sternly call
out:
"Now,
boys,
I
don't
want
to
see
one
of
you
touch
a rail."
He
would
then
face
in
the
opposite
direction,
keeping his
gaze
fixed
on
the
distant
hills,
resolutely
seeing
nothing while
his
men
took
the
fences
completely
to
pieces.
¹³

Now
and
then
the
private
soldier
would
encounter
the aristocratic
spirit
of
the
Old
Dominion
in
all
of
its
pristine freshness.
As
the
army
got
down
to
the
North
Anna
River,
a regiment
was
sent
across
at
Jericho
Ford,,
and
hostile
Confederates
were
believed
to
be
very
near,
so
the
regiment
formed line
of
battle
in
a
well-tilled
garden
just
behind
a
pleasant country
house.
As
the
men
fell
into
place
in
this
garden,
examining
muskets
and
cartridges
to
see
if
they
had
been
dampened
by
the
ford,
an
elderly
woman
came
out
of
the
house to
lodge
a
dignified
protest:

"Gentlemen,
why
have
you
come?
Mr.
Lee
is
not
here. You
are
spoiling
my
garden."

The
men
chuckled
and
paid
little
attention
until
the
colonel
finally
ordered:
"Boys,
keep
between
the
rows."
¹⁴

The
inevitable
foraging
on
defenseless
civilians
seems
to have
been
kept
to
a
minimum.
There
were
dairy
herds
in
this area,
however,
and
the
men
did
want
fresh
milk,
and
they occasionally
tried
to
get
it
for
themselves.
(The
average
soldier
in
those
days
knew
how
to
milk
a
cow.)
This
did
not always
work
out
very
well.
A
Massachusetts
soldier
explained why:
"To
hold
a
dipper
with
one
hand
and
milk
with
the other,
particularly
when
three
other
hands
were
endeavoring to
do
the
same
thing
on
the
same
cow,
and
she
unwilling
to stand
still,
required
a
degree
of
skill
that
few
of
us
possessed."
¹⁵

The
farmers'
worst
troubles
probably
came
because
both armies
had
by
now
acquired
the
habit
of
digging
trenches
the moment
they
halted.
Any
position
where
a
brigade
stopped might
easily
become
the
scene
of
a
fight,
and
the
great
virtues of
an
entrenched
position
had
by
now
become
visible
to everyone.
It
was
rarely
necessary
for
an
officer
to
tell
the men
to
entrench.
Usually
they
began
digging
even
before
they started
to
boil
their
coffee.