A Stillness at Appomattox (65 page)

One
officer
insisted:
"Never
were
the
men
more
hopeful
or in
better
spirits,
more
willing
for
marching,
more
ready
to fight,
than
at
this
time,"
and
he
said
they
had
"an
idea
that we
were
still
advancing,
that
there
was
a
plan
that
would
be carried
out
successfully."
Another
officer
wrote
that
"the
men cannot
help
feeling
that
the
worst
is
over,
now
that
our
great leader
has
pushed
the
enemy
almost
to
the
wall,"
and
a
new recruit
who
joined
up
just
after
Spotsylvania
wrote
home
that the
veterans
with
whom
he
talked
"place
unbounded
faith
in General
Grant."
A
man
in
the
IX
Corps,
recalling
that
his regiment
lost
its
flag
in
the
fighting
east
of
the
Bloody
Angle, told
how
the
men
talked
about
the
loss
and
agreed
finally that
it
was
cause
for
pride
rather
than
for
shame,
since
it proved
that
they
had
been
in
a
very
hot
place;
and
he
added stoutly,
"Be
it
considered
a
disgrace
by
whom
it
may,
that does
not
make
it
one."
²

Looking
back
on
the
campaign,
men
remembered
a
series of
pictures
which,
as
one
soldier
said,
were
'like
the
fragments
of
a
half-forgotten
dream,
distinct
in
themselves
but without
any
definite
connection
as
to
time
or
place."
He sketched
in
a
few
of
these
fragments:
"I
see
a
long
column of
weary
soldiers,
winding
along
over
hill
and
valley,
in
the night,
gliding
past
a
stately
mansion,
with
beautiful
grounds and
shaded
walks,
and
everywhere
the
freshness
and
fragrance
of
spring.
Again
I
see
a
line
of
battle
stretching
out across
an
open
field,
the
men
resting
lazily
in
the
ranks.
A little
to
the
left,
near
some
shade
trees,
stands
a
battery
ready for
action,
the
guns
pointing
toward
some
unseen
enemy
beyond.
It
is
noon,
and
the
sunlight
is
pouring
down
upon
the scene,
bright
and
clear."
⁸

If
they
were
close
to
Richmond
at
last,
and
feeling
good about
it,
the
Rebels
were
always
in
front
of
them,
ready
for business.
Furthermore,
the
field
of
maneuver
was
growing very
narrow.
The
army
could
no
longer
swing
back
and
forth in
wide
arcs,
going
twenty
miles
to
one
side
in
order
to
get

five
miles
forward.
This
was
coffin
corner,
and
there
was
little room
to
sidestep.
Any
road
that
was
taken
now
had
to
lead
to Richmond,
and
all
of
the
roads
to
Richmond
were
blocked
by pugnacious
Southerners,
who
had
trenches
and
gun
pits
wherever
there
was
high
ground.

Right
now
the
Confederates
were
dug
in
behind
the
headwaters
of
Totopotomoy
Creek,
an
insignificant
watercourse whose
turns
and
swampy
banks
offered
good
defensive ground.
The
chance
of
breaking
this
line
looked
no
better than
in
the
Wilderness
or
at
Spotsylvania.
It
was
better
to
go around
the
line
than
to
try
to
go
through
it,
and
to
go
around it
would
be
harder
here
than
it
had
been
before.

Down
below
the
Federal
left,
within
a
mile
or
so
of
the Chickahominy,
there
was
another
of
those
seedy
taverns
that dotted
the
Virginia
landscape—a
quiet
place
at
a
sleepy
crossroads,
the
name
of
it
Cold
Harbor,
perched
unobtrusively
on a
highway
that
wandered
up
from
the
Federal
supply
base, back
at
White
House
on
the
Pamunkey,
and
went
on
to
cross the
Chickahominy
and
go
to
Richmond.

This
war
went
by
a
queer
script
of
its
own,
and
it
had
a
way of
putting
all
of
its
weight
down
on
some
utterly
unimportant little
spot
that
no
one
had
ever
heard
of
before—Shiloh Church,
or
Chancellorsville,
or
some
such—and
because
armies contended
for
them,
those
place
names
became
great
and
terrible.
Now
there
was
Cold
Harbor,
a
wide
spot
on
a
lonely dusty
road,
set
in
a
broad
plain
that
was
furrowed
by
tedious ravines
and
went
rolling
off
to
a
chain
of
low
hills
on
the
south and
west.

The
weather
was
hot
and
the
landscape
looked
barren,
and a
Federal
officer
who
visited
the
place
wondered
how
it
had ever
got
its
name.
There
was
no
harbor
within
miles,
and
the place
was
far
from
cold—was,
in
fact,
as
he
reflected,
very much
like
a
bake
oven—and
the
roads
were
ankle-deep
in powdery
dust
that
hung
in
low,
choking
clouds
whenever
a marching
column
went
by,
and
it
seemed
that
no
man
in
his senses
would
ever
want
to
come
here.
Years
afterward,
a
veteran
remarked
that
of
all
of
the
battlefields
of
the
war,
Cold