Glory Road (51 page)

They passed a little cabin, and by the roadside in front of it there was a bent old woman—an "old crone," as one Soldier ungallantly called her—and she caught the feel of their unease, and as the ranks passed her she kept repeating soothingly: "Never mind, boys— they're nothing but
men."
A soldier who heard her wrote that these commonplace words "seemed almost sublime as she uttered them, standing unmoved by all the uproar of battle," and he said that they calmed the men so that they shook off their panic and were brave soldiers once more.
²³

Cemetery Ridge was secure at last, and yet still the day would not die. Far to the right a great crescent of fire and smoke was climbing the sides of Culp's Hill, encircling the lone Union brigade which held that point, and it seemed to observers in the rear that all of the wooded hill was ablaze with jagged bolts of chain lightning. Among Slocum's men who had been holding this hill were many New England lumbermen, and these men had spent the day with their axes making stout breastworks of solid logs. When Slocum took his men away to reinforce the line on Cemetery Ridge he had left General George Greene's brigade behind, and these men in their good breastworks were putting up a desperate fight. Four times the Rebels surged up the slope through the trees, a solid division of first-rate troops, and each time the fire over the logs drove them back. Yet part of the Union line, which ran through low ground southeast of the hill, was overrun, and as the darkness came down the Union position here was still insecure. It was as certain as anything could be that the Confederate attack would be renewed at dawn.

On the saddle between Culp's Hill and Cemetery Hill there was one final brush with disaster. While the fight raged on Culp's Hill the Union troops along this saddle saw a long Rebel line forming in the plain to the north, just east of Gettysburg, and the ranked batteries came to life and fired at it long-range in the fading fight. The line moved closer, dipping down into lower ground, wheeling a little toward the west, and then striking straight up the ravine where Hancock had spotted danger the evening before. On a little knoll at the head of this ravine stood the 5th Maine Battery, six brass smoothbores, and it fired so fast at the advancing line that gunners dropped exhausted in the hot dusk and had to be relieved by volunteers hastily called from the nearest infantry regiment. On up the ravine came the Rebels, and the rising ground shielded them from the waiting batteries on the east side of Cemetery Hill. It was dark now, and the Union line on the rim of the ravine was traced in fire as the infantry went into action.

Along part of the rim the sparkling lights suddenly went out. The Rebels were in the Yankee line, fighting hand to hand with Von Gilsa's brigade, and they shattered it and sent it flying. The Maine battery kept on firing until it had shot away the last of its ammunition, and beside it the 33rd Massachusetts and what was left of the Iron Brigade got the Rebels in flank at close range, and most of the charging line went to pieces and slid back downhill in the dark. But some of the Confederates—very tough men, these, from Louisiana —kept coming on, and they ran in among the guns on the eastern slope of Cemetery Hill, and once again there was savage fighting between gunners and infantry, cannoneers clubbing Rebels with anything they could lay their hands on, including fence rails. The Louisiana boys spiked a gun in Ricketts's battery, overran a New York battery beside it, and tried to drag some gunners off bodily as prisoners, and here once more the Federal grip on a key position was being broken.

Then over the top of Cemetery Hill a shadowy mass came rolling forward—Carroll's brigade from Hancock's corps, sent over on the run when Howard called for help. The daylight was entirely gone now, and in the darkness Carroll's men could see nothing except the points and splashes of flame in the overrun batteries, and they came running blindly down the slope, shouting breathlessly as they ran. There was a confused sound of pounding feet and colliding human bodies, grunts and yells and curses and a crackle of rifle fire—and the last of the Confederates were driven out, Carroll's brigade drew up along the lip of the ravine, and the line was secure once again.
²⁴

The day's fighting was over at last. The noise died down, and the smoke drifted away, and a huge brilliant moon came up, flooding all of the ghastly battlefield with a rich mellow light.

3. And It May Be Forever

Around the foot of Culp's Hill the men had an uneasy night. There was a hollow meadow where the ground was low and spongy, dark as a pit under the trees and streaky with thin smoky moonlight in the open, and where there should have been alert skirmish lines there were listless exhausted men who had lost their sense of direction and had no idea where their enemies might be. Near the foot of the hill there was a spring, and shadowy figures from both armies came up in the dark to fill canteens, lounging nearby for low-voiced casual conversation. Some of Slocum's men who had just returned from Cemetery Ridge came wandering in to get some of the water. One of them remarked that "the Rebs had caught Hail Columbia" over on the left that evening.

A Confederate heard and sprang up, yelling: "Hell-those are Yankees!" and it was as if his shout reminded the men that they were in the midst of a battle. Someone fired his musket, other shots were fired, and men struck blindly at each other in the dark, swinging clubbed muskets and firing with their fists. The uproar aroused the authorities, and after casualties had been given and taken, including on each side a moderate haul of disgusted prisoners, officers came in and pulled the rival forces apart and established orderly military lines across the swale with sentries in front.

Behind the sentries men tried to sleep, but they did not do very well at it. The sentries kept peering forward into the gloom, and when one of them heard footsteps or thought he saw movement he fired. Men on the other side would fire at the flash of the rifle, still other men would fire at them, and a fusillade would break out all along the line, with no one able to see what he was shooting at. The sleeping men would stumble to their feet, grab their weapons, and get ready to beat off an attack. Then quiet would slowly return, the men would go back to sleep, and fifteen minutes later it would happen all over again.
¹

Nobody in the army got much sleep that night. It was hot, and the fighting had gone on until after the last of the long summer twilight faded, and there was so much rearranging of battle lines that one soldier wrote: "The entire army seemed to be in motion the greater part of the night." There was a great scarcity of drinking water. (One man remembered kneeling by a hoofprint in a muddy cowpath and laboriously spooning into his tin cup enough dirty water to make some coffee.)
²
Ambulances and stretcher parties were busy all along the western slope of Cemetery Ridge, where there was more than enough work for them. Searching the hillside with them were many private soldiers who had been assigned to no stretcher details but who were simply looking for missing comrades. One of the things that held those thin regiments together was the strong sense of personal attachment the men had for each other. Most of the men in any given company came from the same town or county and knew each other from before the war, and a man who was left wounded on the field knew that his friends would come out to help him if they could. So men went across the torn thickets and meadows in the late moonlight without orders, hunting for comrades who had not come back.

Behind the lines there were the field hospitals, and every house and barn within reach had been filled with wounded men. Brigadier General Zook of the II Corps, shot through the belly with one of those wounds which medical knowledge of that day could not cure, was carried back to a small house on the Baltimore Pike. The house was full of wounded men, most of them screaming—the overworked doctors had not got to the place yet—and the floors were hideous and slippery with blood. An aide asked Zook if he should bring the chaplain to him, but Zook shook his head and said quietly that it was too late, and after a while he died.
³
Colonel Cross had died before midnight, gasping: "I did hope I would live to see peace and our country restored.
...
I think the boys will miss me." The boys would, those who were left—his old 5 th New Hampshire had lost 100 out of 150 men that day, and its surviving fragment was detached from the army and sent home to recruit as soon as the battle was over. One of the soldiers paid his tribute to the redheaded colonel in words which any troop commander in that war might have been proud of: "He taught us to aim in battle, and above all things he ignored and made us ignore the idea of retreating. [Cross used to boast that his regiment simply did not dare to retreat without orders.] Besides this he clothed us and fed us well, taught us to build good quarters, and camped us on good ground."
⁴
Cross was camping on far ground tonight, and many good men had gone to keep him company there.

Late at night Meade called a meeting of his corps commanders. They met in a stuffy little box of a room at headquarters, the principal generals of this army, and they quietly talked over the fighting they had had that day. The army's losses had been fearful—probably twenty thousand men in two days—and the immediate, temporary loss made it a good deal worse than that, since, as always, a good many thousand additional men had got blown loose from their regiments, had wandered off heaven knew where, and would not be back in line for days to come. Nobody seemed to think that the army ought to retreat, but nobody thought that it ought to attack, either. The moral dominance of Robert E. Lee over the Federal commanders was all but complete. In a crisis like this they were bound to come up with the one idea: hold on if we can, wait and see what Lee is going to do, and then try to stop him.

For some reason—perhaps because he was new in command and did not know many of his generals very well—Meade turned the meeting into a formal council of war, with specific propositions put up for a vote and with Dan Butterfield writing down the answers. The verdict was unanimous: the army should stay where it was and await attack. Meade nodded and said, "Such, then, is the decision," and the meeting broke up. As the generals left, Meade stopped John Gibbon, who commanded Hancock's 2nd Division along the crest of Cemetery Ridge near Ziegler's Grove.

"If Lee attacks tomorrow, it will be in your front," said Meade. Gibbon asked him why he thought so, adding something to the effect that if Lee did attack there he would be repulsed. Meade replied that Lee had attacked both flanks the day before and had failed, and if he attacked once more he would hit the center. Gibbon went off to an improvised bed in an ambulance, reflecting that this was an odd application of the law of probabilities.
⁸

When the first streaks of daylight came it was apparent that Lee was not yet through with the Federal right flank. His men had seized nearly half of the Culp's Hill line the evening before, and they held a half-open door leading directly to the army's unprotected rear. Slocum had all of his corps reassembled, and during the night he and General Hunt had been planting guns on some high ground by the Baltimore Pike. At dawn these guns opened a rapid bombardment at no more than eight hundred yards' range—Ewell's men were that close to the Federal rear—and after fifteen minutes the gunfire was stopped and Slocum's men prepared to charge. But the Rebels were ready first and they made their own attack before the Federals could take off, and there was bitter fighting all up and down the wooded hillside and across the hollow ground where the men had blundered into each other in the darkness. Try as they might—and they tried with uncommon desperation—the Confederates could not get to the top of the hill. The Federals here had the unusual experience of standing in good trenches where they could inflict much more loss than they received, and they laid a blistering fire on the slopes while the guns in the rear fired as fast as the men could load. Some of the fire fell short, and a few of the advanced Federal regiments were hit. Doughty Colonel Wooster of the 20th Connecticut saw one of his men lose both arms from the explosion of a Federal shell, and he angrily sent back word to the battery commander that if it happened again he would pull his men out of line, face them about, and charge his own guns. (Long afterward, at a veterans' reunion, a member of this regiment told his comrades: "He was just the man to keep his word, and you were just the boys to execute his threat.")
⁶

The lines on top of the hill were unshaken, but there was still a good deal of Rebel strength down in the lower ground to the southeast, and the high command wanted a counterattack. No one was sure how many Rebels were in there, and a division commander ordered skirmishers thrown forward to feel the line and get a little information. Somehow this order reached the front as a straight order for attack by the two leading regiments, 2nd Massachusetts and 27th Indiana. Colonel Charles R. Mudge, commanding the 2nd Massachusetts, blinked when the aide gave him the order, for he knew there were many more Rebels just ahead than any two regiments could handle.

"Are you sure that is the order?" he demanded.

The aide assured him that it was.

"Well," said Mudge, "it is murder, but that's the order." He raised his voice to a great parade-ground shout. "Up, men—over the works! Forward, double-quick!"

The two regiments put up a cheer and charged out into the little meadow. There were three Rebel brigades within range, concealed among trees and rocks, and they cut loose with what wintry-faced old Colonel Colgrove of the Indiana regiment later described as "one of the most destructive fires I have ever witnessed." The charge collapsed before it reached the trees and the survivors came back to a little stone wall, where they beat off a countercharge. Colonel Mudge was killed, his regiment lost four color-bearers, nearly 250 men were shot, and the only advantage was that the division commander now knew that the enemy held the far side of the swale in great strength.
⁷

One more valiant Confederate attack was made. Slocum had plenty of men now—two brigades from the fresh VI Corps had come in to help—and the charging Confederates never had a chance. Their left-flank elements came under a killing fire from Federals down in the flat, and the hilltop trenches were still invulnerable. In front of the 7th Ohio some seventy Confederates raised the white flag of surrender, and when the Federals ceased fire a doughty Rebel staff officer rode up, indignant, and tried to stop the surrender. The Federals killed him and took their beaten enemies into their lines. By ten-thirty the attack had been beaten off for good, and the Confederates had sullenly withdrawn to the lines they had occupied the day before, leaving thousands of dead and wounded behind them.
⁸