Glory Road (52 page)

As the fighting around Culp's Hill ended, an uneasy quiet came down on the great battlefield. It ceased briefly when the old row over that barn in front of Hays's division broke out again, with Hancock's and A. P. Hill's gunners suddenly running to their pieces and exchanging salvos in an immense meaningless cannonade. The barn took fire at last, its flames burning thin and insubstantial in the hot midday sunlight. The quarreling skirmishers fell back, and the cannonade died down as quickly as it had begun. It had happened almost by reflex action, as if the armies were so edgy that anything could touch off a fight, and the silence that followed was uneasy and insecure. Somehow, invisible but sensed by everyone, a slow fuse was burning toward one final, supreme explosion. The battie was following its own course now, and perhaps nobody controlled it. These two armies had come together, a gigantic thunderhead was stacked up higher than anything the war had known before, and it was full of a terrible, shattering tension that sooner or later would have to discharge itself. The soldiers held their places and waited for it in silence.

Whatever was coming, it was going to hit Cemetery Ridge when it came. From private to commanding general, everyone took that for granted. The soldiers cowered behind low stone walls and insubstantial earth-and-rail breastworks, the heat of the sun heavy on their shoulders. In front of Ziegler's Grove one regiment which still carried the old-style smoothbore muskets emptied its cartridge boxes on the stone wall in front, for easier access in reloading, and most of the men tore apart their buck-and-ball cartridges and made up new ones containing a dozen or more buckshot apiece.
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General Hunt went along the ridge, making sure that the guns were ready and that caisson and limber chests were full. Off to the left, where the ridge sagged, McGilvery had thirty-nine guns in line, and he had his men building a little earthen embankment in front of the guns for protection.

Not far away, up in the front line, was a brigade of nine-month men from Vermont. They had enlisted in the preceding fall and had gone down to Washington green as grass. A diarist in one regiment wrote of their train ride across New Jersey that "such a night of suffering and misery is far beyond the power of any pen to portray," because they had to ride in unheated cars. In Washington they had manned the fortifications all winter and spring, and they had not been any too happy about it. Such veterans as they met showed lack of respect for their status as soldiers, and their historian noted moodily that "
we have been called, by some, nin
e-monthlings, hatched on two-hundred-dollar bounty eggs." Being Vermonters, they did not care very much what other people said about them, but they did want to fight, and they were pleased when, near the end of June, they had been pulled out of the forts and sent up to join the Army of the Potomac.
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Now for the first time they were in the presence of the enemy, even though the enemy's infantry was invisible under the trees on Seminary Ridge, and they showed a certain nervousness as they waited.

The enemy's artillery was far from invisible. It was very much in evidence, as a matter of fact. All morning there had been a ceaseless, ominous activity, with more and more Confederate batteries coming up into one prodigious line that began at the peach orchard and ran north along the Emmitsburg road and just west of it—scores and scores of guns, more of them than the Federals had ever seen in one row, bleak and silent in the bright light, their muzzles staring blankly toward the center of Cemetery Ridge. Farther north the Confederates had still more guns glinting out of the shade on Seminary Ridge, and off to the northwest on Oak Hill a few long-range pieces were placed in order to bear on Ziegler's Grove and the cemetery.

Meade was busy in his little headquarters house on the far slope of Cemetery Ridge. There were many things to see to, and there was much coming and going of the staff. There were occasional interruptions too. Somehow a civilian got in to see Meade that morning, a man who lived on the outskirts of town, coming in angrily to protest that the Federal troops were using his house for a hospital, were burying dead soldiers in his garden, and were strewing amputated arms and legs all over his lawn. He wanted damages, and he demanded that Meade give him a paper which he could use as a claim on the government. Short-tempered Meade blew up at him, told him that if this battle were lost he would have no government to apply to and no property that was worth anything, and hustled him out of there with the warning that if he heard any more from him he would give him a musket and put him in the ranks to fight.
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Twelve o'clock and after, and John Gibbon thought about Meade and went to see him. He found the general looking haggard and asked him to come over to division headquarters and have some lunch-Gibbon's mess staff had picked up an old rooster somewhere and the bird had just been cooked. Meade demurred, saying that he was needed where he was, but Gibbon told him that he must keep up his strength and that the paper work could wait, and Meade finally gave in. With Hancock and some staff officers the generals sat down by an ambulance near the crest of the ridge and ate the chicken. (Rather a tough old bird, as Gibbon remembered it.) Meade finished early and went back to headquarters, and the rest of the group sat there and idled. Hancock called an aide and began dictating an order regarding the supply of beef for his corps.

One o'clock, and the day was hotter than ever, and there was still that great fragile quiet upon the broad shallow valley between the opposing ridges, with the endless row of Confederate cannon ranked there in the open, not a sound or a sign of movement. Then at last there was a quick bright flash of fight, and a white puffball of smoke floated up from a gun down near the peach orchard and hung, slowly turning and expanding, in the windless air, and the dull clang of the discharge echoed over the hollow. Silence for a few seconds, then another flash and smoke puff and echoing report from the same battery. There was a quick ripple of movement all along the line of Confederate guns as hundreds of gunners sprang to their feet and ran to their places. Then every gun in the line was fired in one titanic, rolling crash—the loudest noise, probably, that had ever been heard on the American continent up to that moment—and a hurricane of exploding shell came sweeping over Cemetery Ridge and the air was all smoke and stabbing flame and unendurable noise and deadly flying iron.

For just a moment Hancock tried to finish his dictation. The gesture was impossible, and it was not solely because nobody could hear what he was saying. The surrounding circle of couriers, orderlies, horse holders, and aides swirled away in what Hancock's chief of staff described as "a scene of confusion such as is seldom seen even on a field of battle." Men and horses were blown to bits where they stood. Some of the horses broke away and galloped off riderless in a frenzy of terror. The ambulance which held the luncheon equipment bounded wildly over the rocks when the team took to its heels after the driver fell from his seat, killed by a shell fragment. Officers were running for their horses, shouting at the top of their voices, and Gibbon, who could see neither his horse nor his orderly, ran up the ridge toward the battle line.
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From end to end of the ridge Federal gunners were scrambling to their feet to open fire in reply.

One hundred and thirty Rebel guns were smiting the Yankee line, and it was like nothing the oldest soldier had ever imagined before. Men who thought that at Antietam and Fredericksburg they had seen and heard the worst that a massed cannonade could do confessed that this went beyond the bounds of their experience. Dazed Federal gunners, firing the eighty-odd guns on the ridge in feverish haste, found that exploding Rebel shell overhead and all around them made such a stupendous racket that the sound of their own guns was muffled, as if the guns were being fired a great way off.

One of General Hays's soldiers, whose brigade had to shift its position slightly just then, wrote afterward: "How that short march was made I don't know. The air was all murderous iron; it seemed as if there couldn't be room for any soldier upright and in motion." Farther to the left, a veteran in the 1st Minnesota got the same impression, declaring that "it seemed that nothing four feet from the ground could live." Infantry lying flat behind walls and barricades was nearly suffocated by the choking clouds of smoke. One man recalled that the men were very quiet. Usually, in a cannonade, the infantry would make wisecracks, and when shell flew overhead the men would offer derisive advice to the Rebel gunners: "Shorten your fuses" . . . "Depress your guns." But this was like no previous bombardment, and the men were silent, hugging the ground and saying nothing.
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The artillery was taking a frightful pounding. Caissons and limber chests were exploding, sending huge fountains of black smoke high in the air. Gun wheels were broken, men and horses were killed, and the dead and wounded were torn apart afresh by shell that skimmed low over the earth. Vicious fragments of broken rock, as dangerous as actual shell fragments, whirred through the air when the projectiles hit the ground. Ziegler's Grove seemed to be filled with flying fence rails, limbs of trees, and splinters from broken gun carriages and limbers. Through it all Colonel Richard Coulter, commanding blinded General Paul's brigade, was walking along holding his limp left arm in his right hand and asking, bewildered: "Who in hell would suppose a sharpshooter could hit a crazy bone at that distance?"

General Hunt somehow made his way along the line, ordering the gunners to save their ammunition even if they had to cease firing altogether. An infantry attack, he was sure, would follow this bombardment, and he wanted to have shell enough to break it up before it reached the line. Off to the left, in McGilvery's fine of guns, his order was obeyed, but on the II Corps front Hancock countermanded it, feeling that his infantry would stand the punishment better if its own artillery kept on firing. So the cannoneers kept to their work, firing smoothly and without fuss, battery commanders standing amid the turmoil calling: "Number One, fire! . . . Number Two, fire!" as methodically as if they were firing parade-ground salutes.

All along the line there was what General Gibbon called "the most infernal pandemonium it has ever been my fortune to look upon." In the entire valley there was nothing to be seen but a dense coiling smoke bank, glowing and sparkling wickedly with the unceasing flashing of the Rebel guns. On Cemetery Ridge the smoke hung a couple of feet off the ground, so that only the legs of the busy gunners were visible. The cannonade was taking a horrible toll of the horses, and as he watched the poor beasts Gibbon was struck by the stolid, almost apathetic way in which they endured their ordeal, standing motionless in their places even while those beside them were kicking in their death agonies. Going over to a certain little clump of trees near the center of his line, Gibbon met the officer who commanded there, Brigadier General Alexander Webb, who was sitting on the ground smoking his pipe, as if the whole battle were no concern of his, and it occurred to Gibbon suddenly that men behaved under fire very much as horses did.
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Oddly enough, the extreme front line was the safest place on Cemetery Ridge. The Confederates were making just one mistake in this shattering bombardment: uniformly, they were firing just a little too high. Along the II Corps front the infantry suffered comparatively little from the shelling. Gibbon went far out in front of his firing line, trying in vain to see what the Confederates might be doing behind their flaming line of guns, and he found that he could walk erect there in almost complete safety. The farther back one went, the greater was the danger, and beyond the crest, over on the eastern slope of the ridge, it was worst of all. Most of the shell just cleared the crest and curved down to strike or explode in the rear, out of sight of the gunners who had done the firing.

As a result the whole rear-guard population—orderlies, clerks, cooks, servants, musicians, ambulance drivers, and just plain stragglers—went streaming back along the Baltimore Pike as fast as they could run, scourged out of what had seemed like a safely protected hillside by the worst shelling they ever saw. A soldier who saw them go wrote with satisfaction that "it seemed as if half of the army was running away, but it was only the noncombatants," and a regiment acting as train guard a mile or so down the road speedily rounded up five hundred fugitives to turn over to the provost guard.
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It was impossible to take wounded men back from the ridge through this zone of fire, and caisson drivers who had to take fresh ammunition forward needed to be fantastically brave or reckless.

Most dangerous spot on the whole slope may have been the field immediately around Meade's headquarters. A newspaper correspondent there wrote that from two to six shells were exploding around the little cottage every second, and he counted sixteen dead horses lying mangled by the fence, grotesque in death with their halters still tied to the top rail. An ambulance went careening by, one horse galloping madly on three legs, a solid shot having removed the fourth. One shell knocked away the front steps of the cottage, another broke one of the two pillars by the door, another went through the low garret, still another smashed the second pillar. Meade came to the doorway to look things over, and a shot smashed through the doorjamb, missing him by inches. He got his staff out in the yard, figuring that flying splinters made the inside of the little house more dangerous than the outside.