Glory Road (54 page)

Gibbon was down with a bullet through his shoulder, Webb had been wounded, and Hancock was knocked off his horse by a bullet that went through his saddle and drove a tenpenny nail and bits of wood deep into his thigh. Except for one valiant staff officer, there was not a mounted man to be seen. Hunt was in the middle of the infantry, firing his revolver. On the open crest of the ridge men were volleying at the Confederates behind the wall and among the trees. From the left, regiments were running over to help, coming in through the smoke like a mob gone out of control.

These were Hall's men, and men from Harrow's brigade on the left—famous old regiments, 20th Massachusetts and 7th Michigan and "that shattered thunderbolt" (as an officer on Gibbon's staff called it), the remnant of the 1st Minnesota. They were not "moving by the right flank" or "changing front forward" or executing any other recognized tactical maneuver, and they were not obeying the commands of any officers, although their officers were in their midst, yelling hoarsely and gesturing madly with their swords. No formal tactical move was possible in that jammed smoky confusion, and no shouted command could be heard in the everlasting din. One soldier wrote afterward that the only order he remembered hearing, from first to last, was "Up, boys—they're coming!" right at the start.
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This was not a controlled movement at all. It was simply a crowd of armed men running over spontaneously to get into the middle of an enormous fight, Yankee soldiers swarming in to get at their enemies, all regimental formations lost, every man going in on his own.

Some of the men stopped and fired over the low earthen barricade toward the front where there were still Rebels in the open. Others jammed in toward the clump of trees, firing through gaps in the crowd ahead, sometimes hitting their own comrades. Off to the left the Vermonters were still out in front, facing north, tearing the Confederate flank to tatters, and from the right Hays's men and the guns in the grove were firing in obliquely. The heavy smoke went up toward the sky, so heavy that Lee over on Seminary Ridge could get nothing but an occasional glimpse of red battle flags adrift in the murk.

Back on the crest, facing the clump of trees, the line swayed as men worked up their nerve. The mounted staff officer was shouting, men were yelling to each other, and a color-bearer jumped up and ran forward, waving his flag. The staff was broken by a shot, and he grabbed the stump and held the ragged colors above his head, and by ones and twos and then all along the crest men sprang to their feet and followed him, firing as they ran. Armistead was stretched out on the ground now with a bullet in him, and the other gray-coats who had got in among the guns were down too, and the Federals came in on the Rebel mass among the little trees, and the smoke hid the hot afternoon sun.

Pickett's men were in a box now. On their left Pettigrew's division had evaporated, on the right they were dissolving under an unceasing flank fire, in front they were getting a head-on assault that was too heavy to take, and there was no support in sight. Longstreet had sent a brigade up to cover their right, but in the blinding fog the brigade had lost its direction and was heading straight for Mc-Gilvery's ranked cannon, which blasted it with deadly aim, and the Vermont regiments wheeled completely around and got the brigade in flank. It fell apart and its bits and pieces went tumbling back to

Seminary Ridge. And suddenly the tension was gone and the firing was dying down, and the Confederates by the clump of trees were going back to their own lines or dropping their muskets and raising their hands in surrender. Meade came riding up to the crest just now, and an officer met him and told him that Lee's charge had been crushed, and Meade raised his hand and cried "Thank God!" The last of the fugitives went back toward their starting point, Federal gunners following them with shell, and Gibbon's weary soldiers were sending a great mass of Rebel prisoners back to the rear. The fighting was over.

Hancock was on a stretcher, dictating a note to Meade. He believed that a quick counterattack now would take the Rebel army off balance and finish it, and he urged that the men be sent forward without delay. He added proudly: "I did not leave the field so long as a Rebel was to be seen upright." An aide came up to him and handed him a watch, a pair of spurs, and other trinkets. They came from Lewis Armistead, whom the aide had found dying there beside Cushing's last gun. Armistead had asked that these mementos of an old friendship be sent to Hancock, and he had gasped out some sort of farewell message.
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"Tell Hancock I have done him and my country a great injustice which I shall never cease to regret" was the way the aide had it; he may have dressed it up a good deal or, for that matter, he may have dreamed it all, and it does not matter much either way. Armistead had died, going beyond regrets forever, and as if he had been waiting for this last message, Hancock had the stretcher-bearers carry him off to the field hospital.

The smoke drifted away and the noise died down, and a soldier who looked out over the ground where the men had fought said that he looked upon "a square mile of Tophet."
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4. Valley of Dry Bones

One day they would make a park there, with neat lawns and smooth black roadways, and there would be marble statues and bronze plaques to tell the story in bloodless prose. Silent cannon would rest behind grassy embankments, their wheels bolted down to concrete foundations, their malevolence wholly gone, and here and there birds would nest in the muzzles. In the museums and tourist-bait trinket shops old bullets and broken buckles and twisted bayonets would repose under glass, with a rusty musket or so on the wall and little illustrated booklets lying on top of the counter. There would be neat brick and timber cabins on the hillsides, and people would sleep soundly in houses built where the armies had stormed and cried at each other, as if to prove that men killed in battle send forth no restless ghosts to plague comfortable civilians at night. The town and the woods and the ridges and hills would become a national shrine, filled with romantic memories which are in themselves a kind of forgetting, and visitors would stand by the clump of trees and look off to the west and see nothing but the rolling fields and the quiet groves and the great blue bank of the mountains.

But first there would have to be a great deal of tidying up.

The day after the battle began muggy and cloudy, and there was a tremendous rainstorm. (There always seemed to be a great rain after a hard battle in that war, and men believed that something in the firing of many guns brought rain clouds and jarred the moisture out of them.) The long line of Rebel cannon along the Emmitsburg road had been pulled back, and when Slocum and Howard sent scouting parties out to the north and east of town they found no Rebels except wounded men and a few stragglers. On Seminary Ridge the Confederates were still in evidence, and for a time Meade appears to have been uncertain whether the
battle
was really over.

But the Confederate Army had had enough. It had lost 25,000 men, artillery ammunition was nearly exhausted, supplies were low, and Lee was holding his line on Seminary Ridge merely to let his trains and his advance guard get a decent start on the long roads back to Virginia. A wagon train seventeen miles long, loaded with wounded men, crawled over the mountain road toward Chambersburg. It was a nightmarish procession of pain. A great many of the wounded men had received no medical attention whatever, the almost springless wagons rolled and jolted over the uneven road, and no halts were permitted for any reason. The cavalry officer in charge of the train said that he learned more on that trip about the horrors of war than he had learned in all of his battles.
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As the signs of a Confederate retreat multiplied, Meade worked the VI Corps forward to take up the pursuit, but he was in no hurry about it. If the Rebels wanted to go back to Virginia, it seemed like a good idea to wish them Godspeed and let them go.

Meade was able to see some things very clearly. He knew that the victory had been brutally hard on his army, and above all things he was determined not to do anything that might create any risks. A quick checkup after the battle showed him that he had no more than 51,000 men armed and equipped and present for duty. This total was approximately 38,000 below the number he had had just before the battle. Casualties had been about 23,000, so it was evident that the impact of battle had jarred fully 15,000 uninjured men loose from the ranks. They would be back later, but for the moment they were lost, and the army was not half as large as it had been when Hooker took it down to the Rappahannock fords two months earlier.
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The I Corps was hardly as big as an ordinary division, and the III Corps was not a great deal better off. (Both of these famous corps were mortally hurt, as it turned out; in the army reorganization of the following winter they were broken up and their survivors were transferred to other units.) The II Corps had lost more than a third of its men, and its best generals, Hancock and Gibbon, would be out for months. The XI Corps had suffered nearly as much and in addition had had another blow to its reputation and morale, with the rest of the army making caustic remarks about its wild flight through town, the astounding number of prisoners it had lost, and its inability to keep the Rebels out of the guns on Cemetery Hill on the evening of July 2. Some of the army's finest combat units had been all but destroyed —the Iron Brigade, the 5th New Hampshire, the 1st Minnesota, the 2nd Massachusetts, and the 16th Maine, among others—and artillery losses had been so severe that Hunt had to consolidate some of his best batteries. Three of the seven army corps were under temporary commanders.

Of all these things Meade was acutely aware. The old habit of caution was strong at army headquarters, and another heritage from the McClellan era was cropping out just now: Meade somehow had been persuaded that the Rebel army in this campaign was larger than his own. So he waited where he was, ignoring the clear signs that he was in the presence of a badly beaten enemy, and he moved his patrols forward very carefully.

The soldiers themselves had no doubt about how the battle had come out. On the afternoon of July 3 they had seen something they had never seen before—the principal attacking column of the Army of Northern Virginia running in desperate disordered fragments back to its lines after a smashing repulse—and some of the men on Cemetery Ridge had stood up exultantly and cried "Fredericksburg!" as they watched. As they went forward through the town and down to the Emmitsburg road they were dazed by the human wreckage they saw. Toward the left, where for a time nothing but artillery had beaten back the Rebel attack, they found bodies dreadfully broken and dismembered. An officer who went over that part of the ground wrote that on no other field had he seen such appalling numbers of dead. In places where the infantry fire had been especially intense the dead men lay in great rows, and in the twilight it seemed as if whole brigades had made their bivouac there and had gone to sleep. On the ground covered by Pickett's charge one officer wrote that "I saw men, horses, and material in some places piled up together, which is something seldom seen unless in pictures of battles, and the appearance of the field with these mounds of dead men and horses, and very many bodies lying in every position singly, was terrible, especially as the night lent a somber hue to everything the eye rested on."
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A fearful odor of decay lay over the field. A cavalry patrol went through Gettysburg to scout the Cashtown road to the west, and as it came out by the fields where dead bodies had been lying in the heat for four days the cavalrymen sickened and vomited as they rode. The country here was the ultimate abomination of desolation: "As far as the eye could reach on both sides of the Cashtown road you see blue-coated boys, swollen up to look as giants, quite black in the face, but nearly all on their backs, looking into the clear blue with open eyes, with their clothes torn open. It is strange that dying men tear their clothes in this manner. You see them lying in platoons of infantry with officers and arms exactly as they stood or ran—artillery men with caisson blown up and four horses, each in position, dead. You meet also limbs and fragments of men. The road is strewn with dead, whom the Rebels have half buried and whom the heavy rain has uncovered."
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Here and there by the road the cavalrymen met oddly embattled farmers, armed with pitchforks and flails, who had rounded up small batches of Rebel stragglers and wanted to turn them over to the authorities. These farmers, it appeared, were moved not so much by patriotic fervor as by old-fashioned rage. In their retreat the Confederates had left the roads and had marched across the fields, trampling down the ripening wheat and rye in great swaths, and if the farmers could not have justice, they at least wanted to see the destroyers locked up.

The town of Gettysburg looked as if some universal moving day had been interrupted by catastrophe. Streets were barricaded up to window levels with everything that would serve—wagons, rocking chairs, bureaus, stoves, fence rails, old lumber, and piles of rocks— and there were scars from cannon balls and bullets. In row houses facing Cemetery Hill the Rebel sharpshooters had found vantage points in second-floor rooms, and they had knocked out walls between houses to provide communication along their line. One civilian had been killed—a girl named Jennie Wade, shot down by a stray bullet while she baked bread in her kitchen. When she died she had in her pocket a picture of her fiance, Corporal Johnson Skelley of the 87th Pennsylvania, and she never knew that two weeks earlier Corporal Skelley had been mortally wounded in the fighting around Winchester, Virginia.
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