Glory Road (55 page)

Details were at work all over the field, collecting the last of the helpless wounded and burying the dead. This last was an almost impossible job, since more than five thousand men had been killed in action. Federals who were buried by men of their own regiments were given little wooden markers, with the name and regimental identification carved with a jackknife or scrawled with pencil, but in hundreds and hundreds of cases no identification was possible and the men went into the ground as "unknown." Long wide trenches were dug and the men were laid in them side by side, and sometimes there was nothing more in the way of a gravestone than a little headboard at one end of the trench stating the number of bodies that were buried in it. In places the burial details just gave up and did not try to make graves, but simply shoveled earth over the bodies as they lay on the ground.
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There was an immense harvest of discarded weapons to be picked up. As a first step the men attached bayonets to the rifles which lay on the field and stuck them in the ground for collection later, and along Cemetery Ridge there were whole acres of these, "standing as thick as trees in the nursery." Ordnance officers who took charge of these weapons noted an oddity. Out of more than thirty-seven thousand muskets which had been left on the field, nearly a third were loaded with more than one cartridge. In the excitement of battle men forgot to fix percussion caps, sometimes even forgot to pull the trigger, and reloaded automatically without realizing that they had not fired. One man remarked briefly that "not all the forces attacking or attacked are fully conscious of what they are doing," and veterans were free to admit that in this as in all other battles there had been a great deal of wild, ineffective shooting. Whole regiments at times fired volleys with the line of muskets pointing vaguely toward the sky at an angle from the vertical of no more than forty-five degrees, and men were often s
een to fire with both eyes tightl
y shut. An Ohio soldier in the XII Corps reflected that in the Culp's Hill fighting on the morning of July 3 every man in the corps had fired 250 rounds, and he mused that "the mystery exists how any Rebels escaped."
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It was a rough war for wounded men. Immense field hospitals had been established in the low ground east of the Baltimore Pike, by Rock Creek, and the heavy rains of July 4 flooded this ground, and some of the helpless wounded men were drowned. An attempt was made to get some of the less seriously wounded over to the railroad, where they could be sent back to established hospitals in Baltimore, York, and Harrisburg, but Stuart's cavalry had broken the railroad and for a few days no trains were running. The wounded lay where they had been dropped, unsheltered on the bare ground, and the best that the army's medical inspector was able to report was that within a few days they were "made as comfortable as circumstances would permit," although it was admitted that things would have been better if the Medical Corps had been able to get straw for the men to lie on.
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The wounded men were not much given to complaining. A man in the Corn Exchange Regiment saw an amputee sitting outside a hospital tent, perky enough, considering that he had but one leg, playing cards with a wounded comrade. An orderly passed by hauling a hideous load of amputated arms and legs from the operating tent, and the one-legged man looked up with interest, laid down his cards, and asked the orderly to stop and let him inspect the haul. He wanted to take one more look at his lost leg, he said, and he would be able to recognize it because of a certain bunion. The orderly had no intention whatever of shuffling through his ghastly cargo, and he rebuked the soldier and told him that if he believed in the resurrection of the body as a good Christian should, he could wait for the Last Day and take a good look at his missing limb then. The cardplayer agreed that that made sense and went on with his game.
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Slowly, and with immense effort, this shot-to-pieces army pulled itself together and took to the road. The VI Corps was out in front, and it had suffered little in the
battle
and had rested from its prodigious twenty-four-hour hike, but Meade was still cautious and John Sedgwick was equally so, and the pursuit was not pressed. Pulling the army out of Gettysburg was like pulling a shod foot out of deep mud—something to be done slowly and carefully, with infinite pains— and the air of urgency was gone. Colonel Chamberlain of the battle-bruised 20th Maine looked back at his regiment's final bivouac and reported:
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"We returned to Little Round Top, where we buried our dead in the place where we had laid them during the fight, marking each grave by a headboard made of ammunition boxes, with each soldier's name cut upon it. We also buried fifty of the enemy's dead in front of our position of July 2. We then looked after our wounded, whom I had taken the responsibility of putting into the houses of citizens in the vicinity of Littie Round Top, and on the morning of the fifth took up our march on the Emmitsburg road."

The Emmitsburg road had been the last long mile for many men— for handsome John Reynolds riding to meet an unknown Southern sharpshooter in a farmer's barn, for the black-hatted Western regiments with their fife-and-drum corps playing them into
battle
, for many unheard-of men who stepped off it into unmarked graves on slanting rocky fields—and for a few days it had been a famous military highway, pumping a stream of troops off to the unfathomable chances of war. Now it would be a quiet country road again, with a farmer's load of hay or drove of cattle as its most exciting wayfarers, the mountain wall to the west dropping long shadows across it in the blue summer evenings, the dust and the clamor and the rumbling guns gone forever. It was over at last, this enormous battle with its smoke and its grimness and its unheard-of violence, and here again was a simple road leading from one country town to another, with a commonplace little name that would ring and shine in the books forever.

Meade was on the road with his troops, an infinitely weary man with dust on his uniform and his gray beard, feeling responsibility as a paralyzing weight. He had been one of the few men who could have lost the war irretrievably in one day, and he had managed to avoid the mistakes that would have lost it. He would continue to avoid mistakes, even if he had to miss opportunity. Lee's army was at bay on the northern bank of the Potomac, the river too high for fording and all bridges gone, and there might still be a chance to sweep down on him, to force him to battle again and to destroy him and his army and the star-crossed, legendary cause which they represented in one last, blazing, triumphant assault. But it was a chance and no more than that. Meade could see all of the things that might go wrong with it: could see the Potomac, moreover, as a border between two countries, so that the important thing just now might be to get the Southern army across that border back into the land where it belonged. Meade brought his army up to the river very slowly. Nevertheless, when he found that the Rebels were still there, well dug in on a great crescent of rising ground not many miles from the old Antietam battlefield, he put his own men into line of battle and took them carefully forward.

It was more than a week after Gettysburg by now, and some of the army's temporary losses had been made good. The army rolled forward on a front six miles wide, battle flags snapping in the wind, sunlight glittering from thousands of bright muskets, guns clanking along ready to go into battery on command. A soldier who marched with it was struck with the picture: "Throughout the miles of deep lines it presented a beautiful sight as with the swinging cadenced step of veterans they moved over cultivated fields of grain, over roads, orchards, and vineyards, on plain, valley, and hill. Obstructions were leveled by the pioneers in advance, and regardless of damage the army of blue swept over the ground with heavy tread, leaving in their rear destruction and desolation."
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The long blue lines halted and skirmishers were sent out in front to guard against Rebel surprises, and that night there was a heavy rain and the army entrenched, while Meade summoned his corps commanders to determine whether the army should attack or not. The corps commanders were decidedly against it, and the army waited for a day. On July 14 Meade put
it in motion again, having quietl
y concluded that he would try to do what his lieutenants had advised him not to do. But now it was too late. The Army of Northern Virginia had gone south of the river at last, leaving a small rear guard for a delaying action. Meade's cavalry and infantry picked up some Rebel wounded and stragglers, killed the General Pettigrew who had commanded the left wing of Pickett's great assault, and captured a gun or two. That was all. If the war was ever to be won, it would have to be won later—and somewhere else.

All of which was to the infinite displeasure of Abraham Lincoln.

The President had learned a great deal about the military art since those early amateurish days when he had decreed that all Union armies should advance willy-nilly on Washington's birthday and had juggled troops frantically back and forth from McClellan's army to the Shenandoah Valley in a vain effort to catch Stonewall Jackson by telegraphic order. It could even be argued now that he was as canny a strategist as the North possessed, and he had followed the army's slow progress down from Gettysburg in an agony of impatience. He still saw things as he had seen them three weeks earlier, when the governor of New Jersey had asked him to reinstate McClellan: Lee's advance into Pennsylvania had been an opportunity for the Federals, not for the Confederates; if the affair were handled right neither Lee nor his army should ever get back to Virginia; and all of this talk about "driving the enemy from our soil" struck him as deplorable blindness. Vicksburg had fallen and the back door to the Confederacy lay open; one more blow and it would all be over. This war could be won, once and forever, between Pennsylvania and the Potomac River, in this month of July 1863, if someone really set out to win it.

The flaming driving spirit of war, which could find no congenial home anywhere among the top commanders of the Army of the Potomac, had actually found its place at last in the mysterious heart of that melancholy, quizzical civilian, the President of the United States, the man who had confessed that he could not so much as kill a chicken for Sunday dinner without wincing at the sight of bloodshed. Lincoln wrote a harsh letter to Meade, crying in effect:
Why
couldn't you, just this once, go in and smash things and let me worry about picking up the pieces? He wrote it, and then characteristically he did not send it, letting it gather dust in a White House pigeonhole.

Halleck warned Meade that the President was dissatisfied, and Meade, worn almost to a frazzle, with a temper that was never stable, flared back that in that case, since he had done his level best, he would like to be relieved of his command. Halleck soothed him with a friendly, appreciative letter, and Lincoln in turn swallowed his vexation and decided to be grateful for what had been won.
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And the army crossed the river, marched south, and made a stab at trying to pen Lee's army up in the Shenandoah Valley. The HI Corps had the advance, and the corps was now commanded by bumbling, redfaced General W. H. French, who mishandled his troops so flagrantly that Hooker's and Kearny's veterans sardonically referred to their outfit as "the III Corps as we understand it."
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The chance was missed and the Confederates got away, and the Army of the Potomac went down to the Rapidan country and went into camp, to rest and refit before taking up the fight again.

So there would be a new campaign, with other campaigns to follow, and in due time the great gloomy Wilderness around Chancellorsville would know gunfire again, and the wild tumult of battle, and the screams of wounded men trapped in burning thickets. It would be the hard fate of this army to fight dreadful battles without glory and without triumph, using itself up so that the victory might be won by other armies on other fields. The army would be ready for it, but it would be a different army henceforth. The ranks were thinner and there was a new name on the regimental flags, and the men were wiser than they had been before. They were beginning to realize that while a great thing had been done they had really done it themselves.
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Meade was "old Four-Eyes," a general who had won his battle chiefly because his men were incomparably good soldiers. They had fought at Gettysburg with the highest pitch of inspiration, but the inspiration had come from within themselves and had not been fired by anyone at the top, and the staff officers who had felt obliged to hearten the men by spreading the McClellan rumor had simply shown that they themselves did not know what the men were really like. This army was a military instrument at last, and it could be used to the last full measure of its own inexpressible devotion, but from now on it would display enthusiasm for no generals.

A few days after Gettysburg, Meade issued a general order congratulating his troops on their victory, and the order was read in all the regiments at evening parade. The men were very matter-of-fact as they listened. In one regiment the colonel waved his hat and called for three cheers for General Meade, but the cheers were not forthcoming—not, as one of the men explained, because the men disliked Meade, but simply because they did not feel like cheering any more. These soldiers, he pointed out, "with their lights and experiences, could not see the wisdom or the occasion for any such manifestation of enthusiasm"; the army had matured, "its business sense increased with age," and hereafter it would wait and see before it tossed its caps in the air.
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