Books: The Man in Gray
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Thomas Dixon >> The Man in Gray
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"No more tears now, my sweetheart."
"I'll try."
"We may be here for weeks."
"There'll be another fight soon?"
"I think not."
"For a month?"
"Not for a long time."
"Thank God!"
A far-off look stole into his eyes.
"It will be a good one though when it comes, I reckon."
"There can be no _good_ one--if my boy's in it."
"Well, I'll be in it!"
"Yes. I know."
She kissed him and turned back into the house, with the old fear
gripping her heart.
CHAPTER XL
The early months of the war were but skirmishes. The real work of
killing and maiming the flower of the race had not begun.
The defeat had given the sad-eyed President unlimited power to draw
on the resources of the nation for men and money. His call for half
a million soldiers met with instant response. The fighting spirit of
twenty-two million Northern people had been roused. They felt the
disgrace of Bull Run and determined to wipe it out in blood.
Three Northern armies were hurled on the South in a well-planned,
concerted movement to take Richmond. McDowell marched straight down to
Fredericksburg with forty thousand. Fermont, with Milroy, Banks and
Shields, was sweeping through the Shenandoah Valley. McClellan, with
his grand army of one hundred and twenty thousand men, had moved up
the Peninsula in resistless force until he lay on the banks of the
Chickahominy within sight of the spires of Richmond.
To meet these three armies aggregating a quarter of a million men, the
South could marshall barely seventy thousand. Jackson was despatched
with eighteen thousand to baffle the armies of McDowell, Fremont,
Milroy, Shields and Banks in the Valley and prevent their union with
McClellan.
The war really began on Sunday, the second of June, 1862, when Robert
E. Lee was sent to the front to take command of the combined army of
seventy thousand men of the South.
The new commander with consummate genius planned his attack and flung
his gray lines on McClellan with savage power. The two armies fought in
dense thickets often less than fifty yards apart. Their muskets flashed
sheets of yellow flame. The sound of ripping canvas, the fire of small
arms in volleys, could no longer be distinguished. The sullen roar was
endless, deafening, appalling. Over the tops of oak, pine, beech, ash
and tangled undergrowth came the flaming thunder of two great armies
equally fearless, the flower of American manhood in their front ranks,
daring, scorning death, fighting hand to hand, man to man.
The people in the churches of Richmond as they prayed could hear the
awful roar. They turned their startled faces toward the battle. It rang
above the sob of organ and the chant of choir.
The hosts in blue and gray charged again and again through the tangle
of mud and muck and blood and smoke and death. Bayonet rang on bayonet.
They fought hand to hand, as naked savages once fought with bare hands.
The roar died slowly with the shadows of the night, until only the crack
of a rifle here and there broke the stillness.
And then above the low moans of the wounded and dying came the distant
notes of the church bells in Richmond calling men and women again to the
house of God.
There was no shout of triumph--no cheering hosts--only the low moan of
death and the sharp cry of a boy in pain. The men in blue could have
moved in and bivouaced on the ground they had lost. The men in gray had
no strength left.
The dead and the dying were everywhere. The wounded were crawling
through the mud and brush, like stricken animals; some with their legs
broken; some with arms dangling by a thread; some with hideous holes
torn in their faces.
The front was lighted with the unclouded splendor of a full Southern
moon. Down every dim aisle of the woods they lay in awful, dark heaps.
In the fields they lay with faces buried in the dirt or eyes staring up
at the stars, twisted, torn, mangled. The blue and the gray lay side
by side in death, as they had fought in life. The pride and glory of a
mighty race of freemen.
The shadows of the details moved in the moonlight. They were opening the
first of those long, deep trenches. They were careful in these early
days of war. They turned each face downward as they packed them in. The
grave diggers could not then throw the wet dirt into their eyes and
mouths. Aching hearts in far-off homes couldn't see; but these boys
still had hearts within their breasts.
The fog-rimmed lanterns flickered over the fields peering into the faces
on the ground.
The ambulance corps did its best at the new trade. It was utterly
inadequate on either side. It's always so in war. The work of war is to
maim, to murder--not to heal or save.
The long line of creaking wagons began to move into Richmond over the
mud-cut roads. Every hospital was filled. The empty wagons rolled back
in haste over the cobble stones and out on the muddy roads to the front
again.
At the hospital doors the women stood in huddled groups--wives,
sweethearts, mothers, sisters, praying, hoping, fearing, shivering. Far
away in the field hospitals, the young doctors with bare, bloody arms
were busy with saw and knife. Boys who had faced death in battle without
a tremor stood waiting their turn trembling, crying, cursing. They could
see the piles of legs and arms rising higher as the doctors hurled
them from the quivering bodies. They stretched out their hands in the
darkness to feel the touch of loved ones. They must face this horror
alone, and then battle through life, maimed wrecks. They peered through
the shadows under the trees where the dead were piled and envied them
their sleep.
The armies paused next day to gird their loins for the crucial test.
Jackson was still in the Shenandoah Valley holding three armies at bay,
defeating them in detail. His swift marches had so paralyzed his enemies
that McDowell's forty thousand men lay at Fredericksburg unable to move.
Lee summoned Stuart.
When the conference ended the young Cavalry Commander threw himself into
the saddle and started Northward with a song. Determined to learn the
strength of McClellan's right wing and confuse his opponent, Lee had
sent Stuart on the most daring adventure in the history of cavalry
warfare. Stuart had told him that he could ride around McClellan's whole
army, cut his communications and strike terror in his rear.
With twelve hundred picked horsemen, fighting, singing, dare-devil
riders, Stuart slipped from Lee's lines and started toward
Fredericksburg.
On the second day he surprised and captured the Federal pickets without
a shot. He dreaded a meeting with the Cavalry. His father-in-law,
General Cooke, was in command of a brigade of blue riders. He thought
with a moment's pang of the little wife at home praying that they should
never meet. Let her pray. God would help her. He couldn't let such a
thing happen.
He suddenly confronted a squadron of Federal Cavalry. With a yell his
troops charged and cleared the field. They must ride now with swifter
hoofbeat than ever. The news would spread and avengers would be on their
heels. They were now far in the rear of McClellan's grand army. They had
felt out his right wing and knew to a mile where its lines ended.
They dashed toward the York River Railroad which supplied the Northern
army, surprised the company holding Tunstall's Station, took them
prisoners, cut the wires and tore up the tracks.
On his turn toward Richmond when he reached the Chickahominy River, its
waters were swollen and he couldn't cross. He built a bridge out of the
timbers of a barn, took his last horse over and destroyed it, as the
shout of a division of Federal Cavalry was heard in the distance.
With twelve hundred men he had made a raid which added a new rule to
cavalry tactics. He had ridden around a great army, covering ninety
miles in fifty-six hours with the loss of but one man. He had
established the position of the enemy, destroyed enormous quantities
of war material, captured a hundred and sixty-five prisoners and two
hundred horses. He had struck terror to the hearts of a sturdy foe, and
thrilled the South with new courage.
Jackson's victorious little army joined Lee at Gaines' Mill on the
twenty-seventh of June, and on the following day McClellan was in full
retreat.
On the first of July it ended at Malvern Hill on the banks of the James.
Of the one hundred and ten thousand men who marched in battle line on
Richmond, eighty-six thousand only reached the shelter of his gunboats.
The first great battle of the war had raged from the first of June until
the first of July. Fifty thousand brave boys were killed or mangled on
the red fields of death. Washington was in gloom. The Grand Army of more
than two hundred thousand had gone down in defeat. It was incredible.
Richmond had been saved. The glory of Lee, Jackson and Stuart filled the
South with a new radiance. But the celebration of victory was in minor
key. Every home was in mourning.
Six days later Stuart once more clasped his wife to his heart. It had
been a month since he had seen her. The thunder of guns she had heard
without pause. She knew that both her father and her lover were
somewhere in the roaring hell below the city. Stuart never told her how
close they had come to a charge and counter charge at the battle of
Gaines' Mill.
The old, tremulous question she couldn't keep back:
"You didn't see my daddy, did you, dear?"
Stuart shouted in derision at the idea.
"Of course not, honey girl. It's not written in the book of life. Forget
the silly old fear."
"And they didn't even scratch my soldier man?"
"Never a scratch!"
She kissed him again.
"You know I've a little woman praying for me every day. I lead a charmed
life!"
She gazed at his handsome, bronzed face.
"I believe you do, dearest!"
CHAPTER XLI
McClellan fell before the genius of Lee, and Pope was put in his place.
They met at Second Manassas. The new general ended his brief campaign in
a disaster so complete, so appalling that it struck terror to the heart
of the Nation. Lee had crushed him with an ease so amazing that Lincoln
was compelled to recall McClellan to supreme command. When the toll of
the Blood Feud was again reckoned twenty-five thousand more of our brave
boys lay dead or wounded beneath the blazing sun of the South.
The Confederate Government now believed its army invincible, led by Lee.
In spite of poor equipment, with the men half clad and half barefooted,
Lee was ordered to invade Maryland. It was a political move, undertaken
without the approval of the Commander.
As the gray lines swept Northward to cross the Potomac into Maryland,
Lincoln was jubilant. To Hay, his young secretary, he whispered:
"We've got them now, boy. We've got them! The war must speedily end. Lee
can never get into Maryland with fifty thousand effective men. The river
will be behind them. I'll have McClellan on him with a hundred thousand
well-shod, well-fed, well-armed soldiers and the finest equipment of
artillery that ever thundered into battle.
"McClellan's on his mettle. His army will fight like tigers to show their
faith in him. They were all against me when I removed him. Now they'll
show me something. Mark my words."
Luck was with McClellan. By an accident Lee's plan of campaign had
fallen into his hands. Yet it was too late to forestall his first master
stroke. In the face of a hostile army of twice his numbers Lee divided
his forces, threw Jackson's corps on Harper's Ferry, captured the town,
Arsenal and Rifle Works, twelve thousand five hundred prisoners and vast
stores of war material. Among the booty taken were new blue uniforms
with which Jackson promptly clothed his men.
Lee met McClellan at Antietam and waited for Jackson to arrive from
Harper's Ferry.
When McClellan's artillery opened in the gray dawn, more than sixteen
thousand of Lee's footsore men had fallen along the line of march unable
to reach the battlefield. The Union Commander was massing eighty-seven
thousand men behind his flaming batteries. Lee could count on but
thirty-seven thousand. He gave McClellan battle with his little army
hemmed in on one side by Antietam Creek and on the other by the sweeping
Potomac.
The President in Washington received the news of the positions of the
armies and their chances of success with exultation. As the sun rose
a glowing dull red ball of fire breaking through the smoke of the
artillery, Hooker's division swept into action and drove the first line
of Lee's men into the woods. Here they rallied and began to mow down the
charging masses with deadly aim. For two hours the sullen fight raged in
the woods without yielding an inch on either side. Hooker fell wounded.
He called for aid. Mansfield answered and fell dead as he deployed his
men. Sedgwick's Corps charged and were caught in a trap between two
Confederate brigades concealed and massed to meet them. Sedgwick was
wounded and his command barely saved from annihilation.
While this struggle raged on the Union right, the center saw a bloodier
tragedy. French and Richardson charged the Confederate position. A
sunken road crossed the field over which they marched. For four tragic
hours the men in gray held this sunken road until it was piled with
their bodies. When the final charge of massed blue took it, they found
to their amazement that but three hundred living men had been holding it
for an hour against the assaults of five thousand. So perfect was the
faith of those gray soldiers in Robert E. Lee they died as if it were
the order of the day. It was simply fate. Their Commander could make no
mistake.
Burnsides swung his reinforced division around the woods and pushed up
the heights against Sharpsburg to cut Lee's only line of retreat. He
forced the thin, gray lines before him through the streets of the
village. On its outer edge he suddenly confronted a mass of men clad in
their own blue uniform.
How had these men gotten here?
He was not long in doubt. The blue line suddenly flashed a red wave
squarely in their faces. It was Jackson's Corps from Harper's Ferry in
their new uniforms. The shock threw the Union men into confusion, a
desperate charge drove them out of Sharpsburg, and Lee's army camped on
the field with the dead.
For fourteen hours five hundred guns and a hundred thousand muskets
thundered and hissed their message of blood. When night fell more than
twenty thousand of our noblest men lay dead and wounded on the field.
Lee skillfully withdrew his army across the Potomac. Safe in Virginia he
rallied his shattered forces while he sent Stuart once more in a daring
ride around McClellan's army.
Again McClellan fell before the genius of Lee. Burnsides was put in his
place.
They met at Fredericksburg. Burnsides, the courtly, polished gentleman,
crossed the Rappahannock River and charged the hills on which Lee's
grim, gray men had entrenched. His magnificent army marched into a death
trap. Lee's batteries had been trained to rake the field from three
directions.
Five times the Union hosts charged these crescent hills and five times
they were rolled back in waves of blood. A fierce freezing wind sprang
up from the North. The desperate Union Commander thought still to turn
defeat into victory and ordered the sixth charge.
The men in blue pulled down their caps and charged once more into the
jaws of death. The lines as they advanced snatched up the frozen bodies
of their comrades, carried them to the front, stacked the corpses into
long piles for bulwarks, dropped low and fought behind them. In vain.
The gray hills roared and blazed, roared and blazed with increasing
fury. Darkness came at last and drew a mantle of mercy over the scene.
The men in blue planted the frozen bodies of their dead along the outer
line as dummy sentinels and crept through the shadows across the river
shattered, broken, crushed. They left their wounded. Through the long
hours of the freezing night the pitiful cries came to the boys in gray
on the wings of the fierce North winds. They crawled out into the
darkness here and there and held a canteen to the lips of a dying foe.
At dawn they looked and saw the piles of the slain wrapped in white
shrouds of snow. The shivering, ragged, gray figures, thinly clad, swept
down the hill, stripped the dead and shook the frost from the warm
clothes.
Burnsides fell before the genius of Lee and Hooker was put in his place.
Fighting Joe Hooker they called him. At Chancellorsville a few months
later he led his reorganized army across the same river and threw it
on Lee with supreme confidence in the results. He led an army of one
hundred and thirty thousand men in seven grand divisions backed by four
hundred and forty-eight great guns.
Lee, still on the hills behind Fredericksburg, had sixty-two thousand
men and one hundred and seventy guns. He had sent Longstreet's corps
into Tennessee.
Hooker threw the flower of his army across the river seven miles above
Fredericksburg to flank Lee and strike him from the rear while the
remainder of his army crossed in front and between the two he would
crush the Confederate army as an eggshell.
But the unexpected happened. Lee was not only a stark fighter. He was a
supreme master of the art of war. He understood Hooker's move from the
moment it began. His gray army had already slipped out of his trenches
and were feeling their way through the tangled vines and underbrush with
sure, ominous tread. In this wilderness Hooker's four hundred guns would
be as useless as his own hundred and seventy. It would be a hand-to-hand
fight in the tangled brush. The gray veteran was a dead shot and he was
creeping through his own native woods. On this beautiful May morning,
Lee, Jackson, and Stuart met in conference before the battle opened.
The plan was chosen. Lee would open the battle and hold Hooker at close
range. Jackson would "retreat." Out of sight, he would turn, march
swiftly ten miles around their right wing and smash it before sundown.
At five o'clock in the afternoon while Lee held Hooker's front,
Jackson's corps crept into position in Hooker's rear. The shrill note of
a bugle rang from the woods and the yelling gray lines of death swept
down on their unsuspecting foe. Without support the shattered right wing
was crushed, crumpled and rolled back in confusion.
At eight o'clock Jackson, pressing forward in the twilight, was mortally
wounded by his own men and Stuart took his command. The gay, young
cavalier placed himself at the head of Jackson's corps and charged
Hooker's disorganized army. Waving his black plumed hat above his
handsome, bearded face, he chanted with boyish gaiety an improvised
battle song:
"Old Joe Hooker,
Won't you come out o' the Wilderness?"
His men swept the field and as Hooker's army retreated Lee rode to
the front to congratulate Stuart. At sight of his magnificent figure
wreathed in smoke his soldiers went wild. Above the roar of battle rang
their cheers:
"Lee! Lee! Lee!"
From line to line, division to division, the word leaped until the
wounded and the dying joined its chorus.
The picket lines were so close that night in the woods they could talk
to one another. The Southerners were chaffing the Yanks over their many
defeats, when a Yankee voice called through the night his defense of the
war to date:
"Ah, Johnnie, shut up--you make me tired. You're not such fighters as ye
think ye are. Swap generals with us and we'll come over and lick hell
out of you!"
There was silence for a while and then a Confederate chuckled to his
mate:
"I'm damned if they mightn't, too!"
The morning dawned at last after the battle and they began to bury the
dead and care for the wounded. Their agonies had been horrible. Some
had fallen on Friday, thousands on Saturday. It was now Monday. Through
miles of dark, tangled woods in the pouring rain they still lay groaning
and dying.
And over all the wings of buzzards hovered.
The keen eyes of the vultures had watched them fall, poised high as the
battle raged. The woods had been swept again and again by fire. Many of
the bodies were black and charred. Some of the wounded had been burned
to death. Their twisted bodies and distorted features told the story.
The sickening odor of roasted human flesh yet filled the air.
It was late at night on the day after, before the wounded had all been
moved. The surgeons with sleeves rolled high, their arms red, their
shirts soaked, bent over their task through every hour of the black
night until legs and arms were piled in heaps ten feet high beside each
operating table.
Thirty thousand magnificent men had been killed and mangled.
The report from Chancellorsville drifted slowly and ominously northward.
The White House was still. The dead were walking beside the lonely, tall
figure who paced the floor in dumb anguish, pausing now and then at the
window to look toward the hills of Virginia.
Lee's fame now filled the world and the North shivered at the sound of
it.
Volunteering had ceased. But the cannon were still calling for fodder.
The draft was applied. And when it was resisted in fierce riots, the
soldiers trained their guns on their own people. The draft wheel was
turned by bayonets and the ranks of the army filled with fresh young
bodies to be mangled.
Hooker fell before Lee's genius and Meade took his place.
The Confederate Government, flushed with its costly victories, once more
sought a political sensation by the invasion of the North. Lee marched
his army of veterans into Pennsylvania.
At Gettysburg he met Meade.
The first day the Confederates won. They drove the blue army back
through the streets of the village and their gallant General, John F.
Reynolds, was killed.
The second day was one of frightful slaughter. The Union army at its
close had lost twenty thousand men, the Confederate fifteen thousand.
The moon rose and flooded the rocky field of blood and death with silent
glory. From every shadow and from every open space through the hot
breath of the night came the moans of thousands and high above their
chorus rang the cries for water.
No succor could be given. The Confederates were massing their artillery
on Seminary Ridge. The Union legions were burrowing and planting new
batteries.
Fifteen thousand helpless, wounded men lay on the field through the long
hours of the night.
At ten o'clock a wounded man began to sing one of the old hymns of Zion
whose words had come down the ages wet with tears and winged with human
hopes. In five minutes ten thousand voices, from blue and gray, had
joined. Some of them quivered with agony. Some of them trembled with a
dying breath. For two hours the hills echoed with the unearthly music.
At a council of war Longstreet begged Lee to withdraw from Gettysburg
and pick more favorable ground. Reinforced by the arrival of Pickett's
division of fifteen thousand fresh men and Stuart's Cavalry, he decided
to renew the battle at dawn.
The guns opened at the crack of day. For seven hours the waves of blood
ebbed and flowed.
At noon there was a lull.
At one o'clock a puff of white smoke flashed from Seminary Ridge. The
signal of the men in gray had pealed its death call. Along two miles on
this crest they had planted a hundred and fifty guns. Suddenly two miles
of flame burst from the hills in a single fiery wreath. The Federal guns
answered until the heavens were a hell of bursting, screaming, roaring
shells.
At three o'clock the storm died away and the smoke lifted.
Pickett's men were deploying in the plain to charge the heights of
Cemetery Ridge. Fifteen thousand heroic men were forming their line to
rush a hill on whose crest lay seventy-five thousand entrenched soldiers
backed by four hundred guns.
Pickett's bands played as on parade. The gray ranks dressed on their
colors. And then across the plain, with banners flying, they swept and
climbed the hill. The ranks closed as men fell in wide gaps. Not a man
faltered. They fell and lay when they fell. Those who stood moved on and
on. A handful reached the Union lines on the heights. Armistead with a
hundred men broke through, lifted his red battle flag and fell mortally
wounded. The gray wave in sprays of blood ebbed down the hill, and the
battle ended. Meade had lost twenty-three thousand men and seventeen
generals. Lee had lost twenty thousand men and fourteen generals.
The swollen Potomac was behind Lee and his defeated army. So sure was
Stanton of the end that he declared to the President:
"If a single regiment of Lee's army ever gets back into Virginia in
an organized condition it will prove that I am totally unfit to be
Secretary of War."
The impossible happened.
Lee got back into Virginia with every regiment marching to quick step
and undaunted spirit. He crossed the swollen Potomac, his army in
fighting trim, every gun intact, carrying thousands of fat Pennsylvania
cattle and four thousand prisoners of war taken on the bloody hills of
Gettysburg.
The rejoicing in Washington was brief. Meade fell before the genius of
Lee, and Grant, the stark fighter of the West, took his place.
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