A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [196]
Map.13 Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862
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“General George W. Getty, my division commander, and myself,” wrote Herbert’s brigade commander, Colonel Rush Hawkins, “were on the roof of the Slaughter house, a high residence at the lower end of the city.… From this prominent position our repeated repulses and the terrible destruction of the Union troops had been witnessed.” At three o’clock, the two officers were ordered to send in Getty’s division. “The order was obeyed but not until I had tried to induce General Getty against its obedience and general waste of life.”31 The instructions became muddled, however, as couriers failed to return and anyone with a horse was commandeered to deliver messages. Ebenezer Wells happened to be at headquarters and was beckoned over by a general. Someone handed him field glasses, and a distant spot was pointed out on the plain. He was so shocked by what he saw that he almost stumbled. “I was ordered to go and deliver my verbal despatch … and if shot it was to be my dying words for it to be carried on,” he recalled.32 Wells was one of the few who returned unscathed, but the fate of his message is unknown. George Herbert’s regiment misinterpreted their orders to mean they were to advance to a nearby battery rather than toward Marye’s Heights. As it turned out, this saved their lives—the only instance of Burnside’s inability to communicate with his officers proving to be fortuitous. The moral, declared a young British Army officer who studied the battle twenty years later, was “Let your instructions be explicit, plainly-worded and capable of no double construction.”33
Lawley and Vizetelly watched, awestruck, as six Federal advances were mowed down by a combination of Longstreet’s artillery and the rebel troops behind the stone wall. “From the point where I stood, with General Lee and Longstreet,” wrote Vizetelly, “I could see the grape, shell, and canister from the guns of the Washington artillery mow great avenues in the masses of Federal troops rushing to the assault, while the infantry, posted behind a breastwork just under the battery, decimated the nearest columns of the enemy.”34 Looking through his field glasses at the carnage below, Lee commented, “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”35 Francis Dawson was stationed just out of range to hear Lee’s remark. In any case, he was almost spellbound by the battle: “Never in my life do I expect to see such a magnificent sight again,” he wrote to his mother; “the whole scene of conflict was before our eyes, and at our feet, the glorious sun shining as tho’ bloodshed and slaughter were unknown on the beautiful earth; the screaming of shells and the singing of the rifle bullets adding a fearful accompaniment to the continued booming of the heavy guns.” He saw the Federal army hurl itself at the Confederate guns. “It was thrilling to watch the long line advance, note the gaps in the array, as the wounded fell or else staggered to the rear, and see the gallant remnant melt away like snow before our withering fire,” he wrote. The Irish Brigade’s distinctive green and gold flag made its charge one of the easiest to follow from start to terrible finish. George Hart, an English volunteer in the 69th, wrote bitterly, “It was not a fight, it was a massacre.”36
Ill.29 The bombardment of Fredericksburg, Virginia, by the Federals, December 1862, by Frank Vizetelly.
The guns began to silence as night drew in. At 9:00 P.M. Colonel Hawkins interrupted the generals as they were planning the following day’s attack. “I listened until I was thoroughly irritated,” he wrote. None of them seemed to have grasped the day’s defeat. Exasperated,