This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [123]
The Army of the Potomac having crossed the river — having committed itself to an advance at this spot — there was nothing whatever for it to do but try the impossible, and this Burnside ordered it to do. He put half of his army in the town itself and ranged the other half near the river on the open plain to the south, and on the morning of December 13 he called for a two-pronged attack. One column would issue from the town, swarm over the stone wall and the sunken road, and reach the heights there; the other would go out a mile or so to the south, hitting for the place where the wooded hills sloped down to meet the plain; and the man apparently believed that Lee’s army would be broken and driven in flight, with the two assault columns triumphantly joining hands on the far side of the ridge.
There was a fog that morning, and for several hours the plain was invisible while many divisions of Federal troops got into position, steeples and chimney tops of Fredericksburg just visible above the banked mist to the waiting Confederates on the hills. Then the sun burned away the fog, and all of a sudden the whole panorama was in the open — a breath-taking sight, one hundred thousand men fighting men ready for work, an army with banners uncoiling in the sunlight, gun barrels gleaming. Lee watched from the highest point on the ridge, and the sight took hold of him — this strong warrior who held himself under such iron control — so that he burst out with something like a cry of exultation: It is well (he said) that we know how terrible war really is, else we would grow too fond of it.… Then the moment of high drama passed (unforgettable moment, hanging suspended in the memories of that war forever after) and the fighting began.
The fighting was sheer murder. Coming out from the town, Burnside’s men crashed into the stone wall and were broken. Division after division moved up to the attack, marching out of the plain in faultless alignment, to be cut and broken and driven back by a storm of fire; for hour after hour they attacked, until all the plain was stained with the blue bodies that had been thrown on it, and not one armed Yankee ever reached even the foot of the hill. The plain was filled with smoke, shot through with unceasing flashes of fire, and the wild rolling crash of battle went on and on through all the afternoon and there seemed to be no end to it. Burnside was east of the river, encased in the ignorance that besets headquarters, sending over orders to carry on with the attack. His men obeyed every order, until whole divisions had been cut to pieces and the town and the sheltered banks by the river were clogged with men who had been knocked loose from their commands, but from first to last it was completely hopeless. Never, at any time, was there the remotest chance that this attack could succeed.
Downstream things were a little better, although not enough better to help very much. A column led by that grizzled, bad-tempered soldier named George Gordon Meade — a hawk-nosed Pennsylvanian, this man, with goggle eyes and a straggly gray beard and a great simple fidelity to his duty — got into a wooded swamp where the Confederate line was low and punched a small hole in the defenses. Stonewall Jackson was there, and just for a moment it seemed that he might be in trouble; but he brought up reinforcements in a vicious countercharge, the Federal support troops that might have helped Meade’s boys did not appear, and after a while the