This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [124]
The Yankees did not care to. Burnside, to be sure, remained stubborn; he even had some wild idea of going into Fredericksburg, rallying the shattered formations, and personally leading a forlorn-hope attack on the deadly stone wall, but he was talked out of it by his subordinates. For a night and a day his beaten army clung to the ground, looking dumbly up at the armed heights; then, on a night of wind and sleeting rain, the army gave up, pulled its ponderous length back across the bridges, and the attack was given up for good. The great battle of Fredericksburg was over. In front of the stone wall lay hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies gleaming nakedly in the cold December light; during the hours of darkness needy Confederates had come out from their lines to take the warm uniforms which these Yankees would never need.
The Yankees who had not been shot and who went into dispirited camp on the far side of the river had uniforms enough but needed other things; chiefly hope, good management, reason to believe that their terrible fighting was taking place to some good purpose. The high command was quarreling with itself, Burnside and his subordinates bitterly at odds over the way the wasted battle had gone. The administration, already depressed enough by an unhappy congressional election and still carrying the commitment to make the Emancipation Proclamation good by the first of the new year, was aware that Burnside would not do for this army, and it was not aware just who could properly be put in his place. Handsome Joe Hooker, hard-drinking and hard-fighting, looked like the ablest soldier among Burnside’s lieutenants, but he was talking too much just now. He would say presently that what the country needed was a dictator; in saying it, he may well have had himself in mind, and word of what he had said would get back to Lincoln. If the President’s anxious gaze turned away from Virginia that December and fixed itself on Tennessee it is not to be wondered at.
In Tennessee, Rosecrans at last had his army on the move. December was getting on and the roads were not good, but the army was in tolerable spirits; it was facing south again, the long frantic race back to the Ohio River was forgotten, and this new general — “Old Rosy” to all ranks — seemed to be a promising sort. He showed himself about the camps, his huge red nose a beacon as he poked his face into mess shacks or inspected waiting lines of infantry. At reviews he liked to rein in his horse and give his men soldierly advice: “Boys, when you drill, drill like thunder.… It’s not the number of bullets you shoot but the accuracy of aim that kills men in battle.… Never turn your backs to the foe; cowards are sure to get shot.… When you meet the enemy, fire low.”
He liked to stroll through regimental camps in the evenings, and if he saw a light burning in a tent after “taps” he was likely to whack the canvas with the flat of his sword. At such times the men in the tent were fond of shouting profane abuse, and when the general’s crimson face came through the tent flaps they would offer profuse apologies, swearing that they had thought him a rowdy wagon driver who was in the habit of annoying them, and insisting that they really had not heard the lights-out call.
Old Rosy was able to take this sort of thing in good part. His officers found him convivial and approachable, fond of bantering with his staff members. He seemed to have studied his profession attentively, and in conversation around the mess table he could display a vast theoretical knowledge of war. When he discussed some immediate problem he was apt to cite parallel cases out of the textbooks. It was noted that in battle he became restless, was likely to talk so fast that