This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [126]
The men at the right end of McCook’s line got it first, and it came with very little warning. They had been turned to at the moment of daylight, and while they were still blinking the sleep out of their eyes they made out an appalling mass of Confederates coming at them from the south — four solid columns, a brigade to a column, with immense reserves taking shape in the gray half-light beyond. The Confederates came quietly, slipping out of cedar thickets without noise, swinging into battle line and charging on the dead run, raising the Rebel yell only when they actually reached the Union line. In five minutes from the moment the Federals first saw their foes one of the most desperate battles of the war was in full blast.
McCook’s line was hopelessly swamped, hit from the flank and in front by seemingly limitless numbers, and it dissolved almost immediately. An Illinois soldier remembered, as characteristic of the scene, watching a Federal battery which had been firing canister and which started to limber up to withdraw to better ground; the Rebels, he said, swept it with one inconceivable volley which killed seventy-five horses and left the men unable to move a single gun — whereat the surviving artillerists abandoned their guns and fled for the rear. Men in reserve a mile behind McCook’s line hardly heard the crash of battle when fugitives from the front came scampering through their camps, spreading panic in their flight. An Indiana regiment remembered with grim amusement a captain who had been so afflicted with rheumatism that he could walk only with great difficulty, with the help of a cane. Caught up in the rout, he dropped the cane and went to the rear at a breakneck run, so that his men (whom he rapidly outdistanced) guffawed and pointed and cried: “My God, Look at the captain!”6
McCook’s corps was routed, all of Rosecrans’s right wing had vanished, and now everything was up to Pap Thomas, who had his two divisions posted on high ground near a railroad crossing and a four-acre plot of dark cedars known locally as “the round forest.” Thomas was imperturbable. He got reinforcements from Crittenden’s corps (which had long since abandoned any idea of crossing the river to hit the Confederate right), and his men held their ground, pouring out an enormous volume of fire that some of the men felt was louder and more ear-shattering than any other fire they heard in all the war. Charging Confederates were seen to pause in the cotton fields and stuff cotton in their ears to deaden the sound.7
While Thomas held, Rosecrans was riding about the field in a fury of activity. An officer who rode with him that day said that from dawn to dusk the general did not stay in one spot as long as half an hour.8His chief of staff, riding beside him, was beheaded by a cannon ball, blood spattering Old Rosy’s uniform; and with his riding and shouting Rosecrans got together a long line of guns at the right of Thomas’s position and formed a new line of infantry from regiments that had been driven out of McCook’s position earlier. By afternoon the Union army was drawn up in an arrowhead formation, right and left wings standing almost back to back; and there, finally, as the cold day waned, they made their stand and held on grimly, beating off the last of the Rebel attacks.
There was a council of war that midnight, Rosecrans and his principal commanders; and Thomas tilted his chair back and went sound asleep while the generals asked one another whether the army could possibly stay where it was. The word “retreat” came to Thomas through his sleep; Rosecrans was asking him if he could protect the rear while the army withdrew. Thomas opened his eyes