• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1798 0

where their opponents really were. Bragg sent troops in on what he thought was the Federal left, but Thomas had posted his corps farther north than the Confederates supposed, and as the southern advance came groping up through the dark woodland feeling for the exposed flank, he sent a division in and flanked this advance and broke it. More Confederates came up, and the victorious Federal division was flanked and routed in its turn. As the day wore on, this fight for the Union left became the battle, drawing in more and more elements from both armies. The Confederate General Hill (who observed that not even in the brave days of 1861 had he seen southern troops fight with more dash and bravery than they were displaying here) learned something new about the quality of cavalry in the western Confederacy. Hill had always been contemptuous of cavalry, considering it a non-fighting arm given to useless riding and sashaying about, and he had once said bitterly that most gray troopers “cannot see, and cannot be made to see, an armed Yankee.” But here by Chickamauga Creek he found a line of Rebel foot soldiers fighting desperately and with cruel effectiveness amid fallen trees and brush, and when he asked what infantry this was he was told: Bedford Forrest’s cavalry!5

As the pressure increased, more and more of the Army of the Cumberland was sent to help Thomas — a full division from Crittenden’s corps and another from McCook’s — and although the Confederates gained ground step by step they took a fearful mauling while they were doing it. When night came, every unit in the Federal army had been in action. They had given ground, but they still held a great crescent covering the Chattanooga road. Most of the fighting had been on Thomas’s front, and by dusk he had nearly two thirds of the Army of the Cumberland under his control.

The night was unutterably gloomy — a fever-ridden dream, with lost regiments and brigades moving in and out under the thick of the woodland shadows, hunting new positions as the sluggish mechanism of the high command tried to pull the troops back to a stronger line. By turns the forest was silent with midnight blackness and aflame with the flaring lights of the guns and confused with shattering sound; men felt ill at ease as they tramped along overgrown lanes in the wood, moving from blinding darkness into a dancing play of lights caused by “a display of fireworks that one does not care to see more than once in a lifetime.” Nothing had been settled; tomorrow would be worse than today had been; the Rebels were in full strength, and somewhere, somehow, in this vast area of woodland and lost pastures, the showdown would come with the dawn. An Indiana regiment, staggering with exhaustion, found itself by the edge of a stagnant pool, and although dead men and horses lay in the stained water the men broke ranks, ran to the weedy margin, and lay on their bellies to drink. One of the soldiers looked about him at the horrible landscape … star-shine faintly reflected in the iridescent water, bloated corpses all about, men gulping a drink from water they would not ordinarily have touched, leafy branches overhead swaying in a ghostly breeze from nowhere, fitful light in the sky as distant guns went off … and he thought that this place was exactly like what Poe had been trying to get at when he wrote about the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.6

Dawn came in foggy, and through the mist and smoke the sun looked red and ominous. Bragg still clung to his original idea: knock loose the Federal left and drive the Union army back into the blind valleys from which it cannot escape. Rosecrans had caught on, and he visited Thomas that night and told him to hang on at all costs; and when morning came and the Rebels’ attacks were renewed, all of the reserves of the Army of the Cumberland shifted over to meet the assault. The Confederates drove their charge home, and stolid old Pap Thomas — born and made for moments of defensive crisis like this — notified Rosecrans that he would need help. Rosecrans detached a division from his right,