This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [208]
In the western armies a company that had re-enlisted to the extent of three fourths of its numbers (this was the percentage required if a regiment was to keep its old number and its organizational status) would parade through the camps, fife and drum corps playing and everybody cheering; the example was contagious and led others to sign up. In many cases men seem to have been moved by nothing more complex than the fact that they were adjusted to army life and liked the comradeship which the regiment offered. An Iowa soldier who re-enlisted and then went home on his thirty-day furlough found himself writing after one week back on the farm: “I almost wish myself back in the army; everything seems to be so lonesome here. There is nothing going on that is new.”7
Whatever their reason, the men did re-enlist, and in numbers adequate to carry on the war. It was noteworthy that re-enlistments were hardest to get in the Army of the Potomac; when Meade added up the results at the end of March he found that he had twenty-six thousand re-enlistments, which meant that at least half of the men whose time was expiring had refused to stay with the army.8 Nevertheless, even this figure was encouraging. It was insurance; the army would not dissolve just when Grant was starting to use it.
The big drive would begin on May 4; East and West, the armies would move forward then. Along the Rapidan, the Army of the Potomac waited, tense but hopeful; and in northern Georgia, Sherman’s boys got ready for the long march and told one another that this campaign ought to end things. The night before the Westerners moved, the camps were all ablaze with lights. Candles were government issue in those days, and it occurred to the soldiers that since the candles would be of little use in the weeks just ahead they might as well burn them up all at once. So every soldier in camp lit his candle and put it on his tent pole, or wedged it in a bayonet socket and jabbed the bayonet in the ground, or simply held it aloft and waved it; and for miles across the darkened countryside the glimmer and glitter of these little fires twinkled through the spring night, and the men looked at the strange spectacle they were making and set up a cheer that went from end to end of the army.9
3. The Great Decision
The story of the Civil War is really the story of a great many young man who got into uniform by a process they never quite understood and who hoped, every individual one of them, that they would somehow live through it and get back home to nurse the great memories of old soldiers. The Army of the Potomac was like every other army. It had its own character and its own involved sets of hopes and dreams and memories, and it crossed the Rapidan River on a sunny day in May 1864 believing that this was the last bright morning and that everything that had gone before would presently be redeemed and justified by the victory that was about to be won.
The trouble was that the Army of the Potomac did not quite understand the kind of war that was being fought now. It had had various commanders in its three years of desperate life. There had been men whom it loved, men who embodied the irrational image which each soldier had once had of his own blue-clad person, men like McClellan and Hooker; and there had been men whom it came to despise, such as well-intentioned Burnside and blustering John Pope; also, there was grizzled, honest, uninspired George Meade, whom it had learned to tolerate. All of these commanders had believed