This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [210]
Beyond the river there was a vast stretch of dark, almost roadless second-growth timber, known locally as the Wilderness. Somewhere off beyond this forest was the Army of Northern Virginia, and the immediate task of the Army of the Potomac was to get through the forest, reach the open country beyond it, and engage the Confederates in a stand-up fight. The Wilderness itself was no place for a battle. Even the best of its roads were no better than enclosed lanes; its long stretches of forest were full of spiky little saplings and heavy underbrush, there were few clearings, and the whole country was crisscrossed with meaningless little streams that created unexpected ravines or dank fragments of bogland.
Yet it was precisely in the middle of the Wilderness that the great battle began. Lee had no intention of waiting for his enemies to get out in the open country to make their fight. He was outnumbered and outgunned, but here in the almost trackless forest these handicaps would not matter so much; and on the morning of May 5 he drove straight ahead, to find the Federals as quickly as he could and to attack them as soon as he found them. The left wing of his army collided with the right center of the Army of the Potomac a little after daybreak, and after a brief moment of skirmish-line firing the battle got under way.
Grant reacted with vigor. If the Confederates were here in the Wilderness, here he would fight them; orders for the advance were countermanded, and the great ungainly mass of the Federal army turned slowly about and went groping forward through the woodland twilight, men scrambling through almost impenetrable underbrush as they struggled to get out of marching columns into fighting lines. The Confederates were advancing along two parallel roads, the roads three or four miles apart, no place on either road visible from any spot on the other; two separate battles began as the Federals swarmed in to meet them — began, grew moment by moment, and boiled over at last into one enormous fight, with the harsh fog of powder smoke trapped under the trees and seeping out as if all the woodland were an immense boiling cauldron.
Artillery was of little use here; the guns could not be moved through the wood, and if they were moved they had no field of fire. Infantry lines broke into company and platoon units as they moved, sometimes reassembling when the undergrowth thinned, sometimes remaining broken and going forward without cohesion. Men came under heavy fire before they saw their enemies — in most places no one could see one hundred yards in any direction, and as the battle smoke thickened, visibility grew less and less. Often enough there was nothing but the sound of firing to tell men where the battle lines were, and as more and more brigades were thrown into action this sound became appalling in its weight, seeming to come from all directions at once.
It was one fight, and yet it was many separate fights, all carried on almost independently, the co-ordination that existed being little more than the instinctive responses of veteran fighting men. Opportunity and dire peril went hand in hand for each commander, and often enough they went unnoticed because almost nothing about this strange battle could actually be seen by anybody. At one stage the two halves of Lee’s army were separated, a wide gap between them, and the Army of Northern Virginia might have been destroyed if a strong Federal force could have gone through the gap. But the gap went undiscovered, and when its existence was sensed a Federal division that was sent up to take advantage of it lost its way in the dense forest, swung half around without intending to, and exposed its flank to waiting Confederates, who broke it and drove it off in retreat. On