This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [211]
The woods took fire, helpless wounded men were burned to death, and wood smoke mingled with the smoke from the rifles to create a choking, blinding gloom. Night came at last, and the wild tempo of battle became slower; yet some of the men who fought in the Wilderness felt that the fighting never actually stopped all night long, and there were nervous outbursts of firing at intervals all up and down the lines. Off to the rear, such batteries as had been able to get into position sent shells over at random all through the night, and there was a constant shuffling movement of troops as brigade and division commanders tried desperately to pull their fighting lines together.
The battle flamed up in full strength as soon as daylight came. Hancock, on the Union left, held a strong advantage. Not all of Lee’s army was up: Longstreet’s corps, back at last from its long tour of duty in Tennessee, was hurrying in from the west, but it had not arrived in time to get into the first day’s firing, and A. P. Hill’s corps, which held that part of the Confederate line, had been fearfully cut up and was badly outnumbered. Hancock sent his men in at dawn, the Confederates gave ground, and before long the Federal assaulting column had reached the edge of one the Wilderness’s rare clearings, a run-down farm owned by a widow named Tapp. Here was Lee himself, with a good part of the Confederate wagon train visible not far to the rear; if this clearing could be seized and held, Lee’s right would be broken once and for all and his army would be well on the way to destruction. The Federals paused to straighten their lines and then went pounding in, flags in front, everybody cheering at the top of his voice.
Final victory was not ten minutes away, and the surging blue lines came in toward the guns … and then ran into a shattering countercharge. The head of Longstreet’s corps had come on the scene at the last crucial moment, and its tough Texas brigade — the Grenadier Guard of the Confederacy, as one historian has called it — struck like a trip hammer. Lee himself was riding in with the men, swinging his hat, his usual calm broken for once by the hot excitement of battle; he would have led the countercharge if the Texans had not compelled him to go to the rear, out of harm’s way.3 The massed Confederate artillery blazed away at point-blank range, the Federal assault came to a standstill and then broke up in a tangle of disorganized fugitives, and the victory that had seemed so near dissolved and vanished while the pitch of battle rose to a new crescendo.
Then, abruptly, the pendulum swung the other way, and before long it was the Army of the Potomac that was in trouble, with disaster looking as imminent as triumph had looked just before.
Ordered troop movements were almost impossible in the Wilderness, but somehow Longstreet managed one. The left flank of Hancock’s corps was “in the air,” after the repulse of the attack on the Tapp farm clearing; the Confederates saw it, and Longstreet swung a part of his crops around and came in from the south with a crushing flank attack … and suddenly Hancock’s line went to pieces, masses of Union troops were going back to the rear, and the Confederates had seized what might be a decisive advantage.
But Hancock was just about as good a man for moments of crisis as Pap Thomas. A north-and-south road crossed the road along which the Confederates were advancing, a mile or so to the Union rear, and along this road Hancock had his men prepare a stout log breastwork. He rallied