This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [239]
The autumn day ended at last, and the battle ended with it, the shattered Confederate brigades drawing back in defeat. Their losses had been six thousand men killed or wounded, five general officers killed — among them the Pat Cleburne who had mentioned the unmentionable in that officers’ meeting the previous winter — and six more generals wounded, one mortally. Nothing whatever had been gained. Late that night Schofield’s bridge was finished and his army marched off to Nashville, eighteen miles away, saving all of its guns and wagons.
Federal losses had been much smaller, but they had not exactly been trifling; there had been more than two thousand casualties, and the survivors — making their second consecutive all-night march, with a wearing battle sandwiched in between — were at the point of complete exhaustion. Whenever the column came to a momentary halt, men would drop in their tracks and sleep; some men even slept while they marched, stumbling along blindly, helpless automatons. Some of these said afterward that in this marching sleep nightmares came to them, with the sights and sounds of the day’s battle moving through their drugged minds.
They revived when they got to Nashville. The Federal army had held this town for the better part of three years and had surrounded it with powerful fortifications. General Thomas was here with the rest of the army, there were hot coffee and food and good camping ground where tired men could sleep, and there would obviously be no more forced marches in retreat. When Hood’s army came up and ranged itself on the hills facing the Union works, the Federals looked out at them and reflected that it was a fine thing to “occupy the favorable side of the fortifications.”6
Hood came to a standstill here before Nashville. He had already shot his bolt, although he did not seem to realize it. He had started his invasion with approximately forty thousand men, of whom something better than thirty thousand were infantry, he had seen his army badly mauled at Franklin, Thomas outnumbered him by a substantial margin, and there was no longer anything of much consequence that he could do. Lacking a better course, he dug trenches facing the strong Yankee line and put up a hollow pretense of besieging the place.
It worried Pap Thomas very little, but it very seriously worried General Grant. Sherman once said admiringly that Grant never cared in the least what the opposing army might be doing off out of his sight, but Grant was worrying now; for once in his life he had the jitters. From his headquarters hut at Petersburg it looked as if Hood might be making a wild, desperate thrust that could wholly upset all of the Federal war plans. Grant had Lee penned, and Sherman was disemboweling the Confederacy with torch and sword — and now, at the eleventh hour, this Confederate army was on the loose; it might get away from Thomas and go rampaging all the way up through Kentucky, and it was important to destroy it at the earliest moment. And Grant,