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By Root 1807 0

a Confederate flag, and when the Iowans prepared to shoot him their officers went along the line ordering them not to: he was too brave, something about his valiant posture made it indecent to take pot shots at him. Captain Totten’s regulars felt otherwise; an Irish gunnery sergeant swung a piece around, got the Rebel in his sights, pulled the lanyard, and blew the man all to fragments — and with an angry yell the Confederate line surged forward in a new assault. The Kansans came in to help repel this attack, smoke settled close to the ground, everything was a wild clangor of beaten metal and shouting men, and a remarkable number of the northern volunteers got shot. For untaught soldiers it was rough, and men fought blindly, not knowing what they were doing; an officer came on one man who was loading his musket feverishly, firing straight up into the air, reloading and firing again, an automaton acting entirely by blind instinct.8

Lyon came along the line, bleeding from two wounds, his shaggy whiskers clotted with blood. He was profoundly depressed: a third of his men were down, Sigel’s attack had gone completely astray, no help was in sight, all the Rebels in Missouri seemed to be coming in on him. When Totten offered him a pull at the brandy he waved him aside, and to an aide he muttered: “Major, I fear the day is lost.” The aide said something hopeful, and Lyon galloped off to bring up a few companies he had been holding in reserve. He got them up to the front, and some of the untried young hotheads shouted that if he would lead them they would charge with their bayonets and chase the Rebels all the way to Arkansas. Lyon was the man for that. He swung his hat, wreaths of smoke floating about him, blood on his hair and blood on his uniform, and he wheeled to lead them — and then a stray bullet whacked into his heart and killed him. The charge died before it got started, and it developed that there was no surviving Union officer above the rank of major.9

The principal major turned out to be one Samuel D. Sturgis. He looked things over, concluded that the little army had about fought itself out, and took it away in retreat with the regulars to bring up the rear. Eventually the army arrived at the railhead at Rolla. There the 1st Iowa found a consignment of new uniforms, together with orders to head back home and get paid off. The boys took a bath in the nearest pond, threw away their filthy old uniforms, put on the new, and set off for Iowa, glad they had been in that one battle. At Burlington twenty thousand people were waiting to welcome them home, and they paraded down the streets singing a little tune called “The Happy Land of Canaan.”10

Chapter Three

MEN WHO SHAPED THE WAR

1. The Romantics to the Rescue

WINFIELD SCOTT was an old man, vain and ponderous, dropsical and infirm, a swollen and grotesque caricature of the brilliant soldier who had won the Mexican War and who, because he once so perfectly acted the part of the proud soldier, had been known half affectionately as “Old Fuss and Feathers.” He was mixed up now in a war that had come too late for him, a bewildering sort of war that saw his pet enemy, Jefferson Davis, and his pet soldier, Robert E. Lee, making common cause against the country that had all of his loyalty. He was greatly partial to the regular army, believed that volunteer troops needed many months in training camp before they could take the field, and doubted that cavalry would be of much account in this war; everybody knew that it took a full two years of drill to turn an ordinary recruit into a competent trooper. He blamed himself for having let political pressure make him send McDowell’s unready army out on the disastrous expedition to Bull Run, and his own physical disabilities — getting in and out of the chair behind his desk, with much puffing and wheezing, was about all he could manage — must have been a painful reminder that this war was in process of slipping out from under the commanding general of the army.

Yet the old man had a clear eye. Others might talk about the