So the army was heading down into the Wilderness, hoping to cross that unwholesome area quickly and to get the Army of Northern Virginia by the throat immediately thereafter. It was a good enough plan. The difficulty might lie in the fact that Lee was notoriously averse to fighting battles when and where his enemies wanted to fight them.

Some of the soldiers felt this, and as they crossed the river they were vaguely uneasy. A cavalry regiment got over in the middle of the night, drove off the Rebel pickets at the crossing, and went jogging up the sandy roads into the black forest. As they rode the men talked, and one man said that he never thought "the army went hunting around in the night for Johnnies in this way." A comrade explained: "We're stealing a march on old man Lee."

They thought that over briefly, and someone suggested: "Lee'll miss us in the morning."

"Yes," said another, "and then look out. Hell come tearing down this way ready for a fight." ⁴

Lee was on Grant's mind, too, that day. At noon Grant crossed the Rapidan and made temporary headquarters in a deserted farmhouse overlooking the ford, and a newspaper correspondent brashly asked him how long it would take him to reach Richmond. About four days, said Grant soberly; then, as the newspaperman goggled at him, he went on— four days, provided General Lee was a party to the agreement. If not, it would probably take a good deal longer.

Grant had ridden past the troops in midmorning, his ornamented staff trotting at his heels. Riding beside him there was the lone civilian amid all those thousands of soldiers—

Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois, Grant's personal friend and political sponsor, a headquarters visitor for the opening days of the campaign. Washburne wore civilian clothes of funereal black, and when the soldiers saw him they asked one another who this character might be. A staff officer heard one rear-rank wit telling his mates that it was simple; the Old Man had brought along his private undertaker.⁵

For the first twenty-four hours nothing happened. Warren and Sedgwick got their men over the river at Germanna Ford and headed south. The day was warm, and in the hollow roads no air was stirring, and before long the roadside was Uttered with packed knapsacks, overcoats, extra blankets, and other bits of gear which sweating soldiers found too heavy to carry. The veterans wagged their heads : all of that stuff was a sure sign that there were lots of recruits in tthe ranks—no old-timer would load himself down with excess baggage at the beginning of a march.

Artillerists gloated, and scampered about collecting loot; they had an advantage over infantry, in that gun carriages and caissons offered handy places to carry such extras. The more experienced gunners warned their mates not to be hasty. If they waited for heat and fatigue to become a little more oppressive, some of the straw-feet would begin discarding even their haversacks, and those must be collected at all costs. If this march was like most others, they would leave the supply trains far behind, and it was important to lay in a surplus of food.⁸

The road wound and climbed slowly for several miles, and at last it came out into an open space by a crossroads. Off to the left there was a run-down, abandoned stage station, still known as Wilderness Tavern, a ruinous place with its yard full of weeds, half hidden by scraggly trees. Behind it was a meadow where, just a year ago, the Confederates had had a field hospital during the battle of Chancellorsville, and in that field the doctors had amputated the arm of Stonewall Jackson.

A general who came down irons Germanna Ford and stood here by the deserted tavern facing south was practically in the middle of the northern fringe of the Wilderness. To get through the Wilderness he could turn right, turn left, or go straight ahead, and no matter which way he went he had about six miles of Wilderness to cross. Squarely across his path lay the region's principal east-west highway, the Orange Turnpike, which ran from Fredericksburg through Chancellorsville to Orange Court House. Two or three miles to the south there was a companion road roughly parallel to the Turnpike, the Orange Plank Road, a narrow track with a strip of planking running beside a strip of dirt. (The rule in the old days was that a loaded wagon was entitled to stay on the planking; unloaded wagons had to yield the right of way and turn off into the mud.)

The road south from Germanna Ford crossed the Turnpike, slanting off toward the east as it went south, crossed the Plank Road, and finally got to the southern border of the Wilderness and the open country beyond. About halfway between the Turnpike and Plank Road crossings it became known as the Brock Road. The names of these three highways were presently to be written in red on the annals of the Army of the Potomac.

Thus, of the three main highways here, two ran east and west and one went north and south. Interlaced across them were various minor roads and lanes, mapped imperfectly or not at all, giving the appearance of going nowhere and, often enough, actually doing it. Only on the three main roads was any sense of direction to be had. All of the minor roads just wandered.

Somewhere to the west lay the Army of Northern Virginia. Presumably it was moving south, in order to get below the Wilderness and head the Yankees off. If by any chance it proposed to make trouble here in the Wilderness, the Turnpike and the Plank Road were the avenues by which trouble would come. Hence before the army halted for the night it was important to picket those roads, and late in the afternoon of May 4 it was so arranged, with cavalry riding west on the Plank Road and infantry solidly planted on the Turnpike.

While Warren's and Sedgwick's troops were making their bivouac along the Germanna Road and around the Wilderness Tavern, Hancock and the II Corps were making camp half a dozen miles to the east. They had crossed the Rapidan at Ely's Ford, and their route had led them to the historic Chancellorsville crossroads, where the ruins of the old Chancellor house lay charred amid the vines and the creepers, and where the bones of many unburied dead men took on a pallid gleam in the dusk. According to the plan, Hancock's men were to move on in the morning, swinging south and west in a wide arc, getting far down on the lower edge of the Wilderness. They could have gone farther this day, and it might have been well if they had done so, but the belief was that the army had the jump on its enemies. So Hancock's men camped in a haunted gloaming, where Hooker's men had fought a year earlier, and eerie omens were afloat in the dusk.

The army was spraddled out over a wide expanse of country. Burnside's IX Corps was coming down to the Rapidan from the north, the great wagon trains were trundling up behind Hancock at Chancellorsville, and scores of silent guns were parked by the Turnpike. There was something uncanny and foreboding in the air, and when night came seeping up out of the blackness under the low trees the camps were invaded by memories and premonitions.

It was the last night for many young men—the last night, in a sense, for the old Army of the Potomac, which had tramped down many roads of war and which at last was coming up against something new. The men were bivouacked on the sharp edge of a dividing line in the war, and it appears that somehow they sensed it. After tonight, everything was going to be different. The marching and the fighting were going to be different, and the comradeship around the camp-fires was going to be thinned out and changed, and nothing they had learned was going to help very much in the experience that lay just beyond the invisible treetops, where a wind made a stir and rustle in the branches.

In a New York regiment, in Warren's corps, it was remembered that the ordinary songs and campfire chat were missing, and the men were uneasy. They felt that they were far down in the enemy's country, and this dank Wilderness did not seem a good place to be, and they carried "a sense of ominous dread which many of us found it almost impossible to shake off." In one of the cavalry regiments the chaplain brought a group together for divine service, and he read a text about buckling on the whole armor of God and urged the men to "be prepared to stand an inspection before the King of Kings," and the usually irreverent troopers listened in silence, standing with firelight flickering on brown young faces, and some of them wept.⁷

In Hancock's artillery park the gunners found many un-buried skeletons from last year's fight, and the old-timers recalled the horror of that fight, where men with broken backs or shattered thighs lay in the underbrush and watched the flames that were going to burn them alive creep closer and closer. One man predicted that "these woods will surely be burned if we fight here," and others said that they did not fear being killed nearly as much as they feared being wounded and left helpless for the forest fires. A soldier stood by a campfire and abstractedly prodded a grinning whitened skull with his toe: moved by a gloomy impulse, he turned to his comrades and cried: "This is what you are all coming to, and some of you will start toward it tomorrow." Off in the woods the whippoorwills began their remote mournful whistling, and near Wilderness Tavern pickets in the dark wood could hear a dull featureless rumbling far away to the west and they knew that somewhere in the night the Rebels were moving in great strength.⁸

Morning came in clear, with a promise of warmth later in the day, and the army began to move before sunrise. Warren's corps was to go south, sidling toward the west as it went, with Sedgwick's men following close behind and Hancock's corps swinging around farther to the left, and the troops got under way promptly. As they moved, Warren sent one division west on the Turnpike, just to make certain the flank was protected, and the colonel who had the advanced skirmish line in this division rode to the top of a rise and looked westward. The roadway here was like an open glade pointing straight toward Lee's army, its dusty white floor lying empty in the dawn, shadowy woods on either side; and far down this avenue the colonel dimly saw a column of moving troops, with men filing off into the forest to right and left, and he sent a courier hustling back to his division commander with the message: Rebels coming this way I ⁹

His division commander was Brigadier General Charles Griffin, a lean man with a big walrus mustache and a knack of exuding parade-ground smartness even when he was unbuttoned and dirty: an old-time Regular Army artillerist and, like many such, a hard case. His troops liked him very much—once when he came back from sick leave the men pulled him off his horse and carried him to his tent on their shoulders, which did not often happen to generals—and he had very advanced notions about getting his guns well to the front in battle. It was said that in one fight a battery commander whom he was sending forward looked at the approaching enemy and protested: "My God, General, do you mean for me to put my guns out on the skirmish line?" To which Griffin answered impatiently: "Yes, rush them in there—artillery is no better than infantry; put them in the line and let them fight together." ¹⁰ So this morning, with Rebel skirmishers approaching, Griffin pulled a section of guns out of the nearest battery and sent it rolling west on the Turnpike to support his own skirmishers. He had the rest of his division form a line of battle astride the Turnpike, and when the line was formed he ordered it to advance. If the Confederates wanted to start something here he would find out about it soon enough.

This was mean country for a moving line of battle. One hundred feet from the Turnpike a man lost sight of the road entirely, and there seemed to be no other landmarks whatever. No regiment could see the troops on its right or left unless an almost literal elbow-to-elbow contact was maintained, and no general could see more than a small fraction of his troops, or control them except by sending aides and couriers stumbling off through the woods—amid which, in most stretches, it was quite impossible to ride a horse. The going was tough, with scrubby thickets and clumps of saplings breaking the lines apart and all manner of tangled dry stuff underfoot, but the men struggled along and by and by they heard scattering shots from the skirmishers in the woods ahead.

They overtook their skirmish line, at last, and there seemed to be a substantial number of Confederates in front of them. The firing grew heavier, and it turned into regular volley firing, and a rank fog came in as the battle smoke was trapped under the low branches. To right and left and in front the dark woodland began to glow fitfully with savage, pulsating spurts of reddish light.

Keeping their formation as well as they could, the men stumbled on. They could see nothing of what lay in front of them, but the firing grew heavier every minute. The Rebels obviously meant to make a regular fight of it; the firing line was a mile wide, and everyone was shooting desperately into a gloom where moving figures were glimpsed only at rare intervals. Griffin wheeled his two guns a little farther along the road—there was no way to get them off into the woods because nothing on wheels could possibly leave the highway—and they fired straight down the Turnpike, and what had begun as an affair of the skirmishers developed into a full-dress battle.

Griffin sent men back with the news. It was very hard for him to tell what was going on more than a few rods from where he stood, but it seemed obvious that he had had a head-on collision with a Rebel assaulting column fully as big as his own, and the high command had better know about it right away. Meade got the word in his headquarters m a field near Wilderness Tavern, and it seemed to him that Lee must have left a rear guard here to hold the road while he took his main army farther south. He prepared to get other troops up to help Griffin push the rear guard out of the

way, and he sent an officer spurring back toward Germanna Ford to tell Grant about it.¹¹

In a few minutes Grant came up. He talked with Meade and Warren, and listened to the firing, which kept getting heavier and heavier, and word was sent out to stop the movement south: if Lee really wanted to fight here the whole Army of the Potomac would accommodate him. Sedgwick had better bring his men up as fast as he could and Hancock must start back from his thrust below the Plank Road.

Grant's people pitched his headquarters tents in a little meadow in the southwest angle of the crossroads and Grant liimself rode up on a knoll just south of this meadow. He dismounted, sat on a stump, lighted a cigar, drew out a pocketknife, picked up a twig, and began to whittle. A staff officer remembered that Grant was all dressed up this morning, wearing his best uniform with the frock coat unbuttoned, a sash about his waist, sword at his side; he was wearing tan cotton-thread gloves which he forgot to remove, and his work with the twigs and the pocketknife began to snag the fingertips of these gloves and before long they were ruined.¹² Grant was sitting here quietly, wlnttling like a Yankee, and as he smoked without ceasing he issued the orders that would feed more and more troops into this fight.

The fight kept growing bigger. Griffin's men were advancing but it was very slow going, and as the rising wind whipped wisps and streamers of powder smoke through the treetops the advance came to a halt. The Confederates were being reinforced, although hardly any of the Federals had seen any of them. They knew of their presence only as the firing grew stronger, and as bursts of rifle fire came from farther and farther to the right and left.

The smoke intensified the forest gloom and made it opaque. Splinters and tiny branches came down as the bullets clipped through the trees, and only in the rare clearings could any man get a glimpse of his enemies. A Maine regiment came up to a little field, and the bullets were hitting the dried soil and raising little spurts of dust as if the first big drops of a heavy rain were falling.¹³ The dry underbrush and matted duff underfoot began to take fire, here and there, so that malicious little flames ran along the battleground.

It was like fighting blindfolded. Here they were, in a woodland so dense that even in peacetime maneuvers a division would have been unable to keep its alignment; now there did not seem to be any alignment at all, and what was supposed to be a battle line was nothing more than a sprawling, invisible series of groups and individuals, each one firing into the woods and the smoke as if it was the Wilderness itself that was the enemy and not the men in it. A company or a regiment would crouch in the underbrush and fire manfully, taking losses but holding firm; then a sudden swell of firing would be heard off to one side or toward the rear, and for all anyone knew the rest of the army had run away and the Rebels were taking over, and men would begin to retreat, firing as they went, looking for some place where they could feel that they were part of an ordered line.

The battalions of Regulars in Griffin's division were ordered forward, and they found the undergrowth all but literally impassable. One company commander reported afterward that in order to get forward at all he had to hack through the vines, creepers, and bushes, breaking a trail so that his company could follow in single file. When a more open space was reached the men would form company front, but in a few moments they would have to return to single file. Inevitably, men lost touch with their comrades, whole regiments disintegrated, and scores of men blundered into the Confederate lines and were made prisoner. There were regiments which could not even learn the direction from which the musketry that was destroying them was coming. Nothing whatever could be seen but trees and brush and blinding smoke. As one man said, it was "a battle of invisibles with invisibles." ¹⁴

So the line crumbled and came back, and the wild noise of battle was a high-pitched, nerve-racking tumult, and at last Griffin found his men back where they had started from, Rebels on both flanks and things getting worse instead of better. Griffin knew that some of Sedgwick's men had been ordered up on his right and some of Warren's men on his left, but they seemed to have gone astray somewhere and as far as he could learn his division was all alone. He got his line stabilized somehow, and put his men to work improvising breastworks, and then he went back to headquarters, an angry man all fuming. He galloped up to Meade on the knoll where Grant was whittling and he threw himself from his horse and bitterly denounced the generals who were supposed to be helping him but whose troops were not appearing.