GrifBn swore and shouted and then hurried back to his troops. Grant had heard him, and he was not used to brigadiers who publicly and profanely denounced their superiors, and as GrifBn stormed off Grant—who somehow had not quite caught his name—went over to Meade and asked: "Who is this General Gregg? You ought to put him under arrest'

For once in his life Meade was calm and not irascible. He stood facing Grant, towering head and shoulders over him, and he murmured gently: "His name's Griffin, not Gregg, and that's only his way of talking"; and as he spoke he leaned forward and buttoned up Grant's uniform coat for him, for all the world like a kindly father getting his son ready for school.¹⁵ Then Grant went back to his stump and his twigs and his cigars, and couriers dashed off with orders, and in the trackless forest the support troops shouldered their muskets and tried to go forward through the midday twilight.

It was becoming increasingly obvious that this was no rear guard the Federals were fighting. (As a matter of fact, it was Confederate General Ewell’s whole army corps: far from looking for a battleground to the south, Lee was making his fight right here, and if the Federals got one foot of Wilderness ground they were going to have to pay for it.) One of Sedgwick's divisions went stumbling up a cow track in the woods, and at what seemed to be a suitable place the men tried to form a proper battle line and go on to close quarters. But the trees and the undergrowth were too thick. A battle line could not advance, could not even be formed, and at last the separate regiments went blindly forward in column, giving up the formation in which they could fight for a formation in which they could at least move. They reached ground that had been fought over, and around them was the pungent smoke of a forest fire, and they plowed through burnt-over spaces where their feet kicked sparks and smoke puffs out of the matted ground. Dead men lay in these cinders, their bodies charred and partly consumed, and a fearful stench lay in the air.¹⁶

There was no enemy to be seen anywhere. A brigadier made his way to his division commander and asked where he should put his men. "Move," said the commander grandly, "to the sound of the heaviest firing." This was no help at all, because as far as the brigadier could tell the firing came from everywhere, and the only way to find the Rebel battle line was to blunder into it. The smoke became heavier and heavier as the men advanced, and the sound of rifle fire and shouting men and crackling flames grew louder, and the bullets came faster and more deadly. A Wisconsin soldier wrote that the men in his regiment, quite unable to see where they were going or whom they were shooting at, simply knelt in the twilight and "fired by earsight."

There was a high wind, and it whipped the little flames in the underbrush into big flames, and its roar in the treetops mingled with the roar of battle as if some unimaginable tempest were lashing this dark forest. Men who fought were aware that all about them wounded men were pathetically trying to drag themselves along the ground away from the fires.

In one place the soldiers came to a swampy ravine, all overgrown with scrub pines. The ravine was not a hundred yards wide, but the farther bank was completely invisible. There were Rebels there in plenty, as the men could easily tell; some of them were shooting, and others were using axes to cut trees for breastworks, and the wild racket told just what was going on, but from first to last there was no one to be seen. So the men of the VI Corps piled up logs and scooped up earth for breastworks of their own and hung on in the twilight, trading death with enemies they never saw, and at times the noise of musketry all about them swelled up to a clamor such as they had never heard before in any of their battles. There was no sound of artillery, because guns could not be advanced or fired in this jungle—Griffin had long since lost the two guns he had pushed along the open Turnpike— but thousands upon thousands of men were firing their muskets as fast as they could load, until the whole Wilderness seemed to throb with the endless concussion.¹⁷

These VI Corps men were coming up on the north side of the Turnpike. South of it, Warren was hurrying about through the woods, trying to get his other divisions up on Griffin's left. Grant was still sitting on his stump on the little knoll behind the lines, but his staff officers were ranging far and fast through the tangle, and the orders they carried were infusing something of the bearded little general's relentless drive all down the army's chain of command. Nobody had planned to fight here but here was where the fight was, and if in the past the Army of the Potomac had never quite managed to get all of its men into action that fault was not going to be repeated now.

There had never been a fight like this before. Things were clear enough on the map, and Grant had an uncanny way of studying a map once and then carrying it in his memory, but neither he nor anyone else had ever tried to fight a battle in a place where nobody could see anything at all. The armies were visible neither to their enemies nor to their own commanders. It would do no good for the commanding general to ride out along his lines, because there was quite literally no place where as many as a thousand men could be seen at one time, and in any case where the men were fighting the forest was so dense that riding was impossible. There were no adequate roads, and the Federal maps were very imperfect anyway, and the most careful directives could come down to a matter of saying—The enemy is over there somewhere; go and find him and fight him.

Warren cantered along a farm lane and came up to one of his trusted division commanders, Major General James Wadsworth—white-haired, crowding sixty, an old man as ages were reckoned in the army—and Warren told him to get his men into action just south of the Turnpike. Wadsworth was a stout fighter, much admired by his men; he was very wealthy and he was serving without pay, and they honored him for it, and they remembered how on the weary march to Gettysburg he had seized civilians who stood cheering by the roadside and had taken their shoes for his own men to wear. He was quite willing now to go in and fight beside Griffin's division, but he did not know where Griffin's division was and he asked Warren. Warren pulled out a pocket compass and studied it—tactics here were as much a matter of navigation as anything—and he told him to march straight west. Wadsworth's division fell into line, crossed an open field, and plunged into the wood.¹⁸

The division marched quickly into trouble. Either Wads-worth had no compass or it was defective, or perhaps in that incomprehensible undergrowth it was not humanly possible to move any body of troops in a straight line. In any case the men swung round toward the north, and instead of coming in beside Griffin's men they came in on an angle, presenting their left flank to the Confederates just at the moment when the Confederates were sending in reinforcements for a counterattack. The noise of the firing swelled to a terrible new pitch as enormous rolling volleys came out of the woods to break regiments and brigades to bits.

No one could remember anything very distinctly, afterward. Some regiments found that they had got in behind other regiments that were supposed to be far off to one side. Others knew they were near the Rebels only when they found themselves being shot at—shot at with deadly aim, they noticed: the Confederates were hugging the ground and firing low, and if they could not see much of their target they were hitting it with murderous efficiency.

There seemed to be whole acres where the musketry had cut the saplings in two a few feet from the ground, so that the tops lopped over drunkenly to make progress even more impossible. Wadsworth tried hard to swing his division around to face the flanking fire, but it could not be done.

Troops could not be maneuvered in this ground. Companies fought by themselves, lone squads by themselves sometimes, and the fact that no connected battle line could be seen seemed to give a new terror to the fighting. Some regiments broke and fled, not because they were being punished but because the crash of battle suddenly sounded beside or behind them and the panic cry: "We're flanked!" was raisedo

Beyond Wadsworth, Warren had found his division of Pennsylvania Reserves. The Reserves were famous veterans— Meade's own division, once upon a time, the division whose command the governor of Pennsylvania once offered to George B. McClellan in the springtime of the war. It was led by a former army surgeon, Brigadier General Samuel W. Crawford, a member of the original Fort Sumter garrison: "a tall, chesty, glowering man, with heavy eyes, a big nose and bushy whiskers," as one of his men remembered him, who "wore habitually a turn-out-the-guard expression." Crawford tried to bring his men in beside Wadsworth's, but he had even more trouble than Wadsworth had had. One regiment blundered straight into the middle of a Confederate brigade and was captured almost entire, and the others stumbled around in the underbrush, lost all sense of direction and contact, and knew only that they were constantly being shot at from the most improbable directions by men they could not find. It seems that the Reserves were just a trifle lukewarm about things, anyway, this day. Most of them had refused to re-enlist, and the division was fully aware that it had only twenty-seven more days to serve before it would be sent home. Understandably, this tempered enthusiasm: who wanted to get shot, so near the end of his time as a soldier? ¹⁹

The whole Wilderness seemed to be boiling and smoking, with dense clouds going up to blot out the sunlight. From the rear, Warren pushed the rest of his corps into the fight, and there is no coherent story to be told about any of it: it was all violent confusion, with occasional revealing glimpses to be had in the infernal clogged mist.

The smoke blew down across the field, and all around to right and left there was the unending sound of rifle fire, and the log breastworks the Confederates had built took fire and sent heavy yellowish white smoke billowing out in choking clouds, and the living and dead bodies that lay under it were burned beyond recognition.²⁰ And all of this was a part of the fight to see which side could hold its ground astride the Orange Turnpike.

This was one battle. Two miles to the south of it, along the Plank Road, there was a wholly separate battle, just as desperate, drawing men in as the first battle had done, a battle which for a time was a fight by the Army of the Potomac for simple survival.

Key point here was the place where the Plank and Brock roads crossed. A thin line of cavalry had been patrolling the Plank Road, and while Griffin's men were going into action along the Turnpike this cavalry found Confederate infantry pressing up the Plank Road. The infantry began to seem very numerous and determined, and it drove the Yankee cavalry away, and if the Confederates could seize the crossroads the Federal army would be cut in half, with Hancock's corps isolated off to the south, the rest of the army fighting west of Wilderness Tavern, and the Rebels planted squarely in between. So the cavalry sent couriers riding frantically off to headquarters, men who rode with crumpled envelopes held in their teeth, one hand for the reins and the other for the carbine.

Back on his knoll, Grant read these dispatches and he reached out for the nearest troops. These happened to be Brigadier General George W. Getty's division of the VI Corps —6,000 soldiers as cool and as tough as any, including in their number a Vermont brigade which is still remembered as one of the two or three best in the army. Getty was told to get his men over to the Plank Road at top speed and clear the Southerners out of there. At the same time gallopers were sent off to Hancock to tell him to double back on his tracks and get to that vital crossroads as fast as he could.

Getty made it with seconds to spare. He rode ahead of his troops, his staff and mounted orderlies trotting at his heels, and the last of the cavalry had gone and the advancing Confederates were clearly visible. It would be a few minutes before the Federal infantry could get up, so Getty coolly planted himself and his mounted people in the middle of the road, to make it look as if cavalry reinforcements or artillery or somebody of consequence was making a stand here. The bluff worked, briefly; the advancing Confederates slowed down and sent skirmishers creeping forward to find out what was going on, and in the minutes that were bought Getty was able to get his leading regiments into line of battle and start them moving west.²¹

There was enough to keep them busy. The Confederates here belonged to A. P. Hill, and he had a way of piling his men in fast and hard, and the rival battle lines ranged deeply into the woods and fired as fast as they could handle their muskets. Getty could see that he was outnumbered, and he wanted to fight at long range and wait for help. But Grant felt that the day was made for fighting, and he sent down word to wait for nothing—pitch in and attack, and if any reinforcements show up well send them to you.

So Getty's bugles sounded, high and thin over the noise of the firing, and the Federal battle line went crashing forward through the timber. It got to close quarters at once, and in the pathless tangle on both sides of the Plank Road there was an enormous shock and crash of battle, Federals and Confederates shooting at each other at fifty paces, artillery on both sides firing down the narrow road and making it a place where no man could live.

One officer noted that this was like no fight he had ever heard of. Usually, he said, when two rival lines of infantry met at close range the fight was quite brief, one line or the other quickly giving way. But here there was no giving way whatever. The men simply lay on the ground or knelt behind logs and stumps and kept on firing, and the very intensity of their fire pinned both sides in position—the only chance for safety was to crouch low or lie flat; if a man stood up either to advance or to run away he was almost certain to be shot.²²

In a way, the fact that the men could rarely see what they were shooting at made it even worse. They simply pointed their rifles into the rolling smoke and the thick stunted trees and blazed away, shooting low by instinct, and a sheet of flame swept over the desolate intricate woodland, hitting anything that stood three feet off the ground. So this fight went on for no one knew how long—an hour, two hours, an eternity —and the battle zone grew wider and wider as Confederates came groping blindly forward on the flanks. The woods took fire, just as they had done farther north, and the crackle of flames mingled with the wild yelling and cursing of men and the swinging, whacking crash of rifle fire, and the dense forest seemed to trap the roar of battle and press it close to the ground so that the noise became unendurable, more terrible than anything that had ever been heard before. Getty had all of his men in action and there were not enough of them, not by half, and the Vermont Brigade hung on with a thousand of its men killed or wounded, and the terrible little flames came snaking forward through the dead leaves and dry pine thickets. Wounded men were seen to load and cap their muskets so that they could shoot themselves if the fire reached them.²³

Somewhere to the north old Wadsworth was ordered to swing his battered division around and come down to help. He was in a good spot to land on the Rebel flank and he was only a mile away, but his regiments and brigades were trying to wheel around in the densest part of the Wilderness and he was taking a good deal of care because he did not want to drift into battle by the flank a second time—and, all in all, he might as well have been north of the Rapidan. By prodigious effort he got his men faced south and they started to move, but they could reach no one but isolated Confederate skirmishers. They stood squarely in front of a great gap in the Confederate line, but they could not come close to finding it, and they drifted down through the blinding forest like a hulk gone out of control, to run aground at last a few furlongs away from the place where they were needed.

In the rear, Hancock's men were at last coming up the Brock Road. Hancock was in the lead, shoving the winded men out of column and into line in the miserable second growth, prudently putting some of them to work building a log breastwork at the edge of the road for use in case anything went wrong.

There was a nightmare slowness about it all. The Brock Road was no better than a narrow lane, bordered closely by all but impenetrable woods—it had taken Stonewall Jackson two mortal hours to form a battle line in this area, just a year ago—and the road was clotted with artillery and confused moving troops and men felling trees and piling up log barricades. The day grew old and the sun was going down, the western light coming all red and tarnished through the blowing clouds of heavy smoke, and Getty's exhausted line was about ready to fall clear out of the war; and at last Hancock got a couple of brigades lined up and he sent them in to the attack.

When they hit they hit hard—they were veterans, and they believed that when Hancock told them to charge he meant for them to keep on going—and as Hancock slid new troops in behind them and on both sides they swept into the Uttered woods like a tornado. They overran Getty's tired men and bent the Confederates back, and now it was the enemy's turn to feel that they were outnumbered, outflanked, and forsaken. But if the Yankees had one of their crack combat outfits in here, so did the Confederates, and in these murky woods any little knot of determined men could cause much trouble, and there was a titanic wrestle in the darkening woods, and it is possible that in all the war the men of the North and the South did no more desperate fighting than they did right here, on the two sides of the Plank Road.

The Federals had had much close-order drill, and they were used to fighting in solid ranks, where each man could see his comrades at his side. This was not like that at all. It was Braddock and his British Regulars fighting the Indians all over again, and the scrub pines, the brush piles, and the massed saplings broke the advancing lines apart, leaving fragments that felt isolated and alone. As one veteran recalled it, "the troops were so scattered and disorganized by the straggling way they had got forward that there was no central discipline to bind the men together." So this advance was no triumphal march; it had wide gaps in it, and terrible routs and defeats, and desperate deeds of bravery and of cowardice which no one ever knew about. The veteran 1st Massachusetts, shock troops if there ever were any, was cut up into squads and platoons, and the fragments came up toward a little rise of ground and got a close-range volley from Rebels lying prone just beyond the ridge, and broke and ran for it in wild fright. Their panic spread to right and left, for cohesion and spirit were gone, and in a moment a whole division was running away—Gershom Mott's men, who had been Joe Hooker's division long ago, famous as one of the stanchest divisions in the army, shattered and useless now.²⁴

But Hancock had more men than Hill had, and in the end they made their weight felt. The fugitives lost their panic when they got back to the log breastworks by the Brock Road, and the men who had not run kept on advancing, and the Confederates along the Plank Road were on the edge of final disaster when night and sheer breathlessness and muscle weariness at last came down and stopped the fighting. The armies did not draw apart. They simply stopped where they were, and regiments and brigades lay all over the Wilderness, facing in every direction, nobody knowing where he or his neighbors or his enemies might be. Northerners and Southerners were all intermingled in the dreadful night, so close together that men were constantly blundering into the wrong camp and being made prisoners. Skirmishers were awake, firing at any sound or movement, and afterward it seemed to some men that the battle really went on all night without much letup. Deep in the woods many fires sparked and smoldered.

There were horrors in the night. An officer from a New England regiment, out hunting stragglers, groped through the fathomless dark and somewhere far in the rear a wakeful battery sent over a casual, unaimed shell. It burst near him, and its sudden flare lit up a dogwood tree right before him, white blossoms waxen and mystically motionless in the quick red light. Half blinded, the officer moved on in the succeeding darkness, missed his path, stumbled, and kicked a heap of smoldering leaves into flame; and the flame caught in the hair and beard of a dead sergeant lying in the path, lighting up a ghastly face and wide-open sightless eyes.²⁸

2 Shadow in the Night

Never before had there been a night like this one. A reek of wood smoke, powder smoke, and the dreadful odor of burned bodies hung in the air, soiling the night and dimming the stars. There was no silence. Pickets and skirmishers were nervous, firing at everything and at nothing, and from the rear there was a steady rumble and murmur as troops marched up to take new positions. From miles of scorched ground, up front, there was an unceasing crying of wounded men.