Usually wounded men on the battlefield did not make a great deal of noise. The bad pain generally came later on, and while men here and there might moan and cry out and call for water, most of them took what they had to take in a stunned, half-dazed silence. But this night was different. The underbrush was aglow with stealthy fires, and the ground was matted with dead leaves and dry pine needles, and the terror of the flames lay upon the field so that men who could not move screamed for comrades to come and help them. On both sides, stretcher-bearers tried to do what they could; but it was very dark and the woodland was a creepy maze, and anyway a man who went out to help the wounded was very likely to be shot. A Federal wrote that "the Rebels were fidgety and quick to shoot," and a Confederate officer said the Yankee skirmishers made it impossible for his troops to help wounded men who lay only a dozen paces outside of their lines.¹

Behind the front there was ceaseless movement: steady tramp of long columns getting into place for the next day's fighting, and a confused coming and going of stragglers and broken squads and companies hunting their proper commands. In all of this, too, there was a restless stirring by veteran soldiers who were operating a strange, unofficial, and highly effective little system by which the enlisted man kept himself informed about things.

After every battle, men by twos and threes would slip away from their bivouacs and wander up and down the lines, visiting other campfires to exchange information. They were always welcomed, and they were always watched quite closely, because they were notoriously light-fingered and would steal any haversacks that were within their reach. The army called these men "news walkers," and they were in fact amateur and self-appointed reporters, hunting the information by which they could judge how the battle was going, what army morale was like, and what the prospects were for the morrow. They were on the prowl tonight, and one of Hancock's gunners told how he and his mates would look up from their campfires to see "shadowy forms hurrying rapidly through the woods or along the roads." The gunner described their method of operation:

"Frequently these figures would halt, and then, seeing our fire with men around it, they would issue forth from the woods and join us. They would sit down, filling their pipes, light them with glowing coals, and then, with their rifles lying across their knees, ask for the Second Corps news, inquire as to our losses and whether we had gained or lost ground, and what Confederate command was opposed to us. They would anxiously inquire as to the truth of rumors of disaster which they might have heard during the day. They would listen attentively to what we said, and it was a point of honor not to give false information to these men. And they would briefly tell the Fifth or Sixth or Ninth Corps news, and quickly disappear in the darkness."

So it went tonight, with the smoky tainted air heavy under the trees, and men who had fought all day were hiking for miles to find out what had really been happening. Their system was effective. It was notorious that no headquarters announcement was believed unless it jibed with what the news walkers picked up. Often enough the soldiers had a better line on the situation than the generals had, and when they criticized strategy or tactics they usually knew what they were talking about. As the movement finally died out and the men turned in for such sleep as they could get, the army had a pretty fair notion of what had been happening and what was apt to come next.²

What would come next, indeed, was fairly obvious: a big attack along the Plank Road, where the disordered pieces of A. P. Hill's Confederate corps lay crisscross in the darkness. Lee had fought with part of his army missing, and the missing portion—Longstreet's corps—would not be up until midmorning or later. What was in the cards therefore was a hard smash at Lee's right, to overwhelm it before Longstreet's rough veterans could get on the scene, and the fighting was apt to begin as soon as the first faint light broke over the eastern sky.

Grant wanted the attack made at four o'clock, but the corps commanders were having much trouble getting their disordered divisions sorted out and Meade persuaded the general to allow a postponement. Burnside's IX Corps was south of the Rapidan now, and Burnside was under orders to get his men down to the Plank Road and join in the assault. Meanwhile, by a little after five in the morning, Hancock got his own troops and Getty's thinned division from the VI Corps lined up for action, and he immediately sent them west on both sides of the Plank Road.

They ran into action at once. Hill's Confederates had hardly so much as tried to straighten their lines during the night—all of the ordinary difficulties of moving troops in this jungle were infinitely intensified in the darkness—and they were not in the best shape to meet an attack. But they were very tough characters and they started firing as soon as the first Yankee skirmishers came crashing through the underbrush, and beneath the low branches the gray half-light of dawn became spectral with wispy layers of smoke. The skirmishers waited to let the main battle line catch up with them, and then everybody went plunging forward and the battle of the Wilderness was on again.

Hancock was a driver, and he sent his men on like a flood tide. From their dark bivouac north of the road, Wadsworth's division from the V Corps fell into line and came tramping down at an angle, flanking some of Hill's men and knocking them out of the way. The Federal battle line was more than a mile wide and it moved with enormous weight, overrunning the islands of stubborn resistance and shooting down the Rebels who were groping for new positions, and an unearthly racket of musketry went rolling up the sky.

Back by the crossroads Hancock was elated. The wound he had received at Gettysburg still hurt him, and he had official permission to go about in an ambulance if he chose, but he was astride his horse today and as reports came back he felt that everything was going as it should. To one of Meade's staff officers he called out gaily: "We are driving them, sir-tell General Meade we are driving them most beautifully.

He was robust and handsome and the joy of battle was on him, and to look at him as he sat his horse in this moment of triumph was to understand why the war correspondents liked to tag him "Hancock the superb."

Yet even as he exulted in his success he was beginning to fret. Burnside's men were coming down much more slowly than had been expected. They were supposed to take part in this big attack and they should be here now, but they were not showing up and Hancock began to worry. He told Meade's man that with their weight added to his own column of attack "we could smash A. P. Hill all to pieces!" ⁸

Yet things were going well, regardless. Two miles west of the crossroads where Hancock was waiting, the cheering Federals were sweeping in on the edge of a meager little clearing around the Widow Tapp's farm, where Lee himself stood among his guns and tried to patch up a dissolving battle line. Just beyond him the white tops of the Confederate wagon trains were visible, and if Hancock's men could just go driving on across this clearing Hancock's goal would be won.

And there was a moment, just here by the Tapp farmstead, with dawn coming up through the smoke and the Northern advance breaking out of the trees, when the authentic end of the war could be glimpsed beyond the ragged clearing. If Hancock's men could go storming on for another half mile, Lee's army would be broken and it would all be over. It may be that the Army of the Potomac never came nearer to it than this—neither above the Antietam, nor at Gettysburg, nor anywhere else—and final victory was just half an hour away. But the magical half hour flickered and was lost forever, and if any Northern soldier saw victory here he saw no more than a moving shadow distorted by the battle smoke.

Confederate artillery was massed in the open ground, and the guns fired before the last fugitive Rebels had time to get out of the way, and for a moment the pursuing Federals were knocked back into the woods. Then west of the clearing there rose the high, quavering scream of the Rebel yell, and Long-street's men—here at last!—came running in, gripping their rifles in their tanned fists. Lee was in their midst, swinging his hat and trying to lead them until they made him go back (for they knew that the Confederacy could live no longer than that man lived) and there was a staggering shock as the Northern and Southern assault waves dashed together. Above and below the Plank Road, far off into the dark murky wood, the fighting swelled and rolled as more and more of Lee's last-minute reserves came running into action, and the counterattack broke the force of the Federal charge.⁴

But the charge was still on. Back by the Brock Road Hancock was still driving reinforcements forward. Almost half of the army was under his command this morning, and he proposed to use every man who had been given him. Wads-worth's men struggled out of the jungle at last and the Plank Road lay across their way, and they surged forward in a great crowd, yelling mightily. They got into the path of Getty's division, which was driving west along the road, and there was a heavy traffic jam, two divisions all intermingled, men swearing, officers thwacking about with swords, and the disordered mob sagged off toward the south; and Lee's guns in the Tapp farm clearing caught the right flank of Wadsworth's uneven line and blasted it with fearful effect. Wadsworth was galloping desperately up and down the Plank Road, his old Revolutionary War saber in his hand, trying once again to get his line wheeled around so that it could face the firing instead of getting it all in the flank. Back to the right and rear the leading division of Burnside's corps was at last creeping down through the woods, and far to the north by the Orange Turnpike Warren's and Sedgwick's soldiers opened a hot fire on Ewell's men, to keep the Confederates from sending help from their left to their right.

The focus of it all was the narrow Plank Road and the deadly woods on both sides of it. Never before had the Army of the Potomac thrown so many men into one assault as were thrown in here. Twenty-five thousand soldiers were moving up in one stupendous charge, and most of them were battle-trained veterans. Yet what they had learned in other battles seemed to be of little use here, and in the Wilderness numbers did not seem to count. They were fighting a strange, desperate fight, without color and without drama. The whole thing was invisible. It was smothered down out of sight in five miles of smoking wilderness, and even men who were in the storm center of it saw no more than fragmentary pictures-little groups of men moving in and out of a spooky, reddish luminous haze, with rifles flashing indistinctly in the gloom, the everlasting trees and brush always in the way, the weight of the smoke tamping down everything except the evil flames that sprang up wherever men fought.

In other battles these soldiers had known the fearful pageantry of war. There was none of that here, for this was the battle no man saw. There was only the clanging twilight and the heavy second growth and the enemies who could rarely be seen but who were always firing. There was no more war in the grand style, with things in it to hearten a man even as they killed him. This was all cramped and close and ugly, like a duel fought with knives in a cellar far underground.

Up from the forest came a tumult such as none of the army's battles had made before. It had a higher pitch, because so little artillery was used, but more rifles were being fired than ever before and they were being fired more rapidly and continuously, and the noise was unbroken, maddening, beyond all description. A man in the VI Corps called it "the most terrific musketry firing ever heard on the American continent," and a New Yorker said that from the rear it sounded like "the wailing of a tempest or the roaring of the ocean in a storm." Groping for the right superlative, another soldier wrote that "the loudest and longest peals of thunder were no more to be compared to it in depth or volume than the rippling of a trout brook to the roaring of Niagara." Far back by Wilderness Tavern Meade's chief of staff tilted a professional ear and commented that the uproar "approached the sublime." ⁵

Always the little flames sprang up, as the blast from rifle muzzles hit the dried leaves and the brittle pine twigs, and the fear of these flames haunted every soldier. Often, when they were hit, men cried at once for help—anything was better than to lie in a firetrap and wait for the flames. It may be that the heavy blanket of stifling smoke that drifted on ahead of these fires was a mercy, for there were men who believed that at often suffocated the wounded, quickly strangling the life out of them before the fire could torture them to death.⁶

Behind the lines, far to the rear where the smoke-fog and the noise came rolling down the wind, there was a constant movement of walking wounded looking for field hospitals. Some came alone, using muskets as canes or crutches. Others came in little groups, supporting each other, the halt leading the maimed and the blind. All of them were bloody. Cavalry patrols ranged all approaches to the rear areas and when a straggler appeared their curt demand was: "show blood!" The man who could not do it was arrested as a runaway.

The wounded came back with tight, bloodless hps, and in most cases their clothing was disarranged. Unless he was totally disabled, the wounded man's first act, usually, was to tear his clothing open and look at his wound, to see whether it was going to be mortal. The examination over, some men would look relieved, confident that they had little to worry about. Others would turn pale and stare blankly at nothing, convinced that they could not recover. These men had seen many gunshot wounds, and they were pretty fair diagnosticians.

On this day the wounded brought discouraging tales back to the dressing stations. They said the fighting was not going well, and one man remarked glumly that "the Confederates are shooting to kill, this time." Hospitals were alive with rumors of disaster: the right wing had crumbled, Lee had seized the Rapidan crossing, the army would soon find itself surrounded. The adolescent drummer boys had been pressed into service, along the firing lines, as stretcher-bearers. Properly, this was not drummer boys' work, but as one man said, "It was in the Wilderness, under Grant," where "even boys counted." ⁷

Along the Plank Road there was complete pandemonium. The narrow lane was choked with moving men—regiments and bits of regiments trying to re-form, hundreds of Confederate prisoners who had been disarmed and told to hike to the rear and who were trying hard to get back out of range, stretcher-bearers and walking wounded moving along with the same idea in mind, dazed stragglers and lost men hunting in vain for their regiments or for some quiet place to hide or for a safe road to the back country. There was such a tangle in every great battle, of course, and during every attack there were places just behind the front where it looked as if the army were coming apart. Yet the confusion in the Wilderness this morning was something special.⁸ The commanders behind the lines—Grant, smoking and whittling and noting all the dispatches, Meade near him talking busily with staff officers, Hancock at the crossroads ordering men forward—they had no conception of what was really going on up in front. They could not have one. The battle was out of their control, fighting itself, a great curtain of distance and forest and choking smoke cutting them off from contact and knowledge. Things were going wrong, and they could not know about it—nor, if they did know, could they do anything about it

In this forest it was almost as bad to win as to lose. Either way, a battle line was certain to get thrown into hopeless disorder. Along five miles of fighting front there was hardly one brigadier who could really control his own line, because there was hardly one brigadier who could put his hand on more than a fraction of his own command. The lines had been jumbled as they had never been jumbled before. Divisions and brigades were all divided. Along the zone of the heaviest firing there was not a single regiment which had on either flank a regiment which so much as belonged to its own army corps.⁹

Commands were broken into moving fragments which floated blindly about trying to reassemble without the faintest idea where their comrades might be. Reinforcements lost their way as they tried to go forward and made the trouble worse, so that instead of adding weight to the attack they crippled it. In one place, men would be standing ten ranks deep, and a few hundred yards to right or left there would be a complete gap in the line, with nobody at all to hold the ground and only the bushes and the blinding haze to keep the Confederates from seeing what an opening lay in front of them. Brigades got in behind one another and shot blindly into the ranks of their own friends.¹⁰

One of Hancock's best brigadiers was ordered to move up the road and support Getty's division, but before he could get started Getty's division had been crowded over to some other part of the battlefield, so that the support troops moving in without skirmishers ran head on into a Southern battle line, which opened a deadly fire before the Federals realized that they were anywhere near the enemy. The brigadier did not know whether he was within half a mile of the place where he was supposed to be—nor did he know what he was supposed to do, now that he was wherever he was, except fight, which he could not help doing with Rebels all around him. Long after the war he wrote that he still did not know what had been expected of him. What he had actually done was to get several hundred of his men shot to no purpose at all, and at seemed improbable that that was quite what Hancock had wanted.¹¹

Near the road, Wadsworth was still moving his regiments about so that they could renew the attack. The old man was tired and he felt unwell, and he told an aide that he really ought to turn command of the division over to someone else and go to the rear, but there was too much to do just now and he would wait for a lull. Somewhere behind him, men from the IX Corps were pushing forward; the men said afterward they made the final fifty yards of their advance crawling on hands and knees through a pine thicket, and when they got through the thicket they had a terrible hot fight with some Rebels behind a fence-rail breastwork. South of Wadsworth's division, soldiers said that all morning long they had seen neither a general officer nor a staff officer to tell them what to do. They were without commanders, and each regiment was fighting entirely on its own.¹²

This sort of thing could last just so long before something gave way. Nobody knew what was happening because nobody could see 100 feet in any direction, but suddenly, without any warning, the sprawling line across the Plank Road began to come to pieces. Out of the smoke came men who had stopped fighting and were unhurriedly going back out of action, and nothing that anyone said to them seemed to make the slightest difference. One of Wadsworth's soldiers said it was the strangest sight ever seen: the men pressing to the rear did not seem to be demoralized or scared, and yet they did not quite look like organized troops retreating under orders, either. They were just going back, looking like "a throng of armed men who were returning dissatisfied from a muster." One of Meade's staff officers noticed that the men were not running, and were neither pale nor frightened, nor had they thrown away their weapons: "They had fought all they meant to fight for the present and there was an end to it." A New Jersey soldier noted the same baffling traits and said the only explanation he could make was that "a large number of troops were about to leave the service." ¹³

Whatever had happened, there it was—an unpanicked but irreversible retreat by the army's shock troops, thousands of men turning their backs and sauntering calmly toward the rear. Wadsworth's men caught the infection, and as they turned to go the Rebels hit them with hard volleys that turned the retreat into actual rout, and the whole division dissolved, thousands of men streaming off through the woods. Wadsworth stormed along trying to rally them, but a Confederate bullet killed him and for the time being his division simply went out of existence; of 5,000 men who advanced with it in the morning, fewer than 500 could be rallied that evening, the rest all scattered over five square miles of un-plumbed forest. (It might be noted that 1,100 of the 5,000 had been shot.)¹⁴

So the whole advance crumbled, and back by the Brock Road it looked as if this half of the army had broken up. Hundreds of men were pouring down the Plank Road, and other hundreds were breaking out of the woods, and the whole Wilderness seemed to be leaking beaten Yankees. Hancock's inner thoughts just then were not recorded, but he must have thanked the god of battles that the evening before he had had his men build a stout log breastwork all along the western side of the Brock Road, a heavy fence of piled-up saplings standing three feet high and running north and south for two miles or more.

It was just the dike that was needed to check this retreat. Disorganized men who reached it looked about them, fell in behind the barricade, loaded their muskets and peered into the blank woodland from which they had just emerged. Shattered regiments and brigades, crawling over this rude fence, managed to form new ranks on the east side of it, and stood there waiting for orders, their panic gone. Off to the north the roar of battle continued, for Burnside's men at last were making their presence felt, but they had come in too late and their attack was not heavy enough, and nothing that they could do could change the situation on the south side of the Hank Road.

What had happened was perfectly simple, and it had turned Into catastrophe largely because nobody could see what was going on.

When Hancock made his advance that morning he had been plagued by a report (which happened to be false) that some or all of Longstreet's men were apt to come up into action from the south. On his extreme left, therefore, he held one division out of action as flank guard. All sorts of wild rumors about approaching Confederates had been circulating that morning, and the result was that some 8,000 of Hancock's best soldiers had been immobilized. Furthermore, as the rest of the corps advanced along the Plank Road, a gap two miles wide had opened between the assaulting column and this reserve division.

Eventually Hancock decided that all of the rumors were false, and he sent word to this idle division to advance so as to come up on the left flank of the men who were making the attack on the Tapp farm. If this had been done, Longstreet's counterattack would probably have been blunted. But all of Hancock's messages seem to have gone astray—couriers hit by stray bullets, or captured by Confederates, or just plain lost in the battle turmoil—and John Gibbon, the highly competent soldier who commanded the reserve division, never got the orders. So the division stayed out of action, and when the

Federals began to fight with Longstreet's troops in the wild chaos two miles to the west their southern flank was unprotected.¹⁵