It went on for an hour or more, and the advance of the whole Army of the Potomac came to a halt, infantrymen falling asleep in the dust while Yankee cavalry fought Yankee cavalry and the noise of the combat went up to the unheeding sky. It ended at last, with the Pennsylvanians getting away on their new horses and the rookies doing their grumbling best on the beaten nags they had inherited. Next morning the officers of the 3rd Pennsylvania looked their men over and remarked, sagely: "The horses look remarkably well after the night's march," and the first sergeants innocently said, "Yes sir," and that was all there was to it. But the army had lost a couple of hours on the road to Spotsylvania Court House.²

The escort troops were got out of the way at last, and cavalry skirmishers were trotting on in front, and in the gray of earliest dawn the infantry saw puffs of smoke rising from fields and woodlots up ahead where Confederates disputed the right of way. The column halted, while officers went forward to see how the land lay, and the 12th Massachusetts had the advance, followed by the 9th New York. As they stood in the road a solitary horseman came back from the skirmish line and began ordering the regimental officers to deploy their men on the left of the road. The horseman was undersized and swarthy, and he wore a funny flat felt hat with a floppy brim, and he talked as one having authority, and the infantry colonels bluntly asked him: Who are you, giving us orders like this?

The horseman flipped up the brim of his hat so that his face could be seen—olive-dark face with heavy mustaches and hard eyes—and he barked out his name: "Sheridan!" He added that Rebel infantry was just ahead, strung out behind brush piles and cowsheds in the rolling farm land, and it was time for Yankee infantry to go in and chase them out. So the New Yorkers and New Englanders filed off the road, deploying into fighting formation, and Sheridan kept saying: "Quick! Quick!" ³

From the foot of the knoll the ground ranged down into a little valley, with the road to Spotsylvania Court House cutting squarely across it. A quarter of a mile away, on the far side of the valley, there were woods on the rising ground. These woods were not as dense as those in the Wilderness, and in them the general could see a fairly long line of Rebel soldiers, working feverishly to throw up a low breastwork of fence rails and earth. Most of his own division was trailed out behind him over several miles of road and he had just one brigade in line, and it seemed to him that he should let the men rest, wait for the rest of the division to come up, and then if he had to fight go in with everybody together. But then Warren came up, all eager and impetuous, and Warren told him to keep going.

It was hardly seven o'clock but the morning was hot already, and Robinson did not think his beaten-out men could make it. He asked for more time, so that he could at least mass his division for the assault, but Warren was impatient and told him to go ahead without waiting. Orders were orders.

Robinson took a last look at the Rebel position—it looked pretty strong, with the trench line stretching along the crest of the opposite hill—and he consoled himself by thinking that if the attack were made now the Rebels at least would not have time to bring up artillery and make the job completely impossible. So he gave the word, and his men got to their feet and went down into the valley.

There was a chance that they might make it. The Confederates had marched all night, too, and were in no better shape than Robinson's men, and they were still busy trying to finish their trenches. A mile beyond them lay the courthouse and the vital road crossing, and a rattle of carbine fire came faintly over the treetops from a dispute the rival cavalry patrols were having there. If Robinson's men could push this one line of Confederates out of the way, the town and the crossing belonged to the Union and Lee was cut off, and the war would take a very different turn.

But the going was very hard, and there were mean little gullies cutting across the ground, and the Confederates began to lay down a scorching fire of musketry, so that the advancing brigade took heavy losses. The men forced their way through an entanglement of felled pines, started up the farther slope, found the Rebel fire too heavy, and hugged the ground in lee of a steep little bank that gave some protection, waiting for the support troops to come up.

Looking back, they could see Robinson's second brigade, Maryland troops, mostly, falling into line on the knoll and starting forward, and for a moment they took heart. But more Confederates had come up, and these fired over the advanced brigade's heads and hit the Marylanders hard, so that the support wave fell into confusion and began to break for the rear. Robinson himself came along the slope to rally them, but a bullet hit him in the knee and he went down with a wound that would cost him his leg and take him out of the war for keeps. The Maryland brigade ran away and the rest of the division had got into a fruitless fight off to the right somewhere, too far away to lend any help here.

The Federal attacking line hung on for a while, and then a new Confederate brigade appeared off to one side, driving in a fire that went lengthwise along the huddled line and killed men who crouched fiat against the slope, and it was too much. The men made a final, desperate attempt to charge the

Rebel line, and a few of them reached the breastworks and got into a leaden-armed bayonet fight with men as weary as themselves. Then at last they gave up and ran-a queer, slow, stumbling flight, because they were simply too tired to run fast, even when discipline was gone and they were running for their lives.

The brigadier commanding these troops wrote later that he himself very much wanted to run at top speed, but could do no more than hobble along using his unsheathed sword as a cane. He fell in a field before he got very far, and he was carried off, unconscious, and the Rebels kept on firing as the men retreated. The remnant of Robinson's division at last regrouped itself back of the knoll from which it had started. Its division commander and every brigade commander had been put out of action, more than 2,000 enlisted men had been shot, there were stragglers all over the place, and there was no more fight left in anybody. The division had fought its last fight. A day or so later army headquarters broke it up and assigned its remnants to other units.⁴

The rest of Warren's corps came up, followed by Sedgwick's, and the fight that had begun as an advance-guard scrap for possession of an insignificant little ridge spread all across both sides of the little valley and began to pull two whole armies into it. The troops which had been racing for Spotsylvania Court House were running a dead heat to this rolling, half-wooded area a mile west and north of the hamlet, and as fast as the men came up they were strung out on the firing lines, each line unrolling to north and south as more troops arrived. Batteries were brought up, their gun crews glad to see open ground again in place of the impossible Wilderness tangle, and the guns took position on the high ground and began hammering.

It was a confused fight that grew by what it fed on, with separate regiments colliding briefly here and there as they struggled for favorable positions. There was a whole series of little assaults and counterassaults which cost lives and drained away reserves of strength and endurance but which were buried in the reports as incidental to the general process of

getting the battle lines established. Toward evening, though, Grant felt that there were enough men on hand to make a real fight of it, and the Federals staggered forward for an attack.

Gruff General Crawford got his Pennsylvania Reserves ahead so that they overlapped the right end of the Confederate line and for a moment it looked as if they might break something loose, but the men were simply too exhausted to drive their attack home. Also, at the last minute they collided with Robert Rodes's division of Confederates, which had just come on the scene in a state of equal exhaustion. For a time the worn-out troops blazed away at each other at short range, and then the Pennsylvanians pulled back and the day ended with the rival armies spread out in a great crescent, the concave side to the east, with Spotsylvania Court House nestled on the Confederate side of the curve. Sedgwick's and Warren's men were in line side by side, and Hancock was coming up behind and Burnside was bringing his corps down through the night from somewhere off to the north.

The infantry lines were restless as the darkness came down, and patrols and skirmishers were forever prodding at one another and firing sharply at the sight or sound of movement, and now and then the chat-chatter of their firing provoked the artillery to add its own voice. Farther back, the immense column of Yankee cavalry was all astir. It was taking off on a ponderous move that might turn into a very big thing, and while there were certain military reasons for the move the controlling factor in all of it was the fact that two very hot-tempered men had just had a violent argument.

George Gordon Meade commanded the Army of the Potomac, and when he rebuked a man he did it with angry words that struck sparks. On this day he was furiously dissatisfied with the job of his cavalry. The tangle which his own escort troops had kicked up was the least of his worries. What bothered Meade was that the cavalry corps itself, Sheridan's command, had failed in the early morning hours to clear the road from Todd's Tavern down to Spotsylvania. Sheridan had issued certain orders for this movement, and Meade had canceled some of them without bothering to tell Sheridan, and it appears that neither man had planned the business very well anyway. The upshot had been that the army was delayed and missed a big chance. So when Sheridan came to Meade's headquarters, around noon, Meade greeted him with angry words that resounded all over the place, loudly denouncing him for letting his cavalry get in infantry's way.

Phil Sheridan was an uncomplicated man whose chief trait, for good or for evil, was a driving combativeness, and he replied in words just as hot. It was Meade's fault, he shouted, because Meade had countermanded his orders; he was fed up with it, and if he could just pull his cavalry together and use it the way cavalry ought to be used, he could go out and whip Jeb Stuart out of his boots. So it went, back and forth, with staff and orderlies pretending to be deaf and drinking it all in, and at last Meade stalked off to tell Grant about it.

Back of this row was something more than a mere clash of temperaments. Meade was correct in blaming most of the delay on Sheridan, but Sheridan did have a proper complaint. Army headquarters still held more than a trace of the crippling old theory that the cavalry corps after all was pretty much a staff outfit like the signalers, its commander in effect ranking as a member of the general's staff rather than as a leader of combat troops. McClellan had seen it so, and only the departed Hooker had disagreed with him. Sheridan wanted to use his men the way Stuart used his—as a hard, compact, striking force—and it was not possible. What the generals were really arguing about was whether cavalry was to be regarded as a fighting corps or as a collection of train guards, scouts, and couriers, and Grant saw the point as soon as Meade began to talk to him.

When Meade reported how Sheridan had said he could whip Stuart if he could take his men and go off on his own, Grant looked up.

"Did Sheridan say that?" he asked. "Well, he generally knows what he is talking about. Let him start right out and do it." ⁶

So the cavalry corps had been collected in one imposing mass—13,000 mounted men, plus horse artillery, a sinewy column such as this army had never before mustered; and presently it set out on a wide swing that would carry it clear away from the camps and battle lines and take it down cross country on a beeline for Richmond. Stuart would not dare ignore it, the way he had ignored Stoneman's raid in the Chancellorsville campaign, for if he did it had weight enough to go straight into the capital, or to work ruinous damage in the army's nexus of transportation and supply. He would have to follow it and bring it to bay and get into a stand-up fight with it, and then it would be seen what came of it all.

When it set out the cavalry did not go jingling off at a trot, pressing for stray minutes and wearing out its horses. It moved at a walk, conscious of its power, as if it had all the time in the world. Once the advance guard brushed into a Rebel skirmish line, and sent a few squadrons forward to tap the line and see what it was made of. The firing grew brisk and the squadrons came tumbling back. Up came Sheridan, hotly asking what was the matter here. Too many Johnnies up ahead, the men told him.

"Cavalry or infantry?" he demanded. Cavalry, he was told.

"Keep moving, boys—we're going on through," he ordered. "There isn't cavalry enough in all the Southern Confederacy to stop us."

The men cheered, and Sheridan waved his hat, and they broke through the skirmish line and the column kept on going—slow, remorseless, powerful.⁶

On their swing away from the army the troopers went back across the Wilderness, and on the Plank Road they met a great wagon train of wounded men, heading east toward Fredericksburg. It was a dreary procession. There were not ambulances enough to carry all of the men who had been wounded in the Wilderness, and empty ammunition wagons, ration wagons, and similar vehicles had been put into service. These wagons had no springs, and the roads were very rough, and a steady, monotonous sound of moaning and screaming went up from the long train and could be heard far away, long before the wagons themselves came into sight. For miles the wagons filled the road, so that the cavalry had to get off to the side and go trampling through the underbrush.

Between and beside the wagons were the walking wounded, and these men begged for water as the cavalrymen went by, so that the column was slowed while troopers hastily offered their canteens. They were not supposed to do this, but as one trooper wrote, the calls of the wounded men were "an appeal that could not be denied. . , . We had water in our canteens and we took time to dismount and hold them to the lips of the thirsty comrades." The wagons jolted on, an enormous cloud of dust lying in the air above and all around, and now and then the train would halt while some wounded man who had died was taken out and laid in the woods.⁷

Never had the wounded men had it any worse,, The fighting an the Wilderness had caused more casualties than Antietam itself had caused, and the medical corps was snowed under. First orders had been to send the trains northwest back across the Rapidan to a spot on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, so thousands of men had been loaded in wagons and started in that direction. But when the army moved down toward Spotsylvania those orders had to be changed, because the old route by Germanna and Ely's fords was no longer being guarded and Mosby's raiders would unquestionably capture any hospital train that tried to use it. So it had been decided to send the wounded over to Fredericksburg, and the clumsy procession had countermarched (giving the men an extra twenty-four hours in the graceless wagons) and new trains were made up to carry more of them, and thousands upon thousands of wounded were now making the agonizing trip to Fredericksburg.

The medical corps that was taking charge of all this was fearfully shorthanded, because the army had marched off to fight new battles and most of its doctors, hospital attendants, and loads of medical supplies had to go along. A few could be spared for the men in the trains, but nobody knew what would happen when they finally reached Fredericksburg because that was a firmly secessionist town badly ravaged by war and it was not currently occupied by any Federal troops.

An abundance of stretcher-bearers had been detailed, a party from each regiment, but most of them were quite useless. Human nature being what it is, the average colonel picked out for this detail the men who were least likely to be of any help If they remained with the regiment, the inevitable consequence being that the worst loafers and thieves in the army had been appointed to help care for the wounded. Doctors noticed that the pockets of nearly all of the dead men and most of the helpless wounded men had been slit open for the easier removal of purses and watches.

The surgeons had done what they could. They began by sorting the wounded men into three classes—those who could probably walk back, those who had to be carried, and those who could not be moved at all and so would have to remain an field hospitals in the Wilderness, which was still smoldering and which stank to the highest heavens, what with thousands of iinburied bodies. A very few doctors could be spared to remain with these men—four of them, two regular hospital stewards, and twenty of the priceless detailed attendants, as at was finally worked out, for about a thousand totally disabled men.