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The Song of the Rappahannock. Dodd Ira Seymour
Читать онлайн.Название The Song of the Rappahannock
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Автор произведения Dodd Ira Seymour
Жанр Зарубежная классика
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We enlisted on a strictly equal footing, and chose our own company officers. The field officers, the colonel, lieutenant-colonel, and major, were elected by the company officers and appointed by the governor of the State. The non-commissioned officers, the serjeants and corporals, were selected by the captains.
The captain of our own company was a jeweller and an old member of a city militia organisation. Our first lieutenant was a banker's clerk, and our second lieutenant a mechanic who had in some way acquired an excellent knowledge of tactics. These were fair examples of the officers of the regiment. Out of the forty or more of them, ten had served in the State militia; a few of these ten had been with the "three months' men" who were called out at the beginning of the war; scarcely one of them had ever seen a shot fired in anger; the large majority, like the mass of the men, were destitute of any real military knowledge.
As to the colonelcy, the officers had fixed their desires upon a member of one of the old regiments, a highly qualified man; but the State authorities, in their inscrutable wisdom refused to appoint him, and sent us instead a staff officer who, though he had seen some slight service, was ignorant of infantry tactics and without experience in actual command. He was, however, an imposing individual, a fine horseman, with a decidedly military bearing and a self-assurance which temporarily concealed his defects.
Such, then, was the regiment when it was ready to be mustered into the service. You might say, "This is not a regiment; it is a mob," and you would be wrong. The men had gone through no such process of drill as is considered essential to the making of soldiers, yet they were not utterly ignorant even in this matter. It would have been hard at that time to find a young American who did not know something of the rudiments of infantry tactics. The political campaigns immediately preceding the war, with their semi-military organisations and their nightly processions, were a preparation for what followed which has been too little noticed. And when the war began, in every village "Home Guards" or drill classes were formed, and Hardee's and Casey's "Tactics" were well known and carefully studied books. We were all inexperienced, but only a small minority of the thousand men and officers were absolutely ignorant of military drill; moreover the mass of them were intelligent Americans, who learned quickly and easily. When we left the home camp a few weeks after enrollment, we could march deceptively well, and the regiment actually received praise for its fine appearance from spectators whose frequent opportunities had made them critical. Yet we were sadly defective. To keep step, to march by companies, to execute self-consciously a few motions of the manual of arms, is but the alphabet of tactics. The battalion, not the company is the tactical unit, and until a regiment has mastered the battalion drill and has learned skirmish work, it is unfit for modern warfare. In these essential things we were utterly unpractised.
There is also something else more important than drill. With regularly trained troops perfection of drill is simply the index of discipline. We were, in fact, very imperfect in both. Our discipline was certainly lax, yet even this was not wholly lacking. We were not a crowd of enthusiasts. Even at home we had for a year and a half lived in an atmosphere of war; the breath of battle from afar had reached us; we knew something of what it meant to be soldiers and what we were going into. The spirit of the hour enveloped us, and when we were formally mustered in and, with our right hands raised to heaven, took the oath of service, there was no wild cheering; there was instead a feeling of awe. The soul of the army, the mysterious solidarity of the mighty compelling organisation, seemed to take possession of us; we knew that we were no longer our own. Discipline is already half learned when men are thus made ready for it.
Washington was our first destination. We made the journey in freight cars, and on our arrival went into camp under canvas for the first time. It was shortly after the battle of Antietam, and the city was half camp, half hospital. Everywhere one met the monotonous blue uniforms: officers hurrying hither and thither; wounded convalescents, pale and weary, strolling about; sentries and squads of provost guards; occasionally a brigade of dusty and tattered veterans from the front, marching through the streets; and near the railroad stations, train-loads of wounded men who had been brought in from the overcrowded field hospitals, lying on the floors of box cars, the stench of their undressed hurts filling the air. Everywhere the atmosphere of war emptied of its glamour!
The Capital was the sore heart of the nation, and our glimpse of it was a wholesome lesson. It sobered us; it took away all lingering sense of insubordination, and taught us the relentless power of the mighty machine of which we had become a part, and into which we knew we must be fitted.
In a few days we were sent to Frederick City, and our army life began in earnest. For more than a week we slept without tents, upon the ground, under the open sky. We also took final leave of railroad transportation. We had to learn the use of our feet and the meaning of the march. After a short stay at Frederick, orders came to proceed to Hagerstown. Western Maryland was at that time strongly held by the Union forces, yet it was not a perfectly secure country. It was subject to raids of the enemy's cavalry, and there was a spice of danger in our march. We proceeded by easy stages; though, unseasoned as we were, the ten or twelve miles a day with our heavy loads seemed long enough; and at night when we made our bivouac we took carefully guarded positions and threw out pickets. Once there was a rumour that Stewart's raiders were in the neighbourhood, and our colonel made us a little speech in his bravado style. He told us that we must not load our muskets, "that he greatly preferred the bayonet!" Fortunately, we were unmolested. Everywhere along our march through that beautiful Maryland hill country we saw the marks of war. We crossed the famous South Mountain and a corner of the Antietam battlefield. There were groups of lonely graves by the road-side, and here and there the white tents of lingering field hospitals. On one night we camped near Phil. Kearney's old brigade, one regiment of which had come from our own neighbourhood. Some of us went over to their camp to visit friends whom we had not seen since the beginning of the war. We saw the evening dress parade of that choice regiment. They were fresh from the perils and hardships of the campaign; their ranks were sadly thinned, their clothes worn to rags, many of the men were nearly shoeless; but their rifles and their fighting equipments were in perfect order, and their dress parade was performed with a precision which could scarcely have been surpassed had they been a battalion of regulars in garrison with spotless uniforms and white gloves.
When we reached Hagerstown we found that we were assigned to a brigade of veterans, Yankees from the far North, who had come from their ancestral mountain farms at the first call of their country. They were, in many respects, a contrast to our friends whose dress parade we had witnessed. For those military forms and ceremonies so dear to the heart of the professional soldier they had small regard. They were noted foragers. Their commander, an officer of the regular army who afterwards became a distinguished division chief, said of them with mingled vexation and admiration, "I never saw such men. It is impossible to tire them out. No matter how far or how hard you march them, at night they will be all over the country stealing pigs and chickens." Their five regiments were all from one State, and their esprit de corps was very strong. With quaint Yankee drawl they used to boast, "This old brigade has never been broke, and it never shall be." And I think they made good their word to the end. They obeyed their officers with prompt devotion, but only because they knew that this was a necessary part of discipline; they had small reverence for rank or place. One of them once said to me, "When I am on guard, if I see an officer coming I always try to be at the other end of my beat, so that I won't have to salute him." And yet in small essentials these men were very precise soldiers. One evening one of them came over from his regiment to visit us. The enemy suddenly opened fire from his batteries away beyond the river. It was a common occurrence. There was no special danger; the regiments were not even formed in line; yet this veteran promptly took his leave. "You know," he said, "that when firing begins a man ought to be in his place in his own company." It was so always. With all their independence and contempt for conventionalities, the discipline prevailing in that brigade was really most rigid. They were not fond of reviews, and took no special pains to make a show on such occasions; but to see the splendid line they kept in that deadly charge on the Fredericksburg heights, when one of their small regiments lost over a hundred men in a few moments, was enough to bring tears of admiration from a soldier's eyes; and at Salem Heights, when at evening Stonewall Jackson's men, concentrated in overwhelming