Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (53 page)

The puffing of Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine is a subset of the larger problem of glamorizing Little Round Top itself. As Charles Hazlett had warned Warren, Little Round Top’s narrow spine offered very little in the way of a gun platform, and certainly not on the order of
Cemetery Hill’s broad plateau. What is even more important to realize is what defending Little Round Top took away from other vulnerable places. When Warren spontaneously began pulling away elements of the
5th Corps—two entire brigades—he subtracted from the defense of Sickles’ line at the
Emmitsburg Road, and made it all the easier for Longstreet to land the real blow of the afternoon, on the lopsided angle around
Joseph Sherfy’s peach orchard. In his eagerness to fend off Hood’s attack, Warren set up Sickles for the blow which would clear the Emmitsburg Road and bring the Army of the Potomac to its knees. Which is why Gouverneur Warren, who saw this unfolding, now galloped off to “rejoin General Meade near the center of the field, where a new crisis was at hand.”
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  CHAPTER SIXTEEN  

T
HE SOLDIER
sees very little of the general engagement,” wrote one veteran of the 52nd Virginia thirty-five years after Gettysburg, and he warned people who thirsted for reminiscences and retellings of the great battle from its survivors that the old soldier tends to “describe the field” mostly on “other people’s information, not his own knowledge.” Confusion, and not orderliness, was what the soldier actually saw and felt, especially when “orders are sent by messengers, but the messenger is killed or captured before he can give them,” and a regiment or an individual is left to “act on his own judgment.” Even a major general like
Abner Doubleday admitted that “it is difficult in the excitement of a battle to see every thing going on around us, for each has his own part to play and that absorbs his attention to the exclusion of every thing else.” The billows of
smoke expelled by the massed thousands of firearms, just by themselves, “shut the combatants from sight,” admitted a soldier in the 1st Minnesota on July 2nd, “and we could only judge of the direction of the fight by the sound … to tell who were retreating and who advancing.” Entire brigades easily “lost their way in the blinding sulphurous canopy,” and from a distance, cavalry pickets on higher ground around Gettysburg could only see “smoke in the valley beyond.”
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What the soldier mostly experienced in battle was “the booming thunder of the musketry” and “the smoke-cloud” that “rolls up above the trees.” Only afterward, when “each man tells his neighbor what he saw,” does an entire narrative began to take shape. “We tell the whole story—thus picked up and patched together—until some of us, after a while, swear to being an eye witness to every scene and movement of that battle.”

A battlefield is “the lonesomest place which men share together,” and
once the shooting begins, the individual soldier’s experience in battle becomes “utterly abnormal” and tightly concentrated into an immediate semicircle in front and beside him. Isolated from sight by one another, as well as by fear for survival, it was the other senses which became the nineteenth-century soldiers’ chief inlets of information, beginning with the variety of bizarre sounds which dominated the nineteenth-century battlefield—the weird harmonic ring of bullets striking fixed
bayonets, the clicking of the locking ring on the bayonet when fixed on the rifle’s muzzle, the deceptively harmless sound of rifle volleys (
Wilbur Fisk of the 2nd Vermont compared it to the results of holding “a large popper full of pop-corn over a good fire”), the thud of rounds striking flesh or the metallic clink when they struck bone or the dropped-china crack when they hit teeth.
Thomas Livermore, a sergeant in the 1st New Hampshire, remembered that the “thundering roll of musketry” was so deafening that “shouts and loud commands … were drowned in that awful noise.” But individual rounds zipping close by could be heard all too well “over our heads in piping tones,” and sometimes even closer, “like a very small circular saw cutting through thin strips of wood.” Other explosive noises acquired familiar musical associations: “The different calibers, metals, shapes, and distances of the guns” all gave different artillery batteries distinctly different pitches, like “the chimes of old Rome when all her bells rang out.”
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Soldiers generated other kinds of noise themselves. As pulse rates spiked, the mechanisms of personal self-control crumbled, producing loss of bladder and bowel control, along with other ordinary cultural inhibitions. Profanity turned out to be a surprisingly easy way for even the most mild-mannered soldiers to release their tensions. A young enlistee in the Pennsylvania Reserves,
Benjamin Urban, “knew the very best and consistent Christian men of my company to swear in the frenzy of battle and be utterly oblivious of it afterward.” One Methodist officer was rebuked by a private for foul language under fire, and when the infuriated officer denied doing so, the soldier merely referred him to another officer who confirmed that, indeed, he had never heard anyone swear so much in his life. “In the excitement of battle … the Captain was absolutely unconscious that he had acted thus.”

Others lapsed into gallows humor, providing a certain measure of self-protecting bravado. “Men standing in line got in paroxysms of laughter and shouted ‘Say, boys, isn’t this the mos’est fun for the leastest money?’ Tears from laughter made lines on powder-grimed faces, and a general spirit of hilarity prevailed.” Others would compensate for their tension simply by shouting.
Rufus Dawes was surprised how combat induced men to behave with “demoniacal fury and shouting and laughing hysterically” while “the whole field before us is covered with rebels fleeing for life, into the woods.” The deadliest sound of all was the gasp of the wounded man, although by comparison
with the other contributions to pandemonium all around, it seemed almost the gentlest. In a particularly sharp firefight, a soldier hit by a bullet would “throw up his arms with an ‘Ugh!’ and drop,” or fall “by your side with the awful groan and agony of death”; anyone killed outright “would drop flat on his face, or on his back, without a sound.”
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There were other senses that came into play in combat, not the least of which was—in this age of close-order formations—touch. Men sought the “touch of elbow” with the men on either side in line of battle, to serve as a reassurance that they were not being left behind or overly exposed to enemy fire. Taste also made a mark on the soldier, mostly in the form of gunpowder from
cartridges ripped open with the teeth. “We bit off the end of the cartridge with our teeth,” related one Union soldier, and “always got a few grains of powder in our mouth, and as the taste was not unpleasantly peculiar, we chewed the paper which we had bitten off, and by the time we had fired a few times we had a good wad of paper in our mouths which we would chew as a school-girl would chew gum.” Even the weapons in the soldiers’ hands had tactile messages: in the 1st Minnesota, a soldier noticed how “as the
shells from our own and the enemy’s guns passed over us,” there would be a “wiggling vibration of the line of
muskets.”

As with sounds, it was the impact of wounds which were liable to be felt most cruelly, although not nearly so painfully as might have been imagined. “The first sensation of a gunshot wound is not one of pain,” wrote a Michigan veteran. “The feeling is simply one of shock, without discomfort, accompanied by a peculiar tingling, as though a slight electric current was playing about the site of injury,” and followed by “a marked sense of numbness, involving a considerable area around the wounded part.” For most, the impact of a bullet “was as though someone had struck them sharply with a stick” and men often “turned to accuse a comrade of the act” until they discovered “from the flow of blood, that they had been wounded.” But even if the immediate sensation was not one of agony, the results might be. Overall, 90 percent of all wounds in Civil War battles were caused by gunshot, “and the remainder by shell fragments and other large projectiles.” Of these, wounds to the abdomen were fatal in 87 percent of the cases; gunshot wounds to the chest achieved a level of 65 percent fatality.
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And yet, the staggering mortality inflicted by Civil War combat remained more a product of the sheer volume of fire delivered in motionless line-to-line slugfests, rather than any extraordinary lethality in the weapons technology. None of the rifle’s much-vaunted improvements was sufficient to trump the volunteer soldier’s mediocre training, his amateur officers, the cumbersome nine-step loading sequence, or the inevitable palls of powder
smoke. “What precision of aim or direction can be expected,” asked one British officer, when
“one man is priming; another coming to the present; a third taking, what is called, aim; a fourth ramming down his cartridge,” and all the while “the whole body are closely enveloped in smoke, and the enemy totally invisible.” The answer, of course, was
not much
. At the
battle of Stone’s River, six months before Gettysburg, Union major general
William S. Rosecrans worked out a general estimate of how many shots needed to be fired to inflict one hit on the enemy, and came up with the astounding calculation that 20,000 rounds of artillery fired during that battle managed to hit exactly 728 men; even more amazing, his troops had fired off 2 million cartridges and inflicted 13,832 hits on the rebels, all of which meant that it required 27
cannon shots to inflict 1 artillery hit and 145 rifle shots to score 1 infantry hit.

This was, to be sure, a great improvement over the
smoothbore musket, which could require “3,000 to 10,000 cartridges as the proportion to one man killed or wounded.” But it was still worse than the
Crimean War, where British and French troops at the Alma scored 1 hit for every 125 shots—as if even that came close to annihilating an opposing enemy line. “In actual service, not more than one shot in six hundred takes effect,” estimated a Federal officer in early 1862, “and, except for the moral effect of the roar of the musketry and whistling of the balls, the remaining five hundred and ninety-nine might better have been kept in the cartridge boxes.” A modest-sized regiment, letting off a
volley at an oncoming enemy, might be doing very well to hit one or two of them; an entire brigade, firing simultaneously, might be able to hit four or five of its enemies at any single opportunity. Given how attacking infantry, moving over 1,700 yards, could cover that ground in approximately sixteen minutes, then the most each rifleman in massed brigade on the defensive could hope to deliver during the attack were ten reasonably aimed shots.
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It was not the technical improvements of the rifle musket or antiquated tactical theories which sent men charging in suicidal rushes to their deaths which caused the staggering length of the casualty lists of the American Civil War. They were, instead, the result of the inexperience or simple terrified unwillingness of both volunteer officers and soldiers to make those charges swiftly with the bayonet and the consequent bogging down of lines of battle in prolonged and motionless exchanges of fire. Well might old-line generals like Edwin Sumner urge his officers, “If they come out here, give ’em the bayonet; give ’em the bayonet, they can’t stand that.” But in practice, as
Langhorne Wister of the 150th Pennsylvania informed his curious Philadelphia friend
Sidney George Fisher, the reality of bayonet combat “was so shocking that it very rarely happened that bayonets are crossed.”
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This requires taking the constant assertion in soldier memoirs and reminiscences that
the air was filled with the most destructive fire
, or that
a constant hail of bullets fell around us
, with a long measure of caution. By the experience
of most American volunteers who had never been under lethal fire before, the Civil War battlefield certainly was an amphitheater of fear and anxiety. “A person has not much time to think of danger while in action,” Oscar Ladley of the 75th Ohio wrote home after Chancellorsville, “but still a person has a vague idea that he is in considerable danger,” especially after “a shell passes near you like lightning” and “you have a faint idea it is not far off and that the next one will take your head off.” But there was no constant, unremitting hail of fire at all moments, and men could actually stand upright on a Civil War battlefield with at least a certain space of safety, and soldiers on the firing line could indulge in antics that seem more appropriate to the scrimmage line. “You yell, you swing your cap, you load and fire as long as the battle goes your way,” wrote one officer, “it is a supreme minute to you; you are in ecstasies.”
John Cook of the 80th New York had “one reckless fellow” in his regiment rest “the muzzle of his gun on my left shoulder and banged away.” The crack of the rifle “not six inches from my ear, made me jump.” But instead of apology or regret, “I was overwhelmed by the laughter of the men at the start it had given me.” A month after Gettysburg, a Union artillery officer could write in perfect candor that “somehow or other I felt a joyous exaltation, a perfect indifference to circumstances, through the whole of that three days’ fight, and have seldom enjoyed three days more in my life.”
Charles Edward Benton, a soldier in the 150th New York, expressed “a feeling of disappointment in my first and each succeeding experience of battle scenes.” But even Benton was incredulous when, under artillery fire, a “member of another regiment” with whom he had been swapping stories “casually remarked” that being under sustained artillery fire “always makes me sleepy,” and despite “the fact that shells were dropping and exploding here and there … he was soon sleeping soundly on the grass” (this was probably the result of a stress-related spike in heartbeat, since a pulse rate which reaches 175 beats per minute will constrict blood vessels and induce sleep).
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