The march went on and on, and men fell out and lay down in the mud and went to sleep. When the rain stopped, men who kept going lighted candles and stuck them in the muzzles of their rifles, and the straggling column lurched on, will-o'-the-wisp fires flickering in the night, and the riverbank was lined for ten or fifteen miles with officers and men who could not keep up. One survivor wrote that "it was impossible to say whether colonels and brigadier generals had lost their commands, or regiments and brigades had lost their commanders." When day came, after a sketchy bivouac, the column pulled itself together—Humphreys was the man to see to that—and by noon all hands were accounted for and the march was going on compactly again.
14
Up past Frederick they went, pulling for the Pennsylvania line, and the men's spirits rose with the green fields and blue mountains about them, citizens cheering them on when they passed through towns, girls standing by farmhouse doors to wave flags and offer drinks of cold water. The army had its own method of greeting these girls. The wolf-call whistle was unknown to soldiers of that era, but they had an equivalent—an abrupt, significant clearing of the throat, or cough, which burst out spontaneously whenever a line of march went by a nice-looking young woman, so that at such a time, as one veteran said, "the men seemed terribly and suddenly afflicted with some bronchial affection."
16
Coughing and grunting, and vastly pleased with themselves, the men followed the dusty roads, and while they had no idea where they were going, it seemed to them that at last they were marching to victory. As one man put it: "We felt some doubt whether it was ever going to be our fortune to win a victory in Virginia, but no one admitted the possibility of a defeat north of the Potomac."
16
The advance crossed the line into Pennsylvania, and the veteran 2nd Massachusetts went into a little town at the head of one column and found that word of their coming had gone on ahead. The citizens were out in force, and on each side of the main street there were long tables spread with all sorts of good things to eat, pretty girls standing behind the tables, wanting nothing so much as to serve good Union soldiers. There was much coughing and grirming and waving of hands, and the men fixed their mouths for apple butter and pie and soft bread, when bang-bang-bang! from the northern edge of town there came the sound of rifleshots, and couriers came galloping back, and the regiment swung its rifles to the right shoulder and went double-quicking on through the village to help the cavalry drive off Rebel skirmishers. But when they got to the open country there were no Rebels, and nobody seemed to know what the scare had been about, and the 2nd Massachusetts awoke at last to the knowledge that the regiment had been had. They could not retrace their steps back into town, regiments farther back in the line got all of the lunch, and to the end of their days the Massachusetts boys were convinced that the whole thing had been a put-up job devised by scheming characters envious of the regiment which marched at the head of the column.
17
On every road the long columns went north. To the 3rd Michigan, the march seemed pleasant, what with pretty girls and cheering villagers, and one veteran wrote that "the roads around here are beautiful and macadamized and we enjoy marching over them very much. Every man in the ranks feels jubilant." To an Irishman in the 9th Massachusetts there was poetry in the very landscape: "The picturesque farmhouses and granaries appeared under the bright sunlight as white as driven snow. The undulating farming lands were covered with their rich nodding plumes of yellow grain which rose and fell in the breeze, before the approaching eye, on plateaus, valleys, and hills with pleasing effect. The scenery of it all, in its greatness, when viewed from a vantage ground, was a magnificent spectacle." Not all of the notes were quite so enthusiastic. Some soldiers found that when they tried to buy fruit or food they were badly overcharged, and when this happened the men sometimes helped themselves to contents of store or roadside stall and, departing, airily told the proprietor to "charge it to Uncle Sam." On such occasions the inhabitants would try to shame the men by saying that Lee's soldiers had been much more gentlemanly, but this rarely seemed to have any effect.
18
Then came the news that Meade had replaced Hooker. It was unwelcome news, for the enlisted man still liked Hooker, and outside the V Corps Meade was hardly more than a name. In the ranks men asked angrily: "What has Meade ever done?" and bleakly answered: "Nothing!" But if most of the soldiers felt that the government had made a mistake in this change of commanders, they kicked up no fuss over it. The ardent hero worship of the old volunteer days was gone now, and it would never come back again, partly because the heroes were departed but mostly because the men themselves had lost then-old need to make and worship heroes. The soldiers were sorry to see Hooker go, but they did not bother to carry on about it.
19
The man at the top might be anybody. It no longer seemed to matter very much. In the ranks there seems to have come slowly and painfully the realization that the man who would finally get the army through its trials was a profane, weary man with no stars on his shoulders and scant hope of any in his crown, the everlasting high private who was being challenged now, once and for all, to show what kind of man he really was.
Meade announced his accession by a circular to corps commanders, calling on officers to explain to their men the immense issues involved in Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania. Meade said that "the army has fought well heretofore," and he believed that it would fight "more desperately and bravely than ever if it is addressed in fitting terms." He added, somewhat maladroitly—the capacity to sound an inspirational note simply was not in this gnarled gray-bearded man—that corps and other commanders "are authorized to order the instant death of any soldier who fails to do his duty at this hour."
20
The army moved on, some of its segments doing thirty miles and more in a day, and in rear of the moving troops there was pandemonium. A newspaper correspondent who got to Frederick just after the army marched out noted that the place was full of stragglers, with all the liquor shops nmning full tilt and drunken soldiers wandering all over town, trying to steal horses or sneak into private dwellings, "inflamed with whisky and drunk as well with their freedom from accustomed restraint." On the road north from Frederick he found more of the same, and he wrote bitterly:
"Take a worthless vagabond who has enlisted for thirteen dollars a month instead of patriotism, who falls out of ranks because he is a coward and wants to avoid the battle, or because he is lazy and wants to steal a horse to ride on instead of marching, or because he is rapacious and wants to sneak about farmhouses and frighten or wheedle timid country women into giving him better food and lodging than camp life affords—make this armed coward or sneak thief drunk on bad whisky, give him scores and hundreds of armed companions as desperate and drunken as himself—turn loose this motley crew, muskets and revolvers in hand, into a rich country, with quiet, peaceful inhabitants, all unfamiliar with armies and army ways—let them swagger and bully as cowards and vagabonds always do, steal or openly plunder as such thieves always will—and then, if you can imagine the state of things this would produce, you have the condition of the country in the rear of our own army, on our own soil, today."
21
The debris that was set afloat by this backwash of the moving army Uttered towns and hamlets all along the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, underlining the regrettable fact that not all soldiers are shining sons of light; emphasizing, too, the queer gaps in this army's discipline, which meant that a hard march usually cost the army about as many men as a hard battle. How could it have been otherwise? Here was an army in which the whole problem of command had gone unsolved. In the past ten months the army had fought four great battles—Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. It had had a different commander for each one, and now with a fifth battle approaching it had its fifth commander. Of the seven army corps, not one was being led now by the man who had led it at the time of Antietam. All but three of the nineteen infantry divisions had changed command since then. Fewer than half of its fifty-one infantry brigades were led by men who had the proper rank for the job, the rank of brigadier general, and only ten of the fifty-one had led their brigades for as long as ten months.
In the regiments the condition was apt to be even worse. Army regulations rewarded regimental officers who kept their men out of the hottest action and penalized those who took them into the thick of the fighting. When regimental strength declined, as it invariably did, since there was no adequate system for providing replacements, a regiment sooner or later was apt to fall below the minimum strength at which it was permissible to muster in a full colonel or to maintain a regular regimental staff—quartermaster, surgeon, commissary officer, adjutant, and so on. Most of the veteran regiments were commanded by majors or captains, and promotion for these men was impossible no matter how much they might deserve it, simply because their regiments were too small to carry higher ranks. (The three New York regiments in the famous Irish Brigade had been consolidated to two companies apiece now, and these battalions were led by company officers.) If a brigade made up of such regiments was reinforced with a brand-new rookie regiment and the brigadier then got shot or fell ill or resigned, command of the whole brigade would go by seniority to the untested rookie colonel even though the junior officers who led the veteran battalions knew ten times as much as he knew about leading troops.
22
The leadership which men got under this system was apt to be haphazard and unpredictable, and when the army moved it was bound to dribble men to the rear, unraveling a loose fringe of ne'er-do-wells and fainthearts and out-and-out skulkers to ravage the countrysid
e and to scandalize right-th
inking war correspondents. Yet it was noticed that in those outfits which did have good leadership there was very little straggling, and indeed it was more or less an axiom in the Army of the Potomac that a regiment, brigade, or division which fought well also marched well. A commander who "looked after his men," as the expression went, and who insisted on soldierly behavior, would always get a response.
The II Corps had gone under Hancock after Couch departed, and Hancock was driving it along the highways unmercifully in the end-of-June heat and dust, but very few of his men were leaving the ranks. They remembered afterward being driven so hard that when they had to ford any creek or river they were not allowed to fall out to remove their shoes and socks, which meant that they had to march with wet feet and so got very footsore by the end of the day. It was on this march that the skipper of one of Hancock's best regiments, Colonel Colville of the 1st Minnesota, was sternly placed under arrest because he had let his outfit make a little detour in order to cross a certain stream by a footbridge instead of sending the men splashing straight ahead through the shallows.
23
As it reached Pennsylvania the army began to encounter militia regiments—regiments dressed in fancy uniforms, carrying the full complement of equipment, with muskets polished until the barrels shone like mirrors. The veterans looked at these militiamen with dour curiosity and uttered wisecracks designed to put the holiday soldiers in their places. North of Frederick the XII Corps encountered the New York 7th, a dandy regiment wearing, among other things, nice white gloves. There was a rain coming down and the roadside was muddy, and the militiamen were not looking their best as Slocum's veterans cast critical eyes on them. The XII Corps advised the militiamen to come in out of the rain before the dress-parade uniforms got spoiled, asked them where their umbrellas were, and suggested that the boys join the army someday and see what soldiering was like. On another road the VI Corps met a Brooklyn home-guard regiment dressed in uniforms of natty gray, and the veterans coldly advised the militia to dye those uniforms blue: if they ever got into a fight the Army of the Potomac was apt to shoot anybody it saw who came to the field in a gray uniform. Now and then a veteran would ask the home guards where they buried their dead.
24
As it moved the army covered a very wide front, thirty-five or forty miles from tip to tip. Orders were vague because plans were vague. Lee's army was somewhere between York, on the east, and Chambersburg, on the west, and as June ended it became apparent that the Confederates were beginning to pull their far-flung detachments together, heading toward some sort of concentration east of the long barrier of South Mountain. Meade considered that when it came to a fight the line of Pipe Creek, a meandering little stream along the Pennsylvania border, would be a good place for the Army of the Potomac to make its stand. He was uneasy about it—Halleck was warning him that he was pretty far west and that Lee might be able to make a dash around his right and strike at Baltimore or Washington—and he kept his men pushing on, tentacles of cavalry reaching forward, looking for a contact. In York an agent of the Sanitary Commission got inside the Rebel lines and took a look at one of Ewell's camps, finding the Rebels "well stripped for action and capable of fast movement."
"Physically, the men looked about equal to the generality of our own troops, and there were fewer boys among them," this man wrote. "Their dress was a wretched mixture of all cuts and colors. There was not the slightest attempt at uniformity in this respect. Every man seemed to have put on whatever he could get hold of, without regard to shape or color. . . . Their shoes, as a general thing, were poor; some of the men were entirely barefooted. Their equipments were light as compared with those of our men. They consisted of a thin woolen blanket, coiled up and slung from the shoulder in the form of a sash, a haversack swung from the opposite shoulder, and a cartridge box. The whole cannot weigh more than twelve or fourteen pounds." He asked one of these lanky Rebels if they had no shelter tents, and the soldier was scornful of such comforts, saying, "I just wouldn't tote one."
25