"You know I"ve a little woman praying for me every day. I lead a charmed life!"
She gazed at his handsome, bronzed face.
"I believe you do, dearest!"
CHAPTER XLI
McClellan fell before the genius of Lee, and Pope was put in his place.
They met at Second Mana.s.sas. The new general ended his brief campaign in a disaster so complete, so appalling that it struck terror to the heart of the Nation. Lee had crushed him with an ease so amazing that Lincoln was compelled to recall McClellan to supreme command. When the toll of the Blood Feud was again reckoned twenty-five thousand more of our brave boys lay dead or wounded beneath the blazing sun of the South.
The Confederate Government now believed its army invincible, led by Lee.
In spite of poor equipment, with the men half clad and half barefooted, Lee was ordered to invade Maryland. It was a political move, undertaken without the approval of the Commander.
As the gray lines swept Northward to cross the Potomac into Maryland, Lincoln was jubilant. To Hay, his young secretary, he whispered:
"We"ve got them now, boy. We"ve got them! The war must speedily end. Lee can never get into Maryland with fifty thousand effective men. The river will be behind them. I"ll have McClellan on him with a hundred thousand well-shod, well-fed, well-armed soldiers and the finest equipment of artillery that ever thundered into battle.
"McClellan"s on his mettle. His army will fight like tigers to show their faith in him. They were all against me when I removed him. Now they"ll show me something. Mark my words."
Luck was with McClellan. By an accident Lee"s plan of campaign had fallen into his hands. Yet it was too late to forestall his first master stroke. In the face of a hostile army of twice his numbers Lee divided his forces, threw Jackson"s corps on Harper"s Ferry, captured the town, a.r.s.enal and Rifle Works, twelve thousand five hundred prisoners and vast stores of war material. Among the booty taken were new blue uniforms with which Jackson promptly clothed his men.
Lee met McClellan at Antietam and waited for Jackson to arrive from Harper"s Ferry.
When McClellan"s artillery opened in the gray dawn, more than sixteen thousand of Lee"s footsore men had fallen along the line of march unable to reach the battlefield. The Union Commander was ma.s.sing eighty-seven thousand men behind his flaming batteries. Lee could count on but thirty-seven thousand. He gave McClellan battle with his little army hemmed in on one side by Antietam Creek and on the other by the sweeping Potomac.
The President in Washington received the news of the positions of the armies and their chances of success with exultation. As the sun rose a glowing dull red ball of fire breaking through the smoke of the artillery, Hooker"s division swept into action and drove the first line of Lee"s men into the woods. Here they rallied and began to mow down the charging ma.s.ses with deadly aim. For two hours the sullen fight raged in the woods without yielding an inch on either side. Hooker fell wounded.
He called for aid. Mansfield answered and fell dead as he deployed his men. Sedgwick"s Corps charged and were caught in a trap between two Confederate brigades concealed and ma.s.sed to meet them. Sedgwick was wounded and his command barely saved from annihilation.
While this struggle raged on the Union right, the center saw a bloodier tragedy. French and Richardson charged the Confederate position. A sunken road crossed the field over which they marched. For four tragic hours the men in gray held this sunken road until it was piled with their bodies. When the final charge of ma.s.sed blue took it, they found to their amazement that but three hundred living men had been holding it for an hour against the a.s.saults of five thousand. So perfect was the faith of those gray soldiers in Robert E. Lee they died as if it were the order of the day. It was simply fate. Their Commander could make no mistake.
Burnsides swung his reinforced division around the woods and pushed up the heights against Sharpsburg to cut Lee"s only line of retreat. He forced the thin, gray lines before him through the streets of the village. On its outer edge he suddenly confronted a ma.s.s of men clad in their own blue uniform.
How had these men gotten here?
He was not long in doubt. The blue line suddenly flashed a red wave squarely in their faces. It was Jackson"s Corps from Harper"s Ferry in their new uniforms. The shock threw the Union men into confusion, a desperate charge drove them out of Sharpsburg, and Lee"s army camped on the field with the dead.
For fourteen hours five hundred guns and a hundred thousand muskets thundered and hissed their message of blood. When night fell more than twenty thousand of our n.o.blest men lay dead and wounded on the field.
Lee skillfully withdrew his army across the Potomac. Safe in Virginia he rallied his shattered forces while he sent Stuart once more in a daring ride around McClellan"s army.
Again McClellan fell before the genius of Lee. Burnsides was put in his place.
They met at Fredericksburg. Burnsides, the courtly, polished gentleman, crossed the Rappahannock River and charged the hills on which Lee"s grim, gray men had entrenched. His magnificent army marched into a death trap. Lee"s batteries had been trained to rake the field from three directions.
Five times the Union hosts charged these crescent hills and five times they were rolled back in waves of blood. A fierce freezing wind sprang up from the North. The desperate Union Commander thought still to turn defeat into victory and ordered the sixth charge.
The men in blue pulled down their caps and charged once more into the jaws of death. The lines as they advanced s.n.a.t.c.hed up the frozen bodies of their comrades, carried them to the front, stacked the corpses into long piles for bulwarks, dropped low and fought behind them. In vain.
The gray hills roared and blazed, roared and blazed with increasing fury. Darkness came at last and drew a mantle of mercy over the scene.
The men in blue planted the frozen bodies of their dead along the outer line as dummy sentinels and crept through the shadows across the river shattered, broken, crushed. They left their wounded. Through the long hours of the freezing night the pitiful cries came to the boys in gray on the wings of the fierce North winds. They crawled out into the darkness here and there and held a canteen to the lips of a dying foe.
At dawn they looked and saw the piles of the slain wrapped in white shrouds of snow. The shivering, ragged, gray figures, thinly clad, swept down the hill, stripped the dead and shook the frost from the warm clothes.
Burnsides fell before the genius of Lee and Hooker was put in his place.
Fighting Joe Hooker they called him. At Chancellorsville a few months later he led his reorganized army across the same river and threw it on Lee with supreme confidence in the results. He led an army of one hundred and thirty thousand men in seven grand divisions backed by four hundred and forty-eight great guns.
Lee, still on the hills behind Fredericksburg, had sixty-two thousand men and one hundred and seventy guns. He had sent Longstreet"s corps into Tennessee.
Hooker threw the flower of his army across the river seven miles above Fredericksburg to flank Lee and strike him from the rear while the remainder of his army crossed in front and between the two he would crush the Confederate army as an eggsh.e.l.l.
But the unexpected happened. Lee was not only a stark fighter. He was a supreme master of the art of war. He understood Hooker"s move from the moment it began. His gray army had already slipped out of his trenches and were feeling their way through the tangled vines and underbrush with sure, ominous tread. In this wilderness Hooker"s four hundred guns would be as useless as his own hundred and seventy. It would be a hand-to-hand fight in the tangled brush. The gray veteran was a dead shot and he was creeping through his own native woods. On this beautiful May morning, Lee, Jackson, and Stuart met in conference before the battle opened.
The plan was chosen. Lee would open the battle and hold Hooker at close range. Jackson would "retreat." Out of sight, he would turn, march swiftly ten miles around their right wing and smash it before sundown.
At five o"clock in the afternoon while Lee held Hooker"s front, Jackson"s corps crept into position in Hooker"s rear. The shrill note of a bugle rang from the woods and the yelling gray lines of death swept down on their unsuspecting foe. Without support the shattered right wing was crushed, crumpled and rolled back in confusion.
At eight o"clock Jackson, pressing forward in the twilight, was mortally wounded by his own men and Stuart took his command. The gay, young cavalier placed himself at the head of Jackson"s corps and charged Hooker"s disorganized army. Waving his black plumed hat above his handsome, bearded face, he chanted with boyish gaiety an improvised battle song:
"Old Joe Hooker, Won"t you come out o" the Wilderness?"
His men swept the field and as Hooker"s army retreated Lee rode to the front to congratulate Stuart. At sight of his magnificent figure wreathed in smoke his soldiers went wild. Above the roar of battle rang their cheers:
"Lee! Lee! Lee!"
From line to line, division to division, the word leaped until the wounded and the dying joined its chorus.
The picket lines were so close that night in the woods they could talk to one another. The Southerners were chaffing the Yanks over their many defeats, when a Yankee voice called through the night his defense of the war to date:
"Ah, Johnnie, shut up--you make me tired. You"re not such fighters as ye think ye are. Swap generals with us and we"ll come over and lick h.e.l.l out of you!"
There was silence for a while and then a Confederate chuckled to his mate:
"I"m d.a.m.ned if they mightn"t, too!"
The morning dawned at last after the battle and they began to bury the dead and care for the wounded. Their agonies had been horrible. Some had fallen on Friday, thousands on Sat.u.r.day. It was now Monday. Through miles of dark, tangled woods in the pouring rain they still lay groaning and dying.
And over all the wings of buzzards hovered.
The keen eyes of the vultures had watched them fall, poised high as the battle raged. The woods had been swept again and again by fire. Many of the bodies were black and charred. Some of the wounded had been burned to death. Their twisted bodies and distorted features told the story.
The sickening odor of roasted human flesh yet filled the air.
It was late at night on the day after, before the wounded had all been moved. The surgeons with sleeves rolled high, their arms red, their shirts soaked, bent over their task through every hour of the black night until legs and arms were piled in heaps ten feet high beside each operating table.
Thirty thousand magnificent men had been killed and mangled.