CHAPTER XXXVI.

MISSION RIDGE AND CHICKAMAUGA.

Accordingly, one cloudy December morning the chaplain, accompanied by two ladies of his household, took me up at my hotel, and drove us out of Chattanooga on the Rossville Road.

Leaving the open valley behind us we crossed a bushy plain, and passed through a clump of oaken woods. Before us, on the east, rose Missionary Ridge, forest-covered, its steep sides all russet-hued with fallen leaves, visible through the naked brown trees.

The chaplain who witnessed the scene, described to us the storming of those heights by the Army of the Cumberland, on the twenty-fifth of November, a little more than two years before. It was the finishing stroke to which the affair at Lookout Mountain was the brilliant prelude. It was the revenge for Chickamauga. There was a Rebel line of works along the base of the ridge; and the crests were defended by infantry and heavy artillery. The charge was ordered; and forward across the plain and up the slope swept a single glittering line of steel six miles in length. The Rebels were driven from their lower works by the bayonet. The army rushed forward without firing a shot, and pausing only to take breath for a moment in the depressions of the hill; then onward again, storming the heights, from which burst upon them a whistling and howling storm of iron and lead. General Thomas says the Ridge was carried simultaneously at six different points. The attack commenced at three o’clock in the afternoon; at four the crests were taken, and Bragg’s army in flight. The first captured gun was turned upon the enemy by Corporal Kramer of the Forty-first Ohio regiment, belonging to Hazen’s brigade of Wood’s division. He discharged it by firing his musket over the vent. It took six men to carry the colors of the First Ohio to the summit, five falling by the way in the attempt. Corporal Angelbeck, finding a Rebel caisson on fire, cut it loose from the horses and run it off down the hill before it exploded. These instances of personal intrepidity (which I give on the authority of Major-General Hazen, whom I saw afterwards at Murfreesboro’) are but illustrations of the gallantry shown by our troops along the whole line.

The plain we were crossing was the same which General Hooker’s forces swept over in their pursuit of the enemy. We passed the Georgia State-line; and, amid hilly woods filled with a bushy undergrowth, entered the mountain solitudes; crossing Missionary Ridge by the Rossville Gap. Rossville, which consisted of a blacksmith-shop and dwelling in the Gap, had been burned to the ground. Beyond this point the road forked; the left-hand track leading to Ringold, the right to Lafayette.

Driving southward along the Lafayette Road we soon reached the site of Cloud Spring Hospital, in the rear of the battle-field. A desolate, dreary scene: the day was cold and wet; dead leaves strewed the ground; the wind whistled in the trees. There were indications that here the work of disinterment was about to begin. Shovels and picks were ready on the ground; and beside the long, low trenches of the dead waited piles of yellow pine coffins spattered with rain.

A little further on we came to traces of the conflict,—boughs broken and trees cut off by shells. We rode southward along the line of battle, over an undulating plain, with sparse timber on one side, and on the other a field of girdled trees, which had been a cotton-field at the time of the battle. These ghostly groves, called “deadenings,” sometimes seen in other parts of the country, are an especial feature of the Southern landscape. When timbered land is to be put under cultivation, the trees, instead of being cut away, are often merely deadened with the axe, which encircles them with a line severing the bark, and there left to stand and decay slowly through a series of years. First the sapless bark flakes and falls piecemeal, and the wind breaks off the brittle twigs and small boughs. Next the larger branches come down; and the naked trunk, covered in the course of time by a dry-rot, and perforated by worms and the bills of woodpeckers, stands with the stumps of two or three of its largest topmost limbs upstretched in stern and sullen gloom to heaven. There is something awful and sublime in the aspect of a whole forest of such. The tempest roars among them, but not a limb sways. Spring comes, and all around the woods are green and glad, but not a leaf or tender bud puts forth upon the spectral trunks. The sun rises, and the field is ruled by the shadows of these pillars, which sweep slowly around, shortening as noon approaches, and lengthening again at the approach of night. Corn and cotton flourish well; the powdery rot and half-decayed fragments which fall serving as a continual nourishment to the soil. It takes from ten to twenty years for these corpses standing over their graves to crumble and disappear beneath them. Sometimes they rot to the roots; or, when all is ready, a hurricane hurls his crashing balls, and the whole grove goes down in a night-time, like ten-pins.

Dismal enough looked the “deadening,” in the cold and drizzling rain that morning on the battle-field. Scarcely less so seemed the woods beyond, all shattered and torn by shot and shell, as if a tornado had swept them. On the northern side of these was Kelly’s house. The Dyer Farm was beyond; upon which we found two hundred colored soldiers encamped, in a muddy village of winter huts near the ruins of the burned farm-house. The Dyer family were said to be excellent Rebels. Dyer served as a guerilla; and it was his wife who burned her feather-bed in order that it might not be used by our wounded soldiers. After that patriotic act she wandered off in the woods and died. Her husband had since returned, and was now living in a new log-hut within sight of the camp.

The camp was a strange spectacle. The men were cooking their dinners or drying their clothes around out-door fires of logs which filled the air with smoke. Near by were piles of coffins,—some empty, some containing the remains of soldiers that had just been disinterred. The camp was surrounded by fields of stumps and piny undergrowth. Here and there were scattered trees, hitched at some of which were mules munching their dinners of wet hay.

There were two hundred and seventeen soldiers in camp. At first they had a horror of the work for which they were detailed. All the superstition of the African was roused within them at sight of the mouldering dead. They declared that the skulls moved, and started back with shrieks. An officer, to encourage them, unconcernedly took out the bones from a grave and placed them carefully in a coffin. They were induced to imitate his example. In a few hours they chatted or whistled and sang at their work; and in a few days it was common to see them perform their labor and eat their luncheons at the same time,—lay bones into the coffin with one hand, and hold with the other the hard-tack they were nibbling.

More than nine tenths of the bodies taken from Chickamauga were unknown. Some had been buried in trenches; some singly; some laid side by side, and covered with a little earth, perhaps not more than six inches deep, leaving feet and skull exposed; and many had not been buried at all. Throughout the woods were scattered these lonely graves. The method of finding them was simple. A hundred men were deployed in a line, a yard apart, each examining half a yard of ground on both sides of him, as they proceeded. Thus was swept a space five hundred yards in breadth. Trees were blazed or stakes set along the edge of this space, to guide the company on its return. In this manner the entire battle-field had been or was to be searched. When a grave was found, the entire line was halted until the teams came up and the body was removed. Many graves were marked with stakes, but some were to be discovered only by the raised or disturbed appearance of the ground. Those bodies which had been buried in trenches were but little decomposed; while of those buried singly in boxes not much was left but the bones and a handful of dust.

We had diverged from the Lafayette Road in order to ride along the line of battle east of it,—passing the positions occupied on Sunday, the second day, by Baird, Johnson, and Palmer’s divisions, respectively. Next to Palmer was Reynolds; then came Brannan, then Wood, then Davis, then Sheridan, on the extreme right. The line, which on Saturday ran due north and south, east of the road,—the left resting at Kelly’s house and the right at Gordon’s Mills,—was on Sunday curved, the right being drawn in and lying diagonally across and behind the road. In front (on the east) was Chickamauga Creek. Missionary Ridge was in the rear; on a spur of which the right rested. I recapitulate these positions, because newspaper accounts of the battle, and historical accounts based upon them, are on two or three points confused and contradictory: and because an understanding of them is important to what I am about to say.

Quitting the camp, we approached the scene of the great blunder which lost us the battle of Chickamauga. At half-past nine in the morning the attack commenced, the Rebels hurling masses of troops with their accustomed vigor against Rosecrans’s left and centre. Not a division gave way: the whole line stood firm and unmoved: all was going well; when Rosecrans sent the following imperative order to General Wood:—

“_Close up as fast as possible on General Reynolds, and support him._”

General Brannan’s division, as you have noticed, was between Wood and Reynolds. How then could Wood close up on Reynolds without taking out his division and marching by the left flank in Brannan’s rear? In military parlance, to _close up_ may mean two quite different things. It may mean to move by the flank in order to close a gap which occurs between one body of troops and another body. Or it may mean to make a similar movement to that by which a rank of soldiers is said to _close up_ on the rank in front of it. To _close to the right or left_, is one thing; to _close up on_, another. To General Wood, situated as he was, the order could have no other meaning than the latter. He could not _close up_ on General Reynolds and support him without taking a position in his rear. Yet the order seemed to him very extraordinary. To General McCook, who was present when it was received, he remarked,—

“This is very singular! What am I to do?” For to take out his division was to make a gap in the army which might prove fatal to it.

“The order is so positive,” replied McCook, “that you must obey it at once. Move your division out, and I will move Davis’s in to fill the gap. Move quick, or you won’t be out of the way before I bring in his division.”

General Wood saw no alternative but to obey the order. He would have been justified in disobeying it, only on the supposition that the commanding general was ignorant of the position of his forces. Had Rosecrans been absent from the field, such a supposition would have been reasonable, and such disobedience duty. But Rosecrans was on the field; and he was supposed to know infinitely more than could be known to any division commander concerning the exigencies of the battle. Had Wood kept his place, and Reynolds been overwhelmed and the field lost in consequence of that act of insubordination, he would have deserved to be court-martialled and shot. On the contrary, he moved his division out, and in consequence of his strict _obedience_ to orders the field was lost. He had scarcely opened the gap between Brannan and Davis, when the Rebels rushed in and cut the army to pieces.

General Rosecrans, in his official report, sought to shift the responsibility of this fatal movement from his own shoulders to those of General Wood. This was manifestly unjust. It appears to me that the true explanation of it lies in the fact that Rosecrans, although a man of brilliant parts, had not the steady balance of mind necessary to a great general. He could organize an army, or plan a campaign in his tent; but he had no self-possession on the field of battle. In great emergencies he became confused and forgetful. It was probably this nervousness and paralysis of memory which caused the disaster at Chickamauga. He had forgotten the position of his forces. He intended to order General Wood to close to the left on Brannan; or on Reynolds, forgetting that Brannan was between them. But the order was to close up on and _support_ Reynolds; whereas Reynolds, like Brannan, was doing very well, and did not particularly need support.

The routed divisions of the army fled to Chattanooga,—the commanding general among the foremost; where he hastened to telegraph to the War Department and the dismayed nation that all was lost; while General Garfield, his chief of staff, extricating himself from the rabble, rode back to the part of the field where firing was still heard,—running the gauntlet of the enemy’s lines,—and joined General Thomas, who, rallying fragments of corps on a spur of Missionary Ridge, was stemming the tide of the foe, and saving the army from destruction.

Through woods dotted all over with the graves of soldiers buried where they fell, we drove to the scene of that final fight.

Bones of dead horses strewed the ground. At the foot of the wooded hill were trenches full of Longstreet’s slaughtered men. That was to them a most tragical termination to what had seemed a victory. Inspired by their recent success, they charged again and again up those fatal slopes, only to be cut down like ripe grain by the deadly volleys which poured from a crescent of flame and smoke, where the heroic remnant of the army had taken up its position, and was not to be dislodged.