CHAPTER XVI

CIVIL WAR--PERSONAL INCIDENTS AT ANTIETAM

General Hooker was about the first man in the saddle. The pickets had begun sniping long before dawn. My bivouac was within sight of his tent. "The old man," said one of his staff, "would have liked to be with the pickets." No doubt. He would have liked to be anywhere in the field where the chance of a bullet coming his way was greatest. Kinglake has a passage which might have been written for Hooker. That accomplished historian of war remarks that the reasons against fighting a battle are always stronger than the reasons for fighting. If it were to be decided on the balance of arguments, no battle would ever be begun. But there are Generals who have in them an overmastering impulse of battle; it is in the blood; temperament prevails over argument, and they are the men who carry on war. Hooker was one of them. He loved fighting for fighting's sake, and with the apostles of peace at any price he had not an atom of sympathy. He would have thought Herbert Spencer something less than a man, as he was; and Mr. Carnegie, if he had been anything then but the {146} boy he has never outgrown, a worthy disciple of an unworthy master.

No, I am not keeping you waiting for the story of Antietam, for I am not going to re-tell it. But General Hooker, on that day a hero, has had hard measure since, and I like to do him what justice I can. I liked the man. My acquaintance with him began that morning. To hear him issue an order was like the sound of the first cannon shot. He gathered up brigades and divisions in his hand, and sent them straight against the enemy. That is not at all a piece of rhetoric. It is a literal statement of the literal fact. His men loved him and dreaded him. Early in the morning he had scattered his staff to the winds, and was riding alone, on the firing line. Looking about him for an officer, he saw me and said, "Who are you?" I told him. "Will you take an order for me?" "Certainly." There was a regiment which seemed wavering, and had fallen a little back. "Tell the colonel of that regiment to take his men to the front and keep them there." I gave the order. Again the question:

"Who are you?"

"The order is General Hooker's."

"It must come to me from a staff officer or from my brigade commander."

"Very good. I will report to General Hooker that you decline to obey."

"Oh, for God's sake don't do that! The Rebels are too many for us but I had rather face them than Hooker."

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And on went his regiment. I returned to Hooker and reported. "Yes," said he, "I see, but don't let the next man talk so much"; and I was sent off again.

I was with Hooker when he was wounded, about nine o'clock. He was, as he always was, the finest target in the field and a natural mark for the Rebel sharpshooters. It was easy to see that they followed him, and their bullets followed him, wherever he rode. I pointed that out to him. He replied with an explosion of curses and contempt. He did not believe he could be hit. No Rebel bullet was to find its billet in him. He was tall and sat high in his saddle. He was of course in uniform--no khaki in those days, but bright blue, and gilt buttons and all the rest of it; his high-coloured face itself a mark, and he rode a white horse. Not long after I had spoken, a bullet struck him in the foot. It was the best bullet those troublesome gentlemen in grey fired that morning. He swayed in the saddle and fell, or would have fallen if he had not been caught. Then they carried to the rear the hope of the Union arms for that day; and for other days to follow.

I saw him again about four in the afternoon. I had been asked to see him by one or two of General McClellan's staff who knew I had been with General Hooker in the morning. I have said long since what the errand was they wished to lay upon me, or what I supposed it to be. General Wilson explained to me, on the publication of that {148} article, that I had mistaken the meaning of the men I talked with; that the officers who asked me to go never designed that I should suggest to Hooker to take command of the army, but only to find out whether he could resume the command of his own corps; and perhaps of another; not waiting for orders, apparently. It does not much matter, for I, of course, declined to carry any such message as I thought was proposed to me. It was for the officers themselves, if for anybody, to carry it. If they had any such purpose in mind, it was mutiny; patriotic but unmilitary. Well might they lose patience when they saw the promise of a shattered rebellion fade before their eyes. But that day was not yet, happily, since a premature victory over the South would have left great questions unsettled. This scheme, or dream, was none the less interesting because it showed, as I thought, what McClellan's own officers thought of his generalship on that fateful day; and possibly of something besides his generalship.

But I went to the little square red-brick house where Hooker had been taken, and was allowed to see him. It needed no questions. He was too evidently done for; till that day and many days to come had passed. He was suffering great pain. I told him I had come by request of some of General McClellan's staff to ask how he was.

"You can see for yourself," he answered faintly. "The pain is bad enough, but what I hate to think is that it was a Rebel bullet which did it."

His courage was indomitable; his contempt for {149} the Rebels not one whit abated. He asked for the latest news from the field of battle. I told him it was no longer a field of battle; that McClellan was resting on his arms; that he would not use his reserves; and that there was every prospect that Lee would escape with his beaten army across the Potomac. He raged at the thought.

"Unless,"--I added.

"You need not go on," retorted Hooker. "You must see I cannot move."

It tortured him to think that his morning's work was half thrown away; and that McClellan, with some fourteen thousand fresh troops, was content to see the sun go down on an indecisive day. Into his face, white with the pain which tore at him, came heat and colour and the anger of an indignant soul. The surgeon shook his head, and I said good-bye.

I rode back to headquarters; only to find that the decision had been taken or perhaps that McClellan was incapable of any decision; his mind halting, as usual, between two opinions; and the negative in the end prevailing over the positive. He had an irresistible impulse to do nothing he could leave undone. I asked for General Sedgwick. He had been badly wounded--I think thrice wounded, but had fought on till the third--and been carried off the field. Nobody could tell me where he was. I saw him once again. A Rebel bullet laid him low at Spottsylvania. One of the best generals we had: a man of utterly transparent honesty, simplicity, and truth of {150} character; trusted, beloved, ardently followed by his men; a commander who had done great things and was capable of greater.

Since it was too late to get anything through to New York that night, I wasted some hours in one camp and another. Perhaps they were not wasted. I heard everywhere a chorus of execration. McClellan's name was hardly mentioned without a curse. Not a soldier in the ranks who did not believe it had been possible to drive Lee into and over the Potomac.

At nine o'clock in the evening I started for Frederick, thirty miles away. My horse had two bullets in him, and I had to commandeer another from a colleague, who objected but yielded. I reached Frederick at three in the morning, sleeping in the saddle a good part of the way, as I had been up since four o'clock of the morning before. The telegraph office was closed, and nobody knew where the telegraph clerk lived. I thought it odd that in time of war, and after an important battle, the Government at Washington should have kept open no means of communication with the general commanding; but so it was. Frederick was the nearest and, so far as I knew, the only available telegraph office. There was no field telegraph. The wires were not down, but the operator was sleeping peacefully elsewhere.

He reappeared about seven. I asked him if he would take a message. After some demur he promised to try to get a short one through. I sat down on a log by the door and began to write, {151} giving him sheet after sheet till a column or more had gone, as I supposed, to New York. _The Tribune_ had been notified that a message was coming. But neither my private notice to _The Tribune_ nor my story of the battle was sent to New York. It was sent to the War Office at Washington, and such was the disorder then prevailing that it was the first news, or perhaps only the first coherent account, of the battle which reached the War Office and the President. They kept it to themselves during all that day. At night, in time for next morning's paper, it was released, wired on, and duly appeared in Saturday's _Tribune_.

I never doubted that when my telegram had once been sent I should find a train to Baltimore. There was none. I saw one official after another. Nobody knew, or nobody would say, when a train would leave. It might go at any moment, or not at all. I tried in vain for a special. There could be no special without military warrant. I wired the War Office and got no answer. It was trying work, for what I had hoped was to reach New York in time for Saturday morning's paper. Finally, I was allowed to travel by a mixed train which arrived in Baltimore some ten minutes before the Washington express for New York came in.

That is all the margin there was. The cars were lighted by oil lamps, dimly burning, one at each end of the car, hung near the ceiling. I had to choose between the chance of wiring a long and as yet unwritten dispatch from Baltimore, {152} and going myself by train. The first word at the telegraph office settled it. They would promise nothing.

So by the light of the one dim oil lamp, above my head, standing, I began a narrative of the battle of Antietam. I wrote with a pencil. It must have been about nine o'clock when I began. I ended as the train rolled into Jersey City by daylight. The office knew that a dispatch was coming, the compositors were waiting, and at six o'clock the worst piece of manuscript the oldest of them had ever seen was put into their hands. But they were good men, and there were proof-readers of genius, and somewhere near the uptown breakfast hour, _The Tribune_ issued an extra with six columns about Antietam.

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