Part 15

In the rear of our street and parallel to it was another, through which a railroad track was laid, and there, after a battle, I have seen many car-loads of wounded men brought in, lying on the floors of rough cars, into which they had been loaded from the field of action. All grimy with the heat, dust and wounds of battle, they were placed upon stretchers, and by the convalescents and nurses were carried to the dainty beds. They were first washed and put to bed, then supplied with food and drink, then visited by the surgeons, assistants, and nurses.

The arrangements for cooking were, of course, upon a very large scale. Huge coppers were used for boiling, and brick ovens for baking. In one of the latter three barrels of beans could be cooked for the Sunday dinner.

A little Scotch woman, Miss Duncan, was in charge of this diet kitchen, having a number of men under her direction; no time was frittered away, a perfect system was maintained, and the men submitted meekly to her despotic sway. I have seen a six-foot man rush for sand and mop, to erase an accidental spot of grease before it should be discovered by her sharp eyes. Everything under her _régime_ was a miracle of neatness and economy. The pans were kept shining and arranged in regular order on the shelves, and the store-room was dazzlingly neat. The smallest number of rations issued from her kitchen was 5,000 per diem, and she has sent out as many as 15,000 in one day. Nothing was wasted; the surgeon was bright enough to secure beef of the best quality, and even hoofs and tails supplied fine jelly and excellent soups, and what could not be used directly was sent to feed the swine at the piggery.

The negro camp was filled with families of contrabands who had found their way within our lines. These were served with rations, and drawn upon for such assistance as they were competent to give. The women washed for the hospital, and the men did all sorts of rough work. Sleeping from ten to thirty in one tent, they lived by day out of doors, and negroes of all ages and all colors basked in the sun or hugged the fires, or rolled about in the dirt. Many of the children came in with only one article of clothing, and that very commonly was a coffee bag with a hole for the head to go through. One old woman said that she came in because she had heard that “the champagne was a-goan to open.” Rough as they fared to our eyes, it was evident they had never lived in such sybaritic luxury before.

Every part of the extensive camp was swept daily; neatness was the order everywhere. The precision and beauty of the routine, and the exactness which followed discipline, spoiled me for civil life at home afterward, for I craved that system, punctuality, and order which cannot be found except under military rule.

Passing down the walks in front of the patients’ tents, their thin white faces claimed one’s pity, but there was comfort in seeing here, within hearing of the droning voice of the cannon and the tearing sound of musketry, that the victims of the battle found a quiet place to rest, where, lying in the soft air and bounteous sunlight, carefully nursed and daintily fed, their wounds might be healed and their ills abated before they were again to be plunged into the chaos of war.

In the winter many of the tents were replaced by log houses, and some of these became charming cottages, having many conveniences. Around my house was a little garden with a tiny fence, and oats were sown in the beds to form ornamented borders, in which all the corps badges were represented.

But with the spring all this was to disappear; the army moving forward to final victory, and the _impedimenta_ like myself, going back to civil or civilized tameness in the cold North. But even now I have but to shut my eyes as my neighbor, the old army bugler, practices the calls in the clear winter air, and again returns the memory of those days.

XX.

_ABOUT PETERSBURG._

Such portions of the army as were not stationed in the trenches were called upon frequently to repel attacks, and occasionally were sent out on expeditions to destroy railroads, or otherwise to interfere with the enemy’s supplies, and to weaken his lines. One of these was the action on the Weldon railroad, August 18th, in which we lost thirteen men. Another led to the battle of Peeble’s Farm, September 30th, 1864.

The expeditionary force was composed of the 5th and 9th Corps, and the movement was as usual off to the left. After marching three miles our brigade was in front of Fort McRee, and the men were ordered to lie down in the edge of a piece of woods until the remainder of the attacking force could be posted. The 32d Massachusetts was directly in front of the fort, the 4th Michigan on the right, and on the left a brigade of new troops, which however took no part in the attack.

It was about three o’clock in the afternoon when the order for the advance was given, and we moved out into an open field, finding ourselves, perhaps half a mile distant from the fort and the line of the breastworks of the enemy. Their batteries opened upon us promptly, but old soldiers know that it is not the great guns that are most to be feared, and our line moved steadily on until it came within rifle range of the rebel works and the small arms began their deadly work; then the order for double quick was given and the men, sure that the faster they moved the less was their risk, dashed forward with alacrity and in a few moments closed upon the lines of the enemy. Colonel Edmands in this charge was disabled by a wound in his leg below the knee. Colonel Welch, of the 4th Michigan, while in the act of urging his horse over the first defences, fell mortally wounded upon the breastworks.

The first to mount the earthworks was a captain of “ours“; he stood long enough to swing his sword above his head and shouted “come on boys, we’ve got ‘em”--then dropped inside closely followed by two other officers; one of them had jumped the ditch and the other having jumped into it, scrambled out with the assistance of his men. When these three officers with one soldier mounted the parapet, its defenders were still firing, but when they were inside, the fort was captured. Surrounded by our troops, they knew that if four men could get in in spite of them, the rest would follow, and soldiers quickly learn to know when the day is lost and to submit gracefully to the misfortune of war. In the fort we made forty prisoners, of whom eighteen were officers, and captured one piece of artillery--minus the horses--which the gunners managed to cut loose and run away, although not without a struggle.

As we gained these the first of their works, the enemy retired to his second line of defences and the prisoners being speedily secured, we pushed on with the rest to the attack. At the inner line there was some close work where bayonets and butts of rifles came into use, but there was no great resistance, for the enemy were badly demoralized and our chief interest centered in an effort to capture one of their colors. The bearer was a tall and vigorous man, but one of our comrades, a gallant young fellow, grappled the bearer and secured the flag. Just as he turned to escape with his prize, one of the rebels with a musket tripped our man, who fell, still clinging to the staff, but at the same moment the stalwart standard-bearer grasped the flag, broke the lance and bore away his flag, leaving the northman only the wrong end of the stick.

After carrying the second line, our division was halted and left resting on their arms while the 9th Corps passed into the front and followed the routed forces. They were however soon met by a force which proved too strong for them, and after a short struggle were in their turn driven backward, losing all that they had gained and threatening to cause confusion in the whole line, but our General (Griffin, called “old Griff” for short) seeing the danger and having unlimited faith in his command, threw the division into the pathway of the rebels, now flushed with hope of final victory, and with a few volleys checked them and turned the tide again; darkness closed upon the fight and the field was ours. We called the battle that of Peeble’s farm, because it was fought upon the lands of General and Colonel Peebles, two officers of the Confederate army. The fort was afterward named Fort Welch in honor of the gallant Colonel who had baptized it with his blood.

After the fort was captured and the men disarmed, the fight raged for a time along the line, and the Confederate prisoners huddled together under the breastworks for protection from the missiles which were still uncomfortably numerous, and which they had no further occasion to brave.

While thus situated, a large number of men of our brigade swarmed in at the entrance of the fort, and one of their officers, a captain of a Maine regiment, rushing up to a squad of the prisoners, pistol in hand, fired, shooting one of them in the head. It is charitable to presume that the captain was blinded with the excitement of the fight, but he narrowly escaped a similar fate himself before his brother officers hurried him away; and it is likely he may never forget the shouts of opprobrium and the epithets of ignominy which the deed provoked from the Union men who witnessed his cowardly or reckless act.

When the battle commenced, and as we moved to the assault, the brigade of new troops which was posted on our left was deployed to protect that flank, and no doubt thought that their time had come. The roar of the battle was in their ears, and the sight of killed and maimed was before their eyes for the first time, and as is commonly the case with raw men at such times, they did not set much store on property; and so finding themselves cumbered with well-crammed knapsacks and new and heavy overcoats, they threw them off to improve their fighting trim. As the veterans came out of the fight and saw such wealth scattered about, no doubt some of them seized the occasion to better themselves, by exchanging old for new, and for some days afterwards the new men were apt to claim as their own every new overcoat worn by any of our men; but in the army the fashions of dress are so similar that it is not easy to see any difference between one man’s coat and another’s, and so our Johnny Raws had to put their losses down to the debit of experience account and draw new clothing for that “lost in battle.”

The experience of this day was a very cheering one to the troops engaged; we had had our enemy “on the hip” and kept him trotting, and we felt that it might be what indeed it proved--the beginning of a chase which should tire him in the end.

The 9th Massachusetts Regiment did not reënlist, and when their three years’ term of service expired, their reënlisted men and late recruits were transferred to the 32d. On the 26th of October the enlisted men of the 18th and 22d, whose time of service did not expire with that of their regiments, were also added to our battalion, increasing its numbers so largely as to require the organization of two new companies, L and M, the officers for which were transferred with the men. Thus the Regiment was now composed of twelve companies, and its parades exhibited a front which two years before would have been respectable for a brigade.

By general orders of October 26th, a reorganization of our division was effected, by which we were transferred to the third brigade, which was then composed entirely of veteran regiments.

On the 6th of December, 1864, we were, as we supposed, established in winter quarters, on the Jerusalem plank road, in a dry and healthy location, when orders came for a movement, and we regretfully abandoned our improvements and took up a line of march along the plank road.

We marched three miles that afternoon and bivouacked by the wayside. The next morning, early, we started again toward our destination, of which we knew nothing, except that our haversack rations meant three days of absence, and the forty rounds in our cartridge boxes implied no expectation of big fighting. After marching twelve miles the command was massed at the bank of the Nottoway River, which we crossed about midnight and yet moved on. At daylight we were at Sussex Court House, and at three in the afternoon reached what proved to be our objective--the line of the Weldon Railroad, five miles from Jarratt’s Station.

Here we rested until dark, when the men were ranged out along the railway and set to work to destroy it. First the rails were removed; then the sleepers were taken up, piled and fired; when the rails, laid across the burning ties, were heated so as to be pliable, they were doubled and twisted in such manner that they could not be relaid unless rerolled. Then the same operation was repeated on another length of track until several miles in all were ruined. It was a long day’s work, and we bivouacked the second night along the road-bed, making our coffee at the smouldering fires.

On the 10th we started on the return march, and although it was raining and very muddy, we made twenty miles that day, reaching a bivouac near Sussex Court House. The next day we passed over the Nottoway, and on the 12th reached the Jerusalem road, and went into camp within a half-mile of the spot we had left to make the excursion which has been described. Here again we built dug-outs and huts, in which we were allowed to remain until the early spring.

On the return march the men did considerable foraging on their own account. A goose, a chicken, a turkey or duck, seemed to be a part of the men’s equipment. One squad captured a little pony, harnessed him to a sulky, and loaded the sulky with their knapsacks and live stock. One man appeared under a stove-pipe hat, but it didn’t wear well. At night, sweet potatoes, sorghum molasses, and apple-jack, were abundant in the camp.

Our enlisted men were not apt to be damaged by the over-supply of spirituous liquors. The sale of them was strictly forbidden, and when a sutler was detected as implicated in the trade, his entire stock of all kinds of merchandise was confiscated, and in some cases distributed among the near-by soldiers.

Whiskey was used as a medicine, but its value as such is problematical. As a restorative for men exhausted by labor or by battle, it has, no doubt, a good effect, but it should not be given until the work is done or the battle fought. It would have been a great advantage to the army if the commissioned officers had not been able to obtain supplies, for Dutch courage is a poor substitute for the real thing, and a clear head is even more important to him who commands than to him who has only to obey.

On the Weldon Railroad expedition, some of the men, by a mysterious instinct, discovered several barrels of apple-jack which had been concealed under a stack of hay, and many of the canteens were filled with spirit by the soldiers as they passed. Several of these, overcome by their potations, fell out of the line of our outward march, and probably to sleep off the fumes, stretched themselves out upon the broad veranda of a planter’s house. On the return march they were found there with their throats cut--dead--and the murder was avenged by the burning of the house. No doubt many more suffered for their excess by imprisonment in Southern barracoons.

The New Year of 1865 found the Regiment in log huts near the Jerusalem plank-road, a mile in the rear of our works before Petersburg, on swampy ground. The two wings of the battalion alternated in fatigue duty, building, extending, or strengthening works, the labor continuing day and night.

Suddenly on the afternoon of February 4, 1865, orders came to move the next morning (Sunday), at daylight. The general impression was that there was to be another raid on the railroad connections of the enemy, and the camp huts were left standing. At daylight on the 5th, the column started and sunset found us near to Nottoway Court House. We were ordered out on picket, but were recalled about midnight and marched until dawn, when we were at Hatcher’s run--the point where that stream is crossed by the Vaughn road.

The day before, the 2d Corps had been engaged with the enemy here, and the 32d was posted in some rifle pits on the further side of the Run, out of which the rebel forces had been driven. Our Regiment was the extreme right of the 5th Corps, and on its right connected with the left of the 2d Corps across the stream. About 2 o’clock P. M., Crawford’s division advanced from the left, moved across our front and encountered the enemy; two hours later our brigade was put in by General Warren to fill a gap in Crawford’s line, and the contest was sharp until about dusk, when the onset of a fresh body of the enemy drove back Crawford’s command in some confusion. The locality of the action was in a thick wood of pines where we could not see to any great distance, and as our part of the line held on, we found ourselves with the 155th Pennsylvania quite alone and flanked on both sides. It required considerable coolness and some sharp fighting to enable us to get back to the original line of battle, and our losses in doing so were heavy--74 in killed, wounded, and missing; included in which number was Major Shepard, who was made prisoner while commanding the brigade line of skirmishers, and Captain Bowdlear severely wounded. The action we named that of Dabney’s Mills.

Until the 11th we remained in the same position. The weather was very cold and stormy, and the enemy’s artillery at times very annoying, but no infantry attack was made. On the 11th the corps changed its line slightly, and we soon had a camp more comfortable than that we left on the Jerusalem road. Here we remained digging and picketing until we started out on the final campaign.

In the action of the 6th, Major Shepard commanded the skirmish line in front of our brigade. When Crawford advanced across our front, the pickets became useless and the Major proceeded to call them in and to join the brigade. While marching to the left, as he supposed in the rear of the Union line of battle, he happened into the gap which had just been made in Crawford’s command by a Confederate charge, and he suddenly found himself in the rear of the enemy; at the same moment he was struck in the head by a musket ball, which had just force enough to stretch him senseless on the ground. The Major recovered to find himself an object of interest to a half-dozen rebel stragglers, one of whom exchanged hats with him, another borrowed his nice overcoat, while others contented themselves with his various equipments. Perhaps Shepard did not recover full consciousness until the moment when one of the plunderers ordered him to take off and yield up his boots. But this was the feather too much. Those boots were new, elegant, and costly, and the Major made a stand in and for them, replying to all threats by the declaration that they couldn’t have the boots, and that he preferred death to the loss of them.

How the affair might have ended we cannot say, had not an officer appeared in sight, to whom the Major formally surrendered himself; but thereupon the stragglers left him with his boots and his life to boot, and both have given him much contentment since that day.

XXI.

_THE LAST CAMPAIGN._

The month of March is really a spring month in the latitude of southern Virginia, and out of the attending frosts and thaws, storms, mists, and bright days which make up the winter there, we had come to the time when the buds were breaking out into greenness, and when even within sound of the great guns, the venturesome birds would sing the lays of spring.

The whole army was inspired with the feeling that the last campaign was about to open, and that the triumph of the Union cause must be at hand.

For six weeks we had been established in our huts, when on the 29th day of March, early in the morning, we bade good-bye to our village camp, and with the 5th Corps moved out to the rear and left. The weather was warm and as the march proceeded, personal property in the way of clothing, which had been valuable in the winter season, and convenient in the camp, began to increase in weight and to decrease rapidly in value. As the men realized that we were off this time in earnest, they began to shed their surplus clothing. The roads were difficult and the march toilsome. At every halt loads were lightened, and spare blankets, overcoats, shelters, etc., strewed the line of march, until by nightfall all were in light marching trim.

In the absence of Colonel Edmunds, disabled by sickness, and Major Shepard, prisoner of war, the Regiment to the end of the campaign was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Cunningham, assisted by Captain Bancroft as acting major.

The direction of our march finally led us toward the Boydtown plank-road, near which in the afternoon the 1st and 2d brigades of our division became hotly engaged, and ours (the 3d,) was put in position in a low, level, and swampy field. During the night it set in to rain with that ease and abundance which seems to be characteristic of the climate, and we passed a thoroughly uncomfortable night, during which men thought regretfully of the blankets and rubber sheets which they had thrown away during the previous day.

Through Thursday the 30th the rain continued, but about noon the 32d was deployed in front as skirmishers, with orders to feel for the enemy--feeling for him in the sloppy weather, we found him behind some log breastworks, from which we rooted him out and pushed him a short distance backward. But the enemy in his turn got to be pressing, and our ammunition becoming scarce, we were in our turn pushed back to our starting point. The Confederates even charged the line of our corps, but were repulsed with considerable loss.

Late in the afternoon, with replenished cartridge boxes, we reoccupied the log breastworks, and being ordered to feel forward again, did so. This time it was a fort and an open field with too much artillery for comfort, but we got up close, burrowed, and held on. It seems that we had reached around to the extreme right of Lee’s line of works for the defence of Petersburg, and hereafter we were to be free of these inconvenient obstructions to our way.

Friday, March 31st, at 5 A. M., we were relieved by the 2d Corps, and moved off again to the left, where General Warren posted the divisions of his corps, in _echelon_ a little west of the Boydtown road. The ground, owing to the long rain, was in a condition very unfavorable to any movement, and our formation was hardly completed when the 2d and 3d divisions, (Crawford’s and Ayer’s,) were attacked and driven back with some loss, but our division (the 1st,) held its position, and the 2d and 3d coming into line with us, the whole corps, preceded by a strong skirmish line, again advanced and pressed the rebels hard.

Captain Lauriat commanding four companies of the 32d was in the line of skirmishers, and seized the opportunity, as the lines closed, to draw off on the flank, and through a bit of wood got into the rear of the enemy’s skirmishers and stampeded them. So rapid was our advance that at one spot we captured the enemy’s dinner of bacon, as also a number of guns in stacks.