This Wilderness is, perhaps, the very wildest tract of land that lies anywhere east of the Mississippi. It skirts the southern bank of the Rapidan for fifteen miles, extending inland from that stream for about ten miles. Originally it was densely timbered, but in colonial days, and a little later, the timber was cut away to supply fuel for the iron-furnaces that once abounded there, but that were afterward abandoned. As the region does not at all tempt to agriculture, the abandonment of the iron mines left it a veritable wilderness. Its surface became covered with densely growing scrub trees, interlaced with a tangle of vines and imbedded, as it were, in an undergrowth of a density inconceivable to men who have not acquainted themselves with the lavish luxuriance of Southern vegetation.
It was in this Wilderness that Lee’s columns struck Grant’s in flank, and for two days a battle raged there, of which, for difficulty of conditions, there is scarcely a parallel in the history of warfare.
The men could not see each other at a distance of more than a few rods. Regiments, struggling through the tangled vines and underbrush, came unexpectedly upon regiments of the enemy and fought desperately for the possession of the ground, neither knowing how much or how little the holding, the conquest, or the loss of the position involved might signify in a military way.
Orderly fighting was utterly out of the question. Not only was it impossible for corps commanders to handle their troops with co-operative intent; even brigades were so broken up, and their several parts so hopelessly separated and lost to each other in the thickets, that their commanders knew neither when nor where nor how to set one regiment to reinforce another at a critical juncture.
It was a veritable Donnybrook Fair on a large scale, where the only strategy consisted in pushing forward, and the only tactics in striking with all possible might at the enemy, wherever he was found.
The fighting was desperate on both sides. It was such fighting as only the most hardened veterans could have been expected to do under circumstances so unfavourable, such fighting as would have been simply impossible at any earlier stage of the war. To valour these two armies had added discipline and long use in war. Their determination was that of veterans, their courage that of matchless heroes, their endurance that of insensate machines. Here for the first time the two greatest armies of modern history had met in their perfection of discipline, of experience in war, and of that high courage which makes no distinction between the facing of death and the confronting of a summer shower. To these war-seasoned men on either side the hum of bullets meant no more than the buzzing of mosquitoes; battle, no more than a breeze.
But bullets were by no means the only source of trouble and danger. Several times during the long struggle, the woods caught fire, literally suffocating men by hundreds who had passed safely through hail-storms of bullets and successfully met and repelled charges with the bayonet. Earthworks hastily thrown up with pine-log revetments for their support, after enabling the men behind them to resist and repel successive assaults of desperate adversaries, became themselves an irresistible foe, by the firing of their log fronts and the consequent emanation of a smoke too stifling for human lungs to breathe and yet retain capacity for further breathing. The artillery played a comparatively small and very difficult part in all this. Manœuvring with guns in that underbrush was well-nigh impossible, and there were no vantage grounds anywhere from which a gun could deliver its fire at more than pistol-shot range. So delivering it, either the cannon fire quickly drove the enemy away, or the fire of the enemy drove the gun away; and in neither case, after that, could the artillery-men see any enemy to shoot at.
Nevertheless, Marshall Pollard’s battery managed to expend the greater part of its ammunition during those days, and that with effect. Kilgariff was largely instrumental in this. Early in the contest Pollard had clearly seen the difficulty—nay, the impossibility—of handling a battery of six guns as a unit in such conditions. He was subject to orders, of course, but in the execution of his orders he had a certain necessary discretion, and he exercised it. He had only two lieutenants present for duty. Each of these, of course, had immediate command of a section of two guns. The third section fell to Sergeant-major Kilgariff, as next in command. So to him Marshall Pollard said:—
“I cannot have you personally with me in this fight. You have a lieutenant’s duty to do, and I trust you to do it well. I shall try to keep the battery together, and under my own command so far as I can; but I foresee that it is going to be impossible to do that completely. I must leave each section commander to his own discretion, in a very large degree. Frankly, I have much greater confidence in your ability to fight your guns for all they are worth than I have in that of either of the lieutenants. They are good men and true, but they have had no experience in independent command. You—well, anyhow, you know more than they do So I am glad that you have the left section. That, of course, must be the first to be detached. The others I shall try to keep under my own direction.”
Beyond a mere “Thank you, Captain,” Kilgariff made no response. Half an hour later his section was detached and sent to a point of special difficulty and danger. He plunged into action with an impetuosity which surprised General Ewell, who was in personal command at that point, and whose uniform habit it was to place himself at the post of danger. But a moment later, observing the discretion with which Kilgariff selected a position of vantage and planted his guns, with equal reference to their effectiveness and their safety from capture by a dash of the enemy, General Ewell turned to his staff, and said:—