And the splendid fighting of his men was a tribute to the skill and genius with which he had created an effective army out of what he had described as "regiments cowering upon the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, others going home." Out of a demoralized and disorganized mass reinforced by utterly untrained civilians, McClellan had within a few months created an army capable of stubbornly contesting every inch of ground even while effecting a retreat the very thought of which might well have disorganized an army. For soldiers in retreat do not usually fight as soldiers do when advancing upon an enemy. They are apt to be filled with the sentiment of hopelessness which retreat suggests and to hesitate to risk their lives in contests that seem to offer no adequate return for sacrifice.
If McClellan conspicuously failed as an energetic commander, in this his first important campaign, he succeeded at any rate in demonstrating the perfection of that work of organization by means of which he had created the splendid Army of the Potomac out of raw recruits and panic-stricken fugitives from battle.
At Gaines's Mill they gallantly endured a loss of no less than 9,000 men, and while they were driven from their position at last, they lost nothing of their morale, but were ready two days later to fight an equally determined battle, though it was the battle of a beaten and broken army which had been driven by force out of a supremely advantageous position and was now seeking safety in a flight that knew no ceasing night or day, except now and then a pause to offer a sullen resistance to an ever-present and pressing foe, and to ward off complete destruction by the offer of battle wherever the ground gave opportunity for resistance.
Here was McClellan's reward; here was his glory. This army of his a few months earlier under such a succession of defeats would have broken into panic-stricken rout. Thanks solely to his discipline and his dominant influence, it now endured compulsory and disastrous retreat with fortitude and stubbornly contested every inch of the blood-soaked ground.
It outnumbered Lee's force and its equipment was immeasurably superior to his. Under a commander of high gift for field work it might perhaps have beaten Lee and forced its triumphant way into Richmond. Under the commander it had it did itself great honor by retreating in good order and stubbornly resisting the Confederate advance wherever it was permitted to do so.
McClellan being now in full retreat and considering only those problems which related to escape, abandoned the position at Fair Oaks and posted Sumner and Heintzelman at Savage's Station. Their sole function was to guard the flank of the hurriedly retreating Federal army. To that end they were ordered to defend the position at Savage's Station until nightfall, or, in other words, until McClellan's retreating army should have passed that point in its hurried flight.
Here the Confederates under Magruder attacked with fury and the Federal general Heintzelman was driven into retreat. But Sumner heroically held his ground until nightfall, thus accomplishing McClellan's purpose, though at cost of a fearful loss in killed and wounded. He was so hard pressed indeed that when he retired at nightfall, he was forced to leave all his wounded in the enemy's hands and make a precipitate retreat to avoid the capture of his entire force.
Fortunately his enemy was a civilized one, so that his wounded men, left in their hands, were as tenderly cared for as if Federal surgeons had had them in charge. The only difference was that Federal surgeons had all possible medicaments and surgical appliances, while the Confederates, by reason of the blockade, lacked many life-saving agents, particularly the quinine which men wounded after long campaigning in the Chickahominy and White Oak swamps needed as imperatively as a shipwrecked crew needs life-lines and breeches-buoys. The war was so far civilized that the surgeons on either side eagerly did their best for such of the enemy's wounded as might fall into their hands. But it was still so far savage,—and it remained so to the end—that the side which possessed a navy shut out from the other as contraband of war the medicines necessary to the saving of human life and the rescue of the wounded from a needless death, as resolutely as it shut out gunpowder itself. In other words, the blockade was to this extent a part of that savagery which makes war upon the sick and wounded and other non-combatants as determinedly as it does upon stalwart men with guns in their hands and cartridge boxes strapped around their waists. There is cruelly no room for doubt that during the Seven Days' battles thousands of gallant fellows on both sides were buried in the fetid mud of those swamps, who might have been saved, had the world then been civilized enough for the Federals to let the Confederates have the quinine, the calomel and the opium they needed for the salvation of the lives of those who could fight no more, whether Federal or Confederate in their allegiance.
No nation is even yet civilized enough for this. "War is all Hell," said General Sherman, and its hellishness is nowhere so aggressively manifest as when it denies to a hard-pressed adversary the medicines necessary to the salvation of human life, the rescue from death of those who are already incapacitated, either by wounds or by disease, from further fighting. It is quite legitimate and logical to forbid the sending of food supplies to your enemy, because food is the foundation of every army's resisting power. But when a starving army surrenders, as Lee's did at Appomattox, the first care of its conqueror is to issue rations to the men who have ceased to fight, as Grant issued them on that historic occasion, even before the terms of capitulation could be written out. But it is a very different and a very much more barbarous thing to deny to surgeons in the field the means of saving human life whether the subjects of such life-saving happen to belong to the one army or to the other. The people of the United States are to-day paying princely sums as pensions to the families of those who died under Confederate surgeons' hands simply because the laws and usages of war forbade to those surgeons the medicines necessary to their life-saving work, and treated life-saving appliances as they treated gunpowder and arms, as contraband of war. Why should this hideous wrong have existed after the middle of the nineteenth century? Why should it continue to exist at the dawn of the twentieth? Are we, after all, only savages under a thin veneer of pretended civilization?
On the thirtieth of June the Confederates again assailed McClellan's retreating columns at Frazier's farm. A fearful contest ensued, for so superbly had McClellan organized and disciplined his army that even after days of disaster and depressing retreat it stood ready still to resist and to fight for every inch of ground.