CHAPTER XVII
A FRAGMENT OF UNWRITTEN MILITARY HISTORY

By this time—September, 1862—Mr. Dana had retired from The Tribune and Mr. Sydney Howard Gay had become managing editor in Mr. Dana's place. The natural gift of command which belonged to Mr. Dana had not descended upon Mr. Gay; it never does descend; but he was capable of a quick decision, and when, having returned that morning from Antietam, I saw him in the afternoon, he was in a managing-editor state of mind. With much firm kindness of manner he suggested that I should start that evening to rejoin the army. I said yes, because, in my inexperience and in my artless awe of my superior officer, I did not know what else to say. And I took the night train to Washington.

With the discomforts of the night railway service between New York and Washington I had already made acquaintance. They were considerable, but less than they are now. There was then no overheated Pullman car; there was no overbearing coloured porter to patronize you, and to brush the dust from other people's clothes into your face, and to heat the furnace—by which I mean the steam-heated car—seven times hotter; there was no promiscuous dormitory. When Lord Charles Beresford was last in Washington, four or five years ago, he told me one afternoon he was going to New York by the midnight train. When I suggested that the day service was less unpleasant than the night, he answered: "Oh, it doesn't matter to me. I can sleep on a clothes-line." There spoke the sailor lad of whom there are still traces in the great admiral of to-day. I have never tried the clothes-line, but I had lately been sleeping for many nights together on the sacred soil of Virginia, or the perhaps less sacred soil of Maryland, thinking myself lucky if I could borrow two rails from a Virginia fence to sleep between. I am not sure whether I liked the stiff seats of the old-fashioned coach much better, but I am quite sure I should prefer the open air and the sacred soil and the Virginia rails to the "luxurious" stuffiness of the modern sleeping car. The only real luxury I know of in American railway travel is the private car.

However, I might as well have stayed in New York, for I was soon invalided back again with a camp fever, and then remained in the office to write war "editorials," and others.

But I was to make one more journey to the field, and once more to see General Hooker. General McClellan, thinking it over for a month and more after Antietam, had finally crossed the Potomac, dawdled about a little, and been ordered to Trenton, New Jersey, well out of the way of further mischief. General Burnside had succeeded McClellan; had fought and lost the battle of Fredericksburg, with the maximum of incompetency, in December, 1862; had McClellanized till January 25th, and had then yielded up the command of the unhappy Army of the Potomac to General Hooker. Fighting Joe spent some three months in getting his army into good fighting order; then tried his luck against Lee and Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville. Luck in the shape of a bullet, whether Union or Rebel took Jackson out of his way; but Lee, perhaps for the first time, showed the greater qualities of generalship, and Hooker, at the end of a three days battle, was defeated; the Union forces recrossing the Rappahannock on the night of May 4th, 1863.

I must apologize for restating, even in the briefest form, facts which everybody knows. I do it because, soon after Chancellorsville, I was sent again to the Army of the Potomac on a mission of inquiry. It was almost the blackest period of the war; the darkness before dawn; a dawn which was to come from the West as well as from the East. The army was demoralized; so was public opinion; so, I think, were the military authorities in Washington; and nobody knew where to look for a commanding officer. There remained not one in whom the President or the Army of the Potomac had faith. They were groping for a General, and groping so far as the East was concerned, in the dark. My business was to throw such as light as I could on the causes of Hooker's defeat, and to find out, if I could, whom the Army of the Potomac wanted as leader. And I was given to understand that the results of my inquiry would be published in The Tribune.

They never were. I spent rather more than a week with the army, at one headquarters or another. General Hooker, to whom I of course presented myself in the first instance, very kindly asked me to be his guest, but that was impossible. I could not be the guest of the man whom I was to investigate. I told Hooker my errand. As General commanding, he had the right to order me out of the lines, which would have brought my mission to an end. Instead, he offered me all facilities consistent with his duty. "If I am to be investigated," he said, rather grimly, "it might as well be by you as anybody." Indeed; he had a kindness for me and had offered me, or tried to offer, after Antietam, a place on his staff; which military regulations did not permit. It was not necessary to tell him I had every wish he might come well out of the examination. But I had.

So I went about to one general and another and from one corps to another, and talked with men of all ranks and of no rank. I knew General Sedgwick best and went to him first. He was a man of action rather than words, and was reluctant to talk. Besides, his share in the battle had been greater than anybody's but Hooker himself. He told me what his orders had been, and how he had tried to carry them out. Up to a certain point, he had been successful. He had crossed the Rappahannock in the early morning of May 3rd, carried the heights near Fredericksburg by noon, advanced toward Chancellor's with intent to turn Lee's rear, till he brought up against an immovable Rebel force late in the afternoon. He held his position all night and during most of the next day, the 4th. Then Lee, who was at his best, brought up more troops, and forced Sedgwick back across the river at night. He had lost five thousand men.