CHAPTER IX.
IN THE WOODS AT CHANCELLORSVILLE.
It is no easy matter to describe a long day's march to one who knows nothing of the hardships of a soldier's life. That a body of troops marched some twenty-five or thirty miles on a certain day from daylight to midnight, from one point to another, seems, to one who has not tried it, no great undertaking. Thirty miles! It is but an hour's ride in the cars. Nor can the single pedestrian, who easily covers greater distances in less time, have a full idea of the fatigue of a soldier as he throws himself down by the roadside, utterly exhausted, when the day's march is done.
Unnumbered circumstances combine to test the soldier's powers of endurance to the very utmost. He has, in the first place, a heavy load to carry. His knapsack, haversack, canteen, ammunition, musket, and accoutrements are by no means a light matter at the outset, and they grow heavier with every additional mile of the road. So true is this, that, in deciding what of our clothing to take along on a march and what to throw away, we soon learned to be guided by the soldiers' proverb that "what weighs an ounce in the morning weighs a pound at night." Then, too, the soldier is not master of his own movements, as is the solitary pedestrian; for he cannot pick his way, nor husband his strength by resting when and where he may choose. He marches generally "four abreast," sometimes at double-quick, when the rear is closing up, and again at a most provokingly slow pace when there is some impediment on the road ahead. Often his canteen is empty, no water is to be had, and he marches on in a cloud of dust, with parched throat and lips and trembling limbs,—on and on, and still on, until about the midnight hour, at the final "Halt!" he drops to the ground like a shot, feverish, irritable, exhausted in body and soul.
It would seem a shame and a folly to take troops thus utterly worn out, and hurl them at midnight into a battle the issue of which hangs trembling in the balance. Yet this was what they came pretty near doing with us, after our long march from four miles below Fredericksburg to the extreme right of the army at Chancellorsville.
A Surgeon writing upon the Pommel of his Saddle an Order for an Ambulance.
I have a very indistinct and cloudy recollection of that march. I can quite well remember the beginning of it, when at the early dawn the enemy's batteries drove us, under a sharp shell-fire, at a lively double-quick for the first four miles. And I can well recall how, at midnight, we threw ourselves under the great oak-trees near Chancellorsville, and were in a moment sound asleep amid the heaven-rending thunder of the guns, the unbroken roll of the musketry, and the shouts and yells of the lines charging each other a quarter of a mile to our front. But when I attempt to call up the incidents that happened by the way, I am utterly at a loss. My memory has retained nothing but a confused mass of images: here a farmhouse, there a mill; a company of stragglers driven on by the guard; a surgeon writing upon the pommel of his saddle an order for an ambulance to carry a poor exhausted and but half-conscious fellow; an officer's staff or an orderly dashing by at a lively trot; a halt for coffee in the edge of a wood; filling a canteen (oh, blessed memory!) at some meadow stream or roadside spring; and on, and on, and on, amid the rattle of bayonet-scabbards and tin cups, mopping our faces and crunching our hard-tack as we went,—this, and such as this, is all that will now come to mind.