The road from the Wilderness leads straight to Spottsylvania. Mere localities; lonely, obscure, faintly marked on the maps they were and are still. Yet once, for just eight days their slumber was broken by the reverberations of continuous gigantic battle; and scarcely another week in modern history has borne such fruitage of sacrifice. Official reports, which seldom err by excess, tell us that our army lost 36,000 men during those eight days. What the South lost no one knows, for General Lee had issued a special order forbidding his officers to keep the count. But figures after all are an inane expression of such an immolation. These were men who fell,—young men, our best. After that week and after Cold Harbor, which quickly followed, the Army of the Potomac, the generous host of volunteers for home and country's sake, was never the same.
One regiment always comes to mind when Spottsylvania is named. It is indeed only one out of many distinguished for heroic losses; but I knew it well. Its members were fellow-citizens from my own State; the regiment entered service at the same time with our own. We marched together in the Sixth Army Corps; our first battles were alike; we both left our dead on the plains below Fredericksburg and at bloody Salem Heights.
The Fifteenth New Jersey was a choice regiment recruited from the flower of the manhood of the northern counties, and peculiarly full of that high sentiment which consecrated patriotism in 1862. It was officered largely by promotions from the veteran Jersey Brigade to which it was assigned, and after it took the field was commanded by a very able regular army officer. A light loss at Fredericksburg, a very severe one at Salem Church, where the regiment though as yet unseasoned bore itself with a steadiness and gallantry that excited general admiration, then a year of hard campaigning with but little serious fighting, and the Wilderness was reached.
The Fifteenth entered the week of battles with four hundred and twenty-nine men and fourteen line officers, beside field and staff. Of those eight days in the Wilderness and at Spottsylvania only one passed in which they met with no loss. During the fierce fighting on the fifth and sixth of May, though holding a responsible and exposed position, they suffered surprisingly little. On the seventh, another small loss met them on the skirmish line. They marched out of the Wilderness poorer by one sadly missed captain and perhaps twenty men. The eighth brought the Jersey Brigade as the advance guard of the Sixth Corps to Spottsylvania. At once, with no time to rest, they were plunged into the first of that remorselessly persistent series of terrific assaults which have made the name of "The Bloody Angle" forever famous. This first was but a reconnaissance ordered by General Warren to "develop that hill." For the Fifteenth it meant a charge across a treacherous morass, through timber slashings protecting and hiding the enemy's works, up to and over the very parapet, then back again; and it cost them over a hundred good men. The ninth brought duty on a perilous skirmish line, with a loss which included their colour-serjeant, killed by the same sharpshooter who slew General Sedgwick, the beloved commander of the Sixth Corps. The tenth, another battle again before the Bloody Angle, and another severe loss. The modest narrative of the regiment's historian says of May 11th:—
"There was musketry firing through the early morning, and several times the roll of discharges rose high, but we were left in quiet for several hours and made up our regimental reports. Then three brigades, including our own, were ordered to hold themselves in readiness for a charge, and were drawn up in order. During the night the enemy had made their fortification in our front most formidable. We looked up at the frowning works and flaunting battle-flags and felt that the attempt to capture them would be a march to death." But the assault was postponed and "the day was one of comparative quiet," and, for a wonder, a day of no losses for the Fifteenth regiment.
Seven days of ceaseless battle have now reduced the regiment by nearly one-third. Less than three hundred men remain in the ranks. It has been moreover a week of pitiless, unbroken strain, of wearing anxiety, of sleepless nights passed in worrying marches or in nervously exhausting picket duty close to the lines of an alert enemy. Imagine if you can seven days and nights with scarce a moment's respite from the crack of cannon or the threatening rattle of musketry, seven days when you are seldom out of sight of the swollen corpses of the dead or out of hearing of the wails of the wounded; seven horrible days, only one of which has gone by without seeing from half-a-dozen to a hundred of your comrades shot down, and ask yourself how fit you would be to take part in a desperate assault, a veritable march to death on the morrow?
Yet with this preparation and this anticipation thousands of men lay down in the chilling rain that night to get what rest they could. An officer whom I know well—he came home in command of the regiment—told me that on this night he and three others, two captains and two lieutenants, were huddled together under a shelter tent, trying to get a little rest and escape from the pitiless storm. One of the captains, seeing troops filing by, spoke up:
"Well, there goes the Second Corps; we are in for another light to-morrow, and it will be a nasty one. But I feel as though I would come out all right. I don't believe the bullet is yet moulded that will kill me!"
The other captain replied sadly, "I don't feel that way. I do not believe I shall be alive to-morrow night."
The two lieutenants said nothing; they only listened and thought.