“This is very singular! What am I to do?” For to take out his division was to make a gap in the army which might prove fatal to it.
“The order is so positive,” replied McCook, “that you must obey it at once. Move your division out, and I will move Davis’s in to fill the gap. Move quick, or you won’t be out of the way before I bring in his division.”
General Wood saw no alternative but to obey the order. He would have been justified in disobeying it, only on the supposition that the commanding general was ignorant of the position of his forces. Had Rosecrans been absent from the field, such a supposition would have been reasonable, and such disobedience duty. But Rosecrans was on the field; and he was supposed to know infinitely more than could be known to any division commander concerning the exigencies of the battle. Had Wood kept his place, and Reynolds been overwhelmed and the field lost in consequence of that act of insubordination, he would have deserved to be court-martialled and shot. On the contrary, he moved his division out, and in consequence of his strict obedience to orders the field was lost. He had scarcely opened the gap between Brannan and Davis, when the Rebels rushed in and cut the army to pieces.
General Rosecrans, in his official report, sought to shift the responsibility of this fatal movement from his own shoulders to those of General Wood. This was manifestly unjust. It appears to me that the true explanation of it lies in the fact that Rosecrans, although a man of brilliant parts, had not the steady balance of mind necessary to a great general. He could organize an army, or plan a campaign in his tent; but he had no self-possession on the field of battle. In great emergencies he became confused and forgetful. It was probably this nervousness and paralysis of memory which caused the disaster at Chickamauga. He had forgotten the position of his forces. He intended to order General Wood to close to the left on Brannan; or on Reynolds, forgetting that Brannan was between them. But the order was to close up on and support Reynolds; whereas Reynolds, like Brannan, was doing very well, and did not particularly need support.
The routed divisions of the army fled to Chattanooga,—the commanding general among the foremost; where he hastened to telegraph to the War Department and the dismayed nation that all was lost; while General Garfield, his chief of staff, extricating himself from the rabble, rode back to the part of the field where firing was still heard,—running the gauntlet of the enemy’s lines,—and joined General Thomas, who, rallying fragments of corps on a spur of Missionary Ridge, was stemming the tide of the foe, and saving the army from destruction.
Through woods dotted all over with the graves of soldiers buried where they fell, we drove to the scene of that final fight.
Bones of dead horses strewed the ground. At the foot of the wooded hill were trenches full of Longstreet’s slaughtered men. That was to them a most tragical termination to what had seemed a victory. Inspired by their recent success, they charged again and again up those fatal slopes, only to be cut down like ripe grain by the deadly volleys which poured from a crescent of flame and smoke, where the heroic remnant of the army had taken up its position, and was not to be dislodged.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
FROM CHATTANOOGA TO MURFREESBORO’.
The military operations, of which Chattanooga was so long the centre, have left their mark upon all the surrounding country. Travel which way you will, you are sure to follow in their track. There are fortifications at every commanding point. Every railroad bridge is defended by redoubts and block-houses; and many important bridges have been burned. The entire route to Atlanta is a scene of conflict and desolation: earthworks, like the foot-prints of a Titan on the march; rifle-pits extending for miles along the railroad track; hills all dug up into forts and entrenchments; the town of Marietta in ruins; farms swept clean of their fences and buildings; everywhere, along the blackened war-path, solitary standing chimneys left, “like exclamation points,” to emphasize the silent story of destruction.
I saw a few “Union men” at Chattanooga. But their loyalty was generally of a qualified sort. One, who was well known for his daring opposition to the secession leaders, and for his many narrow escapes from death, told me how he lived during the war. Once when the Rebels came to kill him, they took his brother instead. His residence was on a hill, and three times subsequently he saved his life by taking a canoe and crossing the river in it when he saw his assassins coming. Yet this man hated the free negro worse than he hated the Rebels; and he said to me, “If the government attempts now to force negro-suffrage upon the South, it will have to wade through a sea of blood to which all that has been shed was only a drop!” Another, who claimed also to be a Union man, said, “Before the South will ever consent to help pay the National debt, there will be another rebellion bigger than the last. You would make her repudiate her own war-debt, and then pay the expenses of her own whipping. I tell you, this can’t be done.” The threats of another rebellion, and of an extraordinarily large sea of blood, were not, I suppose, to be understood literally. This is the fiery Southron’s metaphorical manner of expressing himself. Yet these men were perfectly sincere in their profession of sentiments which one would have expected to hear only from the lips of Rebels.