To meet these three armies aggregating a quarter of a million men, the
South could marshall barely seventy thousand. Jackson was despatched
with eighteen thousand to baffle the armies of McDowell, Fremont,
Milroy, Shields and Banks in the Valley and prevent their union with
McClellan.
The war really began on Sunday, the second of June, 1862, when Robert E. Lee was sent to the front to take command of the combined army of seventy thousand men of the South.
The new commander with consummate genius planned his attack and flung his gray lines on McClellan with savage power. The two armies fought in dense thickets often less than fifty yards apart. Their muskets flashed sheets of yellow flame. The sound of ripping canvas, the fire of small arms in volleys, could no longer be distinguished. The sullen roar was endless, deafening, appalling. Over the tops of oak, pine, beech, ash and tangled undergrowth came the flaming thunder of two great armies equally fearless, the flower of American manhood in their front ranks, daring, scorning death, fighting hand to hand, man to man.
The people in the churches of Richmond as they prayed could hear the awful roar. They turned their startled faces toward the battle. It rang above the sob of organ and the chant of choir.
The hosts in blue and gray charged again and again through the tangle of mud and muck and blood and smoke and death. Bayonet rang on bayonet. They fought hand to hand, as naked savages once fought with bare hands. The roar died slowly with the shadows of the night, until only the crack of a rifle here and there broke the stillness.
And then above the low moans of the wounded and dying came the distant notes of the church bells in Richmond calling men and women again to the house of God.
There was no shout of triumph—no cheering hosts—only the low moan of death and the sharp cry of a boy in pain. The men in blue could have moved in and bivouaced on the ground they had lost. The men in gray had no strength left.
The dead and the dying were everywhere. The wounded were crawling through the mud and brush, like stricken animals; some with their legs broken; some with arms dangling by a thread; some with hideous holes torn in their faces.
The front was lighted with the unclouded splendor of a full Southern moon. Down every dim aisle of the woods they lay in awful, dark heaps. In the fields they lay with faces buried in the dirt or eyes staring up at the stars, twisted, torn, mangled. The blue and the gray lay side by side in death, as they had fought in life. The pride and glory of a mighty race of freemen.
The shadows of the details moved in the moonlight. They were opening the first of those long, deep trenches. They were careful in these early days of war. They turned each face downward as they packed them in. The grave diggers could not then throw the wet dirt into their eyes and mouths. Aching hearts in far-off homes couldn't see; but these boys still had hearts within their breasts.