Cease firing

by Mary Johnston

The morning light was darkened. The earth heaved so that many of the blue staggered and fell. A mass sprang into the air, mounted a hundred feet and spread out into an umbrella-shaped cloud. As it began to descend, it was seen that earth and rock might come upon the blue themselves. The troops gave back with shouts.

In that cloud of pulverized earth, smoke, and flame were mammoth clods of clay, one as large as a small cabin, timber of salient and breastworks, guns, carriages, caissons, sandbags, anything and everything that had been upon the mined ground, including some hundreds of human beings. The hole it left behind it was one hundred and seventy feet long, sixty wide, and thirty deep. Back into this now rained in part the lumps of earth, the logs of wood, the pieces of iron, the human clay. The trembling of the earth ceased, the sound of the detonation ceased. There came what seemed an instant of utter quiet, for after that rage of sound the cries of the yet living, the only partially buried in that pit, counted as nothing. The instant was shattered by the concerted voice of one hundred and fifty blue guns and mortars, prepared and stationed to add their great quota of death and terror. They brought into that morning of distraction one of the heaviest cannonades of all the war.

Through the rocking air, in the first slant beams of the sun the blue troops heard the order to advance. They moved. Before them were their own breastworks over which they must swarm, thus sharply breaking line. Beyond these, one hundred and fifty yards away, were curious heaps of earth, something like dunes. The air above was yet dust and smoke. On went the Second Brigade, leading. It came, yet without just alignment, to the crest of the dunes, and from these it saw the crater.... There was no pausing, there could be none, for the First Brigade, immediately in the rear, was pressing on. The blue troops slid down the steep incline and came upon the floor of the crater, among the débris and the horribly caught and buried and smothered men.

There followed a moment’s hesitation and gasp of astonishment; then the blue officers shouted the brigade forward. It overpassed the seamed floor and reached the steep other side of the excavation. Behind it it heard, or might have heard if anything could have been heard in the roar of one hundred and fifty guns, the First Brigade slipping and stumbling in its turn down the almost perpendicular slope into the crater. The Second Brigade climbed somehow the thirty feet up to the level of the world at large. On this side the hole it was a grey world.

If the explosion had stunned the grey, they had now regained their senses. If the force of the appalling blue cannonade caused an end-of-the-world sensation, even in such a cataclysm there was room for action. The grey acted. Into the ruined trenches right and left of and behind the destroyed salient poured what was left of Elliott’s brigade. Regiments of Wise and Ramseur came at a run. Lee, now with Beauregard at the threatened front, sent orders to Mahone to bring up two brigades with all speed. A gun of Davidson’s battery in a salient to the right commanded at less than four hundred yards what had been Elliott’s Salient and was now the crater. Wright’s battery on the left, Haskell’s Coehorn mortars fringing a gorge line in the rear, likewise could send death into that hollow. Infantry and artillery, the grey opened with a steady, rapid fire. And all the time, behind the blue Second Brigade, now forming for a rush on the greyward edge of the crater, came massing into that deep and wide and long bear-pit more blue troops, and yet more. And now the Second Brigade, checked and disconcerted by the unexpected strength of the resistance, wavered, could not be formed, fell back into the crater that was already too filled with men.

Here formation became impossible. An aide was sent in hot haste to General Ledlie, for his own fame somewhat too securely placed in the rear. Ledlie sent back word to Marshall and Bartlett, leading, that they must advance and assault at once; it was General Burnside’s order. The aide says: “This message was delivered. But the firing on the crater now was incessant, and it was as heavy a fire of canister as was ever poured continuously upon a single objective point. It was as utterly impracticable to re-form a brigade in that crater as it would be to marshal bees into line after upsetting the hive; and equally as impracticable to re-form outside of the crater, under the severe fire in front and rear, as it would be to hold a dress parade in front of a charging enemy.”

So far from the pit being cleared, it received fresh accessions. Griffin’s brigade, coming up, tried to pass by the right, but entangled in a maze of grey earthworks, trenches, traverses, and disordered by the searching fire, it too fell aside and sank into the hollow made by the mine. “Every organization melted away, as soon as it entered this hole in the ground, into a mass of human beings clinging by toes and heels to the almost perpendicular sides. If a man was shot on the crest he fell and rolled to the bottom of the pit.”

The blue Third Division, arriving, attacked the manned works to the left, took and for a little held them, then was driven back. Haskell’s grey battery of sixteen guns on the Jerusalem Plank Road came greatly into action. Lee and Beauregard were watching from the Gee house. Mahone, of A.P. Hill’s Corps, was coming up with three brigades, coming fast....

The coloured division of the Ninth Army corps had a song,—

“We looks lak men er-marchin’ on,