Читать книгу My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field - Charles Carleton Coffin - Страница 12

Table of Contents

The Rebels began the war by firing upon Fort Sumter. You remember how stupefying the news of its surrender. You could not at first believe that they would fire upon the Stars and Stripes—the flag respected and honored everywhere on earth. When there was no longer a doubt that they had begun hostilities, you could not have felt worse if you had heard of the death of a very dear friend. But as you thought it over and reflected upon the wickedness of the act, so deliberate and terrible, you felt that you would like to see the traitors hung; not that it would be a pleasure to see men die a felon’s death, but because you loved your country and its flag, with its heaven-born hues, its azure field of stars! Not that the flag is anything in itself to be protected, honored, and revered, but because it is the emblem of constitutional liberty and freedom, the ensign of the best, freest, noblest government ever established. It had cost suffering and blood. Kings, aristocrats, despots, and tyrants, in the Old World and in the New hated it, but millions of men in other lands, suffering, abused, robbed of their rights, beheld it as their banner of hope. When you thought how it had been struck down by traitors, when you heard that the President had called for seventy five thousand troops, you hurrahed with all your might, and wished that you were old enough and big enough to go and fight the Rebels.

The drums beat in the street. You saw the soldiers hasten to take their places in the gathering ranks. You marched beside them and kept step with the music. The sunlight gleamed from their bayonets. Their standards waved in the breeze, while the drum, the fife, the bugle, and the trumpet thrilled you as never before. You marched proudly and defiantly. You felt that you could annihilate the stoutest Rebel. You followed the soldiers to the railroad depot and hurrahed till the train which bore them away was out of sight.

Let us follow them to Washington, and see the gathering of a great army. The Rebels have threatened to capture that city and make it their seat of government, and it must be saved.

We have been a quiet, peaceable nation, and have had no great standing armies of a half-million men. We know but little about war. The Northern States are unprepared for war. President Buchanan’s Secretary of War, Floyd, has proved himself a thief. He has stolen several hundred thousands of muskets, thousands of pieces of artillery, sending them from the Northern arsenals to the South. The slaveholders have been for many years plotting the rebellion. They are armed, and we are not. Their arsenals are well filled, while ours are empty, because President Buchanan was a weak old man, and kept thieves and traitors in places of trust and power.

At the call of the President every village sends its soldiers, every town its company. When you listened to the soul-thrilling music of the band, and watched the long, winding train as it vanished with the troops in the distance, you had one little glimpse of the machinery of war, as when riding past a great manufactory you see a single pulley, or a row of spindles through a window. You do not see the thousands of wheels, belts, shafts—the hundred thousand spindles, the arms of iron, fingers of brass, and springs of steel, and the mighty wheel which gives motion to all—and so you have not seen the great, complicated, far-reaching, and powerful machinery of war.

But there is activity everywhere. Drums are beating, men assembling, soldiers marching, and hastening on in regiments. They go into camp and sleep on the ground, wrapped in their blankets. It is a new life. They have no napkins, no table-cloths at breakfast, dinner, or supper, no china plates or silver forks. Each soldier has his tin plate and cup, and makes a hearty meal of beef and bread. It is hard-baked bread. They call it hard-tack, because it might be tacked upon the roof of a house instead of shingles. They also have Cincinnati chicken. At home they called it pork; fowls are scarce and pork is plenty in camp, so they make believe it is chicken!

There is drilling by squads, companies, battalions, and by regiments. Some stand guard around the camp by day, and others go out on picket at night, to watch for the enemy. It is military life. Everything is done by orders. When you become a soldier, you cannot go and come as you please. Privates, lieutenants, captains, colonels, generals, all are subject to the orders of their superior officers. All must obey the general in command. You march, drill, eat, sleep, go to bed, and get up by order. At sunrise you hear the reveille, and at nine o’clock in the evening the tattoo. Then the candle, which has been burning in your tent with a bayonet for a candlestick, must be put out. In the dead of night, while sleeping soundly and dreaming of home, you hear the drum-beat. It is the long roll. There is a rattle of musketry. The pickets are at it. Every man springs to his feet.

“Turn out! turn out!” shouts the colonel.

“Fall in! fall in!” cries the captain.

There is confusion throughout the camp—a trampling of feet and loud, hurried talking. In your haste you get your boots on wrong, and buckle your cartridge-box on bottom up. You rush out in the darkness, not minding your steps, and are caught by the tent-ropes. You tumble headlong, upsetting to-morrow’s breakfast of beans. You take your place in the ranks, nervous, excited, and trembling at you know not what. The regiment rushes toward the firing, which suddenly ceases. An officer rides up in the darkness and says it is a false alarm! You march back to camp, cool and collected now, grumbling at the stupidity of the picket, who saw a bush, thought it was a Rebel, fired his gun, and alarmed the whole camp.

In the autumn of 1861 the army of the Potomac, encamped around Washington, numbered about two hundred thousand men. Before it marches to the battle-field, let us see how it is organized, how it looks, how it is fed; let us get an insight into its machinery.

Go up in the balloon which you see hanging in the air across the Potomac from Georgetown, and look down upon this great army. All the country round is dotted with white tents—some in the open fields, and some half hid by the forest-trees. Looking away to the northwest you see the right wing. Arlington is the centre, and at Alexandria is the left wing. You see men in ranks, in files, in long lines, in masses, moving to and fro, marching and countermarching, learning how to fight a battle. There are thousands of wagons and horses; there are from two to three hundred pieces of artillery. How long the line, if all were on the march! Men marching in files are about three feet apart. A wagon with four horses occupies fifty feet. If this army was moving on a narrow country road, four cavalrymen riding abreast, and men in files of four, with all the artillery, ammunition-wagons, supply-trains, ambulances, and equipment, it would reach from Boston to Hartford, or from New York city to Albany, a hundred and fifty miles!

To move such a multitude, to bring order out of confusion, there must be a system, a plan, and an organization. Regiments are therefore formed into brigades, with usually about four regiments to a brigade. Three or four brigades compose a division, and three or four divisions make an army corps. A corps when full numbers from twenty-five to thirty thousand men.

When an army moves, the general commanding it issues his orders to the generals commanding the corps; they issue their orders to the division commanders, the division commanders to the brigadiers, they to the colonels, and the colonels to captains, and the captains to the companies. As the great wheel in the factory turns all the machinery, so one mind moves the whole army. The general-in-chief must designate the road which each corps shall take, the time when they are to march, where they are to march to, and sometimes the hour when they must arrive at an appointed place. The corps commanders must direct which of their divisions shall march first, what roads they shall take, and where they shall encamp at night. The division commanders direct what brigades shall march first. No corps, division, or brigade commander can take any other road than that assigned him, without producing confusion and delay.

The army must have its food regularly. Think how much food it takes to supply the city of Boston, or Cincinnati every day. Yet here are as many men as there are people in those cities. There are a great many more horses in the army than in the stables of both of those cities. All must be fed. There must be a constant supply of beef, pork, bread, beans, vinegar, sugar, and coffee, oats, corn, and hay.

The army must also have its supplies of clothing, its boots, shoes, and coats. It must have its ammunition, its millions of cartridges of different kinds; for there are a great many kinds of guns in the regiments—Springfield and Enfield muskets, French, Belgian, Prussian, and Austrian guns, requiring a great many different kinds of ammunition. There are a great many different kinds of cannon. There must be no lack of ammunition, no mistake in its distribution. So there is the Quartermaster’s Department, the Commissary, and the Ordnance Department. The Quartermaster moves and clothes the army, the Commissary feeds it, and the Ordnance officer supplies it with ammunition. The general-in-chief has a Quartermaster-General, a chief Commissary and a chief Ordnance officer, who issue their orders to the chief officers in their departments attached to each corps. They issue their orders to their subordinates in the divisions, and the division officers to those in the brigades.

Then there is a Surgeon-General, who directs all the hospital operations, who must see that the sick and wounded are all taken care of. There are camp surgeons, division, brigade, and regimental surgeons. There are hospital nurses, ambulance drivers, all subject to the orders of the surgeon. No other officer can direct them. Each department is complete in itself.

It has cost a great deal of thought, labor, and money to construct this great machinery. In creating it there has been much thinking, energy, determination, and labor; and there must be constant forethought in anticipating future wants, necessities, and contingencies, when to move, where, and how. The army does not exist of its own accord, but by constant, unremitting effort.

The people of the country determined that the Constitution, the Union, and the government bequeathed by their fathers should be preserved. They authorized the President to raise a great army. Congress voted money and men. The President, acting as the agent of the people, and as Commander-in-Chief, appointed men to bring all the materials together and organize the army. Look at what was wanted to build this mighty machine and to keep it going.

First, the hundreds of thousands of men; the thousands of horses; the thousands of barrels of beef, pork, and flour; thousands of hogsheads of sugar, vinegar, rice, salt, bags of coffee, and immense stores of other things. Thousands of tons of hay, bags of oats and corn. What numbers of men and women have been at work to get each soldier ready for the field. He has boots, clothes, and equipments. The tanner, currier, shoemaker, the manufacturer, with his swift-flying shuttles, the operator tending his looms and spinning-jennies, the tailor with his sewing-machines, the gunsmith, the harness-maker, the blacksmith—all trades and occupations have been employed. There are saddles, bridles, knapsacks, canteens, dippers, plates, knives, stoves, kettles, tents, blankets, medicines, drums, swords, pistols, guns, cannon, powder, percussion-caps, bullets, shot, shells, wagons—everything.

Walk leisurely through the camps, and observe the little things and the great things, see the men on the march. Then go into the Army and Navy Departments in Washington, in those brick buildings west of the President’s house. In those rooms are surveys, maps, plans, papers, charts of the ocean, of the sea-coast, currents, sand-bars, shoals, the rising and falling of tides. In the Topographical Bureau you see maps of all sections of the country. There is the Ordnance Bureau, with all sorts of guns, rifles, muskets, carbines, pistols, swords, shells, rifled shot, fuses which the inventors have brought in. There are a great many bureaus, with immense piles of papers and volumes, containing experiments upon the strength of iron, the trials of cannon, guns, mortars, and powder. There have been experiments to determine how much powder shall be used, whether it shall be as fine as mustard-seed or as coarse as lumps of sugar, and the results are all noted here. All the appliances of science, industry, and art are brought into use to make it the best army the world ever saw.

It is the business of the government to bring the materials together, and the business of the generals to organize it into brigades, divisions, and corps—to determine the number of cavalry and batteries of artillery, to place weak materials in their proper places, and the strongest where they will be most needed.

The general commanding must have a plan of operations. Napoleon said that war is like a game of chess, and that a commander must make his game. He must think it out beforehand, and in such a manner that the enemy will be compelled to play it in his way and be defeated. The general-in-chief must see the end from the beginning, just as Napoleon, sticking his map of Europe full of pins, decided that he could defeat the Austrians at Austerlitz, the Prussians at Jena. That is genius. The general-in-chief makes his plan on the supposition that all his orders will be obeyed promptly, that no one will shirk responsibility, that not one of all the vast multitude will fail to do his duty.

The night before the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon sent an order to an officer to take possession of a little hillock, on which stood a farm-house overlooking the plain. The officer thought it would do just as well if he let it go till morning, but in the morning the English had possession of the spot, and in consequence of that officer’s neglect Napoleon probably lost the great battle, his army, and his empire. Great events often hang on little things, and in military operations it is of the utmost importance that they should be attended to.

From the beginning to the end, unless every man does his duty, from the general in command to the private in the ranks, there is danger of failure.

Thus the army is organized, and thus through organization it becomes a disciplined body. Instead of being a confused mass of men, horses, mules, cannon, caissons, wagons, and ambulances, it is a body which can be divided, subdivided, separated by miles of country, hurried here and there, hurled upon the enemy, and brought together again by the stroke of a pen, by a word, or the click of the telegraph.

When a battle is to be fought, the general-in-chief must not only have his plan how to get the great mass of men to the field, but he must have a plan of movement on the field. Each corps must have its position assigned. There must be a line of battle. It is not a continuous line of men, but there are wide spaces, perhaps miles wide, between the corps, divisions, and brigades. Hills, ravines, streams, swamps, houses, villages, bushes, a fence, rocks, wheat-fields, sunlight and shade, all must be taken into account. Batteries must be placed on hills, or in commanding positions to sweep all the country round. Infantry must be gathered in masses in the centre or on either wing, or deployed and separated according to circumstances. They must be sheltered. They must be thrown here or there, as they may be needed to hold or to crush the enemy. They are to stand still and be ploughed through by shot and shell, or rush into the thickest of the fight, just as they may be ordered. They are not to question the order;—