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.They could advance no farther.The very endurance and determination of the survivors of the earlier attacks were a handicap.These men lay by the hundreds all across the front in a ragged belt two hundred yards deep, keeping up such fire as they could manage, and in the blanketing smoke they shot wildly, hitting their own comrades in the front lines.8 Meanwhile, the fire from the sunken road and from the heights came without a moment's letup.No man who stood upright in the open plain could hope to live long.Yet there were men who wanted to try.Up to Caldwell came the slim, handsome young colonel who commanded the two New York regiments, a dandy of a man with pointed mustaches, the name of him Nelson Miles.He wanted permission to take his two regiments and make a bayonet charge straight up the road for the stone wall.It needed just one spirited dash to clear that wall, he argued, and if two regiments started, men all over the plain would jump up and follow them.But Caldwell refused.There were no supports; if the men did breach the Rebel line they could not stay there, the thing was just impossible.And then Caldwell was wounded and was carried off the field, and Miles took a bullet in the throat and went to the rear with blood dripping through the fingers which he held pressed against the wound.There was nothing for the survivors to do but hug the ground and hope for the best.0From his perch in the cupola General Couch had seen some of this —not much, for the smoke was very heavy, and from the rear one could make out little but the dim forms of blue-clad men swaying uncertainly in a terrible haze that glowed and sparked with deadly fixe.(One man who watched the attackers from the heights beyond the river found himself amazed that the heavy fire "did not absolutely sweep them from the face of the earth.") General Howard, who stood beside Couch for a time, heard him gasp as the smoke lifted briefly: "Oh, great God! See how our men, our poor fellows, are falling!"10Couch decided that enough of them had fallen in front of the stone wall, so he told Howard to lead his division farther to the right, where the Rebel line looked a bit softer.If this impregnable line could not be stormed, perhaps it might be flanked, and Howard must try.There were plenty of troops available to follow him in if his men won any success, and Howard rode off to put his division into action.Couch's idea was a good one, but the shape of the ground was against it.Although no one seems to have realized it at the time, it simply was not possible for an attack issuing from Fredericksburg to hit the Rebel line anywhere except along that impassable sunken road.It looked as if Howard could cross the ditch where the others had crossed and could then shift to his right until he was half a mile or more north of Marye's Heights; but when his men tried it they found that they could edge to the right only a little way before striking impassable ground.A long slough, known locally as Gordon's Marsh, ran to the north on the western side of the ditch: an unobtrusive dike which forced every Federal assault on this part of the field to drift to the left and go crashing up against the one front that could not be broken.11Howard's men drifted and instead of flanking the stone wall they came in, at last, over the wreckage of the other two divisions, fared as they had fared, and reached the outer boundaries of human endurance on that same little rise of ground in front of the wall.Survivors hid out behind houses or face-down on the earth as the others had done, and it seemed that no one could live out in the open.Howard wrote that he had "a feeling akin to terror" whenever he had to send an aide or a mounted orderly forward with a dispatch.12The men who lay in the open used what poor cover they could get.One officer saw three men sheltering behind a dead horse.Here and there a man would be able to get two or three rocks which he would pile up in a pitiful little barricade.Many a soldier lay behind the corpse of a comrade while he loaded and fired.In the brick house and in other houses back on the edge of town sharpshooters found vantage points from which they could fight effectively.They and the men in the field kept up a fire which now and then stung the Southerners painfully.The Confederate brigadier who commanded the troops back of the stone wall was killed, various guns in the upper pits were put out of action from time to time, and it was made risky for any Confederate to pass from one level to another of the defenses on the smoking hillside.But there was nothing in this fire that could possibly drive the defenders away.One Federal who remembered how effectively the Rebels were hidden behind the wall remarked that "no doubt for every Johnny hit a ton of lead was expended," and the men could hear their bullets spattering harmlessly on the stones and knew they were killing very few of the enemy.13Somewhere far to the rear, beyond the deep river, insulated from reality by distance, by the trappings of command, and by sheer mental confusion, there was a guiding intelligence for this army, and to it there came dimly the news of this great fight.It sluggishly sent back repeated and unvarying orders to attack and to keep on attacking.Divisions from the III, V, and DC Corps came over to join in the fight, and always the story was the same.The men who went into action were mostly veterans, and as they marched out into the range of the Confederate gunners they were able to assay with complete accuracy the exact measure of their chances on this smoking plain; yet it is not recorded that any of them turned away or refused to go forward, and each brigade went in with a cheer, however it might be fated to come out.A brigade from the V Corps tried to come in through an unfinished railway cut at the left.The Rebel gunners, vigilant above the battle smoke, saw the brigade coming and swung their guns over and waited for it, and when it came out on the level ground they racked it.The men who were not hit were blinded by the dirt and gravel kicked up by the flying canister, and the brigade drifted back and took refuge in a stretch of low ground near the railway and found to its horror that it was huddling in a spot which had been a sink for a Rebel camp.In the 22nd Massachusetts it was recalled that while the men cowered in this unpleasant spot the quavering voice of a very proper ex-schoolteacher in the ranks was lifted in inquiry: "Who is in command of Company H?" A sergeant growled a reply: who wanted to know, and why? And the ex-schoolteacher—primly, as if the village debating society had convened here in front of the stone wall—made his answer: "I move that we be taken out of here by some responsible officer." The regiment's historian wrote that this drew an unfeeling reply from the sergeant.14Most of the soldiers on the plain would have seconded the motion if they could have heard it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]