The early months of the war were but skirmishes. The real work ofkilling and maiming the flower of the race had not begun.
The defeat had given the sad-eyed President unlimited power to drawon the resources of the nation for men and money. His call for halfa million soldiers met with instant response. The fighting spirit oftwenty-two million Northern people had been roused. They felt thedisgrace of Bull Run and determined to wipe it out in blood.
Three Northern armies were hurled on the South in a well-planned,concerted movement to take Richmond. McDowell marched straight down toFredericksburg with forty thousand. Fermont, with Milroy, Banks andShields, was sweeping through the Shenandoah Valley. McClellan, withhis grand army of one hundred and twenty thousand men, had moved upthe Peninsula in resistless force until he lay on the banks of theChickahominy within sight of the spires of Richmond.
To meet these three armies aggregating a quarter of a million men, theSouth could marshall barely seventy thousand. Jackson was despatchedwith eighteen thousand to baffle the armies of McDowell, Fremont,Milroy, Shields and Banks in the Valley and prevent their union withMcClellan.
The war really began on Sunday, the second of June, 1862, when RobertE. Lee was sent to the front to take command of the combined army ofseventy thousand men of the South.
The new commander with consummate genius planned his attack and flunghis gray lines on McClellan with savage power. The two armies fought indense thickets often less than fifty yards apart. Their muskets flashedsheets of yellow flame. The sound of ripping canvas, the fire of smallarms in volleys, could no longer be distinguished. The sullen roar wasendless, deafening, appalling. Over the tops of oak, pine, beech, ashand tangled undergrowth came the flaming thunder of two great armiesequally 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 theawful roar. They turned their startled faces toward the battle. It rangabove the sob of organ and the chant of choir.
The hosts in blue and gray charged again and again through the tangleof 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 crackof a rifle here and there broke the stillness.
And then above the low moans of the wounded and dying came the distantnotes of the church bells in Richmond calling men and women again to thehouse of God.
There was no shout of triumph--no cheering hosts--only the low moan ofdeath and the sharp cry of a boy in pain. The men in blue could havemoved in and bivouaced on the ground they had lost. The men in gray hadno strength left.
The dead and the dying were everywhere. The wounded were crawlingthrough the mud and brush, like stricken animals; some with their legsbroken; some with arms dangling by a thread; some with hideous holestorn in their faces.
The front was lighted with the unclouded splendor of a full Southernmoon. 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 upat the stars, twisted, torn, mangled. The blue and the gray lay sideby side in death, as they had fought in life. The pride and glory of amighty race of freemen.
The shadows of the details moved in the moonlight. They were opening thefirst of those long, deep trenches. They were careful in these earlydays of war. They turned each face downward as they packed them in. Thegrave diggers could not then throw the wet dirt into their eyes andmouths. Aching hearts in far-off homes couldn\'t see; but these boysstill had hearts within their breasts.
The fog-rimmed lanterns flickered over the fields peering into the faceson the ground.
The ambulance corps did its best at the new trade. It was utterlyinadequate on either side. It\'s always so in war. The work of war is tomaim, to murder--not to heal or save.
The long line of creaking wagons began to move into Richmond over themud-cut roads. Every hospital was filled. The empty wagons rolled backin haste over the cobble stones and out on the muddy roads to the frontagain.
At the hospital doors the women stood in huddled groups--wives,sweethearts, mothers, sisters, praying, hoping, fearing, shivering. Faraway in the field hospitals, the young doctors with bare, bloody armswere busy with saw and knife. Boys who had faced death in battle withouta tre............