Mr Lincoln's Army Read Online Free Page A

Haupt had
his railroad open as far as the Bull Run Bridge and was pushing supplies
forward as fast as the trains could move.
    As far as Haupt could see, things were on the
mend. Pope was in touch with Washington and with his supply line again, his
wagons were moving the stores up from Fairfax Station to Centreville, and the
fighting seemed to be going favorably. But on the following day the luckless
railroad man entered into a full-fledged nightmare, which was visited on him by
order of the Secretary of War, Mr. Edwin M. Stanton.
    Stanton, with his pudgy, bustling figure, his
scraggly beard, and his hot little eyes, was prone to disastrous impulses when
the going got tough, and he gave way to one on the thirtieth of August, 1862.
Late the night before, Pope reported having fought a heavy battle in which he
had lost ten thousand men and the enemy twice that many. The Confederates, he
assured the Secretary, were in full retreat and he was about to pursue with
vigor, which was all to the good. But Stanton, reflecting on those ten thousand
casualties—plus the Rebel wounded, who must be tended for humanity's
sake—suddenly concluded that the wounded would never in the world be cared for
unless he departed swiftly from regular channels, and he immediately departed
therefrom with restless energy. He publicly issued an invitation to government
clerks, private citizens, and all the sundry to volunteer as nurses and
stretcher-bearers for the wounded out beyond Centreville. Simultaneously he
ordered Haupt to stop whatever he was doing and prepare to transport this
volunteer brigade to the field at once. (He also rounded up all the hacks and
carriages he could find in Washington and sent them off to Centreville by road,
but that did not affect Haupt; it just clogged the highway that Pope's men had
to use.) Shortly thereafter scores and hundreds of civilians began to pour into
Alexandria demanding transportation. Most of them were drunk, and those who
were not were carrying bottles of whisky and obviously would be drunk before
very long.
    Haupt's head swam at the thought of dumping
this howling mob down on a battlefield. Orders were orders, to be sure, but he
was enough of an army man to know that there are ways and ways of rendering
obedience. He delayed the train as long as he could; then, when he finally sent
it off, he wired the officer in command at Fairfax Station to arrest all who
were drunk. Also, he bethought himself that while he had been ordered to take
this mob out he had not been ordered to bring it back, so as soon as the train had
been unloaded he had it hauled back to Alexandria.
    "Those who were sober enough straggled
off as soon as it was light enough to see, and wandered around until all whisky
and provisions became exhausted, when they returned to the station to get
transportation back," Haupt wrote later. "In this, most of them were
disappointed."
    It
seemed cruel, he added, to make these people walk all the way back to
Washington in the rain, but it was better to do that than to ignore the
wounded; besides, his opinion of the volunteer nurses was not
high—"generally it was a hard crowd and of no use whatever on the
field." He learned later that some of the men bribed army ambulance
drivers to leave the wounded and carry the civilians back to Washington. 4
    And as this affair began to be straightened
out the news from the front abruptly became worse. Having announced that he had
won a great victory, Pope was slow to report bad news, but the news came
trickling back anyway. One of the first to get the drift was General Jacob Cox,
an Ohioan who had gone to the lines at Upton's Hill in command of the four
regiments McClellan had sent out to hold the ground "at any hazard."
On the morning of August 30, Cox saw the ambulances coming in from Centreville,
accompanied by the walking wounded. These were men who had left the field the
night before, and their impression was that they had won the battle and that
the enemy was