Mr Lincoln's Army Read Online Free Page B

in retreat. Cox noticed that the sound of the firing, which he
had been hearing all the previous day, was not nearly so loud. Adding that to
the reports from the wounded men, he assumed that Pope was pursuing the foe and
that the gunfire came from rear-guard actions—an assumption which Pope himself
held until he finally reached the point at which further delusion was impossible.
During the afternoon, however, Cox could hear that the sound of the firing was
getting louder—much louder and much heavier, with long, sustained,
reverberating rolls of gunfire in which the individual shots could no longer be
distinguished. Toward evening the pathetic parade of wounded was coming in
greater numbers. It was accompanied by stragglers, and by dark the evidence of
a disastrous defeat was all too visible. 5 The spirits of the
soldiers in the camps around Alexandria, which had been raised mightily by the
early report of a victory, began to sag, and the provost marshal notified the
War Department that he needed more men if he was to preserve order—"we are
being overrun with straggling officers and men." The colonel of the 55th New
York Infantry, landing at the Alexandria wharves next morning, noted an air of
great depression as soon as he stepped ashore. Nobody knew just what had
happened, but all sorts of rumors were afloat; he found the word
"treason" being used freely.
    Treason: betrayal, treachery, a will to lose
when the means to win are at hand; a dark, frightening word, coming up out of
the shadows, carrying fear and distrust and panic unreason with it, so that the
visible enemies in gray and butternut off toward the Bull Run Mountains seemed
less to be feared than those who might be standing, all unsuspected, at one's
elbow. The word was used everywhere: in the President's Cabinet, in the War
Department, in the tents of the generals, and—most disastrously of all—in the
ranks of the tired army that was plodding back toward Washington. All of the
disillusionment which began when the army was repulsed before Richmond, all of
the sudden war-weariness which had come so soon to a land that had been long at
peace, all of the bewilderment felt by men who saw themselves striking
ineffectually at targets that mysteriously shifted and dissolved as one
struck—all of this, welling up in the hearts of men who had done their best to
no avail, began to find expression in that word. There had been betrayal: of
high hopes and noble purposes, of all the army meant to itself and to the
country. The country had suffered more than a defeat. What was happening now
was the beginning of disintegration.
    2.
We Were Never Again Eager
    In
the end it would become an army of legend, with a great name that still clangs
when you touch it. The orations, the brass bands and the faded flags of
innumerable Decoration Day observances, waiting for it in the years ahead,
would at last create a haze of romance, deepening spring by spring until the
regiments and brigades became unreal—colored-lithograph figures out of a
picture-book war, with dignified graybeards bemused by their own fogged
memories of a great day when all the world was young and all the comrades were
valiant.
    But
the end of August in the year 1862 was not the time for taking a distant and
romantic view of things. The Army of the Potomac was not at that moment
conscious of the formation of legends; it was hungry and tired, muddy and
ragged, sullen with the knowledge that it had been shamefully misused, and if
it thought of the future at all it was only to consider the evil chances which
might come forth during the next twenty-four hours. It was in a mood to judge
the future by the past, and the immediate past had been bad. The drunken
generals who had botched up supply lines, the sober generals who had argued
instead of getting reinforcements forward, the incredible civilians who had
gone streaming out to a battlefield as to a holiday brawl, the incompetents who
thought they were winning when