Monday, May 5, 2014

Thursday, May 5th.

Turned out stiff and sore this morning, and drenched to the skin with dew, which falls so heavily here that in the morning the appearance of the tents and fields is very much like that after a severe storm. At five o’clock fell in line and, joining the Corps Headquarter’s train as a guard, we started for Orange Court House. After marching about a mile we began to hear occasional shots from the picket line which preceded us, as our skirmishers met those of the “Johnnies,” and soon we received orders to countermarch and park the train. Returning to the point whence we started we stacked arms in a meadow immediately in front of General Headquarters and awaited developments.

While on the march we met a body of prisoners, who, because we had cut loose from our communications and so could not safely send them to any point in our rear, were kept moving in a circle close to the army and under a strong guard. Among them was a young man of about my own age, a Captain in some Georgia regiment, and calling him aside we sat down for a few moments on a bank of clay while my company was passing. He was a member of the staff of some Georgia brigade, and was captured the night before on the picket line, where he ran into a Yankee picket post supposing it to be composed of his own men. He had read law at the Harvard Law School, which he left to join the Southern army, and was a typical southern aristocrat who looked upon Northerners as little better than the “poor whites” of the South. He was very bitter in his denunciation of the war, and utterly scorned the idea that the South could be “subjugated,” actually declaring with the utmost sincerity that the north was already tired of the effort, and that even now the grass was growing between the stones of the pavements on Broadway in the City of New York, and he showed a clipping from a southern paper in which that statement was actually made. I assured him that I had been in New York in the previous March, and that from the appearance of things there no one would suspect that a war was going on, but I could make no impression upon him whatever. As we parted he gave me his name, but as I did not make a note of it I forgot it before night, a fact for which I am very sorry as I would like to meet him again after the war is over.

The picket firing, which in the morning was light and desultory, gradually increased as the day advanced and seemed to draw nearer and extend to the right. Meantime numerous divisions, brigades and regiments are pressed hastily forward to various points, and as they are lost in the woods and come within range, the sound of musketry deepens until it resembles the roll of heavy thunder, particularly on the right and in front of our (Fifth) corps. Soon the stretcher-bearers, with their ghastly freight, begin to pass by us to the hospitals now established on the plank road in our rear, and returning, with their stretchers dripping with the blood of the last occupants, press to the front again for other wounded. Crowds of soldiers, slightly wounded and assisted by comrades, flock past, many of whom as they stop to rest entertain our boys with stories of the fearful slaughter. Sounds like these followed by sights like these are not, I am bound to say, calculated to screw one’s courage to the sticking point, and I am decidedly of opinion that in time of action, troops just out of range are in more danger of demoralization than those at the immediate front. The former see only the wounded, the dying and the dead, not the living. They hear the terrible sounds of the combat and the groans of the suffering, not the cheers of the victors. They listen to tales of bloody and disastrous defeat, not of the crowning victory. In short, every sense is absorbed in the contemplation of the horrors rather than the glories of war.

About one o’clock P. M. a little cannonading was heard, but the surface of the country is so broken and irregular, and the forests, with their undergrowth of saplings, vines and brambles are so dense, that but little use can be made of artillery. Lieut. Shelton, of our brigade, whom I saw riding gaily by yesterday, lost two guns to-day on a narrow road in our front and was himself taken prisoner. Various wild rumors are flying about, such as that two rebel brigades were completely annihilated this morning, but though the fighting has been very hot and the losses undoubtedly great on both sides, as the firing dies away I cannot learn that either side has attained any decided advantage. The movements would seem to indicate efforts on both sides to get control of commanding points preparatory to more bloody and decisive work. Just at night the Headquarters Train moved back a short distance across the plank road by which we came into the field, and parked in an old corn field, while our battalion pitched its tents near by. Just after I had crawled under my shelter tent I heard the familiar voice of Dr. Lawrence, one of our assistant surgeons, now of the First Battalion attached to the Sixth Corps, anxiously inquiring for my tent, and, having found it, he jumped from his horse and looking in inquired breathlessly if I was much hurt. I assured him that so far as I knew I was not yet very badly damaged, whereupon he expressed the greatest relief, and explained that he had ridden in great haste from the Sixth Corps headquarters, some three miles away, where he had been informed that I had been very dangerously wounded. Being assured of my safety, and showing me the instruments he had brought for the purpose of taking off my leg, arm or head, as the case might require, he remounted his horse and was soon lost in the darkness, but I shall not soon forget an act of such disinterested kindness on the part of the doctor, upon whom I had no sort of claim whatever, personal or professional.