the soft snorting of a hundred, hundred horses, their collective breath softly redolent of forage and the good, strong, clean, earthy smell horses have when they are working. Their hooves were well shod, their coats brushed to a shine, and their thick, kinked veins twitched cheek and flank.
The army marched that day as it had always marched: in song,laughter, talk, and boast. Happy amidst the stamp-tramp-and-creak of worn shoe leather upon the dust, and the hard, fleshy slapping of bare feet upon the same. They marched with bands playing and flags uncased. They marched knowing in their hearts that after this next Big Thing, the war would surely be won, and that Grant was of no account and that the Army of the Potomac was as good as up the spout, Gettysburg notwithstanding. And who was there that couldn’t see it that day, by God? Who was there that could not feel it in the very air of springtime?
But the moment passed and the day grew long. Ahead, down the long pale line of the road and the marching men upon it, loomed a darkness. The road ran east into the Wilderness.
Men by their thousands filled the Old Stone Road and raised the dust in white plumes flecked with gold, shot through with sun. Yet still the air seemed fresh, washed by the rains of the storm just passed. The sun was bright in the leafed trees, upon grass slick with caught rain, and the man-filled road was as protean and indomitable as a river flowing seaward.
And the army flowed—two corps down two parallel roads separated by a mile-wide expanse of scrub forest and hard-luck farms with a third corps, Longstreet’s, a day’s march or more behind as it came out of Bell and Mechanicsville down in Louisa County. It didn’t matter. Two corps marched east to occupy the men from the North, to hold them by the nose until Longstreet, as he always did, could come up for the knockout blow. And then they’d turn them and by God drive them.
The Army of Northern Virginia marched east, and by and by it entered the dark of the Wilderness of Spotsylvania County. The men marching—tramping accordion-style now, bunching up when there was a halt somewhere along the line so that the dust came down upon their hat crowns and fouled their beards—quieted a little as they passed into that dark. They spoke softer if they spoke atall. There was no singing. The bands stopped playing and cased their instruments, placing them carefully in the backs of wagons and gripping rifles instead. All along the road the marching men could not see ten yards into the dark, green tangle, and the road seemed to narrow the farther it ran. Officers rode along the line urging the men onward in soft, tight voices as though they feared waking something. The Wilderness absorbed the sound of the army with an ever-diminishing echo and constant fadeaways. Sound, if it returned at all from the dark hollows, came back softened and strange, and the dust did not rise beyond the canopy.
From its dim, vine-choked heart, the Wilderness of Spotsylvania stretched over the county from the Rappahannock to the Rapidan to south of Chancellorsville and close by the county seat itself. Just as wide east-to-west, it was the darkest, gloomiest mess of forest that most of these men had ever seen, and yet they knew it well, for they had marched through it, back and forth and back again, many times these past years of warring. Vines and creepers snaked across its damp floor and great brown mounds of dried leaves went rustling and skittering along overgrown farm roads when winds actually found them. Strange shadows reared monstrously in cruel thickets to set travelers’ hearts to beating all wrong.
Toward the end of the day, men by handfuls fell out of column to lie awhile in the cool shade. They quivered from harder exercise than they’d known all winter and were pale and shaky from hunger. And as he marched with a dry throat and a jangle of green pain at his temples, David Abernathy spotted the testifying fanatic
The army marched that day as it had always marched: in song,laughter, talk, and boast. Happy amidst the stamp-tramp-and-creak of worn shoe leather upon the dust, and the hard, fleshy slapping of bare feet upon the same. They marched with bands playing and flags uncased. They marched knowing in their hearts that after this next Big Thing, the war would surely be won, and that Grant was of no account and that the Army of the Potomac was as good as up the spout, Gettysburg notwithstanding. And who was there that couldn’t see it that day, by God? Who was there that could not feel it in the very air of springtime?
But the moment passed and the day grew long. Ahead, down the long pale line of the road and the marching men upon it, loomed a darkness. The road ran east into the Wilderness.
Men by their thousands filled the Old Stone Road and raised the dust in white plumes flecked with gold, shot through with sun. Yet still the air seemed fresh, washed by the rains of the storm just passed. The sun was bright in the leafed trees, upon grass slick with caught rain, and the man-filled road was as protean and indomitable as a river flowing seaward.
And the army flowed—two corps down two parallel roads separated by a mile-wide expanse of scrub forest and hard-luck farms with a third corps, Longstreet’s, a day’s march or more behind as it came out of Bell and Mechanicsville down in Louisa County. It didn’t matter. Two corps marched east to occupy the men from the North, to hold them by the nose until Longstreet, as he always did, could come up for the knockout blow. And then they’d turn them and by God drive them.
The Army of Northern Virginia marched east, and by and by it entered the dark of the Wilderness of Spotsylvania County. The men marching—tramping accordion-style now, bunching up when there was a halt somewhere along the line so that the dust came down upon their hat crowns and fouled their beards—quieted a little as they passed into that dark. They spoke softer if they spoke atall. There was no singing. The bands stopped playing and cased their instruments, placing them carefully in the backs of wagons and gripping rifles instead. All along the road the marching men could not see ten yards into the dark, green tangle, and the road seemed to narrow the farther it ran. Officers rode along the line urging the men onward in soft, tight voices as though they feared waking something. The Wilderness absorbed the sound of the army with an ever-diminishing echo and constant fadeaways. Sound, if it returned at all from the dark hollows, came back softened and strange, and the dust did not rise beyond the canopy.
From its dim, vine-choked heart, the Wilderness of Spotsylvania stretched over the county from the Rappahannock to the Rapidan to south of Chancellorsville and close by the county seat itself. Just as wide east-to-west, it was the darkest, gloomiest mess of forest that most of these men had ever seen, and yet they knew it well, for they had marched through it, back and forth and back again, many times these past years of warring. Vines and creepers snaked across its damp floor and great brown mounds of dried leaves went rustling and skittering along overgrown farm roads when winds actually found them. Strange shadows reared monstrously in cruel thickets to set travelers’ hearts to beating all wrong.
Toward the end of the day, men by handfuls fell out of column to lie awhile in the cool shade. They quivered from harder exercise than they’d known all winter and were pale and shaky from hunger. And as he marched with a dry throat and a jangle of green pain at his temples, David Abernathy spotted the testifying fanatic
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