THE GREAT WAR GAME

ALL this while the war was going on tremendously and Kilgariff was chafing at the restraint of a wound which forbade him to bear his part in it.

As we have seen, General Grant had crossed into the Wilderness with a double strategic purpose. He had hoped to turn Lee’s right flank and compel the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. Failing in that, he had hoped, with his enormously superior numbers, to crush and destroy Lee’s army in battle.

He had failed in that purpose also. By his promptitude and vigour in assailing Grant’s army in flank, Lee had compelled his adversary to abandon his flanking purpose, and to withdraw his advance columns over a distance of more than ten miles in order to reinforce his sorely beset divisions in the Wilderness and to save his own army from the destruction he had hoped to inflict upon his adversary.

After suffering a far heavier loss than he inflicted, Grant had summoned reinforcements and moved by his left flank to Spottsylvania Court House. By this movement he had again hoped to turn Lee’s right flank, place himself between the Confederates and their capital, and in that way compel the surrender or dispersal of the Army of Northern Virginia. Again he had been foiled by Lee’s alertness and by the marvellous mobility of an army that moved without a baggage-train, and whose men carried no blankets, no extra clothing, no overcoats, no canteens, no tin cups, no cooking-utensils—nothing, in fact, except their rifles and their ammunition.

Those men were on the verge of starvation all the while. Often they had no rations at all for two days or more at a time. When rations were fullest, they consisted of one, two, or three hard-tack biscuits a day for each man, and perhaps a diminutive slice of salt pork or bacon, which was eaten raw.

But these men, who had formerly fought with the courage of hope, inspired by splendid victory, were fighting now with the courage of utter despair. A great wave of religious fervour had passed over the army and the South. It took upon itself the fatalistic forms of Calvinism, for the most part. The men of the army came to believe that every event which occurs in this world was foreordained of God to occur, decreed “before ever the foundations of the world were laid.” They had not ceased to trust the genius and sagacity of Lee, but they had accepted the rule and guidance of a greater than Lee—of God Almighty himself. With a faith that was sublime even in its perversion, these men committed themselves and their cause to God, and ceased to reckon upon human probabilities as factors in the problem.

There were prayer meetings in every tent and at every bivouac fire, every day and every night. At every pause in the fighting, were it only for a few minutes, the men on the firing-line threw themselves upon their knees and besought God to crown their efforts and their arms with victory, submissively leaving it to Him to determine the where, the when, the how. And in this worship of God and this absolute dependence upon His will the men of that army learned to regard themselves personally as mere pawns upon the chess-board of the divine purpose. They came to regard their own lives as dust in the balance, to be blown away by the breath of God’s will, to be sacrificed, as fuel is, for the maintenance of a flame.

Believing firmly and without question that their cause was in God’s charge, they executed every order given to them with an indifference to personal consequences for the like of which one may search history in vain.

In his movement from the Wilderness to Spottsylvania, General Grant again failed to turn the flank of his wily adversary, and, after a prolonged endeavour to break and destroy Lee’s army there, the Federal commander again moved by his left flank, in the hope of reaching Hanover Court House in advance of the arrival there of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Again he was baffled of his purpose. Again Lee got there first, and took up a position in which, by reason of the river’s tortuous course and the conformation of the ground, Grant could not assail him without dividing his own army into three parts, no one of which could be depended upon to support either of the others.

At one point the Federal general very nearly succeeded. There was a bridge across the stream near Hanover Court House. If that could be seized, the Federal forces might cross and assail Lee’s left flank with effect. A strong column of Federals was thrown forward to possess the bridge, and for a time it looked as if they would succeed and bring the war to an end right there.

But two Confederate batteries—utterly unsupported—were thrown forward. One was Captain Pollard’s; the other was a battery from the battalion of Major Baillie Pegram. Advancing at a full run, the two batteries planted their guns at the head of the bridge, just as the Federal columns were beginning to cross it, and within five minutes the bridge had ceased to be.

Has the reader ever seen Shepard’s spirited painting called “Virginia, 1864”? The sketch from which that painting was made was drawn on this hotly contested field, the artist having three pencils carried away from his grasp by rifle bullets and half a dozen rents made in his drawing-paper while he worked.

Thus, for the third time baffled in his effort to place his army between Lee and Richmond, Grant moved again by his left flank to the neighbourhood of Cold Harbour, where one of the severest battles of the seven days’ fight between Lee and McClellan had been waged.

Again Lee discovered his purpose, and again he got there first. He seized upon a line of hills and hastily fortified them. He was now in front of Richmond and only a few miles in advance of that city’s defences. He thought it not imprudent, therefore, to call to his assistance such troops as were engaged in garrisoning the works about Richmond; thus for the first time in all that strenuous campaign having an opportunity in some small degree to make good the waste of war, by way of preparing himself to meet an enemy who had been reinforced almost daily since the beginning of the campaign, and whose army at that time outnumbered the Confederate force by more than three to one.

At Lee’s back lay the now bridgeless Chickahominy—an erratic stream which might at any moment cut him off from all possibility of retreat. If Grant could defeat him where he lay, or even seriously cripple him, the pathway of the Army of the Potomac into Richmond would be scarcely at all obstructed.

In hope of this result, Grant determined upon an assault in force. In the gray of the morning of June 3, he assailed Lee with all of impetuosity and all of force that an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men could bring to bear against an army of less than fifty thousand.

The result was disastrous in the extreme to the Federals. They marched into a very slaughter pen, where they lost about ten thousand men within twenty minutes, for the reason that Lee had previously discovered their purpose and had prepared himself to receive their onslaught with all the enginery of slaughter.

In effect, this disaster to the Federal arms ended the field campaign of 1864. It had been four times demonstrated that in strategy Lee was more than a match for his adversary. It had been four times demonstrated that in field fighting the little Army of Northern Virginia could not be overcome by the force, three times as great, which Grant had so often and so determinedly hurled against it.

There was nothing left to the Federal commander except to besiege Richmond, either directly on the north and east, or indirectly by way of Petersburg, twenty-two miles south and commanding the main lines of Confederate military communication.

Butler already lay on the south side of the James River with a strong detachment and within easy striking distance of Petersburg, a city defended by an exceedingly inadequate force under Beauregard. Grant ordered Butler to seize upon Petersburg quickly, before the place could be defended. If that plan had been successful, Richmond must have surrendered or been evacuated, and the war must have ended in the early summer of 1864, instead of dragging its slow length along for nearly a year more. But Beauregard’s extraordinary alertness and vigour baffled Butler’s purpose. In spite of the exceeding meagreness of the Confederate defending force, before Grant could push the head of his column into Petersburg, Lee was there; and within a few hours the Army of Northern Virginia, equally skilled in the use of bayonet and spade, had created that slender line of earthworks behind which Lee’s thin and constantly diminishing force defended itself for two thirds of a year to come.