Chapter XXXV: The Crater

At Petersburg, on the Appomattox, twenty miles south of Richmond, June
went by in thunder, day and night, of artillery duels, with, for
undersong, a perpetual, pattering rain of sharpshooters’ bullets, torn
across, at intervals, by a sharp and long sound of musketry. In the
hot and sickly weather, under the hovering smoke, engineers of the
Army of Northern Virginia, engineers of the Army of the Potomac worked
like beavers. The grey line drawn by Beauregard early in the month was
strengthened and pieced out. Over against it curved a great blue
sickle of forts, with trenches and parapets between. Grey and blue
alike had in the rear of their manned works a labyrinth and honeycomb
of approaches, covered ways, pits, magazines, bomb-proofs, traverses.
The blue had fearfully the advantage in artillery. Grey and blue, the
lines, in part, were very close, so close that there would be little
warning of assault. The Army of Northern Virginia, now, in numbers,
not a great army, had to watch, day and night. It watched with an
intensity which brought a further depth into men’s eyes, deep enough
now in all conscience, deep enough in the summer of 1864!

On the twenty-second, Grant attempted to extend his flank upon the
left toward the Weldon Railroad. Lee sent A.P. Hill out against this
movement. Hill, in his red battle shirt, strong fighter and prompt,
swung through an opening left unaware between the two corps, the
Second and Sixth, and, turning, struck the Second in the rear. After
the fiercest fighting the blue, having lost four guns and several
stands of colours, and seventeen hundred prisoners, drew back within
their lines.

Grant dispatched two divisions of cavalry with orders to tear up the
Lynchburg and Danville Railroad. They spread ruin south to the
Staunton River, but here W.H.F. Lee, who had followed, attacked them
at Blacks and Whites. Retiring they found themselves between two
fires. Wade Hampton and Fitzhugh Lee, back from the fight at
Trevillian’s Station, fell upon the two divisions at Sapony Church.
Infantry of Mahone’s came up also and aided. After a running fight of
a day and night, in which the blue lost, in killed and wounded and
taken, fifteen hundred men, twelve guns, and a wagon train, they
escaped over the Blackwater, burning the bridge between them and the
grey, and so returned to Grant at Petersburg.

On the first of July, General Alexander, Longstreet’s Chief of
Artillery, wounded and furloughed home, was driven, before quitting
the lines, to Violet Bank, where were Lee’s headquarters. About the
place were small, much the worse for wear, Confederate tents. The
commanding general himself had a room within the house. The wounded
officer found him standing, with several of the staff, upon the porch
steps. He had his field-glasses open, and he was listening to the
report of a scout. When at last the man saluted and fell back,
Alexander stated the conviction that was in him. He felt a certainty
that the enemy was engaged in driving a mine under the point known as
Elliott’s Salient.

“Why do you think so, General?”

“Their sharpshooters keep up a perpetual, converging fire, sir, upon
just that hand’s-breadth of our line. On the other hand, they pay so
little attention to the works to right and left that the men can show
themselves with impunity. They are not clearing the ground for surface
approaches—well, then, I think that they are working underground. If
you were going from that side to explode a mine and assault
immediately afterward, that would be the place you would choose, I
think.”

“That is true,” said Lee. “But you would have to make a long tunnel to
get under that salient, General.”

“About five hundred feet, sir.”

Mr. Francis Lawley, of the London _Times_, was of the group upon the
steps. “In the siege of Delhi, sir, we drove what was, I believe,
considered the longest possible gallery. It was four hundred feet.
Beyond that it was found impossible to ventilate.”

“The enemy,” said Alexander, “have a number of Pennsylvania
coal-miners, who may be trusted to find some means to ventilate. This
war is doing a power of things that were not done at Delhi.”

“I will act on your warning, General,” said Lee.

The next day the grey began to drive two countermines. Later in the
month they started two others. Pegram’s battery occupied the
threatened salient, with Elliott’s troops in the rifle-pits. The grey
miners drove as far and fast as they might, but they tunnelled outward
from either flank of the salient, while the Pennsylvania coal-miners,
twenty feet underground, dug straight toward the apex. The days
passed—many days.

On the eighteenth was received the news of the removal of Joseph E.
Johnston from the command of the Army of Tennessee. Wade Hampton,
being at headquarters, heard Lee’s expression of opinion and wrote it
to General Johnston.... “He expressed great regret that you had been
removed and said that he had done all in his power to prevent it. He
had said to Mr. Seddon that if you could not command the army we had
no one who could.” Later came the tidings of Hood’s lost battle of
Atlanta and all its train of slow disaster. On the twenty-fifth, news
of Jubal Early’s victory at Winchester the day before was cheered to
the echo. In the last days of the month came news of Stoneman and
McCook’s raiding in Georgia and of the scattered fighting in Arkansas.

North and South, away from the camps, there was flagging of spirit and
sickness of soul. In the North the war was costing close upon four
millions of dollars a day. Gold in July went to two hundred and
eighty-five. The North gained now its fresh soldiers by bounties, and
those heavy. All the northern tier of states, great as they were,
untouched by invasion, and the ocean theirs—all the North winced and
staggered now under the burden of the war. But the South—the South was
past wincing. Bent to her knees, bowed like a caryatid, she fought on
in her fixed position.

At Petersburg, Grant meant to explode a great mine and to follow it,
in the confusion, by a great and determined assault. Moreover, in
order to weaken the opposition here and the more to distract and
appall, he detached Hancock with twenty thousand men for a feint
against Richmond. Hancock marched to Deep Bottom, where Butler, having
ironclads on the river and a considerable force encamped on the
northern bank, guarded two pontoon bridges across the James. Between
this place and Richmond was Conner’s grey brigade and at Drewry’s
Bluff, Willcox’s division. Moving with Hancock was Sheridan and six
thousand horse.

Lee, watchful, sent Kershaw’s division to join with Willcox and Conner
and guard Richmond. Hancock crossed on the twenty-seventh, and that
morning Kershaw came into collision with Sheridan, losing prisoners
and two colours. Lee further detached W.H. F. Lee’s cavalry and Heth’s
infantry. The alarm bell rang rapid and loud in Richmond and all the
home defences went out to the lines. But Hancock, checked at Deep
Bottom, only flourished before Richmond; on the twenty-ninth, indeed,
drew back in part to the Petersburg lines, in order to take part in
the great and general assault. When the thirtieth dawned, with
Willcox, Kershaw, Heth, and the cavalry away, Lee was holding lines,
ten miles from tip to tip, with not more than twenty thousand men.

It was a boding, still night, hot in the far-flung wild tangle of
trenches, pits, and approaches, hot in the fields, hot in Poor Creek
Valley where the blue were massing, hot amongst the guns of Elliott’s
Salient. The stars were a little dimmed by dust in the air and the yet
undissipated smoke from the artillery firing that had ceased at dusk.

In the blue lines there was between generals a difference of opinion
as to what division should lead in the now imminent assault. Burnside
advised the use of Ferrero’s coloured division. Meade dissented, and
the point was referred to Grant. He says: “General Burnside wanted to
put his coloured division in front, and I believe if he had done so it
would have been a success. Still I agreed with General Meade as to his
objections to that plan. General Meade said that if we put the
coloured troops in front (we had only one division) and it should
prove a failure, it would then be said, and very properly, that we
were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care
anything about them. But that could not be said if we put white troops
in front.”

This settled it, and Ledlie’s division was given the lead. It formed
behind earthworks full in front of Elliott’s Salient, in its rear two
supporting divisions; its objective Cemetery Hill, commanding the
town; its orders, as soon as the mine should explode, to pass over and
through the grey’s torn line, take the hill, and pass into Petersburg.
It was midnight when Ledlie’s line was formed, the supporting
divisions drawn up. The night was hot and exceedingly close; the men
stood waiting, feverish, every sense alert. One o’clock—two
o’clock—three o’clock. Ledlie moved forward, taking position
immediately behind the breastworks. Again a wait, every eye upon
where, in the darkness, should be Elliott’s Salient.

On the grey side there was knowledge that a mine was digging, but
ignorance of the day or night in which it would be fired. Lee slept,
or waked, at Violet Bank; far and near in its trenches the Army of
Northern Virginia lay, well-picketed, in a restless sleep. The nights
were hot, and there was much misery and frequent night firing. All
sleep now was restless, easily and often broken. There were South
Carolina troops in and about Elliott’s Salient. Reveille would sound
and the sun would rise shortly before five o’clock.

The stars began to pale. Ledlie sent to General Burnside to ask the
cause of delay. The men had been in ranks for four hours. Burnside
answered that the fuse had been lit at a quarter-past three but
evidently had not burned the sufficient distance. A lieutenant and a
sergeant had volunteered to enter the tunnel, find out what was the
matter and relight the fuse. Ledlie’s aide returned and reported, and
the division stood tense, gazing with a strained intention. It was
light enough now to see, beyond their own advanced works, the grey
line they meant to send skyward. Beyond the line was Petersburg, that
they meant to take; beyond Petersburg, a day’s march, was Richmond.

The light strengthened, pallor in the north and south and west, in the
east a cold, faint, upstreaming purple. Somewhere in the cavalry lines
a bugle blew, remote, thin, of an elfin melancholy. As though it had
been the signal, the mine exploded.

The morning light was darkened. The earth heaved so that many of the
blue staggered and fell. A mass sprang into the air, mounted a hundred
feet and spread out into an umbrella-shaped cloud. As it began to
descend, it was seen that earth and rock might come upon the blue
themselves. The troops gave back with shouts.

In that cloud of pulverized earth, smoke, and flame were mammoth clods
of clay, one as large as a small cabin, timber of salient and
breastworks, guns, carriages, caissons, sandbags, anything and
everything that had been upon the mined ground, including some
hundreds of human beings. The hole it left behind it was one hundred
and seventy feet long, sixty wide, and thirty deep. Back into this now
rained in part the lumps of earth, the logs of wood, the pieces of
iron, the human clay. The trembling of the earth ceased, the sound of
the detonation ceased. There came what seemed an instant of utter
quiet, for after that rage of sound the cries of the yet living, the
only partially buried in that pit, counted as nothing. The instant was
shattered by the concerted voice of one hundred and fifty blue guns
and mortars, prepared and stationed to add their great quota of death
and terror. They brought into that morning of distraction one of the
heaviest cannonades of all the war.

Through the rocking air, in the first slant beams of the sun the blue
troops heard the order to advance. They moved. Before them were their
own breastworks over which they must swarm, thus sharply breaking
line. Beyond these, one hundred and fifty yards away, were curious
heaps of earth, something like dunes. The air above was yet dust and
smoke. On went the Second Brigade, leading. It came, yet without just
alignment, to the crest of the dunes, and from these it saw the
crater.... There was no pausing, there could be none, for the First
Brigade, immediately in the rear, was pressing on. The blue troops
slid down the steep incline and came upon the floor of the crater,
among the débris and the horribly caught and buried and smothered men.

There followed a moment’s hesitation and gasp of astonishment; then
the blue officers shouted the brigade forward. It overpassed the
seamed floor and reached the steep other side of the excavation.
Behind it it heard, or might have heard if anything could have been
heard in the roar of one hundred and fifty guns, the First Brigade
slipping and stumbling in its turn down the almost perpendicular slope
into the crater. The Second Brigade climbed somehow the thirty feet up
to the level of the world at large. On this side the hole it was a
grey world.

If the explosion had stunned the grey, they had now regained their
senses. If the force of the appalling blue cannonade caused an
end-of-the-world sensation, even in such a cataclysm there was room
for action. The grey acted. Into the ruined trenches right and left of
and behind the destroyed salient poured what was left of Elliott’s
brigade. Regiments of Wise and Ramseur came at a run. Lee, now with
Beauregard at the threatened front, sent orders to Mahone to bring up
two brigades with all speed. A gun of Davidson’s battery in a salient
to the right commanded at less than four hundred yards what had been
Elliott’s Salient and was now the crater. Wright’s battery on the
left, Haskell’s Coehorn mortars fringing a gorge line in the rear,
likewise could send death into that hollow. Infantry and artillery,
the grey opened with a steady, rapid fire. And all the time, behind
the blue Second Brigade, now forming for a rush on the greyward edge
of the crater, came massing into that deep and wide and long bear-pit
more blue troops, and yet more. And now the Second Brigade, checked
and disconcerted by the unexpected strength of the resistance,
wavered, could not be formed, fell back into the crater that was
already too filled with men.

Here formation became impossible. An aide was sent in hot haste to
General Ledlie, for his own fame somewhat too securely placed in the
rear. Ledlie sent back word to Marshall and Bartlett, leading, that
they must advance and assault at once; it was General Burnside’s
order. The aide says: “This message was delivered. But the firing on
the crater now was incessant, and it was as heavy a fire of canister
as was ever poured continuously upon a single objective point. It was
as utterly impracticable to re-form a brigade in that crater as it
would be to marshal bees into line after upsetting the hive; and
equally as impracticable to re-form outside of the crater, under the
severe fire in front and rear, as it would be to hold a dress parade
in front of a charging enemy.”

So far from the pit being cleared, it received fresh accessions.
Griffin’s brigade, coming up, tried to pass by the right, but
entangled in a maze of grey earthworks, trenches, traverses, and
disordered by the searching fire, it too fell aside and sank into the
hollow made by the mine. “Every organization melted away, as soon as
it entered this hole in the ground, into a mass of human beings
clinging by toes and heels to the almost perpendicular sides. If a man
was shot on the crest he fell and rolled to the bottom of the pit.”

The blue Third Division, arriving, attacked the manned works to the
left, took and for a little held them, then was driven back. Haskell’s
grey battery of sixteen guns on the Jerusalem Plank Road came greatly
into action. Lee and Beauregard were watching from the Gee house.
Mahone, of A.P. Hill’s Corps, was coming up with three brigades,
coming fast....

The coloured division of the Ninth Army corps had a song,—

“We looks lak men er-marchin’ on,
We looks lak men ob war—”

They had sung it sitting on the ground around camp-fires the night
before when they had been told that they would lead the charge—the
great charge that was going to take Blandford Church and Cemetery, and
then Petersburg, and then Richmond, and was going to end the war and
make all coloured people free, and give to every one a cabin, forty
acres, and a mule, and the deathless friendship of the Northern
people.

“We looks lak men er-marchin’ on,
We looks lak men ob war—”

They had not led that grotesquely halted charge, but now they, too,
were required for victims by the crater. Burnside sent an order, “The
coloured division to advance at all hazards.”

It advanced, got somehow past the crater and came to a bloody,
hand-to-hand conflict with the grey. The fighting here was brutal, a
maddening short war in which, black and white, the always animal
struggle of war grew more animal yet. It was short. The coloured
division broke and fell back into the crater.... All the grey
batteries, all the grey infantry poured fire into this place where
Burnside’s white and coloured troops were now inextricably mixed. At
ten o’clock up came Mahone with three brigades and swept the place.

By two o’clock the Confederate lines were restored and the battle of
the crater ended. This day the blue had been hoist by their own
petard. The next day Grant sent a flag of truce asking a cessation of
hostilities until he could gather his wounded and bury the dead. Lee
gave four hours.

During this truce grey soldiers as well as blue pressed to the edge of
the crater to observe and wonder. They were used to massacre and
horror in great variety, but there was something faintly novel here.
They came not ghoulishly, but good-naturedly—“just wanting to see what
gunpowder could do!” They fraternized with the blue at work and the
blue fraternized with them, for that was the way the grey and blue did
between hostilities. They spoke the same language, they read the same
Bible, they had behind them the same background of a far island home,
and then of small sailing-ships at sea, and then of a new land, huge
forests, Indians, wolves; at last towns and farms, roads, stages,
packet-boats, and railway trains. They had to an extent the same
tastes—to an extent like casts of countenance. The one used “I guess”
and the other used “I reckon,” and they differed somewhat in
temperament, but the innermost meaning was not far from being the
same. At the worst an observer from a far country might have said,
“They are half brothers.” So they fraternized during the truce, the
grey this afternoon, the more triumphant, and the blue the more
rueful.... “Hello, Yanks! You were going to send us to Heaven, weren’t
you? and instead you got sent yourselves!”—“Never mind! better luck
next time! You certainly made a fuss in the world for once!”—“How many
pounds of gunpowder? ‘Eight thousand.’ Geewhilikins! That was a
sizable charge!”—“If you’d been as flush of gunpowder as we are, you
might have made it twenty, just as easy!”—“There’s a man buried over
there—see, where the boot is sticking up!”—“Yes, you blew some of us
into Heaven—twenty-two gunners, they say, and about three hundred of
Elliott’s men—just enough to show your big crowd the way!”—“That
junk-heap over there’s Pegram’s guns.”—“Such a mess! White men and
black men and caissons and limbers.”—“I thought that body was moving;
but no, it was something else.”—“Got any tobacco?”—“We’d like
first-rate to trade for coffee.“—“There’s a man crying for water. Got
your canteen?—mine isn’t any nearer than a spring a mile away. I’ll
take it to him—know what thirst means—been thirsty myself and it means
Hell!“—“Well, it was a fine mine, if it did go a bit wrong, and you
deserve a lot of credit—though I don’t think some of your generals
do!“—“Yes, that’s so! People stay what they always were, even through
war. Lee stays Lee and Grant stays Grant, and Meade stays Meade, and
A.P. Hill stays A.P. Hill. And some others stay what they always were,
too,—more’s the pity!”—“Here, we’ll help cover this row.”—“Did you see
little Billy Mahone charging? Pretty fine, wasn’t it?”—“Saw your
Colonel Marshall and General Bartlett when they were taken prisoner.
They seemed fine men. Yes, that’s so! We ain’t got a monopoly, and you
ain’t got a monopoly.”

The truce would last until full dark. Now, as the sun went down in a
copper sky, most of the work was done. In great numbers the wounded
had been lifted from the floor and sides of the crater; in great
numbers the dead had been lowered into trenches, shallow trenches, the
earth just covering the escaped from life. There were yet blue
working-parties, a faint movement of blue and grey watchers, but the
crater was lonely to what it had been. Only the wild débris remained,
and the mounds beneath which life had gone out and been buried. There
seemed a silence, too, heavy with the approaching night. A grey
pioneer detail that had been engaged in repairing a work that flanked
the vast excavation rested on spade and pick and gazed into the place.
An infantry company of A.P. Hill’s, marching to some assigned post,
was halted for five minutes and allowed to break ranks. Officers and
men desired to look at the big hole in the ground.

In groups or singly they peered over the edge or scrambled halfway
down the loose earth of the sides. The sun’s rim had dipped; the west
showed a forbidding hue, great level washes of a cold and sickly
colour. Steadily this slope of the great earth wheeled under, leaving
the quenchless hearth of the sun, facing the night without the house
of light. It was all but dusk. One of the soldiers of this company was
Maury Stafford. He stood alone, his back to a great projecting piece
of timber and looked into the pit and across to the copper west.
“Barring prison,” he thought, “for simple horror I have never seen a
worse place than this.”