Legends

“And then a whisper of wind coming off the river brought with it the distant sound of a brass band playing Yankee Doodle. Under cover of darkness the Federals had finally thrown their pontoon bridges across the river and were starting to come over in force. There were scattered shots from Fredericksburg as the Confederate rear guard pretended to put up a fight to suck the Federals into the trap that awaited them once they captured Fredericksburg and started across the plain Richmond-bound. The notes of Yankee Doodle and the hollow reports of muskets set everyone to peering toward the river. Bobby Lee reined up next to Jackson, who touched his hat in salute. They talked for a moment, Lee pointing out the Chatham Mansion, which served as Burnside’s command post, within eyeshot on the other side of the river. And then Lee happened to glance in my direction. His eyes fixed on me and he called, What the blazes is going on down there? My interrogator called up that I was a Federal spy caught behind the Confederate lines the previous evening; that they were about to bury me alive as a warning to others. Lee remarked something to Jackson, then stood in his stirrups and, removing his white hat, shouted down, There will be enough killing on these fields today to last a man a lifetime. Tie him to a tree and let him watch the battle, and set him free when it is over. Which is how I came to see the elephant again—to witness the carnage that unfolded below Marye’s Hill that terrible December day. Burnside’s army burst out of Fredericksburg onto the plain and formed up. The 114th Pennsylvania Zouaves with their white headbands were the first to charge the stone wall along the sunken road—they came on with pennants flying while a drummer boy set the cadence for the attack until his head was severed from his body by a cannon ball. It was a massacre from start to finish. Through the afternoon wave upon wave of Federals charged the sunken road, only to be cut down by a hail of minié balls. I counted fourteen assaults in all, but not a one of them made it as far as the wall. The cause was so hapless, the Confederates looking down from the hill took to cheering the courage of the Federals. I could see the Rebel sharpshooters dipping their hands in buckets of water so they could load their Whitworths, scalding hot from being shot so much, without blistering their skin. At one point in the afternoon I could make out groups of Federals trying to take cover behind some brick houses on the plain but the Yankee cavalry, using the flats of sabres, forced them back to the battle. It was a Godawful thing to behold—there have been days since when I wished they’d gone ahead and buried me alive so that the sight and sound of battle would not be graven on my brain.”

“And they let you cross the battlefield to your lines when it was over?”

“As for the field of battle, the less said about it the better. The temperature that night dipped below freezing and my breath came out from between my chattering teeth in great white plumes as I negotiated its pitfalls. I ripped the square of strawboard off my back and started toward the flames I could see burning in Fredericksburg, tripping over the bloated bodies of horses and men, stumbling onto limbless corpses entangled at the bottom of shell craters. Even in the cold of winter there were horseflies drawn to the blood oozing from wounds. The maimed Federals who were still alive dragged the dead into heaps and burrowed under the corpses to keep warm. To my everlasting regret I could do nothing for them. I stopped to cradle a dying soldier who had a slip of paper with his name and address pinned to the back of his blouse. He shivered and murmured Sarah, dearest and expired in my arms. I took the paper, meaning to send it to his next of kin but somehow lost it in the confusion of the night. Riderless horses pawed at the frozen ground looking for fodder, but the only fodder at Fredericksburg on 13 December 1862 was cannon fodder.”

“You reached the town—”