[The following is in regards to the Battle of the Wilderness, which took place on May 5-7, 1964, during the American Civil War.]
The thousands of men who faced each other did so in a landscape that was utterly unsuited for infantry tactics. It was – and still is – a gently sloping kind of countryside, thickly covered with second-growth timber and impenetrably dense underbrush. There are tracts of swamp country, muddy and fetid, heavy with mosquitoes. In May it is dreadfully hot, and the foliage away from the swamps and seeping brooks is always tinder dry.
The fighting therefore was conducted not with artillery – which couldn’t see – not with cavalry – which couldn’t ride. It had to be conducted by infantrymen with muskets – their guns charged with the dreadful flesh-tearing minié ball, a newfangled kind of bullet that was expanded by a powder charge in its base and inflicted huge, unsightly wounds – or hand-to-hand, with bayonets and sabers. And with the heat and smoke of battle came yet another terror – fire.
The brush caught ablaze, and flames tore through the wilderness ahead of a stiff, hot wind. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of men, the wounded as well as the fit, were burned to death, suffering the most terrible agonies.
One doctor wrote how soldiers appeared to have been wounded “in every conceivable way, men with mutilated bodies, with shattered limbs and broken heads, men enduring their injuries with stoic patience, and men giving way to violent grief, men stoically indifferent, and men bravely rejoicing that – it is only a leg!” Such tracks as existed were jammed with crude wagons pulling blood-soaked casualties to the dressing stations, where overworked, sweating doctors tried their best to deal with injuries of the most gruesome kind.
A soldier from Maine wrote with appalled wonder of the fire. “The blaze ran sparkling and crackling up the trunks of the pines, till they stood a pillar of fire from base to topmost spray. Then they wavered and fell, throwing up showers of gleaming sparks, while over all hung the thick clouds of dark smoke, reddened beneath by the glare of flames.”
”Forest fires raged,” wrote another soldier who was at the Wilderness,
ammunition trains exploded; the dead were roasted in the conflagration; the wounded, roused by its hot breath, dragged themselves along with their torn and mangled limbs, in the mad energy of despair, to escape the ravages of the flames, and every bush seemed hung with shreds of bloodstained clothing. It seemed as though Christian men had turned to fiends, and hell itself had usurped the place of the earth.
Source:
Winchester, Simon. “The Madness of War.” The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. HarperPerennial, 1999. 54-6. Print.
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