39 The Clicking of the Wires

The momentary silence that followed the crash of the battle was heavy and threatening; after so much noise, it seemed strange and against Nature. The night sank down suddenly upon the field and blotted out the towns and hills, and through the darkness came no sound; then a rumble sprang up and swelled; the lights began to twinkle on hill and valley and in the town.

The rumble increased, and the lights grew like bunches of fireworks igniting. The two armies turned to work; this was to be no night of rest; the battle of that day, the 1st of July, had been fought by the two vanguards, but a fourth of the total. By the next daylight all would be there, and nearly two hundred thousand men would stand face to face for the final test. We knew now that the great moment had come, and within the narrow valley between the ridges, upon which the remains of the two vanguards stood, the fate of a nation would be decided; the veterans of a hundred battles, they recognised the crisis. While generals and colonels had been planning, and guessing, and trying to name the place upon which the decisive battle would be fought, Fate, careless of them all, had chosen already the unknown little town of Gettysburg. There it lay, in the hands of the South now, its few feeble lights flaring in the darkness, its frightened inhabitants who had not fled or joined the defenders trembling in their homes—a respectable, modest little town, shuddering under the terrible honour that had been thrust upon it unsought.

Shaftoe and I were working at an embankment, and we rested a few moments to stare into the valley and at the threatening ridge that lay over against ours. We were silent; even Shaftoe, the philosopher, hardened as he was by thirty years of war, was awed; he knew better than I that the carnage we had seen that day was but the beginning.

The vapours and the battle smoke floated over the field and permeated the air. The night sank down, close, heavy, and portentous. The lights increased in number, but became dimmer. The rumble grew.

The activity of the two armies went on—not the energy of battle, but the energy of preparation, and never was there greater need of it. Lee himself, the South’s great commander, arrived before sunset and surveyed the field, so brilliantly won by his vanguard. He might have ordered, before the night became impervious, another attack upon our beaten remnants as they lay exhausted and gasping on Cemetery Hill, but he did not. Some of his generals have criticised him for his failure to do so, but whether they were right or not the historians do not agree. Silent, impenetrable, a man who never claimed credit and never shunned blame, he let the world judge him as it chose.

Perhaps he saw difficulties that his generals did not see. Perhaps he was lamenting the absence of the brilliant, too brilliant Stuart, with his ten thousand cavalrymen, gone now some days on a fruitless raid around our army; but, whatever the cause, he did not attack when we were least able to stand it.

Meade, too, a slender man wearing eyeglasses and not of imposing appearance, came soon after nightfall. Hancock, grasping the full measure and meaning of the battle, had sent messengers for him, and not waiting for them to arrive, went in person to tell what he had seen and to bring his commander-in-chief. Thus Meade rode in the dark along the hilltop, and by the flaring camp fires looked upon the field which his vanguard had so gallantly lost.

Meade, like the Southern leader, was cool; he, too, sent messengers for troops, and all through the night he studied the field, noting the points for defence, putting the newly arrived regiments in place, hurrying more messengers for others, and detailing to generals the duties of the next day—the day which all expected to bring forth so much.

That night witnessed a wonderful gathering of men. Gettysburg became a centre to which all things tended. From the two great semicircles of lights facing each other on Seminary Ridge and Cemetery Hill radiated lines of other and fainter lights, flickering and dying away in the darkness; many roads came to Gettysburg, and along all these the troops were marching. It seemed a singular circumstance that the Southern soldier came chiefly out of the north, and the Northern chiefly out of the south, each turning his back to the hostile section.

The regiments came to both armies all through the night, muddy, patient, enduring, ready to kill or be killed, according to order. The hostile lines extended to north and to south as the new regiments and brigades took their places, and the flickering fires bent in two great semicircles.

The full moon came out and lighted up the ridges, the columns and clefts of stone, the sombre, cave-like hollows and the unequal summits of Round Top and Little Round Top, the two steep hills that stood like huge towers dominating the field, tried in vain to penetrate the chasm of the Devil’s Den, and threw its light over the soldiers who slept in thousands along the slopes, and the dead who lay in the valley below.

The tombstones in the old cemetery were cold and white in the moonlight; that cemetery was full of men, the living sleeping above the dead, Northern soldiers covering all the spaces between the stones. Meade and his staff passed among them after midnight, picking their way in order not to step on the sleepers, but too busy with the work of the morning to draw any significance from the place. The general walked on, and the sleeping soldiers remained motionless under the shadow of the tombstones.

As hour after hour passed, the ring of bayonets and gun muzzles contracted, closing in tighter on Gettysburg, and the two armies grew. But forty thousand combined in the first day’s fighting, the numbers soon rose to forty thousand each and then passed on. The regiments crowded each other; the artillery was massed in batteries along all the hillsides, and the artillerymen slept beside their guns.

It was a singular scene to one not animated by the feelings of those who were to have a part in the vast tragedy—the long, dim slopes, the lights, the forms of the recumbent men almost hidden in the dusk, the sombre hills and rocks looking down in silence upon them, the vapours and patches of smoke that still drifted aimlessly about, the soothing rumble like the heave of the sea upon the coast, and the full moon throwing its fantastic light that touched everything and made it ghostly and unreal. This was some old battlefield, some battlefield of ancient times, a Cannae or a Metaurus seen at night!

Throughout all that night, while the two armies were converging upon Gettysburg and the dead of the first day’s battle yet lay upon the field, silvered by the moonlight, the telegraph wires were clicking, and thirty million people were asking what had become of their armies. The battle for a continent and a nation was to be fought upon an area of five square miles, and all who were gathering there knew it; but over an area of three million square miles ignorance as dark as the night itself prevailed. Mingled with this ignorance was an uncertainty, a doubt far more trying. In the South there were fewer telegraphs and newspapers, and less general knowledge about the invasion, but in the North misinformation was free to everybody, and the alarm—the justifiable alarm—caused by the advance of the Army of Northern Virginia was deepened when it and the Army of the Potomac disappeared in the Pennsylvania country, and no man knew when or how they would emerge.

Wherever the telegraph wires reached, their clicking went on, bearing a message of anxiety and question; in New York, in Philadelphia, in Boston, in Chicago, and to the tiny hamlets in the woods, “Where are the armies and when will they meet?” It was asked in the drawing-rooms, where many lights glittered, and in the one-room log house of some far Northwestern town, where the only light was that of the dying coals flickering over the puncheon floor, and in each the doubt and fear were the same.

In Washington, a haggard man, old beyond his years, his face seamed into ugliness, and his eyes melancholy, was the most anxious of them all. It had been for him to decide this war; all the power of the North had been placed in his hands; he was for the time being an equal despot with a Czar; the armies and navies were at his command; he could make and unmake generals as he chose; he could plan the campaigns if he wished; all the resources of a nation were in his hands to risk as he pleased; he had done his best without any thought of glorification or gain of any kind, and so far had won but little success; he had seen his generals one after another beaten, and now the enemy so often the invaded had become the invader. Instead of using the resources of a nation to crush his antagonist, he was compelled to use them in defence of that nation.

This man of imperial power who carried the fate of thirty million people in the hollow of his hand was as ignorant to-night as the humblest farmer in the Northwestern woods. The armies had slipped from him, disappearing in the darkness; the Army of Northern Virginia had gone into obscurity, and with it the Army of the Potomac, the sole defence against it. No one would wish to have been in his place that night, to feel his fears and doubts and responsibility as he vainly traced lines on the map and tried to follow the two armies, only to lose them always in the wilderness of Pennsylvania roads and hills. There are times when one does not wish to have imperial power, to be responsible for the fate of thirty million people.

The wires that clicked so volubly, clicked to his questions, too, but they brought no answer; they searched the darkness, they sent the question along to each Pennsylvania hamlet, and then they ran it out through the woods, until it stopped suddenly at the end of a wire cut through by some army sabre. And always the answer came back to Washington, “Nothing!” None of these questions could reach Gettysburg; it was still an unknown place to all the world save to the two armies that converged upon it in the darkness and whose vanguards had fought there; its sombre fame had begun for itself, but not yet for others.

That was the answer everywhere to all the clicking of wires, “Nothing!” Rumours and reports came in plenty, but the people had fed on them until they turned at the taste; they wanted something more solid, and they sneered at invention. The two armies were lost, swallowed up, and all the telegraph wires of the United States could not find them.

The wires clicked on all through the night and carried the same question over and over again to their uttermost ends, but the answer never varied—“Nothing! nothing!” The thirty million people, North and South alike, were helpless; they had put their cause in the hands of two champions, their armies, and these would decide the issue there in the darkness, without spectators and the cheers of friends.

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