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Bloody Lane

From Days and Events by Thomas Livermore      The events of a battle in which the troops maneuver a good deal are almost always confused in one's memory, and I am not exactly certain of the order in which I place events, nor of the duration of the various struggles here, but they are related as now pictured on my mind. I believe that while we fired by file a little before we advanced across the road, yet that we did not meet with great opposition here, probably because the Irish regiment we relieved had done considerable toward using up the line we first dealt with. At any rate, we swept forward, and as we were advancing (either now or previously across the sward) I heard old General Richardson cry out, "Where's General?" I looked over my right shoulder and saw that gallant old fellow advancing on the right of our line, almost alone, afoot and with his bare sword in his hand, his face was as black as a thunder cloud; and well it might be, for some of our own men, turning their heads toward him, cried out, "Behind the haystack!" and he roared out, "God damn the field officers!" I shall never cease to admire that magnificent fighting general who advanced with his front line, and with his sword bare and ready for use, and his swarthy face, burning eye, and square jaw, though long since lifeless dust, are dear to me.      We swept on over the road into the cornfield, taking prisoner the broken remnants of the line which had opposed, now crouching in the corn before us, and down into a ravine, to the foot of the slope on which the rebel batteries stood, and not more than two hundred yards from them; all the time being pelted with canister from the battery in our front, which hurtled through and tore down even slender cornstalks. The rebels then attempted to send a line of battle down the slope to meet us under cover of the artillery fire, but by this time we had advanced beyond the range of the batteries on the right, and my impression is that either on account of the depth of the ravine we were in or because of the advancing rebel line being in the way, the pieces of the battery in our front were not depressed enough to hurt us, and we gave our undivided attention to this advancing line. We were fresh, and opened a withering, literally withering, fire on the rebels; for although they may have started in regular order, yet before they got to the foot of the slope there was no semblance of a line, and the individuals of what had been the line, either by reason of invincible bravery, or for the purpose of gaining shelter, ran forward, scattering in the face of our fire, with heads down as if before a storm, to a fence which was a few yards in front of us, but did not form a line which annoyed us, that I recollect.      In my opinion here was a glorious chance to win the victory. We seemed to have penetrated to the right flank of the enemy, no infantry appeared to turn our left flank at this juncture, and no battery opened on our left front and the line which the rebels sent down in our front was broken by a regiment of 300 men or less. Of course, I don't know what troops there were in reserve behind the rebel line at this point, but from all that I have learned I see no reason to doubt that if the prolongation of our line to the left, which we ended, had been continued by one division, we should have turned the right of the left wing of this rebel army.      But, however triumphant our advance had been, it seems that Colonel Cross found that he was not only in advance of the line on his right, but that there was an interval between his right and its left on the same alignment; so to avoid the catastrophe which such a position might bring upon us, he moved us to the right and rear until at length we found ourselves in the vicinity of the sunken road again with our line intact. The rebels followed this movement closely with an advance of a formidable line of battle, which we met with a rapid fire, but the rebels now attempted a maneuver, which was the very one I have suggested we might have accomplished; that is, the flanking of our left. We were very busily engaged in the corn when someone on the left detected this movement of the enemy around our left, which was concealed from most of us by the corn. Colonel Cross convinced himself that this was the case when he in some way changed our front "to the left and rear" so as to confront the rebel line squarely.      And then we filed to the left, and outflanking the rebel line in turn, poured such a fire into it as to drive it off. As I was near the right of the line I did not see how much the rebels outflanked us, nor did I see how much we outflanked them, and was very busily occupied with the rebes in my own front.      At this time we were subjected to a most terrible fire of artillery, and I recollect one shell or case shot which burst in the middle of "G," the color company, and killed and wounded eight men and tore a great hole in one of our flags, and our regiment, already weakened, was fast losing men from its ranks. At this trying time the rebel infantry advanced for the third time against us when the colonel moved us into the sunken road and there we planted ourselves for the last struggle.     On looking around me I found that we were in the old, sunken road mentioned several times before, and that the bed of it lay from one to three feet below the surface of the crest along which it ran. In this road there lay so many dead rebels that they formed a line which one might have walked upon as far as I could see, many of whom had been killed by the most horrible wounds of shot and shell, and they lay just as they had been killed apparently, amid the blood which was soaking the earth. It was on this ghastly flooring that we kneeled for the last struggle. The rebels advanced through the corn, firing, the artillery played upon us without mercy, and now we were harder pressed than ever before, with no help at hand from the reserves which we could see. The battle still raged on our right, and it seemed useless to expect aid from that quarter; this is retrospective, however, and I am not aware that we thought of or prayed for help.      As the rebel advance became apparent, we plied the line with musketry with all our power and no doubt with terrible effect, but they still advanced. A color-bearer came forward within fiften yards of our line, and with the utmost desperation waved a rebel flag in front of him. Our men fairly roared, "Shoot the man with the flag!" and he went down in a twinkling and the flag was not raised in sight again. As the fight grew furious the colonel cried out, "Put on your war paint;" and looking around I saw the glorious man standing erect with a red handkerchief, a conspicuous mark, tied around his bare head and the blood from some wounds on his forehead streaming over his face, which was blackened with powder. Taking the cue somehow we rubbed the torn end of the cartridges over our faces, streaking them with powder like a pack of Indians, and the colonel, to complete the similarity, cried out, "Give 'em the war whoop!" and all of us joined him in the Indian war whoop until it must have rung out above the thunder of the ordnance. I have sometimes thought it helped to repel the enemy by alarming him to see this devilish-looking line of faces, and to hear the horrid whoop; and at any rate, it reanimated us and let him know we were unterrified.      Added to the inspiration of these devices, a stream of shouts, curses, and appeals to "Fire! Fire! Fire faster! came from our mouths, and while with our first advance into the cornfield my contemplation of death in the abstract had given place to inflicting it in reality, at this time my spirits became fairly boisterous between firing, shouts, and the smell of powder smoke and all. The dead rebel whom I knelt on held in his hands a "Belgian rifle" (a poor enough arm, but worth something in a pinch like this), and although it was my duty to tend solely to my mens behavior, yet as they were each one of them doing their best, and the cap on this rifle denoted that it was loaded, I took it out of his hands, and discharged it at his living comrades, and liking the work I looked around for another piece to discharge, when Colonel Cross, who was omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent in the fight, cried out sharply, "Mr. Livermore, tend to your company!" and I quenched my aspirations and thenceforward watched my men.      Among the incidents I remember on this day were these. I saw a private of the 61st New York, who was mounted for some reason, with a brilliant red shirt on, riding to and fro along the infantry line where the musketry was hottest, and he being the only mounted man in his vicinity was especially conspicious and I learned he was doing his best to encourage the men. I was told, too, that a woman, who followed the Irish Brigade as laundress or nurse, went up with it, and standing with it in the fight, swung her bonnet around and cheered on the men; and that Colonel Barlow, of the 61st New York, tired of seeing his drummers shrink from their duty tied them to his waist with his sash and led them under fire. A rebel in flying before our advance was killed as he was climbing over a fence and remained fixed upon it, and through mistake or rage our men had shot or bayoneted him many times.

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