Glory Road by Bruce Catton Read Free Book Online Page B

was of several minds. Burnside was toying with ideas of feints downstream to draw off the bulk of Lee's strength, feints upstream to draw it in the opposite direction, feints right here to make possible an unopposed crossing elsewhere. Exactly what all of this would amount to was never clear, but the ideas were at least stirring in his mind. Sumner, who had the great virtue of loyalty, stoutly supported Burnside's plan even though he did not quite understand it. Joe Hooker had more than enough military intelligence to perceive the folly of an attempt to force a crossing here, and he left none of the army's ranking commanders in doubt about his feelings. Nor, for that matter, did he leave Washington in doubt. As early as November 19 he had sent a private letter to Secretary Stanton, putting on record his own criticism of his commanding officer. When Hooker wrote he had just come up behind Sumner, and he had his two army corps camped close to United States Ford on the Rappahannock. He told Stanton that, boats or no boats, he ought to be allowed to take his men across the river and go driving south without worrying about pontoon bridges or anything else. He could live off the country; he would be entering, he said, a rich agricultural district unspoiled by war, and the foraging would be good. In general, he could smash things up so thoroughly that the enemy would have to hurry back to protect Richmond and would not be able to defend the Rappahannock crossings here or anywhere else. 14
    In many ways Hooker's idea was perfectly sound. But Hooker-was Hooker; strange mixture of the conniver and the sincere patriot. In sending to the Secretary of War a pointed criticism of his own commander, he was violating both military law and military etiquette, not to mention the canons of ordinary civilized behavior. And since there was obviously no chance whatever that the Secretary of War, getting Hooker's letter, would promptly reverse Burnside and order the movement which Hooker suggested, what Hooker was really trying to do with all of this irregularity was to get his own lightness and Burnside's wrongness on record in advance of the catastrophe which Hooker scented on the wind. Burnside, Hooker felt, was not going to last long. After Burnside?
    Yet the important thing about this army was never the rivalry of its generals, nor, for that matter, the generals themselves. For this was an army that had to operate strictly on its own. From beginning to end, at one level or another, its command was either erratic or beset with slackness and incompetence. Something like this business of the pontoons was always happening, something was always going irretrievably wrong, owing less to any single shortcoming than to a general failure on the part of someone in shoulder straps. It is impossible to disagree with the historian who remarked that the army was cursed "by a line of brave and patriotic officers whom some good fairy ought to have knocked on the head." 15 What the army finally was to do, if indeed it was to do anything, would at last depend almost entirely on the men in the ranks. Individual leaders who were worthy of them, these men did indeed have here and there, at varying levels of command from company to army corps. But leadership which, as a whole, came even close to being good enough for them —that, from the day the war began to the day it ended, these men never got.
    In addition, they had suffered lately a psychic wound, having lost McClellan, the one commander for whom they felt affection and with whom they felt at ease. They had no light to follow now but the light they might find in their own spirits, and that light was guttering very low as they waited by the riverbank with the weather growing colder and the muddy bivouac becoming more and more cheerless. It seems that they began to get a premonition of disaster, a premonition that was less the result of a conscious appraisal of their chances than the product of many small failures