"Changed a Retreat into a Bayonet Charge"

 

The butternut trousers of the men were coated quite up to the waist with inky black mud, and they were drenched to the skin from floundering and swimming across White Oak swamp to reach the field on time by a short cut. After crossing the mire they had pushed their way through a thicket grown up with tall briers that scratched and tore their hands and faces, and when at last they got sight of the game that had led them such a chase they were in that raspy, nettled, tigerish place of temper that only finds a vent in biting and hitting back at something or somebody. They were Alabamans—Colonel John B. Gordon's Sixth regiment.

 

Two of Casey's regiments, the Eighty-first and the Eighty-fifth New York, had formed a double line across the stump lot of the clearing, the Eighty-first being partially in the woods between the clearing and the swamp. The fire of the Alabamans being returned by the New Yorkers, the former threw themselves down behind logs and stumps and eased their tempers by a few picked shots where they could count their scores. "I dropped him!" "I saw him fall!" they would exclaim and creep nearer for the next trial. They kept this up, too, when the fight afterward became more exciting, and the victims in Casey's ranks were nearly all hit in the head or chest. In a few minutes the New Yorkers left the stump field for the shelter of the woods and intrenchments. The Sixth Alabama was followed by a brigade line under General Rodes, to which had been given the task of driving Casey's men out of the clearing and intrenchments south of the stage road. A brigade under General Rains was to do the same in the woods between the clearing and the swamp. When Gordon's skirmishers had the game well started, Rodes gave the order to charge the works. Gordon's skirmishers rallied on the colors, and mistaking a word of command faced about and started to the rear. Discovering the error they faced about again, and madder than ever over a blunder that nearly drew upon them the odium of cowardice, charged through the tangled abatis and over the intrenchments without a halt. The New Yorkers, surprised by the tactics that changed a retreat into a bayonet charge, hurried back to a second line at Seven Pines, half a mile in the rear. Gordon's men rushed after them across the clearing until they plunged blindly into another morass two or three feet in depth. There, as else where, the forest had been cut so that the intertwined branches and trunks and the thick growth of briers together formed a trackless labyrinth. Rushing deeper and deeper in, every man was for himself, the Alabamans were soon caught like flies in a spider's web. The water in some places ran in currents strong enough to carry a man off his feet, and the heads of the wounded had to be propped up to prevent strangulation.