Free Mr Lincoln's Army by Bruce Catton Page B

in time
to turn around and join in the flight—and there was a huge traffic jam. The
sutlers' wagons seemed to be an especial problem; their drivers were almost
frantic in their desire to get on the road and be gone, for in a jam like this,
with discipline loosened, everybody hungry, and pitch-darkness prevailing, the
soldiers were all too likely to consider them fair game and start
indiscriminate looting. Now and then one of these wagons would succeed in
getting on the highway and the driver would force his distracted horses to a
gallop, careening ahead through infantry detachments and sending the men
flying, and winding up, as likely as not, in a ditch.
    In
the grass and briars off the road there were little groups of men gathered
about flags—each group the nucleus of some lost regiment trying to
reassemble—and over all the noise of the retreat could be heard the cries of
these men, plaintively chanting their regimental numbers: "Twenty-fourth
New York! . . . Third Maine—Third Maine! . . . Bucktails!" Acrid smoke
tainted the night air, and as the darkness deepened a steady rain set in. A
soldier in the 27th New York remembered that his regiment was drawn square
across the road with fixed bayonets to halt the flood; but blows, bayonets and
threats were of no avail—"the disorganized and demoralized mob rushed
recklessly around our flanks." 1 Later, he added, the disorder
subsided, and the regiments marched by in more regular order. A war
correspondent who had witnessed the headlong departure from the field after the
first battle of Bull Run insisted that there was "little or none" of
the panic that attended the first retreat, and felt that, all things
considered, this retreat was fairly orderly; but it stood out in the memory of
the men who had to five through it as one of the gloomiest, most miserable
nights of the war.
    And if there was no sustained panic there was
a smoldering, unreasoning anger, and there was ugly talk. Luckless General McDowell
sat his horse and watched the army struggle past, and as they went by men
called out "Traitor!" and "Scoundrel!" A private in the
11th Massachusetts, from Hooker's division, turned to another and growled:
"How guilty he looks, with that basket on his head!" This was in
reference to poor McDowell's fancy summer headpiece. In the surviving
photographs it does look somewhat like a battered coal scuttle, but the men's
objections were not based on aesthetic grounds; somehow the army had acquired
the remarkable conviction that for an obscure and traitorous purpose McDowell had
designed this hat as a distinguishing mark for the enemy to see and recognize.
As they trudged along the road the men of the 11th told each other how a
brigadier in Hooker's division, meeting a non-com who was staggering wounded to
the rear during the heat of the day's combat, had asked how things were going
up front.
    "We're holding our own now, but McDowell
has charge of the left," said the non-com.
    "Then God save the left!" said the
brigadier bitterly.
    At one stage during the battle, the men
insisted, one of McDowell's regiments fired a random volley and then turned and
ran for the rear, shouting to its officers: "You can't play it on
us!" A diarist explained: "General McDowell was viewed as a traitor by
a large majority of the officers and men . . . and thousands of soldiers firmly
believed that their fives would be purposely wasted if they obeyed his orders
in the time of the conflict." A stout partisan of Joe Hooker, this writer
added: "General Pope acted like a dunderpate during the day, and scorning
the wise advice of abler generals like Hooker and Kearny allowed General
McDowell to maneuver the troops upon the field." One man was heard to say
during the retreat: "I would sooner shoot McDowell than Jackson."
Some uniformed reader of Horace Greeley, passing General Pope, sang out:
"Go west, young man, go west!" A member of the Black Hat
    Brigade
noted that "open sneering at General Pope was heard