Free Never Call Retreat by Bruce Catton Page A

was getting breakfast and he had bled to death. By a path leading to a spring sprawled another dead Federal, still gripping the bail of an oaken bucket. A Confederate had been cut entirely in two by a shell; another soldier had been killed by the windage of a near miss and lay contorted, his face blackened, not a wound on his body; farther on there were two men who had been killed by the same cannon ball, which had passed through their chests, removing their hearts and leaving "a hole big enough to put your arm through." One Rebel remembered seeing a blue-coated soldier whose skull had been broken open like a melon, his intact brain lying on the ground near his body. A Texas soldier wrote that "the seens on the battle field was aufle" and asserted that "the hogs got a holt of some of the Yankey dead before the night was over." A man from Louisiana saw horrors when the moon broke through the rain clouds: "The earth was burdened with the Yankee dead. They were crossed and piled over each other, nearly all of them lying on their backs, with their faces so ghastly turned up to the moon." 10
    New Year's Day brought disillusionment to General Bragg, because the Federal army clung to its position. There had been a tense meeting of the Federal high command, late the night before, in which everybody agreed with Thomas' terse verdict: "This army can't retreat," and Rosecrans ordered his battered divisions to hold their ground. 11 With that decision, the battle of Stone's River began to change from a Confederate victory to a Confederate defeat. Bragg held his army in position on January 1 but he did not resume the attack— could not, because his army had worn itself out. His men had fought magnificently, but there were not enough of them, and it did no good to reflect that they almost certainly would have won decisively if Stevenson's missing division had been there to help. Bragg's army had suffered the astounding loss of approximately one-third of its total effective strength, and although Federal losses had been higher numerically, and almost as high proportionately, a genuine renewal of the Confederate offensive was utterly impossible. 12 In sheer desperation, Bragg ordered Breckinridge to attack the Federal left on the morning of January 2, but the case was hopeless, and the massed Federal artillery quickly broke Breckinridge's brigades to fragments. On January 3 there was another odd pause on the battlefield, while the two mangled armies stared at each other from their wretched bivouacs, and by nightfall it was clear that Bragg had only one option left: retreat. Of infantry and artillery, the only arms that would be effective in a renewed engagement here, he now had no more than 20,000 men. It was reported that Rosecrans was being reinforced, and although this was not true it was obvious that he could get reinforcements long before Bragg could hope to get any. Stone's River was rising behind Hardee's men, if they did not retreat now they might not be able to later— and at last, on the night of January 3, the Confederate army tramped through Murfreesboro and headed south. 13
    It did not have to go far because the Federals were too cut up to pursue. Rosecrans' army stumbled into Murfreesboro like an exhausted man collapsing on his cot, and it spent the better part of six months there, recuperating. This was much too long, yet there was some excuse: this army was only a third as large as the Federal army that had fought at Fredericksburg, yet it had equaled the Fredericksburg losses. These armies at Stone's River had in truth fought each other almost to death and each was out of action for a long time.
    To use such a word as "victory" in connection with a shambles like Stone's River is to risk twisting the word out of its meaning. Yet in a negative but vitally important way Rosecrans' army did win something there. It kept the Confederacy from knocking the props out from under the campaign against Vicksburg. Grant's advance could be