Book Three: The Honest Silence Part Three: The Works Characters
Chapter Fourteen
The Ditch
Henry Ashton. Arlington Heights, in the United Kingdom of America. Thursday, 28 August 1862.
Lee commanded the defence, the only time in his life that he commanded in action, and the only field command he ever exercised was one fought from inside fortifications he had built. The assault fell on the northern part of the Virginia line, well away from the Arlington estate itself; the battle takes its name from the heights along which the works ran, not from the house. It was costly and it was never in doubt.
I have read four accounts of the battle on the heights since it was fought, and I was in it, and I do not recognise any of them.
They call it Arlington Heights, after the heights along which the works ran, and people who were never there think that it was fought at the Colonel’s house. It was not. It was fought a long way above the house, at the northern end of the Virginia line, where the works came down off the high ground towards the river above the city; and the house stood on its bluff with its columns all through the three days, as white as ever, and nobody fired a shot at it or near it. The accounts I have read are full of charges and crises and moments at which everything hung by a thread, and of a single regiment or a single gun that saved the capital. I did not see any of that. I saw a great many brave men broken against works that the Colonel had spent a year making unbreakable, three times, on three days, and I saw what it cost; and that is a kind of battle that does not make good reading, because there is no moment in it at which anything might have gone the other way. There is only the cost. I will try to give Your Majesty that, and not the other thing.
Jackson came out of the valleys in the third week of August.
He came through the gaps of the Blue Ridge faster than anybody in the capital believed an army could move, while the army that had come back from the Rappahannock lay in its camps on the far side of the city, short of the regiments it had lost to the riots; and on the evening of Monday the twenty-fifth his fires were in the woods in front of the northern end of the line, and the whole capital could see them from the Axis, a long low glow along the horizon to the north-west, like a town burning a great way off.
I have never understood why he did it. I have heard it said since that he believed the works were thinly held, with the army away on the roads; that he believed one blow would carry them; that Richmond ordered it and he obeyed. I do not know. I know that the works were not thinly held, and that one blow would not carry them, and that he had been a professor of natural philosophy and a soldier in Mexico, and must have known as well as I did what a ditch twelve feet deep and an abatis and a line of heavy guns do to men who come at them across open ground. I know that he came anyway. My brother had told me once that he was the only man he had ever known who was entirely certain of what God wanted, and I have wondered since whether that is the explanation, and whether it is the kind of explanation that a man ought to accept.
On the morning of the Tuesday, the twenty-sixth, the general commanding on the Virginia bank rode up to the farmhouse on the crest a little after dawn, with his staff, and went in to the Colonel, and came out again a quarter of an hour later, and rode back to his own headquarters; and from then until it was over, it was the Colonel’s orders that went out along the line. I do not know how that was arranged, or whether it was arranged at all, or what was said in the farmhouse. Nobody ever told me and nobody ever wrote it down, so far as I know. The general was a brave man and a sensible one, and I think he understood that the works were the Colonel’s and that the Colonel knew every yard of them, and that this was not the morning to stand on seniority. I have never heard that he resented it. I have never heard that anybody thanked him for it either.
The Colonel sent me to the fort at the northern end of the line.
I knew it better than any of the others, because I had drawn it, in the October before, on a sheet of the Colonel’s paper, and he had looked at it a long time and moved it forty yards to the left, and been right. It stood on a knoll at the end of the high ground, with the land falling away in front of it across open fields to a belt of woods four hundred yards off; and it had a ditch twelve feet deep and twenty wide in front of its parapet, and an abatis of felled trees in front of the ditch, with their branches sharpened and pointed outward; and lines of rifle pits ran from it along the ridge on either hand to the next forts. I had wanted the ditch ten feet deep, to save labour. The Colonel had wanted fourteen. We had made it twelve. My orders were to keep the fort in repair while it was being fired at, and to report to the Colonel what the rebels were doing in front of it, by orderly, every hour.
The garrison was a Pennsylvania regiment. It was the same regiment that had lent me a company to stand in the lane at Leonardtown at the election, and its colonel was the same man who had told me afterwards that it had been the dullest day his men had ever spent. He shook my hand when I came into the fort, and said that he supposed I had come to make it dull again, and I said that I hoped so.
They came at us three times, once on each day.
The first was on the Tuesday morning, out of the woods, in lines, with their flags, across the four hundred yards of open ground, and the guns in the fort and in the forts on either side opened on them at about half the distance, and the lines came on, and closed up, and came on, and reached the abatis, and stopped there, because a man cannot come through an abatis under fire, and lay down in front of it and fired at the parapet for a quarter of an hour, and then went back. It was over by ten in the morning. We had eleven men hit in the fort. I did not count what was lying in front of the abatis, and I would not give Your Majesty the number if I had.
The second was on the Wednesday afternoon, a mile to our left, at the line of rifle pits between our fort and the next, where the Colonel had always said the line was weakest, because the ground there was low and could not be seen from either fort; and he had put a battery of field guns behind it on the Monday night for that reason. The rebels reached the rifle pits and some of them got into them, and the field guns fired into them at a hundred yards, and they came out again. I saw it from the fort through my glass, and I do not wish to describe it. The Colonel had ridden up behind the pits on Traveller at the start of it, and sat there on his horse behind the guns for the whole hour, in plain sight, without moving, and when it was over he rode back along the line to the farmhouse at a walk.
The Pennsylvanian colonel was killed that afternoon, on our parapet, looking over it to see the fight on the left, which I had asked him twice not to do. He had a wife in Lancaster, his adjutant told me, and four children. He had been very kind to me at Leonardtown.
The army from the Rappahannock came in behind the works on the Wednesday night, too late to do anything but stand in the second line, and the new regiment that had been raised in the camps, which had no muskets yet, carried the powder up to the forts all that night and the next, and dug where they were told. Two of my sappers were killed on the parapet that night, putting back the sandbags that the rebel guns had knocked off it during the day. I did not see Daniel among the men carrying the powder. I did not look very hard, among a thousand men in the dark.
The third came on the Thursday, the twenty-eighth, late in the afternoon, and it was against our fort.
They had brought up guns in the night and they shelled us from noon, and at about four o’clock the lines came out of the woods again, more of them than on either of the other days, three lines deep, with their flags, and the drums going, and the officers in front on foot. I was on the parapet with my glass, by the flagstaff, and I watched the first line come into the open and the guns open on it, and then I put the glass on the second line, and I saw the jackets.
They were green, with buff facings. There were not many companies in Virginia that wore green with buff, and I had watched forty men in those jackets drill on the green before the courthouse in King George on a Saturday in December, nearly three years before, while their old captain made speeches from a cart, and my brother did the work. I could not see faces at that distance. I could not see whether he was with them. I could see the jackets, a little to the left of the centre of the second line, coming on across the fields towards a ditch that I had drawn.
I want to be honest with Your Majesty about what I did then, because I have been tempted since to make it better than it was. I did not do anything. There was nothing to do. I did not call to the gunners to aim elsewhere; it would have been absurd, and they would not have heard me, and I would not have done it if they could. I did not leave the parapet. I kept the glass on the green jackets until the smoke covered them, and then I took it off them and put it on the abatis, where my duty was, and wrote my report to the Colonel on my knee, and gave it to the orderly. I have the copy of that report. It says that the third assault had reached the abatis in strength at a quarter past four, and that some part of the second line had passed through it at the angle and was in the ditch. It does not say anything else.
They were in the ditch for perhaps twenty minutes. Some of them had come through the abatis where the shelling had broken it, and gone down into the ditch, and tried to come up the far side of it to the parapet; and the far side was twelve feet of bare earth, revetted, and there was no coming up it, and the men on the parapet fired down into the ditch, and threw down shells with the fuses lit, and I will not describe it any further than that. Then the drums in the woods beat the recall, and what could go back went back. What could not go back stayed in the ditch.
It was over by six. It had been over, I suppose, from the moment they came out of the woods, and everybody in the fort had known it, and I think a great many of the men who came out of the woods had known it too. It was never in doubt. It was only costly.
The Colonel rode up to the fort at sunset, on Traveller, and came in at the gorge and walked along the parapet with me, and looked over it at the ditch, for a long time, without saying anything.
When he had finished looking I told him that the green jackets in the second line had been my brother’s company.
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Then you had better go and look for him, Mr Ashton, when it is dark,” and went back to his horse.
I went out after dark with the stretcher parties, with a lantern, into the ditch and through the abatis and out across the fields as far as the pickets would let us go, and I looked at every green jacket I could find. I found a great many. I knew some of the faces, the ones I could still know. I did not find my brother. A sergeant of the stretcher parties told me that they had taken a good many wounded out of the ditch at dusk, before I came, and carried them back to the ambulances, and that some of them had been officers; and I went back into the fort, and sat on the firing step until it was light, and in the morning I went to the provost marshal’s office in the capital to read the lists of the prisoners, and went back three times that day.
His name was on them on the Friday evening, on the second sheet: wounded and a prisoner, a captain, of a regiment of the Province’s forces, and the name of the place they had taken him to.
I found him on the Saturday, in a corridor of one of the ministries on the Axis.
The public buildings had been hospitals for a year, as I have said, and since the Tuesday they had been more than full; the wounded lay along the corridors on straw and on blankets and on the bare boards, our men at one end and the rebel prisoners at the other, past a sentry, with the surgeons going up and down between them and the ladies of the capital who had come in to nurse going up and down behind the surgeons. Anne was in another building, two streets away, where she had been since the Tuesday. I did not know until afterwards that she had been reading the lists too.
He was at the far end of the corridor, on a blanket on the floor, under a window. His right shoulder was bound up, and his face was grey and thin, and he had grown a beard since I had seen him, which made him look like our father, and he was asleep. I sat down on the floor beside him and waited. I do not know how long it was. When he opened his eyes he looked at the ceiling first, and then at the window, and then at me, and he did not seem surprised.
He said, “Harry.” And then, “I thought you’d come.”
I asked him how he did. He said that the surgeon said he would keep the arm, and that he understood this to be a piece of great good fortune, from what he had seen of the corridor. Then he was quiet for a while, and I thought he had gone to sleep again. Then he said, without turning his head, “Was that your fort? The one with the ditch?”
I said that I had drawn it.
He thought about that. Then he said, “It’s a good ditch.” He said it as a soldier says it, without any irony at all, as a statement of professional fact. And then he told me that they had come at it three times and that the third time he had got into it, and had tried to get his men up the far side, and could not, and had been shot through the shoulder trying, and had lain in the bottom of it until it was dusk, among a good many others, and then somebody with a lantern had taken him out. He said that it was a very good ditch indeed. He said that the whole regiment had known it on the Wednesday night, when they were told that they were to go in on the Thursday, and that their colonel had gone to Jackson to say so, and had come back and said that the Lord would provide.
He did not say anything else about Jackson, then or afterwards, and I did not ask him to.
After a while he said, “Mother wrote me in May.”
I waited. He said that she had written that Daniel had walked off, in April, the week the Crown’s army came to Falmouth, and some of the others with him, in the night. He said it without any heat, as a man reports the weather at home. Then he turned his head on the blanket and looked at me, and said, “Did you know?”
I said that I knew. I said that I had seen him.
He said, “Did you get him back?”
I said, “No.”
He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “No. You wouldn’t,” and turned his face back to the window. I have never known what he meant by that: whether he meant that I was too proud, or too much the Crown’s, or too little of anything at all. I did not ask him. And I did not tell him the rest. I did not tell him that Daniel was in the Crown’s coat, and that it might very well have been Daniel’s regiment that had carried the powder up to the guns that fired into the ditch. I did not tell him because he was wounded, and because he was my brother, and because I did not know how to say it; and I set it down here as one more thing I did not say.
Then he said that I would have to write to our mother for him, because he could not hold a pen.
I told him that she had asked me not to write.
He said, “She asked you not to write to tell her you weren’t coming home. You’re not writing that. You’re writing that I’m alive.” And I could find no answer to that, because there was none, and I borrowed a sheet of paper and a pencil from the surgeon’s orderly, and sat on the floor of the corridor with the paper on my knee, and wrote what he told me.
It was not a long letter. He told her that he was wounded in the shoulder and would keep his arm, and that he was a prisoner and well treated, and that she was not to worry, and that the company had done all that men could do, and he gave her the names of the men of the county who were dead, those he knew of, so that she could tell their families; there were nine. He told her to give his love to everybody. When it was done he asked me to sign it for him, and I wrote his name at the bottom.
Then he said, “And put that you wrote it.”
I looked at him. He was looking at the ceiling.
He said, “She’ll know your hand anyway, Harry. Put it.”
So I wrote under his name that it had been written for him by his brother; and I folded it, and addressed it to my mother at Marlfield, in King George County, in the Province of Virginia, and gave it to the provost marshal’s people that evening to go south under the next flag of truce. I do not know whether she read it. I know that it was my hand, and that she knew my hand better than anybody living, and that it was the first thing I had written to her in seventeen months.
I walked back along the Axis that night towards Charter Hill, past the other ministries, every one of them lit at every window, with the surgeons’ lamps going up and down the corridors inside, and the carts still coming in over the bridge from the heights.
I have said that it was never in doubt, and it was not. The works did what they had been built to do. I have been told since that the Colonel’s three days on the heights saved the capital, and I do not think that is true either, because I do not think that the capital was ever in danger of being lost; I think that it was in danger of something much smaller and much worse, which was that a great many men would be killed trying to take it, and that was not prevented, and could not have been, by any works. It was costly. The cost was in the ditch in front of the fort I had drawn, and on the parapet where a colonel from Lancaster had looked over it, and on a blanket on the floor of a corridor on the Axis, with its face turned to the window. And it was never in doubt. I have tried for four years to decide whether those two things make it better or worse, and I have not been able to decide, and I have stopped expecting to.