4th Iowa Infantry History - Page 13

Your main work being completed you can rest secure, only putting in an embrasure for a howitzer or two here or there. These howitzers are a fine thing to repel an attack, for they throw nearly a bucketful of small balls at a charge. Your skirmish line has, in the mean time, fortified itself sufficiently for protection, and can hold an attacking column long enough for you to form line in the main works before the enemy can get there.

One reads in the papers of the assults on earth-works, of the repulses, and yet one does not know what is contained in those two words-‘Assult repulsed.’ You make up your mind to assult the enemy’s works. You have formed line of battle, with a second and third line behind you for support. You march forth filled with the determination to accomplish the objective, yet feeling the magnitude of the undertaking. Two hundred yards brings you to the picket-line, and here the opposition commences. You dash across the space between the two lines, you lose a few men; and the enemy’s pickets, after making as much noise as possible, run back to their main works. By this time the enemy are pretty sure you are really coming, and open on you with artillery, besides a pretty heavy fire of musketry. This artillery throws the shell screaming through your ranks, producing more moral than physical effect, or throw shrapnell which, bursting in front, scatter myriads of small bullets around. You commence to lose men rapidly. The ball is opened. ‘Forward, double-quick!’ again; and while the whole line of the enemy open fire from behind their works, your men, mindless of this- mindless of death intensified, the bullets and the shells, they dash on with wild cheers.

The abattis with its tangled intricacy of sharpened branched snare your line. Tripping, falling, rising to fall again, the men struggle through this abattis. You get through this abattis, though the minutes are drawn out interminably, and though in each step are left brave men to pay for the ground. You get through a part of you and still rush on: the firing grows more fierce, the men grow more desperate. Your three lines have been almost reduced to one, and you strike anouther line of abattis. In this abattis are the palisades, which must be uprooted by force before a man can pass. You stumble, fall, tear your flesh on these stakes, and must stop to pull them up-stop, when every instant is an hour-stop, when you are already gasping for breath; and here open up the masked batteries, pouring canister into that writhering, struggling, bleeding mass-so close that the flame scorches, that the smoke blinds from those guns. Is it any wonder that your three lines are torn to pieces, and have to give back before the redoubled fire of an enemy as yet uninjured comparatively? And then the slaughter of a retreat there! Oftentimes it is preferable to lie down and take the fire there until night rather than lose all by falling under such circumstances.

This war has demonstrated that earth-works can be rendered nearly impregnable on either side against direct assult. An assult on fortified lines cost a fearful price, and should be well weighed wether the cost exceed not the gain. This, then, is what an assult means-a slaughter pen, a carnel house, and an army of weeping mothers and sisters at home. It is inevitable. When an assult is succesful, it is to be hoped that the public gain may warrant the loss of life requisite. When it is repulsed tenfold is the mourning.

It was a long time before the men could appreciate the value of the field- works. They would grumble and growl, recalling instances without number where the most charming little traps, the most elegant cross-fires, had been prepared with the great labor, and had never been attacked. I saw some men most beautifully satisfied as to the necessity for defensive works the other day. On the 22nd of July, before Atlanta, while these men were engaged in grumbling over some newly-finished works which the enemy would not charge, Hardee struck the Seventeeth Corps in flank and rear. His furious onset crushed the flank, and the Second Brigade of the Third Division to which these grumblers belonged, found themselves suddenly forming the unprotected left of the corps and attacked from the rear in those very works they grumbled so about building. When this attack was made they jumped the works to the front, or outside, and fought that way. This attack repulsed, they jumped back and repulsed an attack from the outside, or real front. Thus they fought, looking forall the world like a long line of these toy-monkeys you see which jump over the end of a stick. Thus they fouhgt for four long hours, cut off from all commanders, corps, division, and brigade, cut off from ammunition-trains, and only cheered by the noble example of General Giles A. Smith, whose command, broken by the first onset-all except one brigade-had rallied behind the works of the Third Division. Firing to front and rear, and to either flank they held their works, only changing front by jumping over the parapet as five assults were made upon them, successivly from front, rear, or flank, until the rebel onset was checked long enough to make sure the saftey of the immense wagon-train already saved by the Sixteenth Corps.

The next works of these men I saw, and seeing them, laughed. Experience had taught the utility of fortifications, and they fortied not only the front, but facing rear and every way, so that they could hold out if surrounded. They were not going to be caught without ammunition either; for each company had its little powder-magazine in a safe place, well stored with ammunition gathered from the battle-field. No grumbling was heard about building the works. All the spare time of the men was devoted to finishing up their pet works, standing off and regarding the effect of each addition with something of the same paternal feeling that an artist exhibits in reguarding the power of each master-stroke in finishing his picture."

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