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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Massachusetts in the Army and Navy during the war of 1861-1865, vol. 1: prelminary narrative, Preliminary narrative. (search)
description of the merely confused and chaotic side of war by Tolstoi or Zola or Crane equals the simplest soldier's narration of the Battle of the Wilderness. It was, in Swinton's phrase, a collision of brute masses. Decisive Battles of the War, p. 383. Once begun, it soon lost almost the semblance of military formation. Men could not see their own officers, keep in their own ranks or even know whom they were fighting. In the dense woods portions of regiments fired into one another. Badeau describes the region as one tangled mass of stunted evergreen, dwarf chestnut, oak and hazel, with an undergrowth of low-limbed bristling shrubs, making the forest almost impenetrable.... A wrestle as blind as at midnight; a gloom that made manoeuvres impracticable; a jungle where regiments stumbled on each other and on the enemy by turns, firing sometimes into their own ranks, and guided often only by the crackling of the bushes or the cheers and cries that arose from the depths around. G