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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)
John Pickering, Jr.), as pontoniers. The first great battle of the campaign was the battle of the Wilderness (May 5-7, 1864), and it was, very fortunately, almost unique of its kind. It was not, like the later contests, an affair of entrenchments; cavalry had no important share in it, artillery little; it came as near as the invention of gunpowder permitted to the earliest form of hand-to-hand fighting. No 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, o