Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield

As the brigade formed column for its advance to the field of Waterloo, Harry found time to instruct Juana to ride Tiny back into Brussels to await the outcome of the battle. Mrs Smith reached the great square of the city to encounter West the groom presiding over a heap of the family’s possessions. Orders had just come for the army’s baggage train to move to a village five miles further back. There, like Thackeray’s Becky Sharp with Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair, Juana and West spent an interminable afternoon, waiting upon news amid a torrent of rumour and alarms. Vitty the pug, infected by the excitement around him, leapt hither and thither, rejecting repose. Tiny the Andalusian would scarcely stand still. Word suddenly came that the French were upon them. Juana mounted and took Vitty in her arms. At that moment, the little horse bolted. For eight frightening miles he would not check until suddenly he gathered himself to leap a wagon, changed his mind and stopped. Juana was thrown over his head. She had just remounted and was gathering her breath when over the hill came a party of fast-riding horsemen. These proved to be British officers and troopers, together with one of her own servants, all bent on flight. ‘Pray, sir, is there any danger?’ she demanded of a hussar. ‘Danger, mum! When I left Brussels, the French were in pursuit down the hill.’ Unwillingly, she was persuaded to follow the party down the road. She sensed that she was in the company of scoundrels, however, when one man urged that she should throw away Vitty to hasten their flight. She arrived at Antwerp emotionally and physically exhausted, her face streaked with mud and tears. She took refuge in the care of the British commandant of the citadel and his wife, with whom she spent the long hours that followed, awaiting news of the outcome of the great clash of armies beyond Brussels.

Lambert’s brigade came late to the field, yet in time to share with the rest of the British army the terrible blood price of the day. Wellington’s sixty-seven thousand men held the ridge of Mont St Jean against French bombardment and relentless assault, at the cost of fifteen thousand casualties. By nightfall, some British infantry squares still occupied the ground they had defended all day, but they were heaped regiments of the dead. One of Lambert’s units, the 27th, was reduced to two officers, both wounded, and 120 men. Smith himself, plunging to and fro through flame and smoke hour after hour, must by late afternoon have been within a few hundred paces of Marcellin Marbot. Two horses were badly wounded under the Englishman. There was an extraordinary moment late that afternoon, when firing died away across the battlefield. Away out on the left flank Smith felt sure the outcome of the battle had been decided, yet could not judge which side was victorious. The fog of war, so literal a term in the age of black powder, obscured the rest of the army from his gaze. Only when the smoke drifted away from the ridge of Mont St Jean could he see red coats still standing firm along its length, amid the wreckage of Bonaparte’s hopes. It was the supreme triumph of Wellington’s generalship against that of the Corsican, a victory gained by the stubborn defiance of the British infantryman. Smith saw that it was safe to surrender to rejoicing.

At the end of that June day, ‘to my wonder, my astonishment, and to my gratitude to Almighty God’, the Smith brothers found that all three had survived. Charles had suffered a slight neck wound. Harry, physically and emotionally exhausted, sat down to make tea in a soldier’s mess tin for Major-General Sir James Kempt, Sir John Lambert and himself. Gazing upon the victorious field, he observed that never in his career as a soldier had he seen such slaughter. Everywhere stood men weeping for dead comrades or relatives, for this was an age when soldiers felt no shame to weep. As Charles Smith helped to gather the dead of his regiment, he glimpsed the corpse of a French officer of delicate mould and appearance, and was astonished on closer examination to discover that this was a young and beautiful woman. Harry Smith mused: ‘What were the circumstances of devotion, passion or patriotism which led to such heroism is, and ever will be, to me a mystery. Love, depend upon it.’

It was late in the afternoon of 19 June, the day following the battle, before the suspense of Juana Smith and thousands of other British camp followers at Antwerp was ended and they were assured that Boney was beaten. Yet still Juana knew nothing about the fate of her Harry. At three o’clock on the morning of the twentieth, against all the pleadings of her companions, she set out with West in quest of him. Arrived at Brussels at seven, she fell in with a party of Riflemen who, to her horror, dolefully declared that Brigade-Major Smith was killed. She hastened towards the battlefield, expecting every cart which passed laden with corpses to contain that of her beloved Harry. Reaching the field of Waterloo, she began to run distraught among fast-decaying bodies and newly-dug graves. Suddenly she met Charlie Gore, ADC to Sir James Kempt. ‘Oh, where is he?’ she cried. ‘Where is my Enrique?’ Gore replied easily: ‘Dearest Juana, believe me; it is poor Charles Smyth, Pack’s Brigade-Major [who is dead]. I swear to you, on my honour, I left Harry riding Lochinvar in perfect health, but very anxious about you.’

‘Oh, may I believe you, Charlie! My heart will burst.’

‘Why should you doubt me?’

‘Then God has heard my prayer!’

She rode on to Mons, arriving at midnight to snatch a few hours’ sleep. At dawn next morning, 21 June, she hurried on to Harry’s brigade bivouac at Bavay, where ‘soon, O gracious God, I sank into his embrace’.

Smith was made brevet lieutenant-colonel and a Companion of the Bath for his part at Waterloo. He was not yet thirty. The Duke of Wellington presented Juana to the Tsar of Russia, explaining: ‘Voila, Sire, ma petite guerrière espagnole qui a fait la guerre avec son mari comme la héroïne de Saragosse.’

So she had indeed. Many years of active service and glory lay before Harry, always with Juana at his side. He led armies to war against the Mahrattas in India and against the Kaffirs in South Africa, rose to the rank of lieutenant-general, and received a knighthood for his contribution to victory at Maharajpore in 1845. He was later elevated to a baronetcy, though sadly the couple bore no child to inherit the title, for his triumph at the 1846 battle of Aliwal in the Sikh Wars. In 1847 he was posted as governor and commander-in-chief at the Cape. In the highest commands, his superiors in London did not deem him a success, and he was eventually recalled from the Cape in 1852. Bluff, eager, hearty little Harry Smith lacked subtlety or political judgement, just as all his life he was reckless with money. In 1854, when Lord Raglan died in the Crimea, Harry was briefly considered a possible successor as commander-in-chief. He himself still chafed for action, and chronic indigence made him desperate for paid employment. But he was sixty-five years old. Lord Panmure, as secretary at war, wrote to Queen Victoria explaining that the most ardent of her lieutenant-generals had been passed over ‘from the circumstances of impaired health and liability to excitement’.

Poor Sir Harry died broke. All his solicitations failed to gain him the peerage he craved. Yet, perhaps more than any other man described in these pages, his life was happy and fulfilled, thanks to his peerless partnership with Juana. There must have been a tinge of melancholy about their childlessness, but to the end of his days, his letters to his wife whenever they found themselves apart were those of a young lover. It is hard to improve upon Smith’s own epitaph for himself, composed in 1844:

I have now served my country nearly forty years. 1 have fought in every quarter of the globe, I have driven four-in-hand in every quarter, I have never had a sick certificate, and only once received leave of absence, which I did for eight months to study mathematics. I have filled every staff situation of a regiment and of the General Staff. I have commanded a regiment in peace, and have often had a great voice in war. I entered the army perfectly unknown to the world, and in ten years by force of circumstances I was lieutenant-colonel, and I have been present in as many battles and sieges as any officer of my standing in the army. I never fought a duel, and only once made a man an apology, although I am as hot a fellow as the world produces; and I may without vanity say, the friendship I have experienced equals the love I bear my comrade, officer or soldier. My wife has accompanied me throughout the world; she has ever met with kind friends and never has had controversy or dispute with man or woman. HARRY SMITH.

If his words were not lacking in conceit, they were nothing less than the truth. Here indeed was the happy warrior, who enjoyed the rare good fortune to share his many campaigns with a perfect companion. For years, the old man celebrated the anniversary of his greatest battlefield triumph with a dinner, at which he caused his charger Aliwal to be led into the hall to share the feast. When the old horse was finally ailing, with many tears Sir Harry led him out to be shot.

Smith wrote in his autobiography of the soldier’s lot: ‘Fear for himself he never knows, though the loss of his comrade pierces his heart.’ In this, he spoke only for himself. He was indeed personally fearless, but many soldiers even of that era were made of softer metal. The record suggests that, like Marbot, Smith carried courage to the point of foolhardiness. Yet unlike some of his brother officers, he was prudent and humane in his stewardship of the lives of others under his command. He was not the stuff of which great captains are made, but he was the kind of British soldier who wins affection and respect as a great comrade. At a glittering soirée in London, he was once asked with wonderful naivety whether he had often faced great risk. ‘My horse did, sometimes,’ he answered lightly. Consider the answer Marcellin Marbot would have made to such a question! Sir Harry Smith Bart., KCB, died at the age of seventy-three in his London home, 1 Eaton Place West, on 12 October 1860. Juana survived for a further twelve years, almost to the day, living quietly in Cadogan Place, her existence devoted to keeping bright the flame of her husband’s memory and reputation. She was buried beside him at Whittlesey. Few couples have achieved such harmony and understanding in times of peace; perhaps none amid the thunder of war.

3 Professor of Arms (#ulink_378665fe-7d68-5ed5-96a0-2268f7acebf5)

THROUGHOUT THE REIGN of Queen Victoria, Europe remained the focus of the civilised world. The memory of the wars of Bonaparte dominated the culture of warriors. This was a folly. If British and Continental soldiers of the later nineteenth century had paid less attention to the memories of 1815, and rather more to the experience of the armies of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in the New World’s decisive conflict, it would have profited them greatly. The American Civil War taught dramatic and important lessons about the nature of future confrontations in arms between industrial societies, for anyone willing to heed them. Yet many European soldiers were foolish enough to suppose that nothing that happened within the mongrel, adolescent society of the United States could be relevant to their own affairs. They paid the price for their lack of interest in the American experience again and again between 1862 and 1914.

For the inhabitants of the North American continent, the Civil War was the most important event in their domestic experience, and produced the greatest soldiers in their history. No American general of the Second World War matched the gifts of Lee, nor perhaps even of Grant; few subordinate commanders showed the brilliance of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, Philip Sheridan, James Longstreet and some of their peers. It is sometimes forgotten, even by Americans, that the nation lost twice as many dead in the conflict between 1861 and 1865 as it did in that between 1941 and 1945, when the US population was vastly larger.

While the rival armies were manned first by citizen volunteers and later by conscripts, most higher commands were held by professional soldiers, many of them West Pointers or graduates of the Virginia Military Institute. Some two thousand alumni of these institutions provided the senior leadership of both sides during a conflict which at one time or another involved four million men. Necessity placed many regiments in the hands of amateurs – in the early days, elected by their men – often with tragic consequences for those they led. Yet a few of those thrust into uniform by circumstance proved uncommonly talented leaders. None more so than Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, at the outbreak of war a thirty-two-year-old professor of modern languages at Bowdoin College in Maine. The conflict ended before Chamberlain was tested in higher commands, but he had already shown himself one of the Union’s finest officers, a model of courage, intelligence and inspirational leadership. When to these qualities were added charity, humanity and generosity of spirit, a knight emerges who might be deemed worthy of a place at an Arthurian Round Table. There have been more distinguished commanders in American history than Professor Chamberlain, but few seem so deserving of admiration as a human being.

He was born in 1828, into a family of stern Maine farmers. His father proposed an army career for Joshua as a teenager, and sent him to be schooled at a local military academy. Yet Chamberlain’s ambitions were at that time scholarly and artistic. He was devoted to music, and played the bass viol. While still a schoolboy he gained a little experience of teaching, and liked the work. He crammed assiduously for a college place with a view to entering the ministry and becoming a missionary overseas. He was finally admitted to Bowdoin College in 1848, after a struggle to learn the necessary classical Greek. His college record was exemplary. He emerged garlanded with prizes and honours, led the choir at the local Congregational church, and fell deeply in love with Fannie Adams, the ward of its minister, a girl two years older than himself. It was often later remarked that Chamberlain could well have been singing in the choir on the day the wife of a Bowdoin professor experienced her vision of the death of Uncle Tom while sitting in Pew 23, which caused Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), vastly influential in mobilising Northern opinion against slavery.

Still anticipating a career as a missionary, and too poor to marry Fannie Adams, whose family anyway opposed the match, Chamberlain enrolled at Bangor Theological Seminary. He spent the next three years studying – Hebrew, German, Arabic and Latin as well as theology – and preaching, to growing local acclaim. In 1855 he became an instructor in logic and natural theology at Bowdoin, and was soon promoted to professor of rhetoric and oratory. Having at last achieved some financial security, he was able to marry Fannie, evidently a moody and sometimes irascible girl, whose enthusiasm for her husband later waned, as his for her never seemed to do. They began to raise a family. By 1861 Joshua Chamberlain had become a significant local figure, respected for his cleverness, integrity and commitment to everything he undertook. Though he had abandoned ideas of a career in the ministry, in a God-fearing age he was a sombrely upright, God-fearing man, not much given to jesting, direct to the edge of naivety. His deep-set eyes reflected remarkable powers of concentration. By a notable feat of will he had overcome an early liability to stammer, to such effect that he gained a reputation as a formidable speaker, as well as a writer. On his salary of $1,100 a year, he and Fannie were able to acquire for $2,500 a pleasant house just off the college campus in which to rear their two surviving children. He found himself increasingly impatient with what he considered the restrictive regime of Bowdoin, with its emphasis on the ancient languages and its unwillingness to give students freedoms he thought they deserved. In 1862 he was granted a two-year leave of absence from the college to travel and study in Europe. This was partly, no doubt, to assuage the restlessness of a teacher whom the college admired and wanted to keep.

Yet already the Civil War was a year old. At the outset it had been perceived as the business of soldiers, no concern of such as Joshua Chamberlain. Now, however, every citizen was conscious of both sides’ desperate need for men. The Bowdoin professor was hostile to slavery, and wholly unsympathetic to secession. In August 1862 he travelled to the state capital, Augusta, to meet the governor and discuss whether his services might be of value to the Union cause. Maine was raising thirteen regiments, and the governor was at his wits’ end how to officer them. At once he offered Chamberlain a colonelcy and a command. The professor declined. Without military experience, he said, he was quite unfit to lead a thousand men. He would, however, consider a lieutenant-colonelcy, in which role he might learn to be a soldier.

On that note he returned to Bowdoin, to face a chorus of recrimination. Colleagues urged his unfitness for military life, the faculty’s need of him, and no doubt also the threatened waste of a clever man’s life, doing a job best left to coarser material. A Bowdoin teacher told the governor that Chamberlain was ‘no fighter, but only a mild-mannered common student’. Brunswick’s town doctor, however, wrote in contradiction, testifying that Chamberlain was a man of ‘energy and sense, as capable of commanding a Reg’t as any man out of…West Point’. The latter view prevailed. When the 20th Maine sailed from Portland for the theatre of war on 3 September, Lieutenant-Colonel Chamberlain was with them, along with a magnificent grey warhorse presented to him as a parting gift by the people of Brunswick. His father, who cared little for the Union cause, offered a somewhat qualified farewell blessing, muttering that his son was ‘in for good, so distinguish yourself and be out of it…Come home with honor, as I know you will if that lucky star will serve you in this war. We hope to be spared, as ‘tis not our war.’

The men of the 20th Maine were volunteers aged between eighteen and forty-five, enlisted for three years, and now commanded by Colonel Adelbert Ames, an ambitious twenty-six-year-old not long out of West Point, who had earned promotion by his courage during the Union defeat at First Bull Run, the earliest major battle of the war, where he won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Arrived at the encampment of his new command, instead of a sentry’s salute Ames received an outstretched hand and the greeting, ‘How d’ye do, Colonel.’ He took one horrified look at the shambling crowd of recruits for whom he had become responsible, and said: ‘This is a hell of a regiment.’ In one of his gloomier moments, he urged the Maine men that the biggest favour they could do the Union was to desert. They had no more notion of soldiering than Professor Chamberlain, and precious little time in which to acquire one.

They joined McClellan’s Army of the Potomac in September 1862, a few days before Antietam, the bloodiest single day’s fighting of the war, at which their own 5th Corps was fortunately left in reserve. From high ground they were shocked spectators of the slaughter. The battle ended in stalemate, but checked Lee’s advance. The 20th Maine could not even march in step. Its officers and men dedicated themselves to mastering the disciplines of war, none more energetically than Chamberlain. He had told the governor of Maine that his greatest advantage in becoming a soldier was that he knew how to learn. So it proved. He also possessed notable self-discipline. When his regiment came under fire for the first time on 20 September, retreating across the Potomac River at Shepherdstown, its lieutenant-colonel impressed all who saw him by the coolness with which he sat his horse in midstream, while Confederate bullets splashed into the water. One of these caused his mount to collapse under him, precipitating Chamberlain into the flood alongside his men. It might be argued that this performance reflected only a green officer’s innocence of peril, save that Chamberlain would behave in the same fashion under fire through twenty battles that followed.

For the next month, the regiment trained hard. Chamberlain wrote to Fannie: ‘I believe that no other New Regt. will ever have the discipline we have now. We all work!’ It was a revelation to this college professor, no longer in the first flush of youth, to discover that he loved the military life: ‘I have my cares and vexations, but let me say that no danger and no hardship ever makes me wish to get back to that college life again…My experience here and the habit of command…will break in upon the notion that certain persons are the natural authorities over me.’ By upbringing he was a country boy, for whom the wilderness held no terrors by day or night. He discovered a natural gift for leadership by example, stripping his jacket to wield a spade beside men digging trenches, sharing every hazard of battle. If his regiment slept on open ground, he shared it with them rather than commandeer a house. He possessed a natural authority, tempered by consideration for those he commanded, which earned more than respect. One of his soldiers wrote: ‘Lieutenant Colonel Chamberlain is almost idolised by the whole regiment…If I wanted any favors, I should apply to him at once, knowing that I should get them if it were in his power to confer them.’

Chamberlain himself wrote to Fannie: ‘Picture to yourself a stout-looking fellow – face covered with beard – with a pair of cavalry pants on – sky blue – big enough for Goliath, and coarse as a sheep’s back…enveloped in a huge cavalry overcoat…and…cap with an immense rent in it…A shawl and rubber talma strapped on behind the saddle…2 pistols in holsters. Sword about three feet long at side – a piece of blue beef and some hard bread in the saddlebags. This figure seated on a magnificent horse gives that particular point and quality of incongruity which constitutes the ludicrous.’

Chamberlain and his regiment suffered their first experience of heavy action on 13 December at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Under fire, and cut off from their own right wing by a fence they were ordered to tear down, most of the men hesitated to expose themselves. Their lieutenant-colonel sprang angrily forward and began to tear the palings apart, shouting to his soldiers: ‘Do you want me to do it?’ They rushed the fence. He wrote later: ‘An officer is so absorbed by the sense of responsibility for his men, his cause, or for the fight that the thought of personal peril has no place whatever in governing his actions. The instinct to seek safety is overcome by the instinct of honour.’ His regiment’s discipline on that battlefield, advancing as if in parade order, roused the admiration of all who witnessed it. That night, Chamberlain slept uneasily between two corpses, with his head on a third. In the days of fighting that followed the regiment was conspicuous for its steadiness in ghastly circumstances. One night, visiting pickets, Chamberlain strayed into the Confederate lines and was challenged. A vision of inglorious captivity flashed before him. Improvising brilliantly, he began inspecting the trenches Confederate soldiers were digging, offering a word of encouragement and caution here and there. In the darkness, his uniform was invisible. ‘Keep a right sharp lookout!’ he urged, then strode back to his own men.

After losing Fredericksburg, the Union army retired to winter quarters for six weeks. Its men were dismayed and indeed enraged by the incompetence of its generals. Chamberlain and the 20th Maine were unusually fortunate in their colonel, Ames, an officer of energy and intelligence. They could not have learned from an abler tutor. Ames sacked some officers whom he considered incorrigible, and formed a close relationship with Chamberlain, with whom he shared a tent. An outbreak of smallpox caused the regiment to be employed on rear area guard duties, in quarantine, through the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville, during which ‘Stonewall’ Jackson was mortally wounded, though Chamberlain contrived to have another horse shot under him on 4 May as he watched the army’s advance. Two weeks later, Ames was promoted to command a brigade. On his strong recommendation and that of his divisional general, the 20th Maine’s fighting professor took over the regiment.

It was a strange business, that such a man as Chamberlain should discover himself to be one of the rare breed who enjoys war, even while recoiling from its barbarity. He chose to perceive much of what befell him in Homeric terms, as an epic in which he thrilled to play a role. He was growing to realise that he might excel as a warrior. Such men are initially surprised to discover that they possess greater powers to endure than others, that their susceptibility to fear is overcome by strength of will and the need to exercise responsibility. Chamberlain always took pains to brief his men, possessing the rare skill of ensuring that those charged with a duty understood it. He knew that he possessed the bearing of a soldier, and was proud of this. The clean-shaven academic now boasted a great shaggy moustache. He possessed no false modesty about the gifts he had discovered in himself. More than anything, he was lucky – though heaven knows, not invulnerable: his head had already been grazed by a minie ball, and much worse would come later. Yet while a host of other officers of comparable courage and ability found their graves in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Chamberlain survived. This was due to no special skill of his, but rather to the fluke which throughout history has dictated which men survive to become legends and which are cut short, to form a legion of forgotten warriors.

Just six weeks after assuming command, on 1 July 1863, Chamberlain was hastening his men up a Pennsylvania road, amid applauding, cheering, and even singing Union sympathisers, towards a small town where the vanguard of the Northern army was already heavily engaged with Lee. It was a cloudless summer’s afternoon. The dusty men of the 5th Corps covered twenty-six miles – not nearly as far as 2nd Corps hiked that day, but enough. At last they halted to bivouac, and set about finding those indispensables for marching soldiers, water and fence rails for firewood. A galloper burst among them from the front. There was to be no bivouac: 5th Corps must keep marching. The army faced crisis. After the previous day’s heavy action, only the fall of darkness had prevented a Confederate triumph. Union forces had been obliged to fall back to new positions south of Gettysburg. It was plain that the action would be renewed at daybreak, and that a ridge between two eminences known as Culp’s Hill and Round Top must be held against Lee’s assault. As 5th Corps trudged on under moonlight, a rumour spread through the ranks that the ghost of George Washington had been seen riding across the battlefield on a white horse. Chamberlain wrote later: ‘Let no one smile at me! I half believed it myself.’

An hour after midnight, the regiment halted to rest for three hours, then set forth again without breaking its fast. Arrived early in the morning at the edge of the battlefield, at last they halted. A statement was read to them from General George Meade, now commanding the army, about the gravity of their task. Sporadic fire was already audible, yet for reasons that have baffled posterity, Lee was slow to launch his great assault. For some hours 5th Corps lingered in the rear, before at last it was committed to join the five-mile front along Cemetery Ridge, where the Army of the Potomac was to stand. Its commanders were granted vastly greater licence than they might have expected to deploy their eighty-eight thousand men, regiments still hastening forward piecemeal. Only late in the afternoon did Meade’s chief engineer Gouverneur Warren perceive to his horror that the key elevations of Round Top and Little Round Top, on the left flank of the line, were undefended and indeed unoccupied, save for a signal corps outpost stationed on the latter. He rushed 5th Corps forward from reserve, even as Long-street’s corps was making its laborious eight-mile detour in order to reach the start line for the Confederate assault unobserved by the Union army. The 15th Alabama Regiment, commanded by Colonel William C. Oates, together with elements of the 47th Alabama, was able to advance up Round Top, scattering the few Union skirmishers in the area, and occupy that hill without resistance.

Disaster threatened the Union. The way seemed open for Lee’s army to turn Meade’s flank and roll up his line. Oates called for Confederate cannon to be hustled up Round Top to sweep the blue-uniformed Union divisions. He himself proposed holding the dominant summit rather than pressing onwards, but his brigadier insisted on renewing the advance. After giving his men ten minutes’ rest following their exertions on the climb, Oates began to align them once more to assault Little Round Top, immediately to the north. He afterwards asserted that his decision to give his men a brief respite cost the Confederacy victory at Gettysburg. He may have been right.

At the last moment, Union commanders perceived the mass of Lee’s men closing on their left flank, preparing to seize Little Round Top. They recognised that if the few hundred yards’ frontage of this steep, wooded rock outcrop were lost, so was the battle. Colonel Strong Vincent, twenty-six-year-old commander of the 3rd Brigade which included 20th Maine, doubled his men towards the crest, shells already falling upon them. Chamberlain’s was the last of Vincent’s four regiments to fall into line at the southern extremity, with his brigadier’s order ‘You are to hold this ground at all costs.’ Another officer, Colonel James Rice, observed sonorously: ‘Colonel, we are making world history today.’ Chamberlain detached one company to cover his left flank from a distance, down the valley east of Round Top. This left him with 358 men to hold the summit. For a brief moment, three Chamberlain brothers were together on the field, for in addition to Tom, who was serving as Joshua’s adjutant, John had appeared as a civilian spectator. Then a shell exploded close by, and the colonel bade the little family group disperse: ‘Another such shot might make it hard for Mother.’

Below him, Chamberlain beheld chaos, with Confederate troops crowding the Devil’s Den and Plum Run gorge. Longstreet’s sharpshooters had a good view of the summit of Little Round Top, and brought a galling fire to bear on its defenders, which cost a stream of casualties. There could be no more convincing proof of the increased effectiveness of rifled weapons during the half-century since the campaigns Marcellin Marbot and Harry Smith knew. The whole of Vincent’s brigade was soon exchanging fire with dense masses of advancing Confederates. Both sides were equally weary with long marching. The Union’s only advantage was that the Confederate artillerymen were obliged to cease fire as their own infantry closed on the objective.

Chamberlain had been a soldier barely nine months, yet his grasp of tactics was already remarkable. Seeing that his rear was critically exposed, under fire he ordered his officers to shuffle the regiment’s entire line leftwards, curling back among the boulders along the south-east face of the hill. He thus doubled 20th Maine’s front, at the cost of thinning its ranks. His new disposition formed an arrowhead with the regiment’s colours on a rock at the tip. The companies just had time to complete their difficult manoeuvre before a storm of shouting and musketry signalled the assault of five Confederate regiments. There were now two Union brigades on Little Round Top, under heavy attack and losing leaders fast – a brigadier and a colonel fell dead within minutes, and more officers soon followed.

Oates’s 15th Alabama had supposed the rear of the Union position to be undefended. As they sprang forward the last yards to the summit, they were shocked to meet a frenzy of fire from the left wing of Chamberlain’s positions. ‘Again and again was this mad rush repeated,’ wrote one of the Maine officers, ‘each time to be beaten off by the ever-thinning line that desperately clung to its ledge of rocks.’ Chamberlain said: ‘At times I saw around me more of the enemy than of my own men; gaps opening, swallowing, closing again with sharp, convulsive energy…All around, strain, mingled roars – shouts of defiance, rally and desperation.’ The Maine men were pushed back in places, yet somehow summoned the energy to recover their ground. Soldiers were tearing open cartridges with their teeth, ramming and firing like madmen. Some wrestled hand to hand with attackers. Chamberlain had thrown into the line every man he possessed, including the sick, cooks, bandsmen and even two former mutineers from 2nd Maine who had been held as prisoners. He sent the adjutant, his brother Tom, to reinforce the depleted colour guard.

The Confederates, exhausted after twenty-five miles of marching followed by this terrible encounter, fell back to regroup. Chamberlain walked among his men, supervising the gathering of dead and wounded, closing ranks and offering the reassurance of his calm presence. A shell fragment had gashed his right foot, while his left leg was bruised where a ball had smashed his scabbard against it. As the grey ranks of the 15th Alabama stumbled uphill once more through the trees, the colonel almost despaired of holding his ground. He begged for reinforcements, but succeeded only in persuading his neighbours of the 83rd Pennsylvania to take over a portion of 20th Maine’s right flank frontage.

A new crisis came as men began to cry ‘Ammunition!’ They had started the action with sixty rounds apiece. Almost all were gone, even after emptying the cartridge boxes of the dead and wounded.

Seeing some of his soldiers preparing to resist the Alabama’s charge with clubbed muskets, Chamberlain made the greatest tactical decision of his life. Calling ‘Bayonet! Forward!’ he ordered Captain Ellis Spear to lead the entire left wing of the regiment in a sweeping, wheeling charge downhill. The right wing held its ground until the regiment was aligned, then sprang forth also. The astounded Confederates checked, recoiled, then broke. One of the Alabaman officers fired his Colt at Chamberlain’s face before surrendering when he found the colonel’s sword at his throat. Many of the erstwhile attackers threw down their weapons and raised their hands. A Confederate attempt to make a stand before a field wall collapsed when from behind the stonework emerged Chamberlain’s detached B Company, firing on their rear. “We ran like a herd of wild cattle,’ a crestfallen Colonel Oates acknowledged. Two Confederate colonels, one badly wounded, surrendered. Chamberlain described how his regiment, ‘swinging like a great gate on its hinges’ down the lower slopes of Little Round Top, ‘swept the front clean of assailants’. Crossing the Union line at the base of the hill, the men of 20th Maine were eager to press on, but Chamberlain checked them beneath the frontage of the 44th New York. After two hours in action he had only some two hundred men left, and he could see the Texas and Alabama survivors rallying. It is a remarkable tribute to his powers of command that he was able to muster his soldiers and redeploy them on the summit of Little Round Top. Having commenced the action 358 strong, they had lost forty killed and ninety wounded. In addition to the casualties inflicted on Lee’s men, they had taken four hundred prisoners.

Both friend and foe paid handsome tribute to Chamberlain’s achievement, which each perceived as the decisive action of Gettysburg. Colonel Oates of the 15th Alabama said: ‘There never were harder fighters than the 20th Maine men and their gallant colonel. His skill and persistency and the great bravery of his men saved Little Round Top and the Army of the Potomac from defeat.’

And the day was not yet done. Early in the long summer evening, Chamberlain and his new brigade commander – Strong Vincent had been mortally wounded – discussed the chances of regaining Big Round Top while the Confederates were reeling. They were fearful that the enemy might yet regain the advantage by deploying artillery on its height. A newly-arrived brigade of Pennsylvania reservists was invited to undertake the recapture of the hill. Its commander declined, and Chamberlain was given the job. Contemplating his exhausted band of survivors, he recalled, ‘I had not the heart to order the poor fellows up.’ Instead, he said simply: ‘I am going, the colors will follow me. As many of my men as feel able to do so can follow us.’ Drawing his sword, he set off, and of course the 20th Maine went after him.

Still lacking ammunition, they deployed in a single line, bayonets forward. Around 9 p.m., in deepening darkness, they scrambled wearily, silently uphill through the trees, fearful of premature detection. As they approached the crest, however, they met only desultory fire. The Confederates fled. With a handful of casualties, the 20th Maine secured the position and called for ammunition. The Pennsylvania reserve brigade was now sent up to provide support. Yet when its regiments encountered Confederate fire, they turned and fled. Further reinforcements eventually arrived during the night. At noon next day, Chamberlain’s little force was relieved and sent into reserve. As the Maine men marched back, the brigade commander seized their leader’s hand: ‘Colonel Chamberlain,’ he said, ‘your gallantry was magnificent, and your coolness and skill saved us.’ On 3 July, while the regiment endured some heavy shellfire, it was not engaged. Meade’s victory rendered almost a third of both sides’ combatants casualties, but Confederate losses were proportionately higher – twenty-eight thousand dead, wounded and missing, to the Union’s twenty-three thousand. Lee’s daring invasion of the North had failed, and could never be renewed.

Soldiers, like the rest of us, are sometimes ungenerous about the achievements of their peers. Yet from highest to lowest, the Union’s men applauded the achievement of Chamberlain and the 20th Maine, which made up a fraction of 1 per cent of Meade’s army. Ames, the regiment’s old commander, swelled with proprietary pride, and wrote to Chamberlain to say so. What Chamberlain had done reflected not merely courage, but imagination, leadership and tactical gifts of the highest order. A professional soldier, steeped in the craft of war, might have been proud to display such speed of thought on a battlefield. Instead, this was the achievement of a rank amateur, a man who had known nothing of soldiering a year before, indeed had intended himself for a cultural pilgrimage among the cathedrals and monuments of Europe. For his deeds at Little Round Top, Chamberlain was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. ‘We are fighting gloriously,’ he wrote to Fannie. ‘Our loss is terrible, but we are beating the Rebels as they were never beaten before. The 20th has immortalised itself.’ On 4 July he led his regiment back to the battlefield to bury their dead, each man’s place signified by a marker formed from an ammunition box. He also visited the wounded, some of whom he was distressed to find suffering in the open, beneath rain now falling heavily. Then Meade led his divisions away, on a deplorably leisurely pursuit of Lee’s beaten army.

For some soldiers, that July day in Pennsylvania would have represented the summit of military achievement, a supreme exertion never to be repeated. Several of the men portrayed in this book achieved their reputations in a single brush with glory. Even if Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had never again done anything of note as a soldier, he would be remembered for Little Round Top. Yet this proved only the first notable experience of an extraordinary Civil War career.

In August he succumbed to malaria, which caused him to be sent home for a fortnight’s sick leave and a rousing reception from his hometown of Brunswick. He returned to the army to find himself assigned to command of a brigade, the 3rd, to which 20th Maine belonged, though his formal elevation to brigadier-general’s rank was delayed for a time. One of his own soldiers wrote proudly: ‘Colonel Chamberlain had, by his uniform kindness and courtesy, his skill and brilliant courage, endeared himself to all his men.’ In Chamberlain’s first action with his new command, at Rappahannock Station in Virginia, though he played no significant role his horse was again shot under him. In November, sleeping with his men in the snows, he succumbed again to malaria, which turned to pneumonia. For a time, as he lay in a Washington hospital, his survival was despaired of. He never forgot the army nurse who tended him to recovery: years later when she was widowed he helped her to secure a pension. By January 1864 he was well enough to perform light administrative duties, and in April he conducted Fannie around the Gettysburg battlefield. In mid-May, after relentless pleading with a medical board, he rejoined the army in Virginia. His sickness may have saved his life, for it caused him to miss the bloody actions at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House.

Through late May and June, sometimes commanding his brigade and sometimes relegated – perfectly contentedly – to leading the 20th Maine, Chamberlain fought through battles at Pole Cat Creek and Bethesda Church, together with some lesser skirmishes. His regiment now ranked as veterans. When withdrawing on 3 June, his brigadier asked earnestly if he could fight the 20th Maine by the rear rank, a difficult and delicate manoeuvre that required the unit to reverse its front. Chamberlain answered insouciantly that he could do it any way that was wanted. A few days later he was posted to command 1st Brigade of General Charles Griffin’s division, which comprised six Pennsylvania regiments. Griffin soon remarked admiringly that the spectacle of Chamberlain dashing from flank to flank in action, leading his men forward from the front, was ‘a magnificent sight’. In the battles of the nineteenth century, a man on a horse was always a prominent target. The horse was essential not, as is sometimes supposed, as a privileged mode of transport, but rather as an officer’s only means of swift movement in an age when command and communication depended entirely upon personal contact.

Early on 18 June at Petersburg, Virginia, Chamberlain led a dashing attack to seize one of the strongest Confederate positions, ‘Fort Hell’, which he then hastened to emplace for artillery. Yet even as he did so – with yet another horse shot under him – a galloper brought orders from Griffin to attack the main Confederate positions three hundred yards further forward, which had been fortified through months of labour. Chamberlain was too intelligent a man to execute any order blindly, or out of fear of being thought timid. He despatched a vigorous written protest: ‘I have just carried an advanced position…I am advanced a mile beyond our own lines, and in an isolated position. On my right is a deep railroad cut; my left flank is in the air…Fully aware of the responsibility I take, I beg to be assured that the order to attack with my single Brigade is with the General’s full understanding…From what I can see of the enemy’s lines, it is my opinion that if an assault is to be made, it should be by nothing less than the whole army.’

Chamberlain’s moral courage availed nothing. Ordered to proceed with the attack, ‘It was a case where I felt it my duty to lead the charge in person, and on foot.’ A sergeant offered Chamberlain a drink of water from his canteen. He answered: ‘Keep it, thank you. I would not take a drink from an enlisted man going into battle. You may need it. My officers can get me a drink.’ If his words reflected a soldier self-consciously acting a hero’s part, no one did it better. As the brigade swept forward, the colour bearer was shot at his side. Chamberlain himself seized the flag. Suddenly he found himself floundering in marshy ground at the foot of a slope below the Confederate position. He turned to urge his men to angle leftward, and was hit in his right hip joint by a minie ball, which passed through his body and the other hip. He asserted later that his first thought was: ‘What will my mother say, her boy, shot in the back?’ Desperate not to be seen to fall, he stuck his sabre into the ground and leaned upon it. His men rushed past him before being halted by devastating fire a few yards short of the enemy’s earthwork. Chamberlain himself collapsed, bleeding profusely. Two of his aides carried him back some distance amid a throng of retiring Union soldiers before he ordered them to leave him and carry orders to his senior colonel to assume command. He also sought infantry support for the gunners, now threatened by a Confederate counter-attack.

An artillery officer surveying the corpse-strew n ground through binoculars spotted Chamberlain’s prostrate figure and identified his rank by his shoulder straps. A stretcher party was sent to bring him in. At first the colonel remonstrated with the bearers, urging them to turn to others in worse case. But even as they hesitated a shell exploded nearby, showering them with stones. Without further ado they seized the wounded man and took him to the rear. Neither Chamberlain nor anyone else expected him to live. He said his farewells. After the surgeons had laboured for some hours – as well as his hip wounds, the internal damage was severe – they desisted for a time, fearing that they were causing a doomed man needless agony.

Chamberlain surprised them, however, by keeping breathing. They renewed their efforts. He survived the surgeons’ agonising intrusions, and after a few days was evacuated to the navy hospital at Annapolis, where he was exhibited as a miracle of contemporary medical science – and of human willpower. Ulysses S. Grant, by now commanding the Union army, was so moved by the story of Chamberlain’s conduct and wounding – ‘gallantly leading his brigade at the time, as he had been in the habit of doing in all the engagements in which he had previously been engaged’, as Grant wrote – that he made his only field promotion of the war, formally recognising Chamberlain as a brigadier-general. The man himself, in a hospital bed, enjoyed the rare pleasure of reading his own obituary notices, which had been published in the New York papers.