Irish Brigade, Fredericksburg, Virginia, December 1862
Lavelle looked towards the town.
Fredericksburg. A burning town … the Rappahannock river between them and it … glaced ice and mud everywhere … and the Confederate cannon lined up waiting for them. ‘Peace on earth, my arse,’ he said into the fog and the damp. ‘What a place to be, with Christmas only two weeks away.’
Earlier in the day, he with others had slaughtered hundreds of bullocks, enough for three days’ rations. Rounded them up in a field and shot them down like traitors. That’s all they seemed to be shooting these days – bullocks.
Lavelle thought they were in disarray. The previous month President Lincoln had sacked the Union Army’s commander, General George McClellan. ‘Little Mac’, as the men called him, due to his diminutive stature, had dillied and dallied after Antietam, always looking for more men, more resources, before he would pursue the Confederate Army, under Lee. To Lavelle’s mind, the superior sized Army of the Potomac had ‘let the Rebs think we’re afraid of them, given them courage.’
Now under this new commander, General Burnside, the advantage had again been lost. Lavelle, and all the men, knew that Fredericksburg could have been taken three weeks ago in November, but Burnside had delayed everything, wanting pontoon bridges built, when they could have waded the river, caught Lee before he was ready. Now Lee had been allowed valuable time to construct new defences, earthworks rising higher and higher on the heights overlooking the town. The boys of the Irish Brigade were worried, preferring ‘Fightin’ rather than friggin’ around in the mud’. Lavelle, too, felt some foreboding at Burnside’s new plan to attack the Confederate cannon frontally. He spoke to Father Corby, the Brigade’s chaplain.
‘Our generals are going to lead the men in front of those guns, which we have stood back and admired the Rebs placing unhindered before us these past three weeks.’
‘Do not trouble yourself,’ the priest told him. ‘Your generals know better than that.’
Now the Union generals had bombarded the town, raining down tons of iron on it like some dastardly manna; the flames rising high above the stricken streets, like the star of Christmas, leading the Northern enemies to capture it. The next day, 12 December, Lavelle along with the 1200 men of the Irish Brigade, marched into Fredericksburg. That night Lavelle hunted down a piece of board, upon which to sleep, the mud oozing up around its sides each time he restlessly turned.
The Saturday morning was misty, damp, bone-piercing cold. General Meagher addressed them, reminding them in his highly-charged manner that the eyes of America were upon them. The flags of the three New York regiments of the Brigade had been so tattered by gunshot, they had been sent homewards for repair. But so the enemy would know it was the Irish Brigade, General Meagher had had distributed to each man a sprig of green boxwood to be worn in their caps.
The new green flag of the 28th Massachussetts Infantry, with harp, sunburst and a garland of shamrocks was unfurled. ‘’Faugh a Ballagh’ the legend scrolled across it said – ‘Clear the Way … for the Irish!’ the men shouted. Lavelle and the 28th marched south through the town, towards the Rebel artillery on Marye’s Heights.
As they went Rebel shells peppered the sky about them. Lavelle saw many Negro women run with their children from the ruins of houses, in chaos and fear not knowing which way to go for safety. As he watched one barefooted and aged woman, carrying a basket and with three children clinging to her, passed close by him. He heard the hiss of the shell, shouted at her but was too late. She was cut literally in half. Two of the children were likewise killed by the missile. He broke rank, ran to where they lay, gathered up the surviving child and threw the both of them to the ground until the danger had passed.
As he arose, the child, a little girl of about six years, kicked and screamed against him. While he struggled with her, he was approached by a well-dressed, elderly man and woman. But it was not to render assistance they came. The man addressed him in an aggressive manner …
‘I am a minister of the gospel … and you Yankees have burned us out of house and home. Take me to your commanding officer. I demand that restitution is made … the people of the North must now give me the living they have deprived me of here. You must take us with you – and damn you all to Hell!’
Lavelle, well used as he was to camp life, was shocked at the level of profanity the minister continued to level at him and his indifference to the blood of the old negro and the two children at their feet. He thrust the young girl into the protesting parson’s arms and levelled his gun at him. ‘If I am damned to Hell, your reverence, you’ll be there before me!’ The man shrank back, his wife beginning to intervene. Lavelle pointed the rifle closer at the man’s head. ‘Now, fulfil your duty and take care of this child … and but for her you’d be dead by now.’ The woman bustled her husband and the child away from Lavelle … and he shouted after them, ‘I’ll be back when this thing is over.’
He had to run to rejoin his regiment.
The men of the Irish Brigade crossed a small canal, eventually coming to rest before a hill. Beyond the hill was the enemy.
Silence.
The waiting for the command.
‘Fix bayonets!’
Now silence was broken. The men shouted and cheered with the exhilaration of that order. It would be close and bloody Lavelle knew. Today he could not lie in the long grass awaiting his moment. He clinked his bayonet into place, the air ringing with steel on steel, the music of war. Lavelle felt his blood run cold at the sound. They were not first in but he watched as the bayonets in the hands of those before them glistened in the sun, advancing into battle like a huge serpent of blue and steel. Then they heard the terrible fusillade of the Confederate guns … and it never stopped.
A second wave of Union soldiers was sent forward, and the Irish Brigade moved up to fill their places. An equal fate met this second attack. Lavelle could feel the sweat rise on him, cold as the rifle he carried.
Then it was ‘Irish Brigade, advance!’ followed by ‘Forward double-quick!’ Then they were running, rushing up the hill, wildly cheering, as if chasing some hunted prey. When he saw before them the Sunken Road, the stone wall running alongside it, Lavelle knew the prey was them. Behind the stone wall waited a thousand rifles, it seemed. In front of the wall lay the Union dead, heaped upon heap upon heap.
It was madness.
They were as lame ducks, having to climb, stumble over their own dead, be picked off like flies. The impetus of the others carried Lavelle forward in some kind of murderous delirium, some releasing death-wish. Was this how it all would end? Now, charged with a wild terror and an equally unfettered bloodlust, he didn’t care … would take with him as many Rebs as he could. From somewhere behind the wall he heard an Irish voice. ‘Oh, Christ, what a pity – it’s the Irish … Meagher’s boys.’ Then Cobb’s Georgia Brigade, many of them immigrant Irish themselves, opened fire on their fellow countrymen.
Around him, Lavelle saw his comrades mowed down like grass before a reaper. But still he went forward, crouched as best he could, the bayonet useless before him, no enemy with which to engage. Men were blown off their feet by the sheer volume of fire. About him minié ball after minié ball whizzed.
Lavelle flung himself on his back between two corpses, using his blanket roll as a further shield. As he did he felt the bullets thud into the bodies. He lay there a moment, turned quickly, picked a target head and shoulders framed above the stone wall and fired. He saw the grey tunic slump away from the wall, only to be replaced by another. He lay low again, reloading on his back and repeated the manoeuvre. He saw that Rebel fall. ‘Get down!’ he shouted to those around him. ‘On your backs!’ It was their only chance – to seek the shelter of the corpses raised like barricades around them. Many followed his example, at last providing some sort of response to the Rebel fusillade. A response Lavelle grimly noted only afforded them by the dead bodies of their comrades.
The gaps now in those who followed them into the Sunken Road were so great but still the men of the Irish Brigade poured forward to fill them. Then, rising above the shells and the scream of battle, Lavelle heard a strange sound. He raised his head. The din of battle abated and before his eyes he saw Rebels standing up from their posts, cheering and applauding the fearlessness and bravery of their Irish foes.
It was a brief interlude, of some deep-down humanity, amidst the terrible slaughter. Soon however the carnage resumed and Lavelle, and those few who had survived with him, were trapped. They could neither move forwards nor backwards without attracting the attention of the enemy. Now out of ammunition, Lavelle was forced to raid the cartridges of those around him who had no further need of them.
He lay there then, practised in a sharpshooter’s stillness, ignoring the blood of comrades, which seeped from their bodies and coagulated on his.
When the fire eventually slackened about dusk, Lavelle crawled on his hands and stomach over his dead and dying comrades. His blanket roll, when he shook it out later, let fall fourteen Rebel bullets.
The following morning, Lavelle learned the full cost of the battle for Marye’s Heights. Of the 1200 men of the Irish Brigade who had gone into battle, more than 500 were killed, wounded or missing; those from Massachusetts, making up a third of that number. The Union army had suffered an unforgettable defeat at the hands of Robert E Lee’s Confederates. ‘That’s the end of the Brigade now,’ the Little Bishop said sorrowfully. Lavelle was glad to see the big man had survived.
‘Well if it is, Bishop, I won’t be sorry. The Union army doesn’t deserve us. It was a death trap we were sent to … bayonets against firing squads,’ he said in disgust.
‘And where was the man who sent us in – our gallant leader – I never saw him after the speeches and the damned boxwood sprig?’ Lavelle angrily tore at the green emblem, still miraculously attached to his kepi. He threw it from him, trampling it into the muddy ground.
General Meagher, they later learned, had mysteriously ‘retired’ from battle at an early stage.