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
