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
