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.
It was 19 November before he resumed command of 1st Brigade. Still unable to walk far or to ride a horse, he remained determined to take the field. He found the army weary and depleted by losses, his own brigade reduced to just two regiments. A few weeks later he once again succumbed to the pain of his wound, and was despatched to hospital in Philadelphia. His friends implored him to acknowledge the inevitable, and retire from military service. Instead, after a month’s sick leave he returned to duty, just in time to participate in the closing actions of the war.
These battles set the seal upon Chamberlain’s reputation. On 29 March 1865 he once again found himself in action under heavy fire, as his brigade crossed the Gravelly Run stream to attack the Confederate right flank. He was riding his beloved little chestnut Charlemagne, purchased out of government hands for $150, among stock captured from the Confederates. Chamberlain was leading a charging column when his horse reared, a bullet struck the beast in the neck, passed on through Chamberlain’s leather orders case, hit a brass-mounted mirror just below his heart, and glanced off to graze two ribs and exit through his coat. It then smashed the pistol of one of his aides with such force that the man was knocked from his saddle.
Shocked, bleeding and winded, Chamberlain collapsed onto his horse’s neck. The divisional commander, Griffin, believing him mortally hit, hastened to his side and said as he put a supporting arm round the reeling man’s waist, ‘My dear general, you are gone.’ But by an extraordinary effort of will, Chamberlain collected himself and responded: ‘Yes, General, I am gone,’ and spurred away. Capless, liberally smeared in his horse’s blood, he looked to all who saw him a man destined for death. Yet his appearance among his own soldiers, who had broken off their assault and were falling back, sufficed to rally them, and they stormed forward once more.
Chamberlain’s horse Charlemagne collapsed from loss of blood, and the general caused the poor beast to be led to the rear. He himself was still shocked – ‘I hardly knew what world I was in’ – but plunged forward into the mêlée. He became isolated from his own troops, surrounded by Confederate soldiers who presented their weapons and demanded his surrender. For a second time in his war, he exploited his dishevelled condition to play a brilliant bluff: ‘Surrender?’ he cried. ‘What’s the matter with you? Come along with me and let us break ’em.’ Flourishing his sword towards the Union line, he hastened the bewildered Confederates forward until they themselves were taken as prisoners.
There was now a lull in the action. A small crowd of spectators gathered around the exhausted Chamberlain, marvelling at this miraculous survivor as they might have gazed upon a Martian. One of 20th Maine’s officers proffered a flask. The general, a teetotaller in early life, drank very deeply indeed. Somebody found him another horse. He hastened away, still covered in mud and blood, to a sector where one of his regiments was pressed. It was plain that this force – the 185th New York – must counter-attack. ‘Once more!’ he shouted. ‘Try the steel! Hell for ten minutes and we are out of it!’ Then he led them forward to a hillock where he was bent upon mounting guns, and held the ground until the cannon arrived. He was stirred by the splendour and terror of the scene – ‘the swift-served bellowing, leaping big guns; the thrashing of the solid shot into the trees; the flying splinters and branches and tree-tops coming down upon the astonished heads’.
As Chamberlain sat his horse, swaying with fatigue, Griffin arrived and cried out: ‘General, you must not leave us. We cannot spare you now.’ Chamberlain responded dryly: ‘I had no thought of it, General.’ Then he led his men, now strongly reinforced, to charge the wood harbouring the enemy. The Confederates were thrown back in disarray down the Quaker Road. His own brigade of some 1,700 men including gunners had suffered four hundred casualties fighting a Confederate force six thousand strong. Visiting the wounded that night, he came upon old General Sickel, badly hit during the day. Sickel welcomed his tenderness, but thought Chamberlain looked more in need of comfort and succour than himself. He whispered wryly: ‘General, you have the soul of a lion and the heart of a woman.’ Chamberlain could scarcely walk from the pain of his wounds old and new, but before he lay down to rest he visited the wounded Charlemagne in a farm building, then sat down by the light of a guttering candle to write a letter to the mother of one of his officers killed that day, to describe the heroic manner of his passing.
Two days later, on 31 March, Chamberlain was resting, very conscious of the pain of his wounds, when a new crisis broke. Lee had attacked 5th Corps in overwhelming force, driving back many of its regiments in headlong flight. A rabble of disorganised men was pouring through the Union positions. The corps commander, Gouverneur Warren, turned in despair to Chamberlain, the finest battlefield leader of men whom he commanded: ‘General,’ he said, ‘will you save the honour of the 5th Corps? That’s all there is about it.’ Chamberlain replied: ‘I’ll try it, General. Only don’t let anybody stop me except the enemy.’ His arm was still in a sling. Every movement cost him pain from his bruises. Yet he led his men forward across Gravelly Run, scorning to linger for bridging, the infantry carrying cartridge boxes above their heads on bayonets. After Chamberlain’s force had swept the far bank, Warren urged a delay to consolidate before trying the strength of the next line of Confederate entrenchments. Chamberlain demurred – speed and momentum were all, he said. He got his way. Instructing his regiments to advance in open order rather than close ranks, and once more mounted on Charlemagne, he cantered forward as the bugle sounded. His force carried the Confederate breastworks and drove the enemy back three hundred yards across the White Oak Road. Although Chamberlain’s deeds that day formed a minor part of the Army of the Potomac’s battle, they provided a further example of remarkable personal leadership. And before it was all over, there was one more action yet to come.
On the morning of 1 April, a day of Union confusion which cost Gouverneur Warren his command while bringing disaster to the Confederate army, Chamberlain at the van of 5th Corps met General Sheridan, under whose command the corps had been placed. ‘By God, that’s what I want to see!’ exclaimed the irascible cavalry commander. ‘General
