Terrible Swift Sword by Joseph Wheelan Page A

foliage and smoke, even signaling was problematic. Chickamauga has been justifiably described as “a hidden battle,” directed not by army commanders but by field commanders. It became essentially a battle of brigades and regiments—a soldier’s fight, waged with rare ferocity.
    While Rosecrans and his commanders braced for powerful follow-up attacks on the Union left, Bragg’s army instead began probing the Union line from its left to its right, seeking weak spots to exploit. The artillery sounded like “the thunder, as of a thousand anvils,” wrote Colonel John Beatty. Bragg’s forces found no chinks in Thomas’s lines where, by midday, roughly 40,000 of Rosecrans’s 58,000 troops were concentrated, leaving the Union center and right thinly manned.
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    OPPOSITE THE POINT AT which Crittenden’s and McCook’s corps were joined, and near Sheridan’s division, Hood and his commander, Lieutenant General James Longstreet, massed the five divisions of the Army of Northern Virginia’s I Corps. The Rebels faced, at most, three scattered Union divisions. Longstreet’s men waited for the right moment to strike.
    With growing concern, Sheridan watched the steady migration of McCook’s and Crittenden’s brigades to Thomas’s left wing. He recognized that “we were in bad straits” and that Thomas had to be reinforced. But Sheridan questioned the wisdom of shifting troops in the face of a numerically superior enemy. 5
    McCook had just ordered two of Sheridan’s three brigades—those commanded by Brigadier General William H. Lytle and the wounded Colonel Bradley’s successor, Colonel Nathan Walworth—to join Thomas when Longstreet attacked, his divisions arrayed in a single column to deliver a “clenched-fist blow.” 6
    McCook called it “a most furious and impetuous assault in overwhelming numbers.” The 16,000 Rebels crashed through a large gap that suddenly yawned in the Union right-center where Brigadier General Thomas Wood had just withdrawn his division to send to Thomas.
    With pitch-perfect timing, Longstreet’s five attacking divisions struck before the hole left by Wood’s division could be filled and just as other units, including Sheridan’s two brigades, were shifting to the left. Just thirty minutes earlier or later, and the Rebels might have met better-organized defenders.

    Assistant War Secretary Charles Dana, a former journalist assigned to observe Rosecrans’s army—some said to spy for War Secretary Edwin Stanton, who despised Rosecrans—had fallen asleep on the grass at Rosecrans’s headquarters at the Widow Glenn’s cabin behind Wood’s division when “the most infernal noise I ever heard” awakened him. Upon sitting up, he observed Rosecrans making the sign of the cross. This alarmed Dana, although Rosecrans, described as “a Jesuit of the highest style of Roman piety,” was merely exhibiting his devout Catholicism. Dana, however, concluded, “If the general is crossing himself, we are in a desperate situation.”
    He then saw for himself that they were indeed in deep trouble. A dense column of gray-clad troops, their bayonets glittering in the hazy sunlight, was quick-stepping toward them. The Rebel column stretched far to the southwest. Wood’s division was nowhere to be seen.
    Rosecrans and his staff hastily evacuated the cabin when musket balls and shells began to rain down. They rode to higher ground along the eastern flank of Missionary Ridge and halted. There, Rosecrans, who must have felt like he was reliving the first hours of Stones River, watched his right wing break apart. He sent for Sheridan, but Sheridan could not come; “affairs were too critical” for him to leave his command. 7
    Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis’s division and, behind it, Sheridan’s third brigade, commanded by Colonel Bernard Laiboldt,