The Battle of the Crater

The Battle of the Crater is another detailed battle of the American Cival War, now in its last bloody year, mentioned in Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox.

“Five forty-five: and at last it happened. To the men who were waiting in the front line it seemed to occur in slow motion: first a long, deep rumble, like summer thunder rolling along a faraway location, then, a swaying and swelling of the ground up ahead, with the solid earth rising to form a rounded hill, everything seeming very gradual and leisurely. Then the rounded hill broke apart, and a prodigious spout of flame and black smoke went up toward the sky, and the air was full of enormousness clods of earth as big as houses, of brass cannons and detached artillery wheels, of wrecked caissons and fluttering tents and weirdly tumbling human bodies; and there was a crash “like the noise of great thunders”, followed by other lesser explosions, and all of the firing line had turned into dust and smoke and flying debris, chocking and blinding men and threatening to engulf Burnside’s whole army corps.”

White Iron on the Anvil, A Still at Appomattox, Bruce Catton

One More River to Cross

“Right now the Confederates were dug in behind the headwaters of Totopotomoy Creek, an insignificant watercourse whose turns and swampy banks offered good defensive ground. The chance of breaking with line looked no better than in the Wilderness or at Spotsylvania. It was better to go around the line then try to go through it, and to go around it would be harder here than it had been before.”

“Down below the Federal left, within a mile or so of the Chickahominy, there was another of those seedy taverns that dotted the Virginia landscape-a quiet place at sleepy crossroads, the name of it Cold Harbor, perched unobtrusively on a highway that wandered up from the Federal supply base, back at White House on the Pamunkey, and went on to cross the Chickahominyan and go to Richmond.”

One More River to Cross, A Stillness at Appomattox, Bruce Cotton