Generals Over Their Heads

Generals Over Their Heads

THIS TERRIBLE SOUND The Battle of Chickamauga. By Peter Cozzens. Illustrated. 675 pp. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. $39.95.

FOR nearly seven months after the bloody battle of Stones River in Tennessee in 1863, two vast forces, the Union Army of the Cumberland and the Confederate Army of Tennessee, hunkered down in the middle of Tennessee, their commanders resisting any urgings from Washington or Richmond to make a hostile move. Finally, during the Tullahoma campaign in the last rainy week of June, the Union commander, Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, ridden with misgivings, ordered his troops into action and over succeeding days repeatedly and resourcefully outmaneuvered Confederate troops under Gen. Braxton Bragg, until the Army of Tennessee retreated across the Cumberland Plateau to Chattanooga.

Tullahoma was a significant victory for the Union, but a greater contest awaited at Chattanooga, an important railway hub known as the Gateway City. Whoever commanded it would control access to middle Tennessee and Kentucky, to east Tennessee and all its rich coal deposits, and even to the Deep South states of Georgia and Alabama. It was there, and in the rough country just across the Tennessee River in northwest Georgia, along Chickamauga Creek, that one of the costliest battles of the Civil War was fought, on Sept. 19 and 20, 1863. It was also at Chickamauga that the deep and disastrous flaws of both commanders destroyed all consideration of their gifts.

Indeed, the personalities of Generals Rosecrans and Bragg have long invited analysis at the hands of someone as deft as Peter Cozzens. The two generals and their commands clearly fascinate Mr. Cozzens, a Foreign Service officer with the State Department and the author of "No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River," about an earlier bloody clash between these generals.

Both the Ohioan Rosecrans and the North Carolinian Bragg were West Point graduates. As an organizer of volunteer troops, Rosecrans acquitted himself well -- but for political reasons he was promoted above his abilities by President Abraham Lincoln shortly before the Battle of Stones River. Bragg, also, rose too high in the Confederate command -- thanks to his friendship with President Jefferson Davis. The Confederate leader was willing to overlook nearly everyone else's low opinion of Bragg, who was sickly, petty, quarrelsome and unstable both militarily and mentally.

After their previous engagements at Stones River and Tullahoma, these two officers would have one last chance at each other at Chickamauga -- before both of their careers would begin to self-destruct. As biographical subjects such men are wonderful fodder; to the author's credit, he examines them unsparingly yet empathically, allowing the reader to experience Chickamauga from their intriguing points of view: Bragg, irresolute and perpetually hunting for scapegoats; and Rosecrans, overly cautious but personally ambitious, ever needful of praise and recognition.

Skillful maneuvering by Rosecrans drew Bragg out of Chattanooga. Convinced that the Army of Tennessee was in full retreat, Rosecrans sent three of his four corps into Georgia in pursuit. But in fact Bragg was stalking the Union forces, having received considerable reinforcements. Rosecrans, eventually realizing that his corps were scattered across a dangerously wide front, began concentrating his forces along the west side of Chickamauga Creek. Mr. Cozzens expertly renders the furious ebb and flow of the two-day battle, capturing both the evolving strategies of each side and the horrendous experience of the fight.

But the greater gift of this narrative lies in Mr. Cozzens's presentation of a multiplicity of points of view -- not only those of Rosecrans and Bragg but also those of their fretful junior officers and their earnest, unsuspecting troops. "This Terrible Sound" is built upon a bonanza of primary research, with the author having combed hundreds of diaries, letters, memoirs, interviews, official reports and regimental histories. The individual voices and the rich experiences they represent are unforgettably presented here.

"A MOUNTAIN is like the wall of a house full of ratholes," complains the anxious Braxton Bragg as he looks across the Tennessee River toward the Cumberland range and the Federal threat. "Who can tell what lies hidden behind that wall?" We become privy as well to the misgivings of Rosecrans and the many animosities of his contentious staff.

We also hear from those plunged into the middle of the battle, like Pvt. Sam Watkins of a Tennessee unit, charging the Union line and finding a "perfect hornet's nest. The balls whistled around our ears like the escape valves of ten thousand engines." And there is Alva Griest from Indiana, who listens as, with nightfall on Sept. 19, battle noises give way to something worse: "The groans from thousands of wounded in our front crying in anguish and pain, some for death to relieve them, others for water," he recorded. "Oh, if I could only drown this terrible sound, and yet I may also lie thus ere tomorrow's sun crosses the heavens."

No victor had emerged on the first day, but on the morning of Sept. 20, as the outnumbered Union troops continued to resist repeated assaults, General Rosecrans committed a blunder that would haunt him for the rest of his long life. Told that there was a gap in the Union lines, the distracted and now fuzzy-thinking Rosecrans failed to verify the report, which turned out to be false, and ordered a division to close the gap. Of course this created a real opening. And it was a tragic irony that the officer commanding the division, the capable Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Wood, had repeatedly been publicly browbeaten by Rosecrans for excessive independence. Wood was itching for revenge; though he saw the peril and seems to have known that his actions would cost them the battle, he "carefully placed the order in his pocket notebook" and complied. Lieut. Gen. James Longstreet's gray columns poured through the resulting breach, and all was chaos in the Union forces. Rosecrans's army suffered some 16,000 casualties, including more than 1,600 dead. But Bragg, left holding the field, actually took greater losses, with more than 2,300 killed in battle and a total of some 18,000 casualties.

Having made clear and compelling narrative sense of this battle, Mr. Cozzens goes on to describe the resulting rout of the Union troops and their retreat to Chattanooga, and the baffling failure to pursue them on the part of General Bragg. That was his greatest blunder -- which redoubled efforts across the rebel leadership to send Bragg home, efforts resisted again by Jefferson Davis. It would not be until after Bragg's disastrous defeat at Missionary Ridge -- two months following Chickamauga -- that he would be removed from command, to the great relief of his own men. That Mr. Cozzens is now writing a book about the Chattanooga campaign and Missionary Ridge should be a cause for celebration for readers anxious to know "what happens next." Five hundred thirty-six pages on the two-day Battle of Chickamauga? Thanks to Mr. Cozzens's bracing, vivid prose style and marvelous eye for personal detail, this reader hankered for even more.

David Haward Bain is the author of "Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines." His book about the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is forthcoming in 1993.