Military
6
In 1864 the Wilderness was a patchwork of second-growth forest where brush, briars, and thickets obscured movement and disrupted battle lines, turning combat into what one soldier called "bushwhacking...on a grand scale." Men accustomed to fighting in open woods and fields faced smoke from thousands of rifles hanging motionless in the air, choking the combatants, while enemy lines emerged to fire a volley and vanished again into the haze. Many soldiers never saw their foes and fired only at muzzle flashes in the undergrowth. When dry leaves caught fire, wounded men burned to death. A Union officer felt that "Hell itself had usurped the place of earth," and Lieutenant Robert Robertson remembered woods lit by musket flashes like lightning, volleys roaring like thunderbolts, brave men falling like autumn leaves, and death holding high carnival in the ranks.
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Lake Wilderness, Virginia · United States
