BY NOON ON MAY 2, 1863, GENERAL THOMAS J. "STONEWALL" JACKSON HAD BEEN leading a long column of gray-clad troops through the woods for four hours. Nearly 30,000 men followed the legendary general on his secret route through the Wilderness of Spotsylvania County. The march to battle eventually would cover a dozen miles. Halfway to their goal, weary, dusty Confederates found a delightful treat in their path: drinkable water. The Wilderness abounds with wet spots. The murky, fetid, stagnant water in the marshy bottoms, however, is just about as far from potable as any liquid found in nature. Copperhead snakes seem to appreciate it; scrawny, unwholesome vegetables grow in it; humans must not drink it, and few are tempted.
Poplar Run, however, bisected Jackson's route with some downhill momentum. Cars following the flank march still splash through a rocky ford today. The U. S. Army, improving the road in the 1930s to accommodate tourists' automobiles, resisted the urge to throw a bridge across a stream that remains almost always fordable.
The sturdy infantry, whose rapid marches had earned them the nom de guerre "Jackson's Foot Cavalry," had fallen into poor condition during the winter. Desuetude had robbed their limbs of endurance. Wretched rations had brought on scurvy and other symptoms of vitamin deprivation. Men who had been able to cover twice the expected distance in 1862 struggled to keep up on May 2, 1863. Officers noticed veterans collapsing by the roadside; some even reported deaths from exertion. Drinkable water must have looked to the marchers as delicious as a Saharan oasis to a lost American soldier in North Africa in 1942. Uncoiling a mass of nearly 30,000 men onto narrow woods paths created a fantastic logistical tangle. When the march started, Jackson's corps had been clustered in camps that covered a compact zone. Near the end of the day, when the general finally had his attack ready to launch, that mighty array again would be deployed into a tight formation. All day long, however, all of those men and cannon had been in an alignment anything but compact. Jackson's entire corps for many hours had been four-men wide and many miles long, forming a great gray serpent winding through the thickets.
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