Through late May and June, sometimes commanding his brigade and sometimes relegated – perfectly contentedly – to leading the 20th Maine, Chamberlain fought through battles at Pole Cat Creek and Bethesda Church, together with some lesser skirmishes. His regiment now ranked as veterans. When withdrawing on 3 June, his brigadier asked earnestly if he could fight the 20th Maine by the rear rank, a difficult and delicate manoeuvre that required the unit to reverse its front. Chamberlain answered insouciantly that he could do it any way that was wanted. A few days later he was posted to command 1st Brigade of General Charles Griffin’s division, which comprised six Pennsylvania regiments. Griffin soon remarked admiringly that the spectacle of Chamberlain dashing from flank to flank in action, leading his men forward from the front, was ‘a magnificent sight’. In the battles of the nineteenth century, a man on a horse was always a prominent target. The horse was essential not, as is sometimes supposed, as a privileged mode of transport, but rather as an officer’s only means of swift movement in an age when command and communication depended entirely upon personal contact.
Early on 18 June at Petersburg, Virginia, Chamberlain led a dashing attack to seize one of the strongest Confederate positions, ‘Fort Hell’, which he then hastened to emplace for artillery. Yet even as he did so – with yet another horse shot under him – a galloper brought orders from Griffin to attack the main Confederate positions three hundred yards further forward, which had been fortified through months of labour. Chamberlain was too intelligent a man to execute any order blindly, or out of fear of being thought timid. He despatched a vigorous written protest: ‘I have just carried an advanced position…I am advanced a mile beyond our own lines, and in an isolated position. On my right is a deep railroad cut; my left flank is in the air…Fully aware of the responsibility I take, I beg to be assured that the order to attack with my single Brigade is with the General’s full understanding…From what I can see of the enemy’s lines, it is my opinion that if an assault is to be made, it should be by nothing less than the whole army.’
Chamberlain’s moral courage availed nothing. Ordered to proceed with the attack, ‘It was a case where I felt it my duty to lead the charge in person, and on foot.’ A sergeant offered Chamberlain a drink of water from his canteen. He answered: ‘Keep it, thank you. I would not take a drink from an enlisted man going into battle. You may need it. My officers can get me a drink.’ If his words reflected a soldier self-consciously acting a hero’s part, no one did it better. As the brigade swept forward, the colour bearer was shot at his side. Chamberlain himself seized the flag. Suddenly he found himself floundering in marshy ground at the foot of a slope below the Confederate position. He turned to urge his men to angle leftward, and was hit in his right hip joint by a minie ball, which passed through his body and the other hip. He asserted later that his first thought was: ‘What will my mother say, her boy, shot in the back?’ Desperate not to be seen to fall, he stuck his sabre into the ground and leaned upon it. His men rushed past him before being halted by devastating fire a few yards short of the enemy’s earthwork. Chamberlain himself collapsed, bleeding profusely. Two of his aides carried him back some distance amid a throng of retiring Union soldiers before he ordered them to leave him and carry orders to his senior colonel to assume command. He also sought infantry support for the gunners, now threatened by a Confederate counter-attack.
An artillery officer surveying the corpse-strew n ground through binoculars spotted Chamberlain’s prostrate figure and identified his rank by his shoulder straps. A stretcher party was sent to bring him in. At first the colonel remonstrated with the bearers, urging them to turn to others in worse case. But even as they hesitated a shell exploded nearby, showering them with stones. Without further ado they seized the wounded man and took him to the rear. Neither Chamberlain nor anyone else expected him to live. He said his farewells. After the surgeons had laboured for some hours – as well as his hip wounds, the internal damage was severe – they desisted for a time, fearing that they were causing a doomed man needless agony.
Chamberlain surprised them, however, by keeping breathing. They renewed their efforts. He survived the surgeons’ agonising intrusions, and after a few days was evacuated to the navy hospital at Annapolis, where he was exhibited as a miracle of contemporary medical science – and of human willpower. Ulysses S. Grant, by now commanding the Union army, was so moved by the story of Chamberlain’s conduct and wounding – ‘gallantly leading his brigade at the time, as he had been in the habit of doing in all the engagements in which he had previously been engaged’, as Grant wrote – that he made his only field promotion of the war, formally recognising Chamberlain as a brigadier-general. The man himself, in a hospital bed, enjoyed the rare pleasure of reading his own obituary notices, which had been published in the New York papers.
It was 19 November before he resumed command of 1st Brigade. Still unable to walk far or to ride a horse, he remained determined to take the field. He found the army weary and depleted by losses, his own brigade reduced to just two regiments. A few weeks later he once again succumbed to the pain of his wound, and was despatched to hospital in Philadelphia. His friends implored him to acknowledge the inevitable, and retire from military service. Instead, after a month’s sick leave he returned to duty, just in time to participate in the closing actions of the war.
These battles set the seal upon Chamberlain’s reputation. On 29 March 1865 he once again found himself in action under heavy fire, as his brigade crossed the Gravelly Run stream to attack the Confederate right flank. He was riding his beloved little chestnut Charlemagne, purchased out of government hands for $150, among stock captured from the Confederates. Chamberlain was leading a charging column when his horse reared, a bullet struck the beast in the neck, passed on through Chamberlain’s leather orders case, hit a brass-mounted mirror just below his heart, and glanced off to graze two ribs and exit through his coat. It then smashed the pistol of one of his aides with such force that the man was knocked from his saddle.
Shocked, bleeding and winded, Chamberlain collapsed onto his horse’s neck. The divisional commander, Griffin, believing him mortally hit, hastened to his side and said as he put a supporting arm round the reeling man’s waist, ‘My dear general, you are gone.’ But by an extraordinary effort of will, Chamberlain collected himself and responded: ‘Yes, General, I am gone,’ and spurred away. Capless, liberally smeared in his horse’s blood, he looked to all who saw him a man destined for death. Yet his appearance among his own soldiers, who had broken off their assault and were falling back, sufficed to rally them, and they stormed forward once more.
Chamberlain’s horse Charlemagne collapsed from loss of blood, and the general caused the poor beast to be led to the rear. He himself was still shocked – ‘I hardly knew what world I was in’ – but plunged forward into the mêlée. He became isolated from his own troops, surrounded by Confederate soldiers who presented their weapons and demanded his surrender. For a second time in his war, he exploited his dishevelled condition to play a brilliant bluff: ‘Surrender?’ he cried. ‘What’s the matter with you? Come along with me and let us break ’em.’ Flourishing his sword towards the Union line, he hastened the bewildered Confederates forward until they themselves were taken as prisoners.
There was now a lull in the action. A small crowd of spectators gathered around the exhausted Chamberlain, marvelling at this miraculous survivor as they