One Civil War soldier famously wrote of daily life in the army: "The first thing in the morning is drill, then drill, then drill again. Then drill, drill, a little more drill. Then drill, and lastly drill. Between drills, we drill, and sometimes stop to eat a little and have roll-call."
That was Oliver Norton, of the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry, who would become the bugler for Col. Strong Vincent, the Erie-born commander who died defending Little Round Top on the second day at Gettysburg - after telling subordinate Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain to hold his ground "at all costs."
Drill was both the bane of a soldier's life and the key to a battle-ready army.
When it's done right, it looks easy; when done wrong, it's a chaos of backwards-to and elbow bumping.
Doing it right was not only important during battle when moving men quickly into a gap could mean the difference between victory or defeat, but also during long marches when coordinating tens of thousands of men could - when done wrong - result in day-long delays.
The history of the Civil War is filled with instances of drill-done-wrong and the costly results.
Part of that is because the vast majority of the army - including officers - were not professional soldiers.
Drill runs counter to all the American virtues of independence and free thinking; instead, it emphasizes regimentation and unquestioning obedience to orders.
That did not come easy - then or now.
"The Civil War volunteer was a temporary soldier, long on self-esteem and very, very short on experience," writes historian Allan Guelzo. "Few of them grasped what discipline meant, and fewer still saw any sense in unquestioningly following orders."
Gen. John Reynolds, who commanded the Pennsylvania Militia raised in anticipation of Lee's first attempt to invade the North in 1862 and who - after expertly orchestrating the very first stages of the battle at Gettysburg - would be killed early in the fighting of the first day, complained bitterly of his 1862 Pennsylvania volunteers' utter lack of discipline.
Guelzo quotes a Michigan officer who groused that "many of the men seem to think they should never be spoken to unless the remarks are prefaced by some words of deferential politeness… Will the gentlemen who compose the first platoon please to halt, &c. is abt. what some of them seem to expect."
It's not much different with Civil War re-enactors today.
Re-enactors dread drill. It's boring as hell, and - because they do it so rarely, compared to their Civil War counterparts - it's often a confusing muddle of zigging when you should have zagged.
Without constant practice in the commands and maneuvers that allowed 19th century armies to move over terrain efficiently and effectively, it's almost impossible to understand what's being done or why. The instinct in the midst of this conceptual jumble is to follow what the guy next to you is doing, which works fine if the guy next to you knows what he's doing. If he doesn't…
But re-enacting lends an insight not only to what Civil War soldiers dealt with daily, but also - when drill is done right - to how elements of an army could move in concert. Like rowing crew, when everyone works in sync, the result can be sublime. It's a kind of battlefield ballet.
A good instructor is key: an officer who understands not only the moves, but also why they are important - and has the patience to explain it.
Timothy App is one of those. The 65-year old professor of art at the Maryland Istitute College of Art is a re-enactor with the 3rd Maryland and very patiently explained to me the various mistakes I was making as well as the logic behind doing them right.
It's not easy. For example, there are multiple ways - all named - to properly hold a rifle, few of them obvious or natural, but there's just one way to properly fix a bayonet, with a complicated but fluid flourish with the left hand. That's before one even takes a step. The orders for marching fill entire books.
But when an instructor like App puts each move into perspective, and you practice it and see and feel it in action, the underlying logic suddenly seems self-evident.
Many soldiers in the Civil War weren't as lucky.
Often the officers training their troops to drill were volunteers who didn't know the rules themselves, and would spend evenings studying ahead for the next day's drill lesson.
The danger of having officers who were vague on the rules was that even when the troops followed orders to a "T," the result could be fatal.
Historian Stephen Sears illustrates one such fateful failure in his book on Gettysburg.
On the second day, Union cannons had been ordered up to support the wavering line near the Peach Orchard; and three of the regiments of Confederate General Kershaw's South Carolinians were supposed to wheel left as they approached and storm the guns.
As Sears writes, "All was proceeding according to plan, and the Yankee gunners had ceased firing and were preparing to pull back before they were overrun, when the unthinkable happened. Private John Cox, 2nd South Carolina, would never forget the moment: 'But just then - and, ah me! to think of it makes my blood curdle even now, nearly fifty years afterwards - the insane order was given to "right flank."' Someone - it was never determined who - had misunderstood Kershaw's orders or his intent and with this false order aborted the attack. The three regiments obediently wheeled right. Before the mistake could be corrected, the Yankee gunners returned to their pieces and mercilessly shelled the suddenly vulnerable column passing close in front of them. 'Hundreds of the bravest and best men of Carolina fell, victims of this fatal blunder,' Kershaw lamented."
Guelzo says the key to the Napoleonic tactics employed during the Civil War was the bayonet charge, but the poor training and discipline of both officers and men made those a fatal rarity.
According to Guelzo, "What ran up the Civil War's enormous casualty lists was not expert marksmanship or highly refined weapons, but the inability of poorly trained officers to get their poorly trained volunteers to charge forward and send the enemy flying before the bayonet, instead of standing up and blazing away for an hour or two in close-range firefights where the sheer volume of lead in the air killed enough people to be noticed."
One of the easiest commands in drill is "dress left" or "dress right," which simply means move over til you bump elbows with the guy to the left or right of you, creating one straight, and orderly line of men. Actually, two lines: one in front and one behind. The members of each then count off in twos, which number determines how one moves in response to subsequent orders and more importantly the position from which one fires his gun.
This could be especially important in the midst of battle when members of the line may have fallen. "Dressing the line" effectively regrouped the unit into a concentrated firing force.
Contrary to what many believe, the rifled musket was not key to most of the fighting in the Civil War.
While the improved accuracy of the rifled musket could indeed be more lethal in the hands of a well-trained sharpshooter, it was largely wasted on the majority of poorly-trained infantry.
Guelzo cites numerous examples from both the North and the South of the infantry's alarming lack of accuracy with rifled muskets.
"When one Illinois regiment lined up to target-shoot at a barrel 180 yards away, only 4 shots out of 160 tries hit the barrel… William Izlar of the 1st South Carolina remembered a fierce exchange of volleys at a distance of no more than 100 yards in which the chief casualties were 'the needles and cones from the extreme top' of the pine trees all around them."
Thus the common command moments before a fight to "aim low!"
No, the key to infantry fighting during most of the Civil War was instead a mass of men firing lead in the same general direction.
Thus "dressing the line" could make a group of soldiers more lethal because their firing would be more concentrated.
My personal favorite historical instance of dressing the line occurred at Gettysburg during Pickett's charge.
Union cannons blasted the advancing Confederate lines, ripping massive holes in the formations. One Virginia soldier recalled seeing, "now & then a man's head or arm or leg… fly like feathers before the wind."
In the midst of this, the men were ordered to stop and "dress the line" - it was at once a re-ordering of the sort described above, a demonstration of the Confederate courage under fire and a massive middle finger thrust at the Union line.
Shelby Foote describes the moment in his three-volume history "The Civil War":
"Coming presently to a slight dip, about midway of the valley – a swale not deep enough to hide them from the enemy gunners, but conveniently parallel to the ridge that was their objective – Pickett’s men received their second order, which was to halt, close up the gaps their casualties had left, and dress the line. They did so, once more with the deliberate precision of the drill field, but with the difference that such gaps continued to appear at an even more alarming rate as the Union gunners, delighted with this sudden transformation of a moving into a stationary target, stepped up their rate of fire. The result was the first evidence of confusion in the Confederate ranks. A soldier would look toward the comrade on his right, feeling meanwhile with his extended hand for the shoulder of the comrade on his left, and there would be a constant sidling motion in the latter direction, as men continued to fall all down the line, leaving additional gaps that had to be closed. This might have gone on indefinitely, or at any rate until there were no survivors left to dress or dress on, but at last the order came for them to continue the advance, still on the oblique.
"This they did, to the considerable relief of most of the bluecoats on the ridge ahead, whose reaction to the maneuver was one of outrage, as if they had been exposed to a blatant indecency, such as the thumbing of a nose, though for others the feeling of revulsion was tempered by awe and incredulity. 'My God, they're dressing the line!' some among the waiting infantry exclaimed, more by way of protest than applause."
Video of re-enactors on the march: