Here is Gordon Rhea's account of Francis Barlow's mud march in the middle of the night at Spotsylvania:
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"Mendell's route to the Brown house covered about three miles, but judging from descriptions afterward, these were the longest three miles of the war. "Oh, what a dreary, tedious movement it was!" was one officer's summation. Another agreed that "a more dismal night march of two hours was never known." The line wound east behind the 5th and 6th Corps, through fields and forests and over streams and swamps. The night, a participant swore, was "dark as Erebus," and sheets of rain scoured the column. "Mud a la Virginia," another expostulated, "and just as dark as Egypt." Each man sloshed behind his file leader, keeping contact, a soldier maintained, "not by sight or touch, but by hearing him growl and swear, as he slipped, splashed, and tried to pull his 'pontoons' out of the mud." Troops dozed whenever the column paused. "I have never before suffered such acute agony from any cause," an officer insisted after the war. "My eyes would close, do what I would to prevent it; and, in order to escape a fall from my horse, I would lean forward and wind my arms about his neck, but the poor brute's head would invariably sink lower and lower, until I would find myself sliding head foremost toward the earth." A pack mule strapped with cooking utensils rampaged and set some of Gibbon's regiments in flight "as though his Satanic Majesty was after them."
Barlow, Miles, and Brooke rode near the column's head. The engineers who accompanied them were indignant at having to conduct an important movement without information about the enemy's position or strength. Hancock's staff was in an equally foul mood and openly cursed the conduct of the war. Brooke denounced the "madness of the undertaking," and Miles became so outspoken that Barlow ordered him to keep quiet. After a while, however, even the stoic division commander fell under the prevailing spell. "As we staggered and stumbled along in the mud and the intense darkness," Barlow recalled, "and I vainly sought for information, the absurdity of our position - that we were proceeding to attack the enemy when no one even knew his direction, and we could hardly keep on our own legs - appealed to me very strongly." Soon he was snickering with the rest. "It was an exquisitely ludicrous scene," Barlow recounted, "and I could hardly sit on my horse for laughter." He ended up pleading with the staffer Charles Morgan, "For heaven's sake, at least face us in the right direction so that we shall not march away from the enemy and have to go round the world and come up in their rear."
Around 12:30, Barlow's mud-spattered troops began collecting in the spongy fields around the Brown house. "I have since laughed with Colonel Morgan as to his utter ignorance of the whole situation," Barlow wrote. The ground where the attack was to start seemed a "mass of darkness, mud, and rain," and Morgan and Mendell could indicate only the general direction of the Confederate works. Barlow sarcastically asked whether there might be a thousand-foot ravine between himself and his objective. "When he could not be assured even on this point," Morgan related, "he seemed to think that he was called upon to lead a forlorn hope, and placed his valuables in the hands of a friend."
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Source: The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7-12, 1864 by Gordon C Rhea, pgs 222-224.
http://books.google.com/books?id=DjWpgi7WBZ4C&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq=egyptian darkness barlow spotsylvania&source=bl&ots=CS_UN7u3Ya&sig=k192WwkEeiqbdVXyu2K_HLtbr5w&hl=en&sa=X&ei=TjwOT5LKN6OJiAKFvInuDQ&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
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