South of Shiloh (14 page)

Gasping, trembling, swinging his elbows, he bulled in between Beeman and an Ohioan, teeth clenched, breath coming in rasps.

“RIGHT DRESS GODDAMN IT! DRESS IS RIGHT!”

Banging shoulders. Curses. The line did an accordion rumba, then rammed together, closing up, elbow to elbow. One moment Paul was panting for breath, the next the loudest shock he’d ever heard, felt, seemed to erupt up out of the very ground, and his muscles spasmed. Christ! The trees were shaking. Involuntarily, he turned. Beeman seized his arm. “Steady down there.”

Trembling, everyone instinctively stooping now, white-faced, crouching. Eyes glancing, clicking audibly, it seemed, like fat cue balls up and down the line. The great sound happened again, and Paul felt the concussion on his face, saw the branches recoil. “That’s cannon fire,” an officer yelled. “Lie down, men.”

“Hot load,” someone muttered, “they must have double-charged it.”

Paul fell to his knees, jerked forward by Beeman’s grip on his arm. He thrust his rifle out in front of him to clear away the brush and landed heavily on his elbows. He shot a look down the squirming line of wide-eyed men who kneeled, lay prostrate, with knuckles blanched white, clutching the long rifles. A drifting, stinking haze of smoke floated over them and, for an instant, Paul was alone, isolated in black-powder limbo.

No more looking in. He was all the way inside, looking out.

The smoke cleared and he saw Beeman’s grinning face, down in the mashed bushes just inches away. They shared a moment of muddy-cheeked exhilaration. Then Paul stared at his own dirty hands, cut by brush: stripes of red, a little ooze of blood. All that mattered now was the tiny copper cap on the rifle cone. He checked to make sure and found it still miraculously in place.

So the damn gun would shoot.

The skirmishers were moving forward now, shouting. Other yells, a yipping howling yell. Beeman pounded his arm, pulled him up to his knees, pointed through the trees. “There, see ’em.”

Gray-brown shadows slipped in the brush ahead of the skirmish line. The yelling general now. Officers waved their swords. Sergeants bellowed from the back of the line. They were getting up out of the brush, dressing right, shouldering arms, going forward. Paul lurched, his ears plugged; not sure if he was hearing a rolling drumbeat or his own heart in his chest. Hoarse, spontaneous growls erupted down the line.

From Paul’s own throat.

And right there, facedown and motionless in a patch of green ferns and moss, sprawled a blue soldier. His hat and rifle flung away. Paul watched the line of muddy shoes ripple over and past the body like an onrushing tide.

Fate card, Paul thought as the long blue double line flowed into a wooded clearing and he saw four more rag-doll shapes, one blue, three brown-gray, scattered in the low brush. A group of blue skirmishers had taken cover behind a long mound of freshly dug earth, loading and firing. One of them writhed in pain on his back. He had a bandanna wrapped around his knee and was holding the knee in both hands, his face contorted in an all-too-believable grimace of pain.

“Halt. In place rest,” Red Beard called out. “If you ain’t already, now’s the time to open those fate cards, boys.”

Paul panted, momentarily snatched back to the twenty-first century. He reached in his pocket, pulled his card out, bit the wrinkled corner and tore it open like a paper cartridge, and read quickly, his heart pounding:
“Pvt. Amos T. Mauldon survived Kirby Creek as well as Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge. He went home when his enlistment expired and did not return to the army.”

Paul grinned, showed the card to Beeman.

“Aw shit, says here ole Abner Massey is a goner,” somebody intoned right behind Paul, in the rear rank.

“Kin I have yer boots.”

“Don’t fret, Abner old boy, I will go home after this fuss and comfort the missus.”

Red Beard walked the line, extending one arm toward the tree line across the clearing. “We’ll follow the skirmish line through the trees ahead; when we come to the edge of the woods we’ll see their entrenchments. A Reb regiment will contest our advance. That’s when people taking hits will go facedown. Pick your time and don’t move. Support will escort you off the field once the battle moves on.”

“What if you’re wounded?”

“Act wounded, groan and roll around,” Red Beard answered. “Support will collect you. The fallen and the wounded will not return to the unit until the event is finished.”

“Makes it more real, I guess,” someone said.

After the momentary lull, firing had started again on the right, beyond the screen of trees. Officers and sergeants now worked up and down the line like border collies, snapping orders. As the gunfire swelled on the right, the skirmishers rose and stalked toward the next line of trees. The three companies lurched forward in line, stamping through the knee-high brush.

Then more shouts and another halt to dress the ranks. Paul used a kerchief to wipe moisture from his spectacles. He toed his shoes in the thick grass, trying to ungunk the red gumbo clotted to the soles. His wool trousers were soaked to the knees from the wet brush and knotted with burrs. Grasshoppers darted in the weeds.

“Jesus.” Sound of a hand slapping a neck. “Can you believe this shit? A mosquito.”

The slap echoed away in a startling moment of quiet. Paul heard the tick of insects, the drip of condensed mist draining from the leaves overhead, and the distant cry of birds. Then he jerked alert as a ragged pop of muskets and the deeper boom of more cannons sounded beyond the woods to the right. Like a tangible echo of the gunfire, a cloud of white smoke combined with the fog and flowed through the trees. Plump with humidity, the white tide drifted no higher than a man’s waist.

“Check them out. On the right, two o’clock, about two hundred yards,” Beeman said.

Paul squinted into the smoke. A blur of movement congealed into three Confederates, who waded hip-deep in the pooling mist. Rifles at port arms, they scrambled through the trees to a swell of higher ground, so their bodies came into full view. They wore a mélange of hobo color, mismatched gray, brown, and green, with blanket rolls across their chests and beehive slouch hats on their heads. A shudder of anticipation snaked down the line. Men instinctively raised their muskets.

Paul’s heart pounded as he saw the Rebels clearly for the first time. He squeezed his rifle, raised it to his shoulder, and was astounded at how easily he had come to see other men as targets.

“Reb scouts, that’s their picket line,” Beeman said.

At about a hundred fifty yards, the three Rebs knelt behind a log and fired their muskets at the advancing blue skirmishers. Paul, getting into the mood of the thing, aimed his musket at the three soldiers. An odd sensation tickled up his spine when he tried to steady the notch in his rear sight on a man in a gray jacket and brown slouch hat.

“Bang,” Paul said. When he lowered the heavy rifle, his breath came in excited gasps and a flush of sweat damped his hands. He turned to Beeman. “Do you think I could have hit that guy?”

Beeman shrugged. “The leaf sights on the ’61 Springfield range out to five hundred yards, suppose to be lethal out to a thousand.”

“I think I could have hit that guy,” Paul said under his breath, turning away from Beeman’s quiet gaze.

The Rebs retreated as the skirmish line plunged into the trees. “At the route step, MARCH,” an officer yelled, swinging his sword. The three companies trudged forward, crossed the clearing, stamped through the last stand of trees, and stopped at the edge of the woods. A cheer broke out to the left, where figures in blue shook their rifles triumphantly around a cannon and Reb prisoners on a gravel road.

Through gaps in the foliage, Paul could see it all in one dizzy sweep. Just like Beeman described it: a long slope with three cannons on the crest, toy-size in the distance. Rebel flags waved in the smoke next to a low white house with slim pillars. Below the house, a rail fence curved across the slope, with men massed thick behind it. Then clusters of other men were running around the end of the fence, forming into line up the slope from where Paul now stood hidden. Atop the hill, in front of the house, Paul saw a monumental figure in white granite catch a flash of sunlight.

“See, over on the right,” Beeman said, pointing to several dozen gray-clad men running back toward the slope. Some of them dashed for groups of horses being held by mounted men and hoisted themselves into the saddles. “Their skirmishers and cavalry are falling back from the creek. Luring the main Yankee body forward. ’Cept now we’re gonna pop out of the woods to the rear of their flank.”

Cheers, a clatter of equipment, and a persistent roll of drums mingled with the gunfire as the main Union force emerged from the thickets across the field.

“Lookit those fellas, taking their blue suits pretty serious,” Beeman observed as the ranks of “galvanized” Southerners in blue uniforms marched out from the thick brush in tight formation, shoulder to shoulder. At the edge of the trees a group of men maneuvered an artillery caisson into place, wheeled a cannon. Then several horsemen in blue cantered into the pasture. One of them rode a prancing black horse and held a fluttering American flag. Never, until this moment, had Paul really felt the sorcerer’s tug of that bit of cloth.

He touched the red bandanna wrapping his head, the pain totally forgotten as he felt his thoughts quicken. He tried to summon Stephen Crane’s words he knew by heart, describing the youthful protagonist in his story reacting to men assembled for battle. Henry Fleming in
The Red Badge of Courage
had been wide-eyed—he was
going to look at war, the red animal—war—the blood-swollen god…

Paul shook his head. It didn’t work like that. No room here for flowery talk. All you could think about now was not screwing up, keeping your place in line, getting the gun up, and pulling the trigger when the time came.

Doing your job.

He glanced left and right. Probably how it had actually looked. The officers conferred; the sergeants paced, hounding the ranks, tightening the companies.

“It’s really something,” he said to Beeman, raising his voice because the Yanks across the field had stopped to fire a long, crashing volley to send the Reb skirmishers on their way. The blue lines vanished in a cloud of white smoke. “I mean, no plastic. No cell phones. No fucking traffic jams.”

He looked up into a sultry gray sky uncut by wires. Mercifully empty of aircraft. Only a few starlings wheeled above the treetops. The air was a dank brew of sweat and filthy wool, wet leather, black powder smoke, and a barn odor of horses and wet grass. He gripped the heavy rifle tighter and took a deep breath.

“The air must have been different back then,” he said. “Imagine breathing air with no radio or television signals in it. No electronics. No PCBs. No millions of internal combustion engines dumping exhaust. No nuclear bomb had ever exploded…”

Beeman cuffed him on the shoulder with his forearm. “Slow down, boy, you’re gonna OD on the period rush.”

Paul said happily, “Christ, think of it. Thousands of men who never thumbed a remote to escape a TV commercial.”

It occurred to him that the men who had stood shoulder to shoulder in this pasture, presenting a wall of living flesh to shot and steel…had never considered purchasing life insurance.

A bugle sounded like a cheerful summons to mass suicide.

“They’re formin’ up there, boys,” an officer shouted. “I do believe they’re coming this way. We’re gonna surprise their Reb asses.”

How many, Paul couldn’t be sure. A double line of yellowish gray…

So that’s…butternut, he thought.

The advancing ranks were partially obscured by the foliage at the edge of the woods. A hundred men, maybe more, tramping down the hill, skirting a copse of trees to the left. A red flag waved in the center of the line.

“SHOULDER ARMS. DRESS THE LINE,” Red Beard bellowed.

The blue lines coiled tighter, connected at the shoulders.

“FORWARD…MARCH.”

No route step now. They set off at a measured tread. Metronome men, crisscrossed with black leather straps, joined at the shoulders in a trundling, steel-quilled blue porcupine. Paul flinched when the cannon shattered the heavy air. He did better when the second cannon fired, and he didn’t even blink when the third one let go.

They cleared the last of obscuring trees, coming out at an angle a little to the left of the approaching Reb formation.

“AT THE RIGHT OBLIQUE, MARCH,” the colonel shouted.

In unison, the blue line shifted direction forty-five degrees.

“Cool,” someone said in the rear rank. “We’re gonna catch them on the end before they can adjust.”

“STEADY BOYS,” an officer shouted.

Paul marched forward, trying to maintain elbow contact with Beeman on the right, the Ohioan on the left. Somewhere in back a drummer banged a rolling cadence.

Paul thought, in real life they would have fixed bayonets. Men would be falling now, hit by musket fire. The haze hovering around the base of the slope bristled with rifle barrels of the advancing Confederates. Now, off in the smoke, the damn band started up, playing “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” On the hill, a shudder of flame and smoke erupted along the fence.

The Reb formation was starting to turn toward them. Not more than a hundred yards away. Paul could make out their faces.

“HALT. RIGHT DRESS.”

The moving rows of upright musket barrels stopped. Tense, controlled sidestepping, drawing up elbow-tight.

“FIRE BY BATTALION,” Colonel Burns bellowed.

Paul’s right foot moved back, instep snugged to left heel, and formed a right angle. Up and down the line, hammers clicked back to full-cock. On either side, rifle barrels appeared tilted up at eye level as the rear rank took the ready position. Paul checked the percussion cap. Still there.

Looking over his barrel, he saw the gray line scrambling to face them, raising their own rifles.

“AIM.”

Paul smoothly raised the heavy rifle and stuffed the butt into his shoulder. Now the barrels to either side of his head extended into full firing position. The man in back of Paul rested his left forearm on Paul’s right shoulder. Paul put his sights on the red-blue flutter of the rebel flag, then lowered the sight picture to the chest of the color-bearer. Christ, aiming a rifle at a man and I never shot a rifle for real in my life, he thought. This is going to be
loud
.