Shiloh (13 page)

No one knew where Beauregard's headquarters was, until we
lucked up on Colonel Jordan, his chief of staff, who told us we would find the
general at Shiloh Meeting House, a log cabin over toward the left, on the
Corinth road. We went the way he said and there it was. I waited at the
road-fork with the horses while Strange went in to report.

While I was standing there, holding the reins of both
horses, a tow-headed boy wearing a homespun shirt under his jacket came up to
me. He was about seventeen, just beginning to raise some fuzz on his cheeks. He
carried his left arm across his stomach, holding it by the wrist with the other
hand. The sleeve of the hurt arm was caked with blood from just below the
shoulder all the way down to the cuff.

"
Whar's
a doctor?" he
said, his voice trembling.

I told him I didn’t know but there should be some of them
over toward the right, where the sound of the fighting had swelled up again,
and he went on. He was sad to see: had a dazed look around the eyes, as if he'd
seen things no boy ought to see, and he wobbled as he walked. I thought to
myself: Boy, you better lie down while you can.

Finally Strange came out of the meeting house and we turned
back the way we had come. That seemed the sensible thing to do, though Lord
knows there was no telling where the regiment was by now. They might be almost
anywhere on the whole wide battlefield, with Forrest leading them.

Strange said he hadn’t talked to old
Bory
himself but one of the aides had told him there was nothing unusual about not
knowing where to go for orders. The battle was being fought that way, he said—It
was just a matter of helping whoever needed help most at the time. That seemed
to me to be a mighty loose-jointed way to fight a war.

When we got past the place where we left Forrest the sun was
near the landline. There was a great yelling in the woods beyond, and just as
we rode up we met what I thought was the whole Yank army coming toward us. Then
I saw they were marching without rifles or colors and they were under guard. It
was what was left of Prentiss' division, surrendered when the other Union
outfits fell back, leaving them stranded, and our regiment and most of Chalmers’
brigade got between them and the river. They looked glum as glum but they had
no cause for shame. They were the
fightingest
men in
the whole blue-belly army, bar none, and if they hadn’t held that sunken road
in the
Hornets
Nest for six hours, it would have been
all up with Grant before sundown.

Beyond the woods, in the little clearing where Prentiss had
surrendered, our troopers and the men of Chalmers' Mississippi brigade were
trying to out-yell each other. Their lips were black from the cartridge bite
and their voices came shrill across the field while the sun went down on the
other side of the battleground, big and red through the trees. The colonel was
still in his shirtsleeves, sitting with one leg across the pommel, smiling and
watching the fun. When Strange told him what Beauregard's aide had said, I suppose
he was easier in his mind—knowing he'd done right—but then again maybe I'm
wrong; maybe it hadn’t bothered him at all. Forrest was never one to let orders
keep him from doing what he knew was best.

That was when I left to go out and do some scouting on my
own. The regiment went on to support Chalmers and Jackson in their attacks
against the siege guns drawn in a half-circle along the ridge near the bluff.
They charged those guns, up the ridge, until Beauregard sent word to call it a
day. But I had no part in that. Following the ravine down toward the river in
the gathering dusk, I came upon the Indian mound, climbed it, and lay there for
nearly an hour, counting troops and hearing them identify themselves as they
came ashore.

They were really obliging about that. Every now and then,
when the steamboat neared bank, some rambunctious Fed would lean over the rail
and yell at the skulkers: "Never mind, boys. Here's the 6th Indiana, come
to win your damned battle for you!" It was Buell's Army of the Ohio—no doubt
about that: I identified them regiment after regiment coming ashore. Some of
the outfits were ones we'd badgered during our operation along the Green River,
back in January.

By the time I knew all I needed, it was full dark and had
begun to rain, first a fine mist like spray, then a slow steady drizzle coming
down through the branches with a quiet murmuring sound against the blackberry
bushes. I went back. It was no easy job in the dark. Being in a hurry, I
stumbled and slipped in the mud—I must have fallen at least a dozen times,
getting disoriented every time. And to cap the climax, as if I wasn’t mad
enough already, when I got back I couldn’t locate the colonel.

I found the camp, all right: just blundered into it. But
Forrest was out in the field somewhere, they told me, looking for Willy, his
fifteen-year-old son, who had struck out with two other boys that afternoon on
a little operation of their own. Long past dark, when they still had not come
back, the colonel went out looking for them. Mrs. Forrest (she was the only
person the colonel was really afraid of) had specially charged him to look out
for Willy from the day she let Forrest take him with him to enlist.

That was in Memphis, June of '61, a month before his
fortieth birthday. He went down to the recruiting office and signed up as a
private in a horse company, taking his youngest brother and his son. He had
voted against secession but when Tennessee left the Union he left with her. By
the time of Shiloh he had already made a name for himself: first by bringing
his command out of Donelson after the generals decided to surrender, then by
taking charge at Nashville and saving the government stores during the hubbub
that followed General Johnston's retreat—but most of the talk was wild. Because
he didn’t speak the way they did in their parlors, or fight the way it showed
in their manuals, they said he was an illiterate cracker who came barefoot out
of the hills in overalls and right away began to show his genius. They meant it
well; it made good listening. But it was just not true.

Bedford Forrest was born in Middle Tennessee, son of a
blacksmith and a pioneer woman named Beck. When he was sixteen his father died
and left him head of a family of nine in the backwoods section of North
Mississippi where they had moved three years before. He grew up there, working
for an uncle in a livery stable. By the time he was twenty-four he was a
partner and had met the girl he intended to marry. Her guardian was a
Presbyterian minister, and when Forrest went to ask for her hand the old man
turned him down:

"Why, Bedford, I couldn’t consent. You cuss and gamble,
and Mary Ann is a Christian girl."

“I know it," Forrest said. "That’s why I want
her."

And he got her, too. The old man officiated at the wedding.

He got most things he went after. Within six years he had
outgrown the Mississippi hamlet and moved to Memphis, expanding his livestock
trade to include real estate and slaves. Ten years later, when the war began,
he was worth beyond a million dollars and owned five thousand acres of
plantation land down in the Delta. What the citizens of Memphis thought of him
is shown by the fact that they elected him to the Board of Aldermen three times
straight running. So when people say Forrest came into the war barefoot and in
overalls, they aren’t telling the truth; they’re spreading the legend.

Less than a month after he enlisted he was called back to
Memphis by Governor Harris and given authority to recruit a cavalry battalion
of his own. That was the real beginning of his military career, and that was
the first time I saw him.

I was on my way to Richmond, just passing through from
Galveston, when I saw the notice in the
Appeal
:

I desire to enlist five hundred able-bodied men, mounted and
equipped with such arms as they can procure (shot-guns and pistols preferable)
suitable to the service. Those who cannot entirely equip themselves will be
furnished arms by the State.

And I thought: Well, as well here as there. It had the sound
of a man I could work for. I had reached that stage in my life where it didn’t
matter which way the cat jumped, and besides, I was tired of riding the train.
It was mid-July of the hottest summer I ever knew. Cigar smoke writhed in long
gray tendrils about the hotel room; the air was like a breath against my face.
Sitting there beside the high window with the newspaper folded in my lap, I
knew I had ended a six-year chase after nothing.

My father was a Baptist preacher in Houston. He'd come to
Texas from Georgia (on the call of the Lord, he said) and when he had founded
his church and was a pillar of society, he channeled all the drive that had
brought him West into making me all he'd hoped to be. I never felt he was doing
it for me, though: I always felt he was doing it for himself. He thought he was
doing fine, too, until the day he got the letter from the head of the divinity
school in Baltimore telling him I'd been dismissed for immorality, and all his
dreams went bang. I was never cut out to be a preacher anyhow. When the proctor
came into the room that Saturday night and stood there with his eyes bugged
out, looking at the whiskey bottles and the girl my roommate and I had picked
up on the waterfront, I was almost glad. It meant an end to trying to be
something I was never meant to be. I packed and left.

All I knew about making my way in the world was what I'd
learned from a thousand divinity tracts and a half-hour lecture my father once
gave me on the benefits of purity. I sold my clothes and shipped as a seaman on
a British bark bound round the Cape with a cargo of hemp for the California
coast. I was nineteen at the time and I had never hit a
Hck
of work in my life.

I jumped ship in Los Angeles, got a berth as driver with a
wagon train heading east for Missouri, and left them in Kansas to join another
one rolling west. It was like that for six years—I tried everything I could
imagine. I was faro dealer in a Monterey gambling hell, wore a tall silk hat
and a claw-hammer coat with a derringer up one sleeve; but I couldn’t make the cards
behave, so they dealt me out. In Utah I sold buffalo meat to Mormons. I panned
for gold on the Sacramento River and was a harvest hand in Minnesota. I worked
as a bouncer in a San Francisco saloon but got bounced so often myself they let
me go. I was a mule skinner with a pack train out of Denver and nearly died of
thirst after running into trouble with Apaches in the Colorado Desert. Six
years was enough: I shipped round the Cape again, this time on a Massachusetts
schooner, and docked at Galveston in late June of '61. I'd intended to go up to
Houston then, to see if my father was alive; but when I heard there was a war
on, I put it out of my mind completely, the way you close a book.

For some men war meant widows' tears and orphans' howls. For
me it meant another delay before time to go to my father and admit I'd done as
poor a job of making a bad man as I had of making a good one. I decided to go
to Richmond to see the lay of the land, then to Wilmington or maybe Charleston
to join the Confederate navy. I preferred fighting on water; it seemed cleaner.
But when I stopped overnight in Memphis, between trains, and saw the notice in
the paper, I changed my mind and settled for the cavalry under Forrest.

The recruiting office was in the Gayoso House— the colonel's
brother Jeffrey swore me in. While I was waiting for there to be enough of us
to go in a group to our quarters upstairs, Forrest entered from Main Street. He
was tall, over six feet, narrow in the hips and broad-shouldered, with the flat
legs of a natural horseman. His hair was iron gray, worn long and brushed back
on both sides of a rounded widow's peak above a high forehead. Between a wide
mustache and a black chin-beard his lips were full but firm. His nose was
straight, nostrils flared, and his eyes were gray-blue. They looked directly at
you when he spoke (I never saw such eyes before or since) and his voice was
low, though later I was to hear it rise to a brassy clangor that sounded from
end to end of the line, above the sound of guns and hoofs.

From that first instant when I saw him walk into the lobby
of the Gayoso, I knew I was looking at the most man in the world. Afterwards—in
Kentucky rounding up horses and men and equipment, then back in camp at the
Memphis Fair Grounds, then fighting gunboats on the Cumberland when no one believed
they could be fought, then in the attack at Sacramento when I first saw him
stand in the stirrups and
beller
"Charge!"
and then out of the wreck of Donelson across freezing creeks and backwater
saddle-skirt deep—I followed him and watched him grow to be what he had become
by the time of Shiloh: the first cavalryman of his time, one of the great ones
of
all
time, though no one realized
it that soon except men who had fought under him.

I was a scout by then, operating out beyond the rim of the
army and dropping back from time to time to report. I liked that work.
Sometimes it took me far from headquarters, beyond the Union lines. Sometimes
it was simpler. At Shiloh it was much simpler. I went to the Indian mound, saw
Buell's men coming ashore, and came back to tell Forrest what I'd seen. The
only trouble was I couldn’t find him.

There was no use floundering around on the battlefield
looking for him while he was looking for Willy, so I waited at headquarters. It
was a long wait, sitting there while rain drummed on the captured tent fly.
Then, about eleven o’clock—not long before the weather broke in earnest—the
colonel and his son arrived from opposite directions. Willy was his special
concern, not only because he was likely to get his head blown off poking it
into every corner of the fighting, but also because the boy had begun to pick
up soldier talk and soldier manners, and Mrs. Forrest had warned her husband to
look out for his deportment as well as his safety. A week before, while we were
at Monterey, the colonel rode over to Polk's camp, borrowed the sons of Bishop
Otey
and General Donelson (they were about Willy's age,
fifteen) and brought them back so Willy would have someone his own age to be
with.