Shiloh (14 page)

Forrest returned first. He was dripping wet, angry, and
worried. I usually steered clear of him at such times but this couldn’t wait.
Just as I was about to report, however, there was a whoop of laughter and
catcalls, and through the opening of the tent we saw the three boys marching a
batch of prisoners in the rain. They had struck out together soon after the taking
of the Peach Orchard, making a tour of the field, and on the way back they came
upon a group of about a dozen Yank stragglers in a ravine near the river—a
sorry, bedraggled lot sitting like mudturtles on some logs. The boys threw down
on them with their shotguns, put them in column, and marched them into camp.
Reporting to the colonel with their prisoners, they were the three proudest
boys in the Confederacy. Forrest was so pleased and amused he even forgot to
scold them.

But he became serious enough when I told him what I'd seen
from the overlook. He called for the six troopers and we put on the blue
overcoats and went out. As soon as he had found out for himself that what I
reported was true, we came back down the mound and he led the way straight for
the camp of Chalmers, whose troops were sleeping on the ground where Prentiss
surrendered. The general was asleep when we got there, but Forrest made one of
the aides wake him up. He came out to us still in his fighting clothes, a young
man, his eyes puffed almost shut with fatigue and his hair rumpled in a wave on
one side from sleeping on it.

His troops had done some of the hardest fighting on the
field, and when he bedded them down for the night he didn’t doubt that tomorrow
would complete the victory. Hearing that the Army of the Ohio had come up, he
shook his head—he couldn’t believe it. When Forrest made it clear that he himself
had seen them arriving on steamboats from down the river, it jarred him
completely awake. But he wouldn’t agree to a night attack. His men were too
weary, he said. Besides, he couldn’t make an attack without orders from Corps
or Army headquarters. Johnston was dead; he didn’t know where to find either
Bragg or Beauregard. So that was that as far as he was concerned. All through
the scene Forrest's face had been getting redder and redder, a sure sign his
anger was rising—I have seen his face go red as brickdust —and at last he stood
up from the camp stool and shook his finger in General Chalmers' face.

"If the enemy comes on us in the morning, we'll be
whipped like hell," he said. And stomped out.

It was the same everywhere we went. No brigadier was willing
to make an attack without orders from above, not even those who realized that
waiting for the Federals to complete their reinforcement meant sure defeat for
us after daylight. The main difference between Chalmers and the other
brigadiers we managed to stumble on was that he knew where his men were
bivouacked—most of them had no idea. They were waiting for morning, they said,
when they could get their troops into line and renew the attack. And every time
they said this, Forrest got a little redder in the face and began to tremble
and told them the same thing he'd told Chalmers: "We'll be whipped like
hell." Then we'd go on to another camp, trying to persuade another
general. Everywhere, always, it was the same—no attack without orders: the men
were too tired to advance till they had their sleep out. Over and over again we
heard it. It was enough to make an angel cuss, let alone N. B. Forrest.

I left him about one o’clock, dead on my feet, but he kept
right on going from camp to camp, blundering around in the wet and the dark,
trying to locate someone with enough rank and gumption to move against the
landing. He finally found General Breckinridge, who was a corps commander—not
to mention Vice President of the United States, just over a year ago, when we
were all one country—but Breckinridge said that as head of the Army reserve he
did not have the authority to order an attack. He didn’t know where Beauregard
was sleeping—nor Polk, he said, nor Bragg—but he told him where to find Hardee,
and Hardee was a fighter.

But there it was even worse. Forrest couldn’t so much as get
past the staff, though at length he managed to see the AAG, a tall thin
middle-aged man with a lisp, wearing a bathrobe and carpet slippers, who heard
what Forrest had to say and then dismissed him, saying the information was sure
to be known at headquarters already. He yawned as he spoke, the words sounding
hollow:

"You can rest assured they know what’s best up there.
We have already received orders to attack at day dawn." He tapped his
teeth with his fingertips, yawning. "So go back to your troops, colonel,
and keep up a strong and vigilant picket line all along your front."

This was the brand of talk that made Forrest maddest. Nine
times out of ten he'd have exploded right there in the staff officer's face,
would have reached out and grabbed him, bathrobe and all, but I suppose he knew
it was too late already, even if he could have got Hardee to order an advance.
Buell's army was mostly ashore by now, probably, and our men needed all the
rest they could get for the fight against fresh troops tomorrow morning.

I took one of the blankets off the Yankee colonel's bed (—it
would be Forrest's bed tonight; there was enough cover on it to wrap a
regiment) and spread it on the ground in one corner of the tent. But before I
even had time to tuck it round me I fell asleep. I knew I was tired but I hadn’t
known how tired. The minute my head came level with my feet, every muscle in my
body turned to jelly. I took a deep breath, intending to heave a sigh, but I let
it out again I was gone from this world, gone to what my old nurse back in
Texas used to call Snooze land.

Next thing I knew, there was a thumping and groaning, mixed
with a jingling and the sound of someone cussing a blue streak. I raised myself
on one elbow, pulled the blanket around me at last, and looked across the tent.
It was Forrest, sitting on the edge of the Yankee colonel's bed and
wrastling
his boots off. The jingling was the spurs, but
the rest of it was just Forrest being angry. He was talking to himself,
muttering something about a vigilant picket line, a bathrobe and a pair of
carpet slippers. None of it made any sense to me. The lightning had stopped and
so had the thunder. The wind had fallen, too, but the rain drummed steadily
against the tent.

Just as I was about to get up and help him, tired as I was,
he got the boots off and lay back on the bed, still mumbling. I could smell
him; any time he got thoroughly mad you could smell it. Suddenly the tent was
filled with snoring. I began to drift back to sleep myself, smelling the strong
sweat of Forrest's anger and thinking how much I had lived through today and
how different tonight was from last night, when we'd bivouacked on the south
bank of Lick Creek and lain there listening to the Federal bands serenading us
unbeknownst. For a second there flicked across my mind a picture of the boy who
had come up to me that afternoon at the crossroads near the chapel and asked
where a doctor was. I wondered if he made it—but only for a second: there were
lots like him, and besides I was asleep by then.

The sound of firing woke me. Dawn had come, paling the canvas
so that the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the big
U S
stenciled on the ceiling (I saw it
in reverse:
S U
, directly above my
head) and when I looked around I saw I was alone in the tent. When Forrest let
a man sleep like that, it meant he was pleased with his work.

By the time I got myself unwrapped from the blanket and out
in front of the tent, the firing had swelled to a steady clatter like the sound
of a wagon crossing a canefield, stalks popping against the axle-tree. The
Union infantry was roaring to the attack. Charging, they made a different sound
from us. Ours was a high yipping series of yells, like foxhunters coursing, but
theirs was a deep roar, like surf on a stormy night. It was somehow more
organized, more concerted, as if they had practiced beforehand, and it came
from down deep in their chests instead of up high in their throats.

They will tell you Shiloh was no cavalry battle; the field
was too cut-up with ravines and choked with timber for the usual mounted work.
However, none of Forrest's men realized this at the time, and we had our
moments. By that time he'd developed us to the point where we were more
horse-infantry than cavalry. We used our horses more to get there on than to
fight on. That was his tactics: "Get there first with the most
men"—only he didn’t call it Tactics; he called it Bulge: "Fifteen
minutes of bulge is worth a week of tactics," and his orders to us were
always direct, in language a man could understand: "Shoot at everything
blue and keep up the scare" or "Hit them on the end," where a
West Pointer would have said: "Be aggressive" or "Engage them on
the flank."

All through the long day's fight, while the battle went
against us, we were not downhearted and we never failed to do whatever was
required of us as long as the colonel was out front in his shirtsleeves,
swinging that terrible sword. That was his way. He'd tried the night before to
get them to do what he knew was right, and if the generals hadn’t seen it his
way he wasn’t going to sit and sulk about it. We fought them mounted; we fought
them dismounted, standing or running, all over that blasted field where the
dead lay thick as leaves at harvest time. There was never a let-up until the
thing was done.

Look at this notice he put in the Memphis Appeal; he was up
there recovering from his Fallen Timbers wound:

200 RECRUITS WANTED

I will receive 200 able-bodied men if they will present
themselves at my headquarters by the first of June with good horse and gun. I
wish none but those who desire to be actively engaged.—Come on, boys, if you
want a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees.

                                                                            
N.
B. Forrest

                                                                            
Colonel,
Commanding

                                                                            
Forrest's
Regiment.

6

Squad

23rd Indiana
 

I used to think how strange it was that the twelve of us had
been brought together by an event which separated brothers and divided the
nation. Each of us had his history and each of the histories was filled with
accidental happenings.

Myself for instance: I was born in New England and was taken
to Indiana, adopted me out of an orphanage. I was six at the time—I can barely
remember. "Your name is Robert," they said; "Robert
Winter." It was my first ride on a train. "You are our son Robert. We
are taking you home." Then we ate sandwiches out of a paper bag. For years
I thought all children came from Boston.

That’s what I mean by accidental. I had to be adopted out of
a New England orphanage to become part of an Indiana squad. And it was the same
all down the line. Every one of the twelve had his own particular story.

This tied in with what Corporal Blake said during one of the
halts Sunday while we were marching from Stony Lonesome toward the sound of
guns across the creek. He said books about war were written to be read by God Almighty,
because no one but God ever saw it that way. A book about war, to be read by
men, ought to tell what each of the twelve of us saw in our own little comer.
Then it would be the way it was—not to God but to us.

I saw what he meant but it was useless talking. Nobody would
do it that way. It would be too jumbled. People when they read, and people when
they write, want to be looking out of that big Eye in the sky, playing God.

But the strange thing was that I should think of it now,
lying before sunup on the edge of the battlefield. Then again, tired and wrought-up
as we were from all the waiting and the bungled march the day before, I suppose
almost anything could have come into my mind. We had marched onto the field
after dark. The first I saw of it was when daylight filtered through and we
were lying there waiting for the shooting to get started again. We weren’t
green—we had seen our share of killing: but this was different to begin with.
We had heard so many tales the night before. The army had been wrecked, they
told us; we were marching in for the surrender.

Our division, Lew Wallace commanding, was in position on the
east side of a hollow. There were woods thick on both sides and a creek down in
the draw. Across it, half a mile away, where the opposite slope rose up in a
bluff, the rebels were lined up waiting. We could see their battle flags and
sunlight sparkling on a battery near the center of their line.

We were the flank division of Grant's army. Snake Creek,
which we crossed the night before, was off to our right. When dawn broke and
the sun came through the haze, I lay there in the grass, watching it glint on
the fieldpieces, and I thought: Oh-oh. If Wallace sends us across that hollow
in the face of those guns, he's going to have considerably fewer of us when we
reach the other side.

There was a long quiet period, nearly an hour, while the two
armies lay and looked across the vacant space like two dogs sizing each other
up. Then firing began to sputter over on the left, like growling, nothing much
at first but finally a steady clatter, growing louder and louder, swelling
along the front toward where we lay.