Shiloh (15 page)

"Hey,
sarge
," Winter
said. "If they marched up here looking for a fight, why don’t they come
on?"

I didn’t answer. Then Klein: "Maybe they know
Bueil
got in last night." Klein was always ready with
some kind of remark.

"Let the generals plan the war," I told him.
"All you are paid to do is fight it."

I really thought our time had come. But Wallace had more
sense than to send us naked across that draw against those guns. He ordered up
two of his batteries, one in front of where we were and another down the line.
They tuned up, ranging in on the brassy glints on the bluff. We enjoyed
watching them work. Thompson's battery, which was directly to our front, did
especially well. We watched the balls rise like black dots, getting smaller,
then come down on the rebel guns across the hollow. The cannoneers were lively,
proud to be putting on a show, and every now and then we cheered them. It didn’t
last long. As soon as one of the secesh guns was dismounted by a direct hit,
the whole battery limbered and got out. That was what we had been waiting for.

It's not often you see war the way a civilian thinks it is,
but it was that way now. We were center brigade, and since our company—G—was
just to the right of the brigade center, we saw the whole show. Wallace was
directly in our rear, standing beside his horse and watching the artillery duel
through his field glasses. Grant rode up with Rawlins and dismounted within six
feet of Wallace, but Wallace was so busy with his glasses that he didn’t know
Grant was there until one of the division staff officers coughed nervously:
"General . . ." Then Wallace turned and saw Grant.

There was bad blood between them and our poor showing
yesterday hadn’t helped matters. Wallace saluted and Grant returned it,
touching the brim of his hat with the tips of his fingers. He had the look of a
man who has missed his sleep. His uniform was rumpled even worse than usual,
and he stood so as to keep the weight off his left ankle, which he had sprained
two days ago when his horse fell on him.

I could not hear what they were saying (both batteries were
going full blast now) but I saw Grant motion with his arm as he talked and
Wallace kept nodding his head in quick, positive jerks. It was clear that Grant
was indicating the direction of attack—he pointed toward the bluff, stabbing
the air—but it seemed foolish to me, seeing we had been given our orders
already.

When the rebel battery fell back, their infantry went with
it. Grant mounted, still talking and motioning with his arm. Wallace kept
nodding—Yes, I understand: Yes—and Grant rode away, Rawlins jogging beside him.

Wallace passed between us and Company F. He went about a
hundred yards out front, then turned his horse and faced us. This must have
been some sort of signal to the brigade commanders, for all the battle flags
tilted forward at once and the whole division stepped out, advancing with
brigades in echelon and not even being fired on. It was pretty as a picture.

Until we struck the scrub oaks halfway down the slope we
could see from flank to flank, blue flags uncased, snapping in the breeze, and
the rifles of the skirmishers catching sunlight. Wallace sat on his horse,
waiting for us to come past. As we opened ranks and flowed around him, we put
our caps on the ends of our gun barrels and gave him a cheer. He raised himself
in the saddle and lifted his hat as we went by. His mustache was black against
his high-colored face and his teeth showed white beneath it. He was
thirty-four, the youngest major general in the army.

We went on, tramping through underbrush, walking with our
rifles held crossways to keep from getting slapped in the face by limbs. As we
crossed the creek I saw the line again for a couple of hundred yards both right
and left, the yellow water splashing calf-deep as the men passed over. Then we
were climbing. We went on up—the bluff was not as steep as it had looked from
across the draw; it wasn’t really a bluff at all—then reached the flat where
the rebel cannon lay wrecked. Its bronze tube had been thrown sidewise, with a
big dent at the breech where the cannonball came down, and both wheels were
canted inward toward the broken splinter-bar. Off to one side lay a pinch-faced
cannoneer, as dead as dead could be. With his long front teeth and his
pooched-out cheeks he looked a little like a chipmunk. The men stood gawking at
him.

"All right," I told them. "All right. Let it
go." The ground was high and level here, without so many trees, and we
could see toward the left where the supporting division was supposed to have
kept up. That was Sherman. But there were no men out there, either Union or Confederate,
so we got orders from Captain Tubbs to form a defensive line till the front was
restored.

I got the squad organized. So far so good, I thought. But I
was beginning to feel a little jumpy. It was too easy: a walk in the woods on a
sunny Monday morning, with nothing to bother us but wet socks from crossing the
creek. There were bound to be hard things coming.

Talk about lucky—I never knew what it was. Just when
everything was going good and I had organized myself a nice grassy spot to take
it easy while the outfit on our left came even with us, I looked up and: spat:
a big fat raindrop hit me square in the eye. At first they were few and far
between, dropping one by one, plumping against the dead leaves with a sound
like a leaky tap, then faster and faster, pattering—a regular summer shower. It
had been bad enough trying to sleep in it the night before, with our oilcloths
left back at Stony Lonesome. Now we were going to have to fight in it as well.
For a while it rained in sunshine (the devil beating his wife) but soon that
passed too; there was only the gray rain falling slantwise, shrouding the
woods.

We waited and waited, hunched over our cartridge boxes
trying to keep the rain out. Sergeant Bonner was next to me, still wearing that
coon-dog look on his face. I never knew a man so eager, so conscious of his
stripes.

"Rebel weather," I said—to be saying something.

He said, "I reckon they don’t like it any better than
we do, Klein. It wets their powder just as damp as ours."

Bonner was Like that. Either he wouldn’t answer you at all
or he would say something to catch you up short. Holliday, on my other flank,
grinned at me through the rain, winking and jerking his head toward the
sergeant. Grissom was on the other side of Holliday; he kept the breech of his
rifle under his coat and held the palm of his hand over the muzzle to keep out
the rain. Diffenbuch was farther down the line, squatting with his collar hiked
up, not paying any mind to anyone.

On the far side of the sergeant, Joyner began to yell:
"Come on down, Raymond. More rain more rest." He always called the rain
Raymond—I never knew why. Joyner was a card. Once at Donelson, where we nearly
froze to death, he kept us warm just laughing at him, till his face went numb
with the cold and he couldn’t talk.

After a while the rain slacked up and Thompson's battery
began to bang away at a column of johnnies coming along a road to the right.
That started the trouble. Somewhere out beyond the curtain of steely rain—it
was thinner now but we still couldn’t see more than a couple of hundred yards
in any direction —there began to be a series of muffled sounds, sort of like
slapping a mattress with a stick, and right behind the booms came some whistling
sounds arching toward us through the trees: artillery. We lay there, hugging
the ground, never minding the wet. Every now and then one was low, bopping
around and banging against the tree trunks. It was nothing new to us. But it
was no fun either.

The rain stopped during the cannonade, almost as quick as it
started, and the sun came out again. Everything glistened shiny new. We were at
the edge of a big field. Beyond a strip of woods on the right was another field
even bigger. In the trees at the other end of the far field, just as the sun
came clear, we saw a host of grayback cavalry bearing down on the third brigade
with their flashing sabers looking clean and rain-washed too. They rode through
the skirmishers, on toward the main line. There they met a volley from massed
rifles. It was as if they had run into a trip wire. Men and horses went down in
a scramble, all confused, and the column turned, what was left of it, and rode
back through the woods. It all happened in a hurry. Except for the wounded
skirmishers, walking back with blood running down their faces from the saber
hacks, they hadn’t hurt us at all. Lavery said, "Wasn’t that pretty,
Diff?" I didn’t see anything pretty about it, God forgive him.

Sherman finally caught up and we went forward together,
across the first field, through the fringe of trees, and into the second,
crossing toward where the cavalry charge had begun. When we were within a
hundred yards, still holding our fire, a long deep line of men in gray jackets
and brown wide-brim hats stood up from the brush and fired directly in our faces.
It was the loudest noise I ever heard, and the brightest flash. There was
artillery mixed up in it, too.

I fired one round, not even taking aim, and wheeled
off" at a run for the rear. Half the secret of being a good soldier is
knowing when to stand and when to run—the trouble was, so many got killed
before they learned it. But there was no doubt about which to do now.

We stopped in the woods between the two fields. Bonner began
to count heads. Klein and Winter were missing. "All right," Bonner
said. "Let’s form! Let’s form!"

Then Klein came walking up. That Klein: he'd stayed out with
the skirmishers a while. He said, "I waited to give them a chance to shoot
at you birds before I crawled back across that field. I'm nobody's fool."

"Let’s form!" Sergeant Bonner was yelling. "Let’s
form!"

Before too long all three brigades were in line at the
fringe of trees between those two fields. The skirmishers—Nebraska boys—stayed
out in the open, lying behind hillocks and brush clumps, firing into the woods
where the rebels had stood up to blast us. When we went forward this time,
passing the skirmishers, we knew what we would meet. That made a difference.
Crossing, we stopped from time to time to fall on one knee, fire and reload,
and worked our way ahead like that. Fifty yards short of the woods we gave them
a final volley and went in with the bayonet. This time it was the johnnies ran.

We took some prisoners there, our first for the day. They
were a scraggly lot. Their uniforms were like something out of a ragbag and
they needed haircuts worse than any men I ever saw. They had beards of all
kinds, done up to make them look ferocious, those that were old enough to grow
them, and they had a way of talking—jabber jabber—that I couldn’t follow. They
were from Louisiana, Frenchies off the New Orleans wharfs. They called
themselves the Crescent Regiment and were supposed to be one of the best the
Confederates had on the field. They didn’t look so capable to me.

That was the first hard fighting of the day. We ran into
plenty just like it and some more that was worse, but generally speaking it was
nothing like as bad as we expected. To hear the stragglers tell it when we came
across Snake Creek the previous night, we were going to be cut to pieces before
sunup. It turned out there was plenty of cutting done, but we were the ones who
did it, not the rebels. Maybe they were fought to a frazzle the day before, or
maybe the news that Buell had come up took the wind out of their sails, or
maybe they had already decided to retreat. Anyhow, every time we really pushed
them they gave.

So if Wallace was worried about his reputation because of
our poor showing on the Sunday march, he could stop fretting now. We more than
redeemed ourselves in the Monday fight.

This goes back. Sunday morning we'd waked up hearing firing
from the direction of Pittsburg, five miles south. It began like a picket clash
but it grew to a regular roar, the heavy booming of cannon coming dull behind
the rattle of musketry. It may have been our imagination but we thought we felt
the ground tremble. The three brigades of our division were strung out two
miles apart on the road running west —the first at Crump's Landing on the
Tennessee, the second (ours) at Stony Lonesome, and the third at Adamsville, a
little over four miles from Crump's.

Soon after the sound of battle grew heavy we got orders to
send our baggage to the Landing for safe keeping. The other brigades marched in
from east and west, joining us at our camp. Wallace didn’t know whether he was
going to have to defend his present position or be prepared to march to the
tableland back of Pittsburg. In either case he had to concentrate and Stony
Lonesome was the place for that,
i
If there was an
attack here, it was best not to receive ' it with our backs too close to the
river. If we were to march to Pittsburg to reinforce Grant's other divisions,
there were two roads we could take. They ran from our camp like a V, both
crossing Snake Creek on the right flank of the army.

I went to Crump's as corporal in charge of the baggage
detail. When I got there I saw Grant's dispatch steamer, the
Tigress
, putting in for bank. Grant was
standing on the
texas
deck. He had pulled his hat
down over his eyes, against the morning sun, and his hands were on the railing.
Wallace waited on another steamer tied at the wharf. Grant's headquarters were
at Savannah in a big brick house overlooking the river; every morning he made
the nine-mile trip to Pittsburg to inspect the training. The way they told it
later, he had just sat down to the breakfast table this Sunday morning and was
lifting his coffee cup when he heard cannons booming from up the river. He put
down the cup without taking a sip, went straight to the wharf, boarded the
Tigress
, and ordered the captain to make
full steam for Pittsburg.