Shiloh (16 page)

Passing Crump's, the pilot warped in and Grant leaned over
the rail and yelled to Wallace: "General, get your troops under arms and
have them ready to move at a moment's notice." Wallace shouted back that
he'd already done this. Grant nodded approval and the pilot brought the
Tigress
about in a wide swing (she hadn’t
even slowed) and took her up the river.

That was about eight o’clock. When I got back to Stony
Lonesome all three brigades were there, the troops resting by the side of the
road with their packs on the grass and their rifles across their knees. The
colonels, expecting march orders any minute, hadn’t even allowed them to stack
arms. I reported to the first sergeant and he sent me back to the squad.

Sergeant Bonner was arguing with Klein about whether Klein
could take his pack off. All the other squads had shed theirs long ago, and
Klein was telling him he was torturing his men just to impress the officers; he
was stripe-struck, Klein said, working for a dome on his chevrons. Bonner was
riled—which was what Klein wanted—and just bull-headed enough to make us keep
them on, now that Klein had made an issue of it. But finally he saw it was no
use. "All right," he said. "Drop them." He didn’t look at
Klein as he said it. Klein took his pack off and leaned back smiling.

You’d think twelve men who had been through as much as we
had (and who expected to go through even worse, perhaps, within a very short
time) would make it a point to get along among themselves. Most of us hated the
army anyhow, shoved as we were away down here in this Rebel wilderness. You’d
think we would try to make up for it by finding some sort of enjoyment in our
squad relationships. But no. Not a waking hour passed that one of us wasn’t
bickering, nursing a grudge. I blamed it all on Bonner at one time; morale was
one of his responsibilities. Then I saw it wouldn’t be a lot different under
anyone else. We hated the army; we hated the war (except when we were actually
fighting it;
then
you don’t have
time)—and we took it out on each other.

We lounged there beside the road, chewing grass stems and
sweating. The sun rose higher. From time to time the sound of guns would swell
and then die down. Occasionally they faded to almost nothing, a mutter, and we
would think perhaps it was over; Grant had surrendered. But then it would come
up louder than ever. Some said the sound moved toward the left, which would
mean Grant was retreating; others said it moved toward the right, which would mean
he was advancing. Myself, I couldn’t tell. Sometimes it seemed to go one way,
then another.

Wallace and his staff, orderlies holding their horses, were
across the road from our company. That was about the center of the column, the
point where the road branched off toward the fighting. Whenever the sound swelled
louder, Wallace would raise his head and stare in that direction. He would take
out his watch, look at it hard for a moment, then put it back in his pocket and
shake his head, fretting under Grant's instructions to hold his troops in
position till orders came. He didn’t like it.

We stayed there three hours, and it seemed longer. At
eleven-thirty a quartermaster captain galloped up on a lathered horse,
dismounted, and handed Wallace a folded piece of paper. The general read it
hurriedly, then slowly. He asked the captain something, and when the captain
answered, Wallace turned to his staff. Within two minutes the couriers passed
us on their horses, going fast.

At that time the cooks were passing out grub. It was beans
as usual. The orders were, finish eating within half an hour, fall in on the
road, and be prepared to march hard. By noon we were under way toward the sound
of firing.

Then was when trouble began. From Stony Lonesome two roads
ran south to the battlefield, both of them crossing Snake Creek, which was the
right boundary. They formed a V with its angle at our starting point. The right
arm of the V ran to a bridge connecting us with Sherman's line of camps.
Wallace had had this bridge strengthened and the road corduroyed (I was on the
detail myself, and a nasty detail it was, too) not only for an emergency such
as this, in which Sherman needed us, but also for an emergency in which we
would need Sherman—it worked both ways. So when Wallace got orders to join the
right flank of Grant's army, he naturally took this road. But that was when
trouble began, as I said.

It was five miles to the bridge. We were within a mile of it
when a major from Grant's staff passed us with his horse in a lope. Shortly
afterwards we were halted. It was hot and the dust was thick. We stood there.
Soon we were surprised to see the head of the column coming toward us, off to
one side of the road. They had countermarched.

Finally the company ahead peeled off and fell in at the tail
and we followed. All the way back, men in ranks on the road yelled at the
column, asking what had happened—"Did you forget to remember
something?"—but by the time we came abreast (we were center brigade) they’d
had enough of shouting and were quiet, standing in the road and breathing the
dust we raised as we passed.

What had happened, Grant—after sending the Q.M. captain with
the note—had got impatient waiting for us and at two o’clock, when we still hadn’t
come, he sent this major to see what was the delay. The major, surprised at not
finding us on the road nearest the river (the left arm of the V) had spurred
his horse and caught up with Wallace just in time to prevent our marching
directly into the arms of the rebs. That was the first we knew of Grant's being
pushed back toward the Landing.

When we got to the turn-around point, within sight of Stony
Lonesome again, the sun had dropped almost level with the treetops and we were
beginning to fag from the ten-mile hike. But there were six miles left to
travel and we went hard, marching up the left arm of the V. Two more of Grant's
staff officers were with us by then, Colonel Birdseye McPherson and Captain
John Rawlins—I saw them when they doubled back down the column with Wallace.
They were egging him and he was chafing under it.

The approach to Snake Creek bridge was through a swamp. By
then the sun was all the way gone and we marched in a blue dusk. The boles of
trees were pale and the backwater glistened. It was gloomy. Crossing the bridge
we saw stragglers wading the creek, in too big a panic to wait for us to clear
the bridge; they were in even too big a panic to wait for each other, crowding
past with wet feet and flopping pants legs. When we shouted down at them, calling
them skulkers and cowards, they yelled back: "You’ll see! You’ll find
out!" and such like. They said Grant was whipped and we were marching in
for the surrender.

It could have been true. The firing had died for the past
hour, and now it was no more than an occasional sputter. We looked at each
other, wondering. But when we were across the bridge, onto the flank of the
battlefield, we saw that the army was still there, what was left of it, and
Buell's men were coming up from the Landing.

Then the rain began. We were put in line on the right of
Sherman, along the road we had marched in on. Sherman's men had tales to tell.
Most of these were descriptions of how the johnnies had overrun them, but they
told some brave ones too. They said a boy in an Ohio regiment had been wounded
and sent to the rear but came back a few minutes later and said to his company
commander, "Captain, give me a gun. This damned fight ain’t got any
rear."

The rain came down harder and lightning flashed. It seemed
like a year since we first left Stony Lonesome.

When we had scattered that Crescent outfit, taking a batch
of prisoners, we stopped to re-form and then went forward again. It was that
way from then on. They wouldn’t stand; they would just wait to ambush us, and
every now and then they would come in a rush, screaming and yelling that wild
crazy way they had. Sometimes it would shake us a bit, but generally not. They
never really pushed it.

The squad worked in two sections: Sergeant Bonner with Klein
and Diffenbuch, Amory, Pope and Holliday; Corporal Blake with myself and
Pettigrew, Grissom and Lavery. About four o’clock Diffenbuch got hit in the
shoulder and we left him leaned against a tree. Diffenbuch was always a quiet
one, and he didn’t have much to say even then.

Raymond was coming and going but it wasn’t like in training,
where you could knock off when he came down. Right after Diff got hit it faired
off and the sun came through. We were walking in sunlight then, dead men all
over the place, some left from yesterday, twisted in ugly positions but washed
clean by the rain. At one point I saw a reb and a Union man lying on opposite
sides of the road, both in the standard prone position for firing. Their rifles
were level and they both had one eye shut. They had the same wound, a neat red
hole in the forehead, and they were stone dead, still lying there with the
sights lined up—they must have fired at the same time. Looking at them I
thought of the terrible urgency they both must have felt in the last
half-second before they both pulled trigger.

We were approaching the camp where Sherman's tents were
standing. They had run from here yesterday morning and now we were back where
it started. The rebels had formed a line along the ridge. We charged them,
bayonets fixed.

That was where Pettigrew got his.

I have seen my share of men get hit (at Donelson we were
caught in a tight and lost five out of twelve in less than ten minutes) but I
never saw one catch it as pretty as Pettigrew did. It was quick and hard— not
messy, either.

We had formed in this draw, down the slope from the hogback
where the tents were pitched. The johnnies had formed in front of the tents,
advanced down to what they call the military crest, and we got set to go up
after them. Corporal Blake was on the right, then myself, then Pettigrew, then
Lavery. Sergeant Bonner, with the other five, was over beyond Lavery.

Captain Tubbs walked up and down, checking the platoons.
Lieutenant McAfee stood fiddling with his sword. Warning came down from the
right to get set. We passed it along. Then we heard Colonel Sanderson bellering
and the company officers picking it up all down the line:
Charge! Charge!
and we went forward. The underbrush was thick here,
creepers and briery vines twined round the trees. They made a crashing sound as
we tramped through.

Toward the crest they thinned and the going was easier. That
was where they opened on us. The minies came our way, singing that song they
sing, and that stopped us. We hugged the ground. "All right, men!"
officers called. "All right!" We crouched in the bushes waiting for
the word.

Corporal Blake looked straight ahead. Pettigrew on my left
was half turned in my direction, the expression on his face no different from
usual. When he saw me looking at him he grinned and said something I couldn’t
hear because of the bullet’s singing and plopping into tree trunks and the
rifles banging away across the draw.

While I was watching him it came:
Charge! Charge!
The whole line sprang up and started forward. I was
still watching Pettigrew—I don’t know why; I certainly didn’t have a
premonition. As he went into it, bent forward and holding his rifle across his
chest, the minie struck him low in the throat (I

heard it hit, above all that racket; it was like when you
thump a watermelon) and he pitched forward with his arms flung out, crucified.

When I stopped and leaned over him I saw that he was almost
gone already. He knew it, too. He tried to tell me something, but all that came
out was three words and a bubble of blood that swelled and broke:

"Tell my wife—"

Grissom was wounded just as they fell back. We had taken the
ridge and they were retreating across the swampy hollow, almost out of rifle
range, when one of them stopped and kneeled and pinked Grissom in the thigh. He
sat down with his hands over the bullet hole and began to laugh and cry at the
same time, like crazy. I think he was unnerved from seeing Pettigrew get it the
way he did back there in the swale. They came from the same home town, grew up
together. Pettigrew saved Grissom's life once by getting the drop on a sniper
at Donelson. He sat there with blood oozing between his fingers, laughing and
crying, both at once, saying he'd got himself a furlough to go home to Indiana
and tell Pettigrew's wife how her husband caught one quick and easy.

It turned out that was the last attack of the day. Wallace
sent word to hold up. That was enough, he told us. And if anyone thinks we weren’t
glad to hear it, let him try pushing an army of rebels through three miles of
scrub oak and briers. The johnnies formed a Line about a mile farther on.
Probably, though, they were no more anxious to receive a charge than we were to
deliver one. The way it looked to me, they were willing to call it a day if
we
were.

We sat on the grass along the ridge where Sherman's camp
was. There was a creek and a bog in the draw, and all across the valley, both
sides of the creek, there were dead rebs so thick you could cross it almost
without touching your feet to the ground. Mostly they had been there since
yesterday, and they were plenty high.

We were shifted around some then, being put in a defensive
line, but there was no more fighting that day. While we were resting, the
burial details went to work. The Union dead were buried by their own outfits,
tagged and identified one by one and all together. But they buried the johnnies
in groups near where they fell. It was interesting to watch, to see the way
they did it. One of these burial trenches was near where we halted and we
watched them at work.