Shiloh (18 page)

So I told them goodbye and watched them ride off with the
ambulance in the twilight, the sound of the guns dying with a growl and a
rumble back toward the river. The rain began to fall, first with a series of
minute ticking sounds like a watch running down, then with a steady patter. I
had come up here to fight the battle and it didn’t seem proper, by my own
lights, to leave before it was finished.

Soon after dark, shells from the Federal gunboats began
landing in the woods. Our army was scattered all over the tableland, commands
mingled past identification and strayed soldiers roaming around asking for
their outfits until finally they realized they would never find them in the
darkness and they might as well bed down wherever they happened to be. I slept
under a tree near Beauregard's tent, not far from Shiloh Chapel; it had been
Sherman's tent the night before. Every fifteen minutes (for I timed them) two of
the big shells landed with a terrible crash, one after another, fragments
singing through the trees. Each of them seemed near enough for me to touch it
with my hand. After a while, however, like all the others on that field, I
became accustomed to them. I was dog tired. I slept.

At dawn I reported to Colonel Jordan for duty with the
staff. He told me to stand by. I had breakfast with him and the captured
Federal general, Benjamin Prentiss. They had shared a bed in one corner of
Sherman's tent the night before, and Prentiss had said: "You gentlemen
have had your way today but it will be very different tomorrow. You’ll see.
Buell will effect a junction with Grant tonight and we'll turn the tables on
you in the morning." No such thing, Colonel Jordan said, and showed him
the telegram from a cavalry commander in North Alabama reporting that Buell's
army was marching on Decatur. But Prentiss shook his head: "You’ll
see."

Dawn had come through clearly now; the sun was pushing up
through the misty trees behind us. As we moved toward the breakfast table (it
was done in style by Beauregard's body servant, linen tablecloth and
everything) the sound of musketry broke out in a sudden clatter toward the
Landing. It swelled and was sustained, the rumble of cannon joining in. We
stood listening.

"There's Buell!" Prentiss cried. "Didn’t I
tell you so?"

He was right. The fighting was very different from that of
the day before; it was clear from the first that Grant had been reinforced.
Beauregard tried to do nothing more than hold him to gain time. He was hoping
that Van Dorn would come with his twenty thousand troops from the
Transmississippi. All morning he watched for them, hoping against hope, holding
back from a general attack on a fresh force larger than his own, and looking
over his shoulder from time to time.

Around noon he thought he saw them. Through the trees,
across a field on the right, there was a body of men dressed in white coats and
firing into an advancing line of Federals. Beauregard thought surely they were
Van Dorn's men; no troops in the Army of the Mississippi wore any such
outlandish get-up, while Van Dorn's westerners would be apt to wear almost
anything. But when he sent me through the woods and across the field to
discover who they were, I saw they were the Orleans Guard battalion, many of
them friends of mine. They had come into the battle wearing their parade
uniforms of dress blue, which drew the fire of their fellow Confederates.
Promptly they returned it, and when a staff officer galloped up and told them
they were shooting at their friends, the colonel said angrily: "I know it,
Sir, but dammit we fire on everybody who fires on us!" Finally, however,
they turned their coats inside-out, showing the white silk linings, and
continued the battle that way.

I rode back and reported to the general. He took it well
enough; at least he gave up hoping for Van Dorn. About two o’clock, when the
army had fallen back to a position near Sherman's camps, Colonel Jordan said to
him: "General, don’t you think our troops are very much in the condition
of a lump of sugar thoroughly soaked in water—preserving its original shape,
though ready to dissolve? Wouldn’t it be judicious to get away with what we
have?"

Beauregard felt the same way about it, but he was in no
hurry. He sat quietly on his horse, watching the fight, his red cap pulled low
on his forehead. "I intend to withdraw in a few minutes," he said
calmly.

And sure enough, soon afterwards he sent couriers to the
corps commanders to prepare for the withdrawal. By four o’clock the action had
been broken off. The three brigades of Breckinridge, or what was left of them,
were posted along a stretch of high ground west of Shiloh Chapel. There was no
pursuit.

I camped alone that night, on the same site we had used two
nights ago when we were set to launch the attack. I was back where I started. I
staked my horse in the little clearing, wrapped the blanket around me and used
the saddle for a pillow. Signs of the old campfire were still there, a few
charred sticks and a neat circle of ashes turned dark gray by the rain. It was
quiet—as quiet as the first night I slept there. The blanket had a smell of
ammonia, more pleasant than otherwise. Soon after dark there was a let-up in
the rain and a few stars came through. The moon rose, faint and far and
old-gold yellow, riding a bank of clouds that scurried past it, ragged as
ill-sheared sheep. Lying under that big, tattered sky and looking back over the
last two days of battle, I saw that it had gone wrong for the very reason I had
thought it most apt to go right. The main fault lay in the battle order I had helped
to prepare, calling myself a latter-day Shakespeare because I had supplied the
commas and semicolons, and ranking Colonel Jordan with Napoleon because it
seemed so beautiful. Attacking the way it directed—three corps in line from
creek to creek, one behind another, with the successive lines feeding
reinforcements piecemeal into the line ahead— divisions and regiments and even
companies had become so intermingled that commanding officers lost touch with
their men and found themselves leading strangers who never before had heard the
sound of their voices. Coordination was lost all down the line. By midafternoon
of the first day it was no longer an army of corps and divisions; it was a mass
of men crowded into an approximate battle formation. The one strong, concerted
push—left and center and right together—which would have ended the battle
Sunday evening, forcing the Federal army into the Tennessee, could not be made
because coordination had been lost. At that stage it was no longer even a
battle: it was a hundred furious little skirmishes, strung out in a crooked
line.

                                                                            
We
but teach

         
Bloody
instructions, which being taught, return

         
To plague
th’inventor
.

There you go, I told myself, reincarnating Shakespeare
again.

I slid into unconsciousness so smoothly I couldn’t tell
where the spilt-milk thinking left off and the dreaming began. The pleasant
pungent odor of ammonia was all around me. The last thing I remember, unless
indeed it was something in the dream, was the sound of my horse cropping grass.
Next thing I knew, Tuesday was dawning.

Breckinridge held his troops in position; the rest of the
army took the road for Corinth. I stayed behind, unattached till I joined a
body of about two hundred Tennessee cavalry under Colonel N. B. Forrest, a
tall, swarthy man with a black chin-beard and a positive manner. He was much
admired for having brought his regiment out of Donelson instead of
surrendering, but I knew men who, believing that an officer in our army should
be a gentleman as well as a soldier, would have refused to serve under him
because he had been a slave dealer in Memphis before the war. They also
objected to a habit he had of using the flat of his saber and even his fists on
his men when he became aroused. I was surprised to find him soft-spoken.

When the other corps had gotten a start, Breckinridge
commenced his withdrawal, leaving the cavalry to discourage pursuit. As a
matter of fact there was no pursuit for us to discourage, yet. We stayed there
an hour, Forrest's regiment and a few scattered troopers from Mississippi and
Kentucky and Texas. Then we drew off, following in the rear of Breckinridge. So
far we hadn’t seen a single Federal. Perhaps it could be called a
retreat—doubtless Grant would call it that—but it was a retreat without pressure.
We fell back when we got good and ready.

Two hours south of the battlefield, on the road to Monterey,
we crossed a wide swampy hollow rising to a crest at the far side with a notch
where the road went through. A branch of Lick Creek flowed through this boggy
swale and trees had been felled on both sides of the stream, doubtless a
logging project begun by some of the natives, then abandoned when the war
began; they had finished the cutting but hadn’t got started on the clearing and
hauling. It was known as the Fallen Timbers, a mean-looking stretch of ground
nearly a mile across, with jagged stumps and felled trees crisscrossed and
interlaced with vines and knee-high weeds. I thought to myself what a mean,
ugly place it would be to fight in.

Forrest, however, had been watching for just such a position
ever since we began the march. From time to time he would rein in his horse and
look at the terrain, seeking a place to make a stand in case of attack. We couldn’t
believe that Grant, reinforced by fresh troops equal in numbers to his retiring
enemy, would let us get away without some sort of pursuit, or at least the show
of one, if for no other reason than to be able to report that he had chased us.
The crest beyond the swale afforded an excellent defensive position. I could
see that Forrest had already decided to form a line there (his eyes lit up the
minute it came into sight) even before one of his scouts with the rear point, a
man they called Polly—I wondered if that was really his name—rode up and
reported a heavy column of cavalry and infantry coming hard down the road
behind us.

Forrest gave his horse its head, riding fast for the notch
where the road rose out of the slough to pass over the crest, and we followed.
There were between three and four hundred of us, half his own Tennessee troops,
the rest gathered from three commands assigned to him for rear-guard duty. In
one group there were Texas rangers. They had lost their colonel in yesterday's
fight and now were under Major Tom Harrison, lanky men wearing high-heeled
boots, the rowels of their spurs as big and bright as silver dollars. Colonel
Wirt Adams had half a hundred Mississippians, wild-looking in checkered shirts
and a crazy assortment of wide-brimmed hats. They appeared to have been engaged
in a six-month contest to see who could grow the fiercest beard. Captain John
Morgan led a handful of Kentuckians. They were soberly dressed and riding
superior horses. The captain himself was tall and fair-faced. With his delicate
hands and waxed mustache, he looked as neat and cool as if he had seen no
fighting. We went through the notch at a canter, and Forrest soon had us spread
out in a position along the crest.

Then we saw the Federals, a brigade of them with a regiment
of cavalry attached, strung out in approach-march formation on the road beyond
the Fallen Timbers. They must have seen us almost as soon as we saw them, for
the point signaled danger and the whole blue mass pulled up in a halt on the
slope giving down to the creek. There was a delay while an officer on a big
gray horse rode forward—a ranker, for he had his staff in tow—and sat there
studying us with his field glasses.

It didn’t take long. He soon put the glasses back in their case,
gave some instructions, and the brigade began to deploy for action. One
regiment was thrown forward as a skirmish line, the cavalry backing them up and
guarding their flanks. The remainder of the brigade was massed in
attack-formation two or three hundred yards in the rear. The blare of the bugle
reached us faintly from across the swale. They came on, looking good according
to the manual.

That was when Forrest gave me my first lesson in his kind of
tactics, and it had nothing to do with the manual. I had heard something about
his unorthodox methods of fighting; I had even been told that boldness was the
basis of his success—he fought "by ear,” they said. But nothing I'd heard
had led me to expect him to accept battle with a whole brigade of Yank infantry,
when all he had to oppose them was three hundred and fifty unorganized
cavalrymen, most of them frazzled from seven days on the go, including two days
of steady fighting.

I thought to myself. Surely he's not going to have us stay
here. Surely he doesn’t expect us to hold them.

They appeared small, automaton-Like, as they picked their
way over and around the fallen trees, lifting their knees to keep their feet
from getting tangled in the vines. By the time they were halfway across, some
on this side of the stream, some yet on the other, their line had lost all
semblance of order —they could hardly have been more disorganized if we had
opened on them with artillery. I looked over toward the notch and saw Forrest
giving orders to his bugler. The sound of the horn rang out. Just as I was
thinking, 'Surely he
cant
expect us to hold this
ridge against a whole brigade,' the bugle was blaring the charge and Forrest
put spurs to his horse; he was leading the way. He was obeying his instinct for
never standing to receive an attack when he had a chance to deliver one.