Shiloh (7 page)

I was still mixed up, wondering what it all meant, when we
begun
to go forward, carrying our rifles at right shoulder
shift the way we had been taught to do on parade. Colonel Thornton was still
out front, flashing his saber and calling back over his shoulder:

"Close up, men. Close up.
Guiiide
centerrrrr
!" The skirmishers went out of sight
in the swale, the same as if they had marched into the ground. When we got to
where they had gone down, we saw them again, but closer now, kneeling and
popping little white puffs of smoke from their rifles. The rattle of firing
rolled across the line and back again, and then it broke into just general
firing. I still couldn’t see what they were shooting at, specially not now that
the smoke was banking up and drifting back against us with a stink like burning
feathers.

Then, for the first time since we left Corinth, bugles begun
to blare and it passed to the double. The line wavered like a shaken rope,
gaining in places and lagging in others and all around me they were yelling
those wild crazy yells. General Cleburne was on his mare to our left, between
us and the 5th Tennessee. He was waving his sword and the mare was plunging and
tossing her mane. I could hear him hollering the same as he would when we did
wrong on the drill field—he had that thick, Irish way of speaking that came on
him when he got mad. We were trotting by then.

As we went forward we caught up with the skirmishers. They
had given around a place where the ground was flat and dark green and there was
water in the grass, sparkling like silver. It was a bog.

We gave to the right to stay on hard ground and the 5th
Tennessee gave to the left; the point of swampland was between us, growing
wider as we went. General Cleburne rode straight ahead, waving his sword and
bawling at us to close the gap, close the gap, and before he knew what had
separated us, the mare was pastern-deep in it, floundering and bucking to get
rid of the general's weight. He was waving his sword with one hand and shaking
his fist at us with the other, so that when the mare gave an extra hard buck
General Cleburne went flying off her nigh side and landed on his hands and
knees in the mud. We could hear him cussing across two hundred yards of bog.
The last I saw of him he was walking out, still waving the sword, picking his
knees high and sinking almost to his boot-tops every step. His face was red as
fire. The brigade was split, two regiments on the right and four on the left,
with a swamp between us; we would have to charge the high ground from two
sides. By this time we had passed around where the other slope came out to a
point leading down to the bog and we couldn’t even see the other regiments.
When we hit the rise we begun to run. I could hear Colonel Thornton puffing
like a switch engine and I thought to myself, He's too old for this. Nobody was
shooting yet because we didn’t see anything to shoot at; we were so busy trying
to keep up, we didn’t have a chance to see anything at all. The Line was
crooked as a ram's horn. Some men were pushing out front and others were
beginning to breathe hard and lag behind. My heart was hammering at my throat—it
seemed like every breath would bust my lungs. I passed a fat fellow holding his
side and groaning. At first I thought he was shot, but then I realized he just
had a stitch. It was Burt Tapley, the one everybody jibed about how much he
ate; he was a great one for the sutlers. Now all that fine food, canned peaches
and suchlike, was staring him in the face.

When we were halfway up the rise I begun to see black shapes
against the rim where it sloped off sharp. At first I thought they were scarecrows—they
looked like scarecrows. That didn’t make sense, except they looked so black and
stick-like. Then I saw they were moving, wiggling, and the rim broke out with
smoke, some of it going straight up and some jetting toward our line, rolling
and jumping with spits of fire mixed in and a humming like wasps past my ears.
I thought:
Lord to God, they’re shooting;
they’re shooting at me!
And it surprised me so, I stopped to look. The
smoke kept rolling up and out, rolling and rolling, still with the stabs of fire
mixed in, and some of the men passed me, bent forward like they were running
into a high wind, rifles held crossways so that the bayonets glinted and
snapped in the sunlight, and their faces were all out of shape from the
yelling.

When I stopped I begun to hear all sorts of things I hadn’t
heard while I was running. It was like being born again, coming into a new
world. There was a great crash and clatter of firing, and over all this I could
hear them all around me, screaming and yelping like on a foxhunt except there
was something crazy mixed up in it too, like horses trapped in a burning barn.
I thought they’d all gone crazy—they looked it, for a fact. Their faces were
split wide open with screaming, mouths twisted every which way, and this wild
lunatic yelping coming out. It wasn’t like they were yelling with their mouths:
it was more like the yelling was something pent up inside them and they were
opening their mouths to let it out. That was the first time I really knew how
scared I was.

If I'd stood there another minute, hearing all this, I would
have gone back. I thought: Luther, you got no business mixed up in all this
ruckus. This is all crazy, I thought. But a big fellow I never saw before ran
into me full tilt, knocking me forward so hard I nearly went sprawling. He
looked at me sort of desperate, like I was a post or something that got in the
way, and went by, yelling. By the time I got my balance I was stumbling
forward, so I just kept going. And that was better. I found that as long as I
was moving I was all right, because then I didn’t hear so much or even see so
much. Moving, it was more like I was off to myself, with just my own particular
worries.

I kept passing men lying on the ground, and at first I
thought they were winded, like the fat one—that was the way they looked to me.
But directly I saw a corporal with the front of his head mostly gone, what had
been under his skull spilling over his face, and I knew they were down because
they were hurt. Every now and then there would be one just sitting there
holding an arm or leg and groaning. Some of them would reach out at us and even
call us by name, but we stayed clear. For some reason we didn’t like them, not
even the sight of them. I saw Lonny Parker that I grew up with; he was holding
his stomach, bawling like a baby, his face all twisted and big tears on his
cheeks. But it wasn’t any different with Lonny—I stayed clear of him too, just
like I'd never known him, much less grown up with him back in Jordan County. It
wasn’t a question of luck, the way some folks will tell you; they will tell you
it's bad luck to be near the wounded. It was just that we didn’t want to be
close to them any longer than it took to run past, the way you wouldn’t want to
be near someone who had something catching, like smallpox.

We were almost to the rim by then and I saw clear enough
that they weren’t scarecrows—that was a foolish thing to think anyhow. They
were men, with faces and thick blue uniforms. It was only a glimpse, though,
because then we gave them a volley and smoke rolled out between us. When we
came through the smoke they were gone except the ones who were on the ground.
They lay in every position, like a man I saw once that had been drug out on
bank after he was run over by a steamboat and the paddles hit him. We were
running and yelling, charging across the flat ground where white canvas tents
stretched out in an even row. The racket was louder now, and then I knew why.
It was because I was yelling too, crazy and blood-curdled as the rest of them.

I passed one end of the row of tents. That must have been
where their officers stayed, for breakfast was laid on a table there with a
white cloth nice as a church picnic. When I saw the white-flour biscuits and
the coffee I understood why people called them the Feds and us the Corn-feds. I
got two of the biscuits (I had to grab quick; everybody was snatching at them)
and while I was stuffing one in my mouth and the other in my pocket, I saw Burt
Tapley. He'd caught up when we stopped to give them that volley, I reckon, and
he was holding the coffee pot like a loving-cup, drinking scalding coffee in
big gulps. It ran from both comers of his mouth, down onto the breast of his
uniform.

Officers were running around waving their swords and
hollering. "Form!" they yelled at us. "Form for attack!" But
nobody paid them much mind—we were too busy rummaging the tents. So they
begun
to lay about with the flats of their swords, driving
us away from the plunder. It didn’t take long. When we were formed in line
again, reloading our guns, squads and companies mixed every which way, they led
us through the row of tents at a run. All around me, men were tripping on the
ropes and cussing and barking their shins on the stakes. Then we got through
and I saw why the officers had been yelling for us to form.

There was a gang of Federal soldiers standing shoulder to
shoulder in the field beyond the tents. I thought it was the whole Yankee army,
lined up waiting for us. Those in front were kneeling under the guns of the men
in the second line, a great bank of blue uniforms and rifle barrels and white
faces like rows of eggs, one above another. When they fired, the smoke came at
us in a solid wall. Things plucked at my clothes and twitched my hat, and when
I looked around I saw men all over the ground, in the same ugly positions as
the men back on the slope, moaning and whimpering, clawing at the grass. Some were
gut-shot, making high yelping sounds like a turpentined dog.

Smoke was still thick when the second volley came. For a
minute I thought I was the only one left alive. Then I saw the others through
the smoke, making for the rear, and I ran too, back toward the tents and the
slope where we'd come up. They gave us another volley as we ran but it was
high; I could hear the balls screech over my head. I cleared the ridge on the
run, and when I came over I saw them stopping. I pulled up within twenty yards
or so and lay flat on the ground, panting.

No
bulLet’s
were falling here but
everybody laid low because they were crackling and snapping in the air over our
heads on a line with the rim where our men were still coming over. They would
come over prepared to run another mile, and then they would see us lying there
and they would try to stop, stumbling and sliding downhill.

I saw one man come over, running sort of straddle-legged,
and just as he cleared the rim I saw the front of his coat jump where the shots
came through. He was running down the slope, stone dead already, the way a deer
will do when it's shot after picking up speed. This man kept going for nearly
fifty yards downhill before his legs stopped pumping and he crashed into the
ground on his stomach. I could see his face as he ran, and there was no doubt
about it, no doubt at all: he was dead and I could see it in his face.

That scared me worse than anything up to then. It wasn’t
really all that bad, looking back on it: it was just that he'd been running
when they shot him and his drive kept him going down the slope. But it seemed
so wrong, so scandalous, somehow so un
religious
for a dead man to have to keep on fighting —or running, anyhow—that it made me
sick at my stomach. I didn’t want to have any more to do with the war if this
was the way it was going to be.

They had told us we would push them back to the river. Push,
they said; that was the word they used. I really thought we were going to push
them— with
bulLet’s
and bayonets of course, and of
course I knew there were going to be men killed: I even thought I might get
killed myself; it crossed my mind a number of times. But it wasn’t the way they
said. It wasn’t that way at all. Because even the dead and dying didn’t have
any decency about them—first the Yankees back on the slope, crumpled and muddy
where their own men had overrun them, then the men in the field beyond the
tents, yelping like gut-shot dogs while they died, and now this one, this big
fellow running straddle-legged and stone cold dead in the face, that wouldn’t
stop running even after he'd been killed.

I was what you might call unnerved, for they may warn you
there's going to be bleeding in battle but you don’t believe it till you see
the blood. What happened from then on was all mixed up in the smoke. We formed
again and went back through the tents. But the same thing happened: they were
there, just as before, and when they threw that wall of smoke and humming
bulLet’s
at us, we came running back down the slope. Three
times we went through and it was the same every time. Finally a fresh brigade
came up from the reserve and we went through together.

This trip was different—we could tell it even before we got
started. We went through the smoke and the
bulLet’s
,
and that was the first time we used bayonets. For a minute it was jab and slash,
everyone yelling enough to curdle your blood just with the shrillness. I was
running, bent low with the rifle held out front, the way they taught me, and
all of a sudden I saw I was going to have it with a big Yank wearing his coat
unbuttoned halfway, showing a red flannel undershirt. I was running and he was
waiting, braced, and it occurred to me, the words shooting through my mind:
What kind of a man is this, would wear a red wool undershirt in April?

I saw his face from below, but he had bent down and his
eyebrows were drawn in a straight line like a black bar over his eyes. He was
full-grown, with a wide brown mustache; I could see the individual hairs on
each side of the shaved line down the middle. I'd have had to say Sir to him
back home. Then something hit my arm a jar—I stumbled against him, lifting my
rifle and falling sideways.
Ee
! I'm killed! I
thought. He turned with me and we were falling, first a slow fall the way it is
in dreams, then sudden, and the ground came up and hit me: ho! We were two feet
apart, looking at each other. He seemed even bigger now, up close, and there
was something wrong with the way he looked. Then I saw why.