The Smoke at Dawn: A Novel of the Civil War (30 page)

“They’re flanking us! Make ready!”

The lieutenant was in full panic, and Bauer tried to ignore that, focused on any kind of light, anything at all. The fight on the left was scattered, seemed to spread all through the woods, both directions. He looked to the front, the anxious shiver blending in with anger, that the rebels would miss them, take their fight only to the other units. Damn! We’re here! We’re ready! He strained again to see anything at all, could still see the flicker of fire from single muskets, but the smoke was rolling through the trees, obscuring any hint of a target. He kept his eyes to the front, forced himself to keep ready, tried not to think what was happening down the way, if there was a fence, if men were out on the railroad tracks, if there was any cover at all. The men around him were mostly silent, as angry and anxious as he was, some terrified, soft whimpering, the sergeant barking out close behind them, “Keep still! Stay ready! They could be coming!”

Bauer saw Irwin in his mind, the big mouth, chip on the man’s shoulder, convinced they were hearing ghosts. Doesn’t sound like ghosts to me, he thought. Never knew a ghost to shoot a musket. He leaned hard against the thick fence post, could smell the smoke from the fight, more scattered firing out to both sides, thought, Maybe we should be … helping out? But the officers were there, moving past behind them, firm, quiet orders, holding the men in position. Geary’s words suddenly broke through Bauer’s thoughts.
Half of Longstreet’s corps
. That’s a bunch, I’m guessing. There’s what? Fifteen hundred of us? He couldn’t help feeling respect for Geary, the man who knew what was happening, who knew what they were supposed to do. Bauer thought of the man’s words again,
The whole Eleventh Corps marched through here
. That’s good, I suppose. But where are those boys now? Right up that road someplace. They gotta be able to hear all this commotion. Maybe. We could use some help.

The blast behind him was sudden, deafening, a burst of terror ripping through him, through the men around him. Out to the front,
the shell impacted out past the closest timber, a fiery blast that erupted close, shattering trees, the flash blinding, startling. He fought to see, held the stare, his ears ringing, painful. And now the cannon fired again, the blast ripping past close over his head. Around him, men dropped down, flattened along the fence, the cannon firing again, and Bauer lay flat, the ground shaking beneath him, but the terror was giving way, a surge of relief taking its place.
Ours!
He kept still, waited, one hand on the musket, the other clamped on his ear. The next blast came now, ripping the woods out to the front, and he had to see, to know what was happening, peered up, over the edge of a fence rail, saw the enormous burst of fire, and the silhouettes of men, like so many ghosts, moving straight toward them.

It was nearly 3
A.M.
when the fight ended. There had been no success, no failure, both sides fumbling in the dark, Geary’s men mostly anchored in two lines, in an L shape, absorbing the surprise shock of nearly equal strength from a brigade of South Carolinians, under the command of Colonel John Bratton. Though Geary’s men mostly held their ground, Bratton’s men began to gain the momentum, advancing blindly into Geary’s supply wagons, threatening to flank the position. As Geary’s men began to exhaust their ammunition, Bratton’s troops made ready for what Bratton believed would be the final blow, a massed charge that would crush Geary’s resistance. But before Bratton could give the order, he received one of his own. The Confederates were ordered to withdraw. Bratton had no choice but to obey, pulling his men northward, across the lone bridge that spanned Lookout Creek. The order had come from Bratton’s superior, General Micah Jenkins, who answered to Longstreet.

Farther up the Brown’s Ferry Road, the troops of Oliver Howard’s Eleventh Corps had indeed heard the eruption of the fight at Wauhatchie. Howard immediately sent a strong force to march southward, to assist whatever crisis had fallen upon John Geary. But Bratton’s men were not the only Confederate forces who had ventured out from the base of Lookout Mountain. Howard’s troops ran into another brigade of rebels, more of Longstreet’s troops, sent to slice across the road that would keep Geary’s division cut off from the
gathering strength at Brown’s Ferry. But the darkness offered no assistance to either side in either place, and by dawn, like Bratton’s men, the rest of the Confederates had withdrawn from whatever confused contact they had made. With the daylight on October 29, the anxious Federal troops could finally see the battleground that showed the effects of Longstreet’s night attack, a fight that had accomplished nothing at all.

They moved through the churned-up ground searching for anything of value. But Bauer had found as little as the others, a few canteens tossed aside, cartridge boxes mostly empty, a bent sword. In the early dawn, the rebels had pulled most of their wounded away, but scattered through the broken timber, men still called out, praying, begging, suffering from wounds inflicted by an enemy few of them ever saw.

Bauer had returned to his camp with most of the men of the platoon, those men surveying the damage to their tents, retrieving bedrolls, sorting through whatever debris the fight had spread through the camp. The talk was flowing now, anxious fear giving way to pride, to rumor and spouting off, but there was one piece of news that was definite. For all the advantage of their surprise assault, driving toward the Federal camps, where the men in blue had been silhouetted by their own fires, there was one disadvantage Bratton’s South Carolinians could not overcome. They had no artillery. In the early morning light, it was clear that the Federal artillery had turned the tide, making the greatest impact on the fight, blasting holes into rebel formations that even the artillerymen could barely see.

Throughout the camps, Bauer shared the gratitude of those around him, hoping to shake the hands of the men who pulled the lanyards, who might have saved the entire division. But it was not to be. The daylight revealed the awful truth, that most of the artillerymen were down. Like the infantry outlined by their campfires, the blasts from the cannon had lit the ground around each gun, offering clear targets for rebel muskets. With each punch of cannon fire, rebel officers had ordered their men to target the gunners, each cannon’s eruption offering a momentary glimpse that gave the rebels a perfect field of fire.

As Bauer and the Pennsylvanians absorbed the sadness of the loss of those men who had done the good work, it was their commander who would suffer a tragedy of his own. Geary’s son, Lieutenant Edward Geary, had been killed in the act of working his battery. For a fight that seemed to most to have been a useless exercise, the loss of Geary’s son cast a pall through the entire unit.

Bauer didn’t know the young man, barely knew any of the men who huddled along the fence with him through two hours of blind terror. But he respected the grief they felt, had gone through that too often himself. It hardly mattered who held the ground, whose troops prevailed. For Geary, and for the men of Joe Hooker’s entire force, it seemed that the valley west of Lookout Mountain was now vulnerable to another assault. But Longstreet had made the only effort he seemed willing to attempt. Withdrawing his troops back up to the heights on Lookout Mountain, he could only observe the vast sea of blue that stretched out below him, the forces that had driven up through the valley that now gave the Federal troops in Chattanooga the supply line they desperately needed. The Cracker Line had expanded into something much more, a pathway where the wagons were already rolling, Baldy Smith’s beloved straight line, the newly placed pontoon bridges already weighed down by the flow of fresh supplies. Bragg’s siege was broken.

The men from Pennsylvania had stayed in their newly captured valley, but for Bauer, it was time to move on. The last leg of his journey took him across the pontoon bridge that would land him in Chattanooga. Where he was to go then was a mystery, something to be cleared up by the provosts who guarded every route that led to the Federal camps.

He had fallen in behind a line of wounded men, a slow, delicate dance over timbers laid flat on a pontoon bridge. There was a pair of stretcher bearers behind him, responding quickly to one of the walking wounded who had collapsed along the way; they gathered the hobbled man in a hammock of dirty canvas. As they moved out onto the rocking bridge, the bearers began chatting about some fistfight, laughing at someone else’s misfortune, a casual conversation as though the injured man carried between them was little more than nameless cargo. The stretcher bearers were white, something of a surprise to Bauer, since throughout the most recent campaigns, Negroes had been assigned that job, just as they now served on most of the grave details. Bauer had seen too much of that kind of duty at Shiloh, had naïvely volunteered for work with the shovel, in return for the
army’s promise of a dose of hard liquor. He recalled that now, dozens of men around him, digging through the soft earth, the shallow ditches that served as a resting place for men who deserved much more. The first rains offered up the futility of the effort, bones and scraps of uniforms protruding from places some farmer might soon reclaim for his crops, a thought that sickened Bauer to his core. The army’s reward of liquor had been another lesson Bauer had learned the worst way possible. He knew little of spirits, suffered mightily from the indulgence, heaving out every bit of solid food into a muddy hole, then hauling away a headache that plagued him for two days. In the eighteen months since that horrific fight, Bauer had kept far away from the bottles, even the smell of whiskey turning his stomach. It amazed him that no matter where he went, there were always men who found the means to squirrel away a good supply of the illicit brew.

In the battles since, the grave diggers had been black. No longer did the officers drift through the campsites, trying to cajole or bribe their men out into the fields, shovel in hand. The Negroes were simply ordered to the job, no one daring to complain about the task that someone had decided was too gruesome for white men. At first the black burial details wore blue, came from a regiment of freedmen, but very soon, as the army continued its march through myriad cotton fields and abandoned plantations, many of the laborers came from the ranks of the freed slaves, who seemed to welcome any job that would take them far from their former masters.

The wounded man behind him let out a sudden moan, and Bauer glanced back from instinct, couldn’t avoid the brief horror, the cloth of the stretcher stained with a wet patch of dark red. He caught a look from the bearer closest to him, saw a white cloth tied around the man’s upper arm, the makeshift insignia he had seen before, as though, without the adornment, the stretcher bearers might otherwise slip away from the sickening duty.

“What’s the problem, soldier? You feel like lending a hand? Old Ned here’s headed for the hospital. You been in a hospital? Takes a strong man just to go near the place.”

“I’ve been in a hospital.”

Bauer turned away, ignored the chuckle from the man, a joke at his
expense. But the wounded man called out, a gasping cry, “No. I don’t wanna go to no hospital.”

“Hey, Ned, you’re awake. Can’t help it. Doctor says you might lose that leg. But it’s a blessing. You’ll be going home, that’s for sure. Leave this mess for the rest of us.”

The chatter continued, and Bauer felt a cold fury, kept his stare to the front, heard the wounded man whimpering now, soft sobs breaking through the jabbering men who carried him. Bauer stepped more quickly, putting distance between them, eased carefully past a man on a single crutch, the bridge bouncing slightly beneath his feet. The man ignored him, focused on keeping his balance, the bridge rocking sideways. Bauer glanced out to the brown water, slow ripples spreading away from the bridge, slowed again, steadied himself, a silent apology to the hobbled man, looked at him, the face of a boy, tears. The boy struggled with the crutch, hopped clumsily, Bauer fighting the urge to help him.

“I’m not gonna lose my leg, am I, sir?”

The childlike voice jolted Bauer, the image coming back to him of a redheaded boy from the 17th Wisconsin. Bauer tried to recall his name, his mind not wanting to see that, a single musket ball through the boy’s forehead, the quivering tuft of red hair, the death of a child so dedicated to wearing a man’s uniform. Bauer erased the image, hadn’t thought of the boy since Vicksburg, wouldn’t think of him now. He focused on the young man close behind him.

“No,” he said. “Looks good, from here. You’re walking okay. Don’t worry.”

He looked past the boy toward the stretcher bearers, saw a nod toward him from the man up front, no jokes this time, the duty taking over. The stretcher bearer shook his head now, and Bauer followed the man’s gaze to the wounded boy’s foot, saw the black ooze from the ripped shoe, another gash on the man’s calf. Bauer kept his pace slow, in time with the boy. He wanted to reach out, some kind of encouragement, give the boy a hearty pat on the shoulder, but his hand stayed at his side, the other hand gripping the musket.