Shiloh Read online

  There was a long quiet period, nearly an hour, while the two armies lay and looked across the vacant space like two dogs sizing each other up. Then firing began to sputter over on the left, like growling, nothing much at first but finally a steady clatter, growing louder and louder, swelling along the front toward where we lay.

  "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.

  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.