Shiloh Read online

  This was the charge that began to break the Hornets Nest. I was sent with a message for Beauregard on the other flank, telling him we were moving forward again, and when I came back General Johnston's body was already stretched out for removal from the field. They told me how he died—from a wound in the right leg, a hurt so slight that anyone with a simple knowledge of tourniquets could have saved him. Doctor Yandell, his surgeon, had been with him all through the battle, but shortly before the final attack near the peach orchard, the general ordered him to establish an aid station for a group of Federal wounded he saw at one point on the field. When the doctor protested. General Johnston cut him off.

  "These men were our enemies a moment ago," he said. "They are our prisoners now. Take care of them."

  When I heard this, that the general had died because of his consideration for men who a short time before had been shooting at him and doing all in their power to wreck his cause, I remembered what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism arid misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.

  He enjoyed posing as a realist and straight thinker —war was more shovelry than chivalry, he said—but he was a highly romantic figure of a man himself and he knew it, he with his creased forehead and his tales of the war in Texas, with his empty sleeve and his midnight drinking beneath the portrait of his wife in that big empty house in New Orleans. He talked that way because of some urge for self-destruction, some compulsion to hate what he had become: an old man with a tragic life, who sent his son off to a war he was too maimed to take part in himself. It was regret. It was regret of a particular regional form.

  I thought of these things while we rode beside the ambulance taking General Johnston's body back to the headquarters where we had slept the night before, where we had crawled from under our blankets at dawn to hear him say that by dark we'd water our horses in the Tennessee—which, incidentally, some Mississippi cavalry outfit did. Beauregard had ordered the fighting stopped, intending to reorganize and complete the victory tomorrow morning. Colonel Preston and the rest of the staff, believing they could be of little use—since all that remained to be done (they thought) was to show Grant a solid front and receive his surrender—decided to accompany the body to Corinth and then by rail to St Louis Cemetery in New Orleans, where my own people had their crypts.

  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 p
iecemeal 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.

  One minute I was expecting to be told to retire, and the next the bugle was blaring the charge. For a moment I mistrusted my ears. It caught me so unprepared I was still sitting there with my mouth dropped open, reins lax in my hands, when the line of horsemen surged forward, galloping down the slope. I finally caught up, the hoofs drumming like thunder, the horses breathing hoarse, the men all yelling. The Texans had dropped the reins onto their horses' necks and were going into the charge with both hands free, one for the saber, the other for the revolver. The checkered-shirt Mississippians carried shotguns across their thighs, whiskers blowing wild in the wind.

  Forrest was fifty yards out front, standing in the stirrups and swinging a saber.

  Most of the skirmishers had begun to run before we hit them, scrambling among the fallen trees and tripping over the vines. Those who stood were knocked sprawling by a blast from revolvers and shotguns fired at twenty paces. I caught a glimpse of Forrest hacking and slas
hing, riding them down. His saber looked ten feet long; it flashed and glinted. All around me horses were tripping and falling, crashing and thrashing in the underbrush, snorting and whinnying with terror. We had scattered the skirmishers, but Forrest didn’t stop. He rode on, still standing and brandishing the saber, charging the Federal cavalry behind the skirmishers. They were in complete disorder even before we struck them, some wheeling their mounts toward the rear, others pressing toward the front, all panicky, firing their carbines in the air. It was the wildest craziest melee a man could imagine, one of those things you would have to see to believe. But it was true, all right, and I was in the very middle of it.

  That was when my horse went down, struck in the knee of the off foreleg by a wild shot—Union or Confederate, Lord knows which—and before I even had time to think what was happening, the whole front end of him broke down and I went sailing over his head. I landed on my chest, spread-eagle; my wind went out with a rush. I got on my hands and knees, trying to breathe and trying to breathe, but no breath would come. My breathing apparatus had been knocked out of action. I was hoping for someone to give me a whack on the back (Rebel or Yank or even one of the horses: I didn’t care) when I looked up and saw something that made me forget that breathing had anything to do with living.

  Forrest was still out front and he was still charging. He had broken the skirmish line, scattered the cavalry, and now he was going after the main body, the remainder of the brigade, which stood in solid ranks to receive the charge. The trouble was, he was charging by himself. Everyone else had reined in when the cavalry scattered; they saw the steady brigade front and turned back to gather prisoners. But not Forrest. He was fifty yards beyond the farthest horseman, still waving that saber and crying "Charge! Charge!" when he struck the blue infantry line, breaking into it and plunging through the ranks. They closed the gap behind him. He was one gray uniform, high on his horse above a sea of blue. I could hear the soldiers shouting, "Kill him!" ''Kill the goddam rebel!" "Knock him off his horse!"