Shiloh Page 14

  Then Forrest saw what had happened and began to haul on the reins, trying to turn back toward his own men. But as the horse wheeled, lashing out with its hoofs while Forrest slashed with his saber, I saw one of the soldiers—a big heavy-set corporal—shove the muzzle of his rifle into the colonel's hip and pull the trigger. The force of the ball lifted Forrest sideways and clear of the saddle, but he regained his seat and held onto the reins, the horse still kicking and plunging and Forrest still hacking and slashing.

  He was facing our lines by then, clearing a path with his saber, and as he came out of the mass of blue uniforms and furious white faces, he reached down and grabbed one of the soldiers by the nape of the neck, swung him onto the crupper of his horse, and galloped back to our lines, using the Federal as a shield against the bullet’s fired after him. When he was out of range he flung the soldier off, the man's head striking one of the jagged stumps with a loud crack, and rode up to where we were waiting. I discovered that my breath had come back—I was breathing short and shallow from excitement.

  That was the end of the fighting. The ball that wounded Forrest was the last that drew blood in the battle of Shiloh. The repulse at the Fallen Timbers put an end to whatever desire the Union army may have had for pursuit. From the crest where we had begun our charge we watched them collect their dead and wounded and turn back the way they had come. That was the last we saw of them.

  Out of the group of prisoners taken here, I heard one tell a questioner that he was from Sherman's division and that the officer we had watched while he studied the field with his glasses was Sherman him-self. I was afoot then, and one of the Tennessee troopers let me ride behind him. We caught up with the column on the Corinth road and doubled it a ways until the horse began to fag and I got down. It was shank's mare for me from there on in.

  Having seen Sherman face to face that way—even if I had not recognized him at the time—I kept remembering the crazy notion I had had, while going to sleep the night before the battle, about capturing him and making him admit he was wrong about what he'd said that Christmas Eve a year and three months ago, at the Louisiana State Military Academy; he was superintendent.

  That year I had the measles and couldn’t go home for the holidays. It was gloomy in the big infirmary with all the other cadets away enjoying turkey and fireworks, so as soon as I got better—though I still wasn’t allowed to get up and had to keep the shades drawn—Sherman had me moved into the spare bedroom in his quarters. The place had a strong odor of niter paper, which he burned for his asthma. I would come awake in the night hearing him cough. He was about twenty pounds underweight and we all thought he was in consumption.

  That Christmas Eve he had supper in his sitting room with Professor Boyd, a Virginian who taught Latin and Greek. The door was ajar and I could see them sitting in front of the fire, enjoying their after-supper cigars. Presently a servant came in with a newspaper which had arrived from town. Sherman had his back to me, less than a dozen feet away, and when he spread the paper I saw the headline big and black: South Carolina had seceded, voted herself out of the Union.

  He read it rapidly. Then he tossed the paper into Mr. Boyd's lap and walked up and down the room while the professor read it. Finally he stopped pacing and stood in front of Mr. Boyd, shaking a bony finger in his face, addressing him as if he had the whole South in the room. "You people of the South don’t know what you are doing," he said. "This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization."

  He resumed his pacing, still talking. "You people speak so lightly of war. You Don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing!" He reached the end of the room and came back, still talking. "You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight too—they are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it. Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth —right at your doors." He stopped and frowned.

  "You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail—shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be—your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see that in the end you’ll surely fail."

  He made another turn at the end of the room, his hands clasped beneath his coattail. As he came back I saw the firelight glisten on the tears in his beard; they sparkled like jewels hung in the russet whiskers.

  The memory of Sherman pacing the floor, saying we were bound to fail, stayed with me constantly through the first year of the war. It rose in my mind while I was joining up, during the heart-breaking attempt to hold the shaky Line that snapped at Bowling Green and Donelson, during the long retreat from Kentucky into Mississippi, and during the march to battle between those two creeks on the tableland above Pittsburg Landing. He was the first American I ever heard refer to the cause of constitutional liberty as a bad one: I knew he was wrong there, I could discount that. But some of the other things—the threat of blockade, for instance, the comparison of our mechanical powers and resources—were not so easily set aside.

  It was not until the charge at the Fallen Timbers that I found the answer, the oversight in his argument. He hadn’t mentioned Forrest or men Like Forrest, men who did not fight as if odds made the winner, who did not necessarily believe that God was on the side of the big battalions, who would charge a brigade with half a regiment of weary men and send that brigade stumbling back to its tents demoralized and glad to be let alone. The army that had Forrest—and would use him—could afford to put its trust in something beside mechanical aptitude or numbers.

  This was the answer to all he had said, and it made my future certain. I said goodbye to staff work, the placing of words on paper where they looked good and played you false, and determined that when I got back to Corinth I would get myself another horse and enlist under Forrest, commissioned or not. Or if it turned out that Forrest did not recover from the wound he had received that day (which seemed Likely) I would enlist under someone as much like him as possible—Wirt Adams, say, or John Morgan. I was through with visions of facing Sherman in his tent and forcing him at pistol point to admit that he was wrong. The time to face him down would be after the war, when no pistol would be needed and the fact could speak for itself.

  It was a load lifted from my brain—I was Like a man long troubled by a bad dream who suddenly discovers he can sleep without its return. Instead of being a prophecy, as I had feared, the things Sherman said that Christmas Eve were a goad, a gauntlet thrown down for me to pick up. I hoped he would last the war so I could tell him.

  These things were in my mind as I traveled south on the Corinth road, first on horseback behind the Tennessee trooper, then trudging along in boots that got tighter and tighter across the instep. They had been made for me by Jeanpris Brothers in New Orleans and they were strictly for riding. When I had slit them and rejoined the column they felt fine at first, but soon the rain began. I started to fag. The boots got worse than ever; it was like walking on pinpoints. Holding onto the tailgate of the wagon was a help. My feet did not touch the ground as long that way, it seemed, and they no longer had to propel my body forward. All they had to do was swing one-two one-two with the pull of the mules, the rhythm of it washing all else out of my mind until I began to remember General Johnston and the way he died at high tide of the battle.

  "It don’t hurt much, Captain," the boy said. "I just can’t lift it."

  Then it was late afternoon, the rain coming slow and steady, not really unpleasant once you were all the way wet, provided you were tire
d enough not to complain —which I was—or had something else hurting you enough to keep your mind oil the rain—which I had. Both sides of the road were Uttered with equipment thrown away by soldiers and by teamsters to lighten their loads: extra caissons and fifth wheels abandoned by the artillerymen when their horses got too weak to haul them, bowie knives and Bibles and playing cards which some of the men had managed to hold onto all the way to the fight and through the fighting, and occasional stragglers sitting beside the road with their heads on their knees, taking a breather.

  As twilight drew in, the wind veered until it came directly out of the north, whistling along the boughs of roadside trees. Thunder rumbled and the rain was like icy spray driven in scuds along the ground. It grew dark suddenly, not with the darkness of night but with the gathering of clouds, a weird, eerie refulgence. Thunder pealed and long zigzags of lightning forked down, bright yellow against the sky. The air had a smell of electricity; when I breathed it came against my tongue with a taste like brass. The rain turned to sleet, first powdery, almost as soft as snow, then larger and larger until it was hail, the individual stones as large as partridge eggs, plopping against the mud and rattling against the wagon bed with a clattering sound Like a stick being raked along a picket fence. Within an hour it was two inches deep everywhere, in the fields, on the roofs of cabins, and in the wagons where the wounded lay.

  We crossed the state line, entering Mississippi again. The storm had passed by then, the worst of it, and what was left of daylight filtered through. The countryside was strange and new, all white and clean except for the muddy puddles. On a rail fence beside the road a brown thrasher sat watching the column go past, and for some reason he singled me out, the steady yellow bead of his eye following me, the long bill turning slowly in profile until I came abreast: whereupon he sprang away from the rail with a single quick motion, his wings and narrow tail the color of dusty cinnamon, and was gone.

  In the wagon the wounded were mostly too sore to brush the sleet and hail away, or perhaps they had reached a stage where they didn’t care. They lay with it piled between their legs and in their laps. It filled the wrinkles in their uniforms so that the angry red of their wounds stood out sharp against its whiteness. Up front, sitting with his back to the driver, there was a man whose face I avoided. His jaw had been shot away but his tongue was still there; it hung down on his throat like a four-in-hand tie.

  The boy who had lost an arm was better now, as if the gusts of rain and sleet and hail had cleared his mind. Above the circles of pain and fatigue, his eyes were bright. He had begun to look around, first at the ones in the wagon with him, then at the others walking alongside. Facing me over the tailgate he suddenly seemed to realize where he was, that the column was heading for Corinth. He wet his lips and looked at me. For the first time, except for the raving, he spoke. "Lieutenant..." His voice was weak; he tried again. "Lieutenant..."

  "Yes?"

  "Lieutenant—did we get whupped?"

  I said I supposed they would call it that. He sort of shrank back into himself, as if this was what he had expected, and did not speak again. It was night now and the stars were out, though the moon had not risen. My boots made a crunching sound in the sleet. Soon the lamps of Corinth came into sight, and along the roadside there were women with hot coffee.

  Note

  Historical characters in this book speak the words they spoke and do the things they did at Shiloh. Many of the minor incidents also occurred, even when here they are assigned to fictional persons; I hope the weather is accurate too. This was made possible by the records left by men who were there — in the memoirs of Grant and Sherman, in the series of articles collected under the title Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, and particularly in the reports of officers, forwarded through channels and collected in Volume X of The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. There you hear the live men speak.

  General Johnston's biography, written by his son William Preston Johnston and published by Appleton in 1878, remains the consummate study of Shiloh. It was this book which first drew my interest and it was this book to which I returned most often for information.

  Section Five is based in part on a paper, "Forrest at Shiloh," read by Major G. V. Rambaut before the Confederate Historical Society of Memphis and published in the 19 January 1896 Commercial Appeal. Robert Selph Henry's biography of Forrest, published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1944, contributed much to this section as well as to others.

  The two best modern studies of the battle are found in Lloyd Lewis' Sherman: Fighting Prophet (Harcourt, Brace, 1932) and Stanley F. Horn's The Army of Tennessee (Bobbs-Merrill, 1941)—I have drawn on both.

  Authorities at Shiloh National Military Park gave me the run of the battlefield, surely one of the best preserved in the world, and were invaluable in locating the scenes of action. Also I think no one who studies our Civil War should make a list of acknowledgments without mentioning the photographs of Mathew Brady and the writings of Douglas Southall Freeman.

  —S. F.

  About the Author

  Although he now makes his home in Memphis, Tennessee, Shelby Foote comes from a long line of Mississippians. He was born in Cireenville, Mississippi, and attended school there until he entered the University of North Carolina. During World War II he served in the European theater as a captain of field artillery. He has written six novels: Tournament, Follow Me Down, Love in a Dry Season, Shiloh, Jordan County, and September September. He was awarded three Guggenheim fellowships during the course of writing his monumental three-volume history, The Civil War: A Narrative.