Shiloh Page 4

  Then came Sumter. But at first not even the declaration of war seemed to offer him an opportunity. He served as drill-master of the Galena volunteers, but when the troops marched away he stayed behind because his position was not official. Then his real chance came. The governor made him a colonel in charge of recruit training at a camp near Springfield, and not long afterwards he picked up a St Louis newspaper and read where he'd been made a brigadier. This had been at the insistence of an Illinois congressman who claimed the appointment for Grant as his share of the political spoils. No one was more surprised than Grant himself.

  He was neither pro nor anti on the slavery question, though his father had been an Abolitionist and his wife had kept her two Negroes with her all through her marriage. A proclamation he issued in Kentucky—"I have nothing to do with opinions. I shall deal only with armed rebellion and its aiders and abettors"— first attracted the attention of the government which was having its troubles with generals who were also politicians. But it was not until the Battle of Belmont that they began to see his fighting qualities. Then the double capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, especially the unconditional surrender note he sent to his old friend Buckner, made his name known everywhere.

  This coming great Battle of Corinth will be fought not more than a month from now. The Rebels are massing & we are massing too — & soon I shall go down & get our revenge for Bull Run. After that I’m sure to get a furlough & we shall be together again. It seems so long. Martha, I give you fair warning now — nothing but Unconditional Surrender, I propose to move immediately upon your works. (For goodness sake don’t let anybody see this not even a peek.)

  It gave us confidence just to see Grant ride among us in his rumpled private's blouse, looking calm and composed no matter what came up and always smoking a cigar. (He'd smoked a pipe before. But after Donelson, people sent him so many boxes of cigars he felt obliged to smoke them.) The soldiers never put much stock in all the tales about him drinking and carousing, for we saw him daily in the field. There may have been those little whiskey-lines around his eyes, but they were there before the war. We knew that he had seen to it himself that the whiskey would not get him this time, the way it had done eight years before, and here was how he did it:

  He had an officer on his staff named Rawlins, a young hard-faced man in his late twenties, dark complexioned with stiff black hair to match. He'd been a lawyer in Galena, handling legal affairs for the Grant brothers' leather store; that was how Grant met him. As soon as he made brigadier. Grant sent for Rawlins and put him on his staff. Rawlins had a gruff manner with everyone, the general included. Other staff officers said he was insubordinate twenty times a day. That was what Grant wanted: someone to take him in hand if he ever let up. I saw his bold, hard signature often on papers passing over my desk— Jno A Rawlins —and you could tell, just by the way he wrote it, he wouldn’t take fooling with. There was a saying in the army: "If you hit Rawlins on the head, you’ll knock Grant's brains out," but that wasn’t true. He was not Grant's brains. He was Grant's conscience, and he was a rough one.

  So that was the way it was. There had been flurries of snow at first (the sunny South! we cried) but we were too busy clearing our camp sites to think about marching, anyhow. Soon afterward the weather cleared, half good days, half bad, and Sherman made a practice of sending us down the road toward Corinth on conditioning marches with flankers out and a screen of pickets, just the way it would be when we moved for keeps. It was fine training. Occasionally there would be run-ins with Rebel cavalry, but they would never stand and fight. We'd see them for a moment, gray figures on scampering horses, with maybe a shot or two like hand-claps and a little pearly gob of smoke coming up; then they would vanish. That was part of our training, being shot at.

  It was during this period that Colonel Appier and I began to fall out. He had a wild notion that all members of his command, cooks and clerks and orderlies included, should not only be well-versed in the school of the soldier, but also should take part in all the various tactical exercises. That was all right for theory, perhaps, but of course when it came to putting it into practice it didn’t work. In the first place they made poor soldiers and in the second place it interfered with their regular duties and in the third place it wasn’t fair in the first place. All my clerks complained, and some of them even applied for transfer. One or the other, they said; not both.

  So I went to the colonel and put my cards on the table. He was angry and began to bluster, complaining that he could never get his orders carried out without a lot of grousing. He said all headquarters personnel were born lazy—and he looked straight at me as he said it. Finally he began to hint that maybe I didn’t like being shot at. Well, truth to tell, I had no more fondness for being shot at than the next man, but I wasn’t going to stand there and take that kind of talk, even if he was my regimental commander. I saluted and left. Next morning when I checked the bulletin board I saw that I'd been put on O D for the night.

  If this had been an ordinary, personal sort of feud I would have been enjoying my revenge already. Colonel Appier had been making a fool of himself, the laughingstock of the whole army, for the past three days. He was a highstrung sort of person anyhow, jumpy, given to imagining the whole Rebel army was right outside his tent-flap. Friday afternoon, April fourth, a regiment on our left lost a picket guard of seven men and an officer, gobbled up by the grayback cavalry, and when the colonel advanced a company to develop the situation they ran into scattered firing, nothing serious, and came back without recovering the men.

  All day Saturday Colonel Appier was on tenterhooks. We felt really ashamed for him. Other outfits began to call us the Long Roll regiment because we had sounded the alarm so often. The last straw came that afternoon. A scouting party ran into the usual Rebel horsemen and the colonel sent me back with a message to General Sherman that a large force of the enemy was moving upon us. I was angry anyhow because I had found just that morning that he'd put me on O D that night, and then after dinner he'd made me accompany him on the scout so I wouldn’t have time to get properly ready for guard mount. Now he was adding the crowning indignity by making me carry one of his wild alarms, crying Wolf again for the God-knows-whatth time, back to the general himself. I knew the reception I'd get at division headquarters, especially if Sherman turned that redheaded temper on me. My hope was that he would be away on inspection or something. Then all I would have to put up with would be the jeers of the adjutant and the clerks.

  As luck would have it, I met the general riding down the road toward our position, accompanied by an aide and an orderly. When I told him what Colonel Appier had said, he clamped his mouth in a line. I could see he was angry—he'd received that message from the colonel too many times already. But he didn’t say anything to me; he clapped the spurs to his horse, and soon we came to a clearing where Colonel Appier and some of his staff were standing beside the road with their horses' reins in their hands.

  Colonel Appier began to tell Sherman how many Rebs there were in the woods out front. He was excited; he flung his arms around and stretched his eyes. Sherman sat there patiently, hearing him through and looking into the empty woods. When the colonel had finished, Sherman looked down at him for almost a full minute, saying nothing. Then he jerked the reins, turning his horse toward camp. As he turned he spoke to Colonel Appier directly.

  "Take your damned regiment back to Ohio," he said, snapping the words. "Beauregard is not such a fool as to leave his base of operations and attack us in ours. There is no enemy nearer than Corinth."

  And he rode away. It was certainly a rebuke to Colonel Appier, administered in the presence of his men. I heard at least one of them snigger.

  Charley Gregg has been promoted First Lieut. in Co G. He bought himself an armored vest in Saint Louis & clanks when he walks. The man who sold it to him said if it did not stop bulLet’s, bring it back & he would give him another. Ha Ha! You would not catch me wearing a thing like that — it would be like admitt
ing in public you were afraid. The men make jokes about getting him out with tin snips but Charley likes it & wears it all the time clanking.

  Dawn had come while I was writing my letter. It was cool and clear, the Lord's day and a fine one. Somewhere out front, over toward the right, the pickets already were stirring. There was a rattle of firing from that direction—two groups of soldiers, grayback horsemen and a bunch of our boys, earning a living—but that meant nothing more than that there were some nervous pickets on the line for the first time, itching to bum a little powder and throw a little lead the way they always did, shooting at shadows for the sake of something to write home about. It died away and the birds began to sing.

  The guard tent, facing northwest so that the sun came up in the rear, was out in an open field a few hundred yards short of a swale which crossed the center of the clearing. In the swale there was a small stream with a thin screen of willows and water oaks along its banks. The willows were green already but the oaks had just begun to bud. I could see through the fringe of trees the field continuing for a few more hundred yards to where it ended abruptly against a line of heavy woods at its far margin. Sherman's headquarters tent had been pitched directly in rear of the guard tent, out of sight across the road. Shiloh Chapel was to the right rear, visible through the trees which were tinted blood-red now, the color moving down as the sun rose higher.

  Near at hand but out of sight, between the guard tent and division headquarters, the cooks were up. I could hear two of them talking above the rattle of pots and pans. I could even recognize their voices. One was Lou Treadway; he was from Georgetown. Back home he always had his pockets full of tracts and was ever ready to talk salvation to anyone who would listen—or to anyone who wouldn’t, for that matter. He knew his Bible, cover to cover, and at the drop of a hat he'd expound on a text, usually an obscure one that gave him plenty of room to move around in. He was a little wrong in the head, but a good cook.

  "Take that chapel yonder," he was saying. "It's called Shiloh. You know what that means, brother?"

  "Can’t say I do," the other cook said. By the sound of his voice, he was plenty weary of Lou's eternal preaching. But this was Sunday and Lou was all wound up. There was no way of stopping him.

  "Second Samuel, brother"—I could the same as see him nod his head that positive way he had. "Says it's what the children of Israel, God's chosen, was working toward. Yes: a place for them to lay down their worries. Bible scholars interpret that it means the Place of Peace." And he went on expounding.

  Now mind you Martha, no more reproaching me for not writing long letters that give all the news about myself. Here are three pages of big sheets close written — you cannot say again your husband never writes you long letters. Guard duty would not be so bad if every man could spend it this way writing to the one he misses most.

  Its a beautiful Sunday morn, the sun just coming up. I bet you are sleep in bed. Remember what I said that last night about next time? All the birds are singing.

  Birds were tearing their throats out, hopping around in the budding limbs, and there was a great scampering of animals out front in the thickets. It was fine to be up at that time of the morning, even if it had meant staying up on guard all the night before. I didn’t feel a bit sleepy, but I knew it would come down on me that afternoon. For the first time, this Southern country took on real beauty, or else I was a little drunk from lack of sleep. I forgot about Colonel Appier and the way he was forever ranting because I misspelled a few words in the regimental orders. The countryside looked so good that it reminded me of spring back home in Ohio, when everything is opening and the air is soft with the touch of summer and fragrant with rising sap and bursting buds.

  O my dearest, if only you knew how much I lo

  There was a rattle of sound all across the front of the position, like snapping limbs, and another racket mixed in too, like screaming women. Bango lifted his head, the big yellow eyes still glazed with sleep. I recognized it as the sound of firing, and then there were the thudding booms of cannon. Beyond the swale and through the screen of trees along the stream I saw rabbits and fluttering birds and even a doe with her spotted-backed fawn. She ran with nervous mincing steps, stopping frequently to turn her head back in the direction she had come from.

  Then I saw the skirmishers come through. They looked tall and lean, even across that distance. Beneath their wide-brimmed hats their faces were sharp, and their gray and butternut trousers were wet to the thighs with dew. They carried their rifles slantwise across their bodies, like quail hunters.

  3

  Private Luther Dade

  Rifleman, 6th Mississippi

  When I went to sleep the stars were out and there was even a moon, thin like a sickle and clear against the night, but when I woke up there was only the blackness and the wind sighing high in the treetops. That was what roused me I believe, because for a minute I disremembered where I was. I thought I was back home, woke up early and laying in bed waiting for pa to come with the lantern to turn me out to milk (that was the best thing about the army: no cows) and ma was in the kitchen humming a hymn while she shook up the stove. But then I realized part of the sound was the breathing and snoring of the men all around me, with maybe a whimper or a moan every now and again when the bad dreams came, and I remembered. We had laid down to sleep in what they call Line of Battle and now the night was nearly over. And when I remembered I wished I'd stayed asleep: because that was the worst part, to lie there alone, feeling lonely, and no one to tell you he was feeling the same.

  But it was warm under the blanket and my clothes had dried and I could feel my new rifle through the cloth where I had laid it to be safe from the dew when I wrapped the covers round me. Then it was the same as if they’d all gone away, or I had; I was back home with my brothers and sisters again, myself the oldest by over a year, and they were gathered around to tell me goodbye the way they did a month ago when I left to join up in Corinth after General Beauregard sent word that all true men were needed to save the country. That was the way he said it. I was just going to tell them I would be back with a Yankee sword for the fireplace, like pa did with the Mexican one, when I heard somebody talking in a hard clear voice not like any of my folks, and when I looked up it was Sergeant Tyree.

  "Roll out there," he said. "Roll out to fight."

  I had gone to sleep and dreamed of home, but here I was, away up in Tennessee, further from Ithaca and Jordan County than I'd ever been in all my life before. It was Sunday already and we were fixing to hit them where they had their backs to the river, the way it was explained while we were waiting for our marching orders three days ago. I sat up.

  From then on everything moved fast with a sort of mixed-up jerkiness, like Punch and Judy. Every face had a kind of drawn look, the way it would be if a man was picking up on something heavy. Late ones like myself were pulling on their shoes or rolling their blankets. Others were already fixed. They squatted with their rifles across their thighs, sitting there in the darkness munching biscuits, those that had saved any, and not doing much talking. They nodded their heads with quick flicky motions, like birds, and nursed their rifles, keeping them out of the dirt. I had gotten to know them all in a month and a few of them were even from the same end of the county I was, but now it was like I was seeing them for the first time, different. All the put-on had gone out of their faces—they were left with what God gave them at the beginning.

  We lined up. And while Sergeant Tyree passed among us, checking us one by one to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be, dawn begun to come through, faint and high. While we were answering roll-call the sun rose big and red through the trees and all up and down the company front they begun to get excited and jabber at one another: "The sun of oyster itch," whatever that meant. I was glad to see the sun again, no matter what they called it.

  One minute we were standing there, shifting from leg to leg, not saying much and more or less avoiding each other's eyes: then we were going
forward. It happened that sudden. There was no bugle or drum or anything like that. The men on our right started moving and we moved too, lurching forward through the underbrush and trying to keep the line straight the way we had been warned to do, but we couldn’t. Captain Plummer was cussing. "Dwess it up," he kept saying, cussing a blue streak; "Dwess it up, dod dam it, dwess it up," all the way through the woods. So after a while, when the trees thinned, we stopped to straighten the line.

  There was someone on a tall claybank horse out front, a fine-looking man in a new uniform with chicken guts on the sleeves all the way to his elbows, spruce and spang as a gamecock. He had on a stiff red cap, round and flat on top like a sawed-off dice box, and he was making a speech. "Soldiers of the South!" he shouted in a fine proud voice, a little husky, and everybody cheered. All I could hear was the cheering and yipping all around me, but I could see his eyes light up and his mouth moving the way it will do when a man is using big words. I thought I heard something about defenders and liberty and even something about the women back home but I couldn’t be sure; there was so much racket. When he was through he stood in the stirrups, raising his cap to us as we went by, and I recognized him. It was General Beauregard, the man I'd come to fight for, and I hadn’t hardly heard a word he said.

  We stayed lined up better now because we were through the worst of the briers and vines, but just as we got going good there was a terrible clatter off to the right, the sound of firecrackers mixed with a roaring and yapping like a barn full of folks at a Fourth of July dogfight or a gouging match. The line begun to crook and weave because some of the men had stopped to listen, and Captain Plummer was cussing them, tongue-tied. Joe Marsh was next to me—he was nearly thirty, middle-aged, and had seen some battle up near Bowling Green. "There you are," he said, slow and calm and proud of himself. "Some outfit has met the elephant." That was what the ones who had been in action always called it: the elephant.