Shiloh Read online

  I saw his face from below, but he had bent down and his eyebrows were drawn in a straight line like a black bar over his eyes. He was full-grown, with a wide brown mustache; I could see the individual hairs on each side of the shaved line down the middle. I'd have had to say Sir to him back home. Then something hit my arm a jar—I stumbled against him, lifting my rifle and falling sideways. Ee! I'm killed! I thought. He turned with me and we were falling, first a slow fall the way it is in dreams, then sudden, and the ground came up and hit me: ho! We were two feet apart, looking at each other. He seemed even bigger now, up close, and there was something wrong with the way he looked. Then I saw why.

  My bayonet had gone in under his jaw, the hand-guard tight against the bottom of his chin, and the point must have stuck in his head bone because he appeared to be trying to open his mouth but couldn’t. It was like he had a mouthful of something bitter and couldn’t spit—his eyes were screwed up, staring at me and blinking a bit from the strain. All I could do was look at him; I couldn’t look away, no matter how I tried. A man will look at something that is making him sick but he can’t stop looking until he begins to vomit —something holds him. That was the way it was with me. Then, while I was watching him, this fellow reached up and touched the handle of the bayonet under his chin. He touched it easy, using the tips of his fingers, tender-like. I could see he wanted to grab and pull it out but he was worried about how much it would hurt and he didn’t dare.

  I let go of the rifle and rolled away. There were bluecoats running across the field and through the woods beyond. All around me men were kneeling and shooting at them like rabbits as they ran. Captain Plummer and two lieutenants were the only officers left on their feet. Two men were bent over Colonel Thornton where they had propped him against a tree with one of his legs laid crooked. Captain Plummer wasn’t limping now—he'd forgotten his blisters, I reckon. He wasn’t even hurt, so far as I could see, but the skirt of his coat was ripped where somebody had taken a swipe at him with a bayonet or a saber.

  He went out into the open with a man carrying the colors, and then begun to wave his sword and call in a high voice: "6th Mississippi, wally here! 6th Mississippi, wally here!"

  Men begun straggling over, collecting round the flag, so I got up and went over with them. We were a sorry lot. My feet were so heavy I could barely lift them, and I had to carry my left arm with my right, the way a baby would cradle a doll. The captain kept calling, "Wally here! 6th Mississippi, wally here!" but after a while he saw there weren’t any more to rally so he gave it up. There were a little over a hundred of us, all that were left out of the four hundred and twenty-five that went in an hour before.

  Our faces were gray, the color of ashes. Some had powder bums red on their cheeks and foreheads and running back into singed patches in their hair. Mouths were rimmed with grime from biting cartridges, mostly a long smear down one comer, and hands were blackened with burnt powder off the ramrods. We'd aged a lifetime since the sun came up. Captain Plummet was calling us to rally, rally here, but there wasn’t much rally left in us. There wasn’t much left in me, anyhow. I felt so tired it was all I could do to make it to where the flag was. I was worried, too, about not having my rifle. I remembered what Sergeant Tyree was always saying: "Your rifle is your best friend. Take care of it." But if that meant pulling it out of the man with the mustache, it would just have to stay there. Then I looked down and be durn if there wasn’t one just like it at my feet. I picked it up, stooping and nursing my bad arm, and stood there with it.

  Joe Marsh was next to me. At first I didn’t know him. He didn’t seem bad hurt, but he had a terrible look around the eyes and there was a knot on his forehead the size of a walnut where some Yank had bopped him with a rifle butt. I thought to ask him how the' Tennessee breed of elephant compared with the Kentucky breed, but I didn’t. He looked at me, first in the face till he finally recognized me, then down at my arm.

  "You better get that tended to."

  "It don’t hurt much," I said.

  "All right. Have it your way."

  He didn’t pay me any mind after that. He had lorded it over me for a month about being a greenhorn, yet here I was, just gone through meeting as big an elephant as any he had met, and he was still trying the same high-and-mightiness. He was mad now because he wasn’t the only one who had seen some battle. He'd had his big secret to throw up to us, but not anymore. We all had it now.

  We were milling around like ants when their hill is upset, trying to fall-in the usual way, by platoons and squads, but some were all the way gone and others had only a couple of men. So we gave that up and just fell-in in three ranks, not even making a good-sized company. Captain Plummet went down the line, looking to see who was worst hurt. He looked at the way I was holding my arm. "Bayonet?"

  "Yes sir."

  "Cut you bad?"

  "It don’t hurt much, captain. I just can’t lift it no higher than this."

  He looked me in the face, and I was afraid he thought I was lying to keep from fighting any more. "All wight," he said. "Fall out and join the others under that twee."

  There were about two dozen of us under it when he got through, including some that hadn’t been able to get in ranks in the first place. They were hacked up all kinds of ways. One had lost an ear and he was the worst worried man of the lot; "Does it look bad?" he kept asking, wanting to know how it would seem to the folks back home. We sat under the tree and watched Captain Plummet march what was left of the regiment away. They were a straggly lot. We were supposed to wait there under the tree till the doctor came.

  We waited, hearing rifles clattering and cannons booming and men yelling further and further in the woods, and the sun climbed up and it got burning hot. I could look back over the valley where we had charged. It wasn’t as wide as it had been before. There were men left all along the way, lying like bundles of dirty clothes. I had a warm, lazy feeling, like on a summer Sunday in the scuppernong arbor back home; next thing I knew I was sound asleep. Now that was strange. I was never one for sleeping in the daytime, not even in that quiet hour after dinner when all the others were taking their naps.

  When I woke up the sun was past the overhead and only a dozen or so of the wounded were still there. The fellow next to me (he was hurt in the leg) said they had drifted off to find a doctor. "Ain’t no doctor coming here," he said. "They ain’t studying us now we're no more good to them." He had a flushed look, like a man in a fever, and he was mad at the whole army, from General Johnston down to me.

  My arm was stiff and the blood had dried on my sleeve. There was just a slit where the bayonet blade went in. It felt itchy, tingling in all directions from the cut, like the spokes of a wheel, but I still hadn’t looked at it and I wasn’t going to. All except two of the men under the tree were leg wounds, not counting myself, and those two were shot up bad around the head. One was singing a song about the bells of Tennessee but it didn’t make much sense.

  "Which way did they go?"

  "Ever which way," one said.

  "Yonder ways, mostly," another said, and pointed over to the right. The shooting was a long way off now, loudest toward the right front. It seemed reasonable that the doctors would be near the loudest shooting.

  I thought I would be dizzy when I stood up but I felt fine, light on my feet and tingly from not having moved for so long. I walked away nursing my arm. When I reached the edge of the field I looked back.

  They were spread around the tree trunk, sprawled out favoring their wounds. I could hear that crazy one singing the Tennessee song.

  I walked on, getting more and more light-headed, till finally it felt Like I was walking about six inches off the ground. I thought I was still asleep, dreaming, except for the ache in my arm. And I saw things no man would want to see twice. There were dead men all around, Confederate and Union, some lying where they fell and others up under bushes where they’d crawled to keep from getting trampled. There were wounded men too, lots of them, wandering around
like myself, their faces dazed and pale from losing blood and being scared.

  I told myself: You better lay down before you fall down. Then I said: No, you’re not bad hurt; keep going. It was like an argument, two voices inside my head and neither one of them mine:

  You better lay down.

  —No: you feel fine.

  You’ll fall and they’ll never find you.

  —That’s not true. You’re just a little light-headed. You’ll be all right.

  No you won’t. You’re hurt. You’re hurt worse than you think. Lay down.

  They went on like that, arguing, and I followed the road, heading south by the sun until I came to a log cabin with a cross on its ridgepole and a little wooden signboard, hand-lettered: Shiloh Meeting House. It must have been some kind of headquarters now because there were officers inside, bending over maps, and messengers kept galloping up with papers.

  I took a left where the road forked, and just beyond the fork there was a sergeant standing with the reins of two horses going back over his shoulder. When I came up he looked at me without saying anything.

  "Where is a doctor?" I asked him. My voice sounded strange from not having used it for so long.

  "I don’t know, bud," he said. But he jerked his thumb down the road toward the sound of the guns. "Should be some of them up there, back of where the fighting is." He was a Texan, by the sound of his voice; it came partly through his nose.

  So I went on down the road. It had been a line of battle that morning, the dead scattered thick on both sides. I was in a fever by then, thinking crazy, and it seemed to me that all the dead men got there this way:

  God was making men and every now and then He would do a bad job on one, and He would look at it and say, "This one won’t do," and He would toss it in a tub He kept there, maybe not even finished with it. And finally, 6 April 1862, the tub got full and God emptied it right out of heaven and they landed here, along this road, tumbled down in all positions, some without arms and legs, some with their heads and bodies split open where they hit the ground so hard.

  I was in a fever bad, to think a thing like that. So there's no telling how long I walked or how far, but I know I came near covering that battlefield from flank to flank. It must have been a couple of hours and maybe three miles, but far as I was concerned it could have been a year and a thousand miles. At first all I wanted was a doctor. Finally I didn’t even want that. All I wanted was to keep moving. I had an idea if I stopped I wouldn’t be able to start again. That kept me going.

  I didn’t notice much along the way, but once I passed an open space with a ten-acre peach orchard in bloom at the far end and cannons puffing smoke up through the blossoms. Great crowds of men were trying to reach the orchard—they would march up in long lines and melt away; there would be a pause and then other lines would march up and melt away. Then I was past all this, in the woods again, and I came to a little gully where things were still and peaceful, like in another world almost; the guns seemed far away. That was the place for me to stop, if any place was. I sat down, leaning back against a stump, and all the weariness came down on me at once. I knew I wouldn’t get up then, not even if I could, but I didn’t mind.

  I didn’t mind anything. It was Like I was somewhere outside myself, looking back. I had reached the stage where a voice can tell you it is over, you’re going to die, and that is all right too. Dying is as good as living, maybe better. The main thing is to be left alone, and if it takes dying to be let alone, a man thinks: All right, let me die. He thinks: Let me die, then.

  This gully was narrow and deep, really a little valley, less than a hundred yards from ridge to ridge. The trees were thick but I could see up to the crest in each direction. There were some dead men and some wounded scattered along the stream that ran through, but I think they must have crawled in after water—there hadn’t been any fighting here and there weren’t any bulLet’s in the trees. I leaned back against the stump, holding my arm across my lap and facing the forward ridge. Then I saw two horsemen come over, side by side, riding close together, one leaning against the other. The second had his arm around the first, holding him in the saddle.

  The second man was in civilian clothes, a boxback coat and a wide black hat. It was Governor Harris; I used to see him when he visited our brigade to talk to the Tennessee boys—electioneering, he called it; he was the Governor of Tennessee. The first man had his head down, reeling in the saddle, but I could see the braid on his sleeves and the wreath of stars on his collar. Then he lolled the other way, head rolling, and I saw him full in the face. It was General Johnston.

  His horse was shot up, wounded in three legs, and his uniform had little rips in the cape and trouser-legs where minie balls had nicked him. One bootsole flapped loose, cut crossways almost through. In his right hand he held a tin cup, one of his fingers still hooked through the handle. I heard about the cup afterwards—he got it earlier in the day. He was riding through a captured camp and one of his lieutenants came out of a Yank colonel's tent and showed him a fine brier pipe he'd found there. General Johnston said "None of that. Sir. We are not here for plunder." Then he must have seen he'd hurt the lieutenant’s feelings, for he leaned down from his horse and picked up this tin cup off a table and said, "Let this be my share of the spoils today," and used it instead of a sword to direct the battle.

  They came down the ridge and stopped under a big oak at the bottom, near where I was, and Governor Harris got off between the horses and eased the general down to the ground. He began to ask questions, trying to make him answer, but he wouldn’t —couldn’t. He undid the general's collar and unfastened his clothes, trying to find where he was shot, but he couldn’t find it. He took out a bottle and tried to make him drink (it was brandy; I could smell it) but he wouldn’t swallow, and when Governor Harris turned his head the brandy ran out of his mouth.

  Then a tall man, wearing the three stars of a colonel, came hurrying down the slope, making straight for where General Johnston was laid out on the ground. He knelt down by his side, leaning forward so that their faces were close together, eye to eye, and begun to nudge him on the shoulder and speak to him in a shaky voice: "Johnston, do you know me. Johnston, do you know me?"

  But the general didn’t know him; the general was dead. He still looked handsome, lying there with his eyes glazing over.

  4

  Private Otto Flickner

  Cannoneer, 1st Minnesota Battery

  He would have reached about to my chin if he'd stood up, but he wouldn’t; he just sat there. When I asked him to rise and take his punishment for calling me a coward, he said: "If you’re so allfired brave, sonny, what you doing back here with us skulkers then?"

  "I ain’t scared the way you made out," I said. "I'm what they call demoralized."

  "Yair?"

  "It's just I lost my confidence."

  "Yair?" He kept saying that.

  "Get up here, I'll show you."

  But he wouldn’t. He just sat there hugging his knees and looking at me with a lop-sided grin on his face. "If what you want's a fight, go up the bluff. That’s where the fighting is." Then he said, still grinning:

  "I’ve already showed the whole wide world I'm yellow."

  I intended to jump him, sitting or no, but what can you do when a man talks like that? saying right out in front of God and everybody that he's scared; it would be the same as fighting something you found when you picked up a rotted log. The others thought it was fun, guffawed at hearing him talk that way. They could laugh about it now—they had got used to being scared and now they made jokes about it.

  They would come down from above looking shamefaced but after a while, when they’d been down here an hour, they’d brighten up and begin to bluster, bragging about how long they held their ground before they broke. "I’ve done my part," they’d say, wagging their heads. But they were all thinking the selfsame thing: I might be a disgrace to my country. I might be a coward, even. But I’m not up there in those woods get
ting shot at.

  And I must admit I had it reasoned the same way. You would form at the warning and get set for some honest fighting, stand up and slug, and they’d come squalling that wild crazy yell—not even human, hardly—and you would stand there at the guns throwing solid shot, then canister and grape, holding them good. And then, sure enough, word would come to bring up the horses: it was time to retire to a new position because some paddle-foot outfit on your left or right was giving way and you had to fall back to keep from getting captured. Twice was all right—you thought maybe that was the way it was supposed to be. But three times was once too often. Men began to walk away, making for the rear. When Lieutenant Pfaender called to them to stand-to they’d just keep walking, not even looking round. So finally, after the third time, I walked too. So much is enough but a little bit more is too much.

  There were ten thousand of us under the bluff before the day was through (—that’s the number I heard told and I believe it) —some scrunched down on the sand where the bluff reared up a hundred feet in the air, others going along the riverbank downstream to where they could wade or swim the creek and get away. "I killed as many of them as they did of me," some said, and laughed. All the time there was this thumping of guns and this ripping sound of rifles from up above, and every now and then the rebel cheering would get louder when they took another camp.

  We were all ranks down here, though you couldn’t tell just which in most cases because they had torn off their chevrons and shoulder straps and all you could see was the broken threads that had held them on. In some cases you couldn’t even tell that, for they’d even picked the threads out, those that had the time. But that didn’t work either because you could still see the darker patches where the sun and rain had weathered the cloth around the place where they’d been sewed.

  They made a complaint, blaming their officers and telling how the lieutenants and captains didn’t know any more about soldiering than the privates. When they first came down they would keep their backs turned, not speaking to anybody, still trembling from the scare. But after a while they’d look around and begin to feel better. Then they would start talking, just a Little at first, sort of feeling the others out, then all together, every man trying to tell his story at the same time. They collected in groups of anywhere from three to thirty, hunkered up side by side and talking or just sitting there looking to see who they could recognize in the crowd. When they saw somebody they knew, their eyes would say: If you won’t tell on me I won’t on you, but not out loud.