Shiloh Page 7

  There were five in the group I joined, not counting the dog. The man that had him said he was a Tennessee hound, a redbone, but he looked more like a Tennessee walking-horse. At first I thought he was shot up bad: there was clotted blood and patches of torn skin all over his hide. But the fellow said he wasn’t even scratched. "He's demoralized—like you," the fellow said, grinning. Then he told how it happened.

  "I was on Guard last night," he said. He had that Ohio way of talking, bearing down hard on the R's. "We come off post at four and went to our bunks at the back of the guard tent. Just before dawn my Tennessee quickstep signaled me a hurry-up call for the bushes, and when I went out I saw the officer of the day (Captain Fountain, from up at Regimental) sitting at the table out front, writing a letter by lamp-light. The dog was at his feet, asleep, but when I went past he raised his head and looked at me with those big round yellow eyes, then dropped his jaw back on his paws and went to sleep again. When I come back he didn’t even look up. He was our mascot, knew every man in the 53d by sight. We named him Bango the day he joined up. —Well, I woke up it was daylight and all outside the tent there was a racket and a booming. 'That’s cannon,' I said to myself, still half asleep; 'we're attacked!' and grabbed my gun and started for the front of the tent. But there was a terrible bang and a flash before I got there, smoke enough to blind you. It cleared some then and I saw what had happened. A rebel shell had come through the tent fly and landed square on top of Captain Fountain. It went off in his lap before he had time to so much as know what hit him. There wasn’t much of him left.

  It blew blood and guts all over the dog, scared him so bad he wasn’t even howling—he was just laying there making little whimpering sounds, bloody as a stuck hog, trembling all over and breathing in shallow pants. I went out and formed with the others. But soon as Colonel Appier seen the johnnies coming across the field, he got down behind a log and hollered: 'Retreat! Save yourselves!' Well, I know a sensible order when I hear one, and if anybody asks me what I'm doing back here, I'll say I'm where my colonel sent me. Which is more than most of you can say.—On the way to the rear I passed the guard tent again and there was Bango the same as before, laying there whimpering with the captain's blood all over him. So I brought him back here with me to see could he get himself together again. But he don’t seem to be doing so good, does he?"

  He reached down and stroked the dog on the muzzle, but Bango didn’t pay him any heed. He just lay there, belly close to the sand, breathing quick Little breaths up high in his throat, eyes all rimmed with red. I could see his hide quiver under the dried blood.

  I said, “Whyn’t you take him down to the river and wash him off?"

  "Well, I Don’t know," the Ohio man said. "I think maybe if he gets another shock he might start snap-

  Seeing the size of those jaws, I couldn’t blame him. After all, when you came right down to it, he was a Rebel dog anyhow. There was no telling what he'd do.

  The other three men had told their stories, and they were all three pretty much the same. They told how they had stayed in line and fought till they saw it was no use staying, and went. I told how it had been with me, how I hung on till things came to pieces that third time, and then walked off the same as the others had done. I told them what Sergeant Buterbaugh had said about the men that were walking away, that they weren’t necessarily cowards; they were just demoralized from losing their confidence. That was when this Michigander said it was all hogwash. We were all cowards back here, he said—and then wouldn’t get up and fight.

  When it began we were in position on the right of the Corinth road at the edge of a strip of woods where our tents were pitched. There was a big open field on the left of the road. Captain Hickenlooper's Ohio battery was advanced into the field. The infantry was in camp along our front and some more were in our rear. We'd been there two days.

  At three o’clock that morning I lay warm in my blankets and heard the advance party going out on a scout. I knew the time for I took out granddaddy's watch and looked at it. This party was going out because General Prentiss had had a feeling all the day before that something spooky was going on out front. I went back to sleep then, feeling glad I was in the artillery and didn’t have to be up beating the bushes for rebs at blue o’clock in the morning. Almost before I had time to know I was asleep I heard them coming back and the long roll sounding.

  By sunup we were posted at the guns, watching the infantry come past. They had a serious look on their faces but they still could Joke with us. "You easy-living boys had better get set," they said. "There's johnnies out there thicker than fleas on a billy goat in a barnlot."

  We didn’t see them, though, for a long time. This was what we'd been training for all those weeks of rollcall and drill, greasing caissons and gun carriages, tending the horses and standing inspection, cleaning limber chests and sorting ammunition. We were downright glad it had come, and all the fellows began making jokes at one another about who was going to funk it. The Hickenlooper boys would call over to us, wanting to know how Minnesota was feeling today, and we'd call back, telling them they’d better be worrying about Ohio; Minnesota was all right; Minnesota could take care of herself.

  All this time there was a ruckus over on the right. It rolled back and forth, getting louder and more furious with yelling mixed up in it. But still they didn’t come. We kept expecting word to limber and move in the direction of the firing. We didn’t like it, waiting that way. It was the same old story—hurry up; wait —while the sound of the shooting swelled and died and swelled again. Everybody began asking questions:

  "Ain’t they coming this way, Butterball?"

  "Yair, sergeant: when are they coming this way?"

  "Bide your time," he said. "They’ll be here all right."

  "I wish if they was coming they’d come on."

  "They’ll be here," Sergeant Buterbaugh said.

  He was a college man, up for a commission, and to tell the truth I never liked him. But he had a way of saying things—he knew all the stars, for instance, and could tell you their names.

  Sure enough, soon as the words were out of his mouth the infantry began popping away and smoke began lazing up from the bushes out front. I couldn’t see what they were shooting at. Far as I could tell, they were banging away at nothing to keep themselves amused the way pickets sometimes do. Captain Munch walked up and down, going from gun to gun and saying, "Steady. Steady, men," like he thought we might take a notion to go into a dance or something. We stood at cannoneers' posts, ready to fire whenever he gave us a target. I was on the handspike because of my size. Then the firing stepped up. Smoke began to roll and drift back against us. There was a high yip-ping sound somewhere out in front of the smoke, like a cage full of beagles at feeding time.

  They didn’t come the way I thought at all. I thought it would be the same as on parade, long lines of men marching with their flags spanking the wind, sleeves and pants legs flapping in cadence, and us standing at our posts the way it was in gun drill, mowing them down. But they didn’t come Like that. They came in dribLet’s, scattered all across the front and through the woods, no two of them moving the same way, running from bush to bush like mice or rabbits. No sooner I'd see a man than he would be gone again. The only thing that stayed put was the smoke—it boiled up a dirty gray and rolled along the ground with little stabs of yellow and pink flicking in it where the muzzles flashed. There was a humming in the air like in the orchard back home when the bees swarmed, only more so.

  But Captain Munch began to sing out commands, and from then on it was hot work, ram and prime and touch her off, roll her back and load again. All six guns were going full time, throwing big balls of fire and smoke out over the battery front, and we were cheering while we fired. I couldn’t see it very well but the captain was bringing us in on a regiment drawn up at the far end of the field. We had the range, about a thousand yards, and we could see the flags go down fluttering and the men milling around while the balls chewed up thei
r ranks.

  During a pause, while I stood at the trail and the rest were out front swabbing the bore, I looked over to the right and saw the gun in the next platoon lying on its side, one of its wheels splintered to the hub and the other one canted up at an angle. I couldn’t think what had done that to it, except maybe a premature, when all of a sudden the ground between the two guns flicked up, throwing dirt at me the way water would splash if you slapped it with a plank, and when I opened my eyes there was a little trench scooped out, about eight inches wide and maybe half that deep, and I knew what did it. Nothing but a cannonball did that—there must be a rebel battery ranging in on us. But if I wasn’t sure then I knew it soon after, for here came another one and I saw it coming: a ricochet—it bounced along, whooing and bouncing, hitting the ground every twenty feet or so. I got the wild idea it somehow had a mind of its own.

  That’s coming my way, I thought. That one's for me.

  But it struck in front, took an extra hard bounce, and sailed right over the gun, exactly down the line of the tube and the trail—I could almost feel it in my hair. It made a whuffing sound going over; I could see the fuze lobbing around on one side of it, sputtering. I looked to see where it was going and saw it go past Captain Munch on the bounce, spinning him around sideways like a man hit by a runaway horse, and go on into the woods, rooting and banging the trees till it went off with a big orange-colored flash, the fragments singing, clipping leaves and twigs. Captain Munch just laid there and directly some men ran over and picked him up and carried him off to one side.

  Then there were infantry running between the guns. Some looked back over their shoulders every now and then as they ran, but most of them had their heads down, going hard for the rear without their rifles. Their faces were pale as paper, their eyes kind of wild-looking, like a child's when you say Boo at him coming round a corner. There were horses mixed up in it (I had forgot there were horses in war; it seemed all wrong) and Sergeant Buterbaugh had me by the arm, shaking me, and I could see his mouth moving but the words did not get through. The horses kicked and plunged and I saw what it was. They were limbering for a displacement. I snagged a caisson getting under way and held on tight while it jounced and rattled across the furrows of a field. I was so busy trying to stay on (—we lost two that way; they flew off, arms outstretched like big birds, and landed in the dust, not making a sound) I didn’t see where we were going. Next thing I knew, we were off to the side of the road preparing for action again, only this time we had four guns instead of six and now Lieutenant Pfaender was battery commander.

  "Action rear!" Sergeant Buterbaugh was yelling. The horses were lathered and blown. "Action rear!"

  But it was the same thing again, the same identical business. By the time we got off a few rounds, the infantry began passing us with that scared look on their faces. And there was the same mixup when the johnnies got our range. The horses came plunging up with the bits in their teeth, and then we were limbered and off again. The only real difference was that this time we didn’t lose any guns or men. It seemed that just when we got set to do some good, word came down to clear out or be captured.

  The third position was different. It was near midday by then and General Prentiss had drawn the whole division in a line along an old sunken road that wound through the woods. What was left of our battery was split in two, one section two hundred yards beyond the other, both just in rear of the road and the Line of infantry. They had their dander up now, they said; they didn’t intend to give up any more ground. Every man built a little pile of cartridges beside him and lay down in the sunken road with his rifle up on the shoulder. "Let 'em come on now'' they said, talking through their gritted teeth. Their mouths were set kind of rigid-like but there was still a worried look around their eyes. I wondered if they meant it.

  They meant it. We were there four hours, and surely that was the hardest fighting of this or any war. This time it was almost the way I had imagined it would be. They came at us in rows, flags flapping and everything, and we stood to our guns and cut them down. When we gave them a volley, rifles and cannon, their line would shake and weave from end to end like a wounded snake, and they would come on, trampling the blackberry bushes until we thought this time they were coming right over us, but then they would break and fall back over their dead and there would be a lull, but not for long, and they would come at us again. It didn’t seem to me that they were men like us, not only because of the way they were dressed (they wore all kinds of uniforms; some even had on white—we called these their graveyard clothes) but mostly because of the way they wouldn’t stop. They took killing better than any natural men would ever do, and they had a way of yelling that didn’t sound even partly human, high and quavery, away up in their throats, without any brain behind it.

  After we had been there three-four hours I began to notice that the gun was harder and harder to roll back into position. Fighting like that, you expected casualties. But then I saw that all the missing ones weren’t leaving because they’d been wounded. A man would stand there during a lull and there would be something come over his face like you see on the faces of children just before they bust out crying—sort of bulged around the mouth and shifty-eyed—and then he would start walking, not even looking round, not paying any attention to anyone that called out to him. He was heading for the rear; he'd had enough. He'd had enough and he didn’t care who knew it.

  Corporal Keller was cussing and calling them cowards (it was during a lull; two more had just walked off) but Sergeant Buterbaugh said no, they weren’t necessarily cowards; they were just demoralized from losing confidence. He was always coming out with something like that, serious, high-sounding —Butterball's jawbreakers, we called them. But this time he really hit the nail on the head. What he said stayed with me from then on, stayed in my mind, especially later when I was making for the rear myself.

  I never would have done a thing like that, never in all the world, but when word came to prepare to displace again, it seemed like all the spark went out of me. Maybe it was gone already but I think not. I was proud of the way we'd held them—I think that did it more than anything: to think you’d done so well and then to be told it was all for nothing. All of a sudden I felt dog-tired, miserable.

  Sergeant Buterbaugh was looking at me a peculiar way, and I knew my face was showing the same thing all those other faces had showed. And I began to walk to the rear. Lieutenant Pfaender was calling after me: "Flickner! Flickner!" but I went on, through the blackjack scrubs. He called me again: "Flickner! Flickner!" but I went on. I suppose by then he saw I really meant it, the same as all the others, and then he didn’t call me anymore.

  My daddy took pride in telling how my grand-daddy had fought against Napoleon in the old country. It disappointed him that I never showed any interest in such things, that I wouldn’t even bother to learn the language. I'd explain: "This is a new country. We don’t need those stories from the old one." It seemed so wrong, so out of place, hearing about Napoleon, when I could see right through the living-room window the big rolling Minnesota prairie with the tall wheat shimmering in the sunlight. But it made him sad, hearing me say that; he'd shake his head from side to side and stroke his beard with a hurt look in his eyes, muttering German.

  When I joined up and came home with the enlistment paper to show him, he took the watch and chain off the front of his vest and gave it to me, showing me how to wind it in two places, one to make it keep time and the other to make it strike the hours. Two of my brothers had already signed up and left but he hadn’t given it to them. "Here," he said. "Wear this. Otto. It was your grossfather's that he wore when he went against the man you don’t want I should mention. I hope you will do as well with it against this Jeffy Davis." You’d have thought it was a gun or a sword or something.

  I swapped the chain for a trip down the line in St Louis and hung the watch on a string around my neck. It was safer that way anyhow. And as I went back through the woods on the way to the Landing, fe
eling it bump against my chest beneath my jacket, I wondered if it ever ticked off any seconds for my granddaddy when he was running from Napoleon. You think strange things when something has happened to you that you know is going to change your life. But I took some comfort remembering what Buterbaugh had said. Those men weren’t cowards, he said; they were just demoralized from losing confidence. And that was the way it was with me, exactly.

  As I got nearer the place where the roads came together to lead down to the Landing I saw more and more men making for the rear. We had all come up this way, debarking from the transports, and we remembered that high bluff (some I suppose had been remembering it ever since the first shots fired that morning, the way it reared up a hundred feet tall between the river and the fighting) and when the going got too rough, that was the one safe place that stood out in our minds. Some had been hurt, carrying an arm buttoned into the front of their jackets or crippling along with a musket for a crutch or wearing a shirtsleeve for a bandage like a turban round their heads. Every now and again there would be a well man helping a hurt one, but generally they walked alone, not looking at the others. I got a notion they were not only trying to get away from the fighting, they were trying to walk right out of the human race.

  Roads led from all corners of the battlefield up to a place on top of the bluff where they came together to form one road giving down to the Landing. We could see the water from there, steamboats at the wharf and two gunboats anchored upstream with cannons run out and sailors loafing on deck to watch the fun. The way we came together at the top of the bluff, going downhill on that one road, we were like grains of sand passing through a funnel. But that was only for a time. Once we were past this place, the spout of the funnel, we fanned out again, spreading up and down the riverbank, and sat there watching the others.