Shiloh (3 page)

And that wasn’t all. When the sun came out, their spirits
rose; everything that had been pent up in them during three days of marching
and waiting in the rain came out with the sun. They began to shoot at birds and
rabbits along the road. West of Mickey's, within two miles of the Federal
outposts, I watched an entire regiment bang away at a little five-point buck
that ran the length of the column down a field adjoining the road. They were
Tennessee troops who prided themselves on their marksmanship, but so far as I
could tell, not a ball came within ten feet of that buck; he went into the
woods at the far end of the field, flaunting his white suit. It was about this
time, too, that many of the men began to tune up their yells, screaming like
wild Indians just for the fun of it.

And that was not all, either. At one point Saturday evening
Beauregard heard a drum rolling, but when he sent orders to have it silenced,
the messenger came back and reported that it couldn’t be done—the drum was in
the Union camp. Beauregard reasoned that if he could hear enemy drumtaps, there
was small doubt that the Federals had heard the random firing and whooping in
the Confederate column. Our whole advantage lay in surprising them, he
believed, and since we plainly had lost all chance for surprise, it was best to
call off the attack until another time. That was when he rode away and located
Bragg and Bishop Polk, to whom he had been giving his opinion about abandoning
the battle plans when General Johnston came up and decided against him.
"I'd fight them if they were a million," the general said.

While the troops were deploying for battle, three lines of
ten thousand men each, with the reserve of six thousand massed in the rear and
cavalry guarding the flanks at the two creeks, the sun set clear and red beyond
the tasseling oaks on tomorrow's battlefield. There was a great stillness in
the blue dusk, and then the stars came out. The moon, which had risen in the
daylight sky, was as thin as a paring, a sickle holding water but unclouded. I
never saw the moon so high, so remote—a dead star lighting a live one where
forty thousand men, young and old but mostly young, slept on their arms in line
of battle, ready for the dawn attack through the woods before them. God knows
what dreams came to them or how many lay there sleepless thinking of home.

General Johnston slept in an ambulance wagon. We staff
members unrolled our blankets about a small campfire, and for a while we lay
there watching the firelight flicker. Every now and then there would be a scrap
of talk, mainly about how good it was that the weather had cleared, but it wouldn’t
last long; presently it would break off of itself, the way talk will do when
the speaker has his mind fixed on something that has nothing to do with
whatever he is talking about. Finally there was only the deep, regular
breathing of the sleepers and the quiet night beyond the low dome of light from
the fire and the high dim stars coming clearer as the embers paled.

I thought of my father, who had been a soldier himself and
lost an arm in Texas fighting under the same man I would fight under tomorrow,
and of my mother who died when I was born and whom I knew only as a Sully
portrait over the mantel in my father's study and some trunks of clothes stored
in the attic of the house in New Orleans. It seemed strange. It seemed strange
that they had met and loved and gone through all that joy and pain, living and
dying so that I could lie by a Tennessee campfire under a spangled reach of
April sky, thinking of them and the
Hfe
that had
produced me.

Then all at once, as I was falling asleep, I remembered
Sherman that Christmas Eve at the academy in Louisiana, the way his tears were
bright against his red beard as he walked up and down the room where the headline
in the paper told of the secession of South Carolina. I was seventeen then, a
long time ago. "You are bound to fail," he said. "In the end you’ll
surely fail."

Now somewhere beyond that rim of firelight, sleeping in his
headquarters tent on the wooded plateau between those two creeks, he probably
had long since forgotten me and all the other cadets. Certainly he never imagined
some of them were sleeping in the woods within a mile of him, ready to break
upon his camp before sunup.

Again the sleep came down, but just before it closed all the
way, I saw again the vision that had come to me a hundred times before: The
battle is raging, flags flapping in the wind and cannon booming, but everything
shrinks to one little scene: Sherman in the Yankee brigadier's uniform and
myself facing him, holding him prisoner, the pistol level between us. "You
see," I say. "You were wrong. You said we would fail but you were
wrong," and he says: "Yes: I was wrong. I was wrong, all right,"
watching the pistol, the tears still bright in his beard.

I had thought I wouldn’t sleep. It seemed I ought to make
some sort of reckoning, to look back over my life and sit in judgment on what
I'd done. But it was not that way. After two days in the saddle and a night in
the rain I suppose I was tired enough. Anyway, I went to sleep with nothing on
my mind except those few scattered images of my father with his empty sleeve
and my mother who was only a portrait (bride of quietness I called her once,
remembering the words from Keats, looking up at her looking down out of the
frame, immortal like the Greek girl on the urn) and Sherman surrendering to me
on tomorrow's battlefield. Before I even had time to tell myself I was losing
consciousness, my thought began to take on that smooth bright-flecked whirling
image that comes with sleep; I was nowhere, nowhere at all.

There were no drums or bugles to waken us that morning;
there was a hand on my shoulder, and at first I could not understand.
"Wake up. Wake up." Then I saw Captain O'Hara bending over me and I
knew where I was. All the others were stirring already, some standing and bucking
their swordbelts, some sitting on their rumpled blankets and pulling on their
boots. Last night's fire was gray ashes. That pale light in the tops of the
trees meant dawn was making.

We were sitting there, drinking coffee, when General
Beauregard rode up. His staff was strung out behind him. Their spurs and sabers
jingled pleasantly; their uniforms were sprinkled with drops of dew from the
trees. The general looked fresh and rested. He was wearing a flat red cap and
it gave him a jaunty air—every maiden's idea of a soldier. As he dismounted,
General Johnston stepped out of the ambulance and Beauregard crossed to meet
him. They came toward us, accepting cups of coffee from the general's body
servant, and when they drew near I was surprised to hear Beauregard again
urging a return to Corinth. He was as earnest as before. He said he had heard
Federal bands playing marching songs most of the night and at irregular
intervals there had been bursts of cheering from the direction of the river.
This meant only one thing, he said: Buell had come up, and now there were
seventy thousand men in the Union camp,
intrenched
and expectant, waiting for us to attack.

General Johnston did not say anything. He just stood there
listening, looking quite calm and blowing on the coffee in the tin cup to cool
it. Beauregard made rapid gestures with his hands and shoulders. Suddenly,
catching him in midsentence, there was a rattle of musketry from the right
front. It had a curious ripping sound, like tearing canvas. General Johnston
looked in that direction, the cup poised with a little plume of steam balanced
above it. Everyone looked toward the sound of firing, then back at him.

"The battle has opened, gentlemen," he said.
"It is too late to change our dispositions."

Beauregard mounted and rode away, his staff jingling behind
him. The rest of us went to our horses. When we had mounted. General Johnston
sat for a moment with the reins held loose in his hands, his face quite grave.
The sound of firing grew, spreading along the front. Then he twitched the
reins, and as his big bay horse began to walk toward the opening battle, he
turned in the saddle and spoke to us:

"Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee
River."

2

Captain Walter Fountain

Adjutant, 53d Ohio

I always claimed the adjutant should not even be
on
the O D roster, but when Colonel
Appier ruled otherwise and it came my turn I took it in good grace and did as
efficient a job as I knew how. When he complained next day about me moping
around half dead on my feet, confusing the orders and sending the wrong reports
to the wrong headquarters, I would simply tell him it was his own doing for
putting me on line officer duty. I didn’t require more sleep than the average
man, probably, but without at least a minimum I would certainly doze at my desk
tomorrow.

Earlier, the night was clear. There was a high thin moon and
all the stars were out. However, after the moon went down at half past twelve
you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I had thought that was just
an expression, a manner of speaking; but at four o’clock, when I made the final
rounds with the sergeant, I tried it and it was true. This took careful doing
because many of the men had never been on guard before, and after so much
picket firing yesterday, they were skittish, ready to shoot at their own
shadows. The main thing was not to sneak up on them. I rattled my saber
wherever I went and luckily didn’t get fired on. When we returned to the guard
tent I trimmed the lamp wick, arranged the things on the table, and sat down to
write my letter.

                                                                                     
On Outpost

                                                                                     
Sunday
6 April

Martha
dearest

I head
this letter Sunday because it is long past midnight. Your poor husband has
drawn O D {officer of the day it means) which in turn means he will lose his
sleep — But that is alright because it gives him a chance to write to his best
girl without the interruptions that always bother us so when I try to write at
other times. This will be a nice long letter, the kind your forever asking for.
You know how much I miss you but do not suppose you will mind hearing it again.

The guard tent pen was even worse than usual. While I was
scraping it I could hear, above the scree of the knife against the quill, the
sound of an owl whooing somewhere in the trees outside, enough to give a man
the creeps, and in the rear of the tent the off-duty men were snoring and
coughing the way they always did in this crazy God-forsaken country.

Bango lay with his head outside the circle of light, eyes
shining out of the darkness like big yellow marbles. He was what they call a
Redbone in these parts, the biggest hound I ever saw. He had been our
regimental mascot ever since a day three weeks ago we were marching past one of
these country shanties and he came trotting horse-size out of the yard, making
straight for the color bearer who was scared half to death thinking he would
lose a leg, at least, but the dog fell right into column alongside the colors,
stepping head-high in time to the cadence. A woman stood on the shanty steps,
calling him to come back, come back. Sir, but he wouldn’t pay her any mind.
He'd rejoined the Union, the men said, and they gave him a cheer. The color sergeant
named him Bango that same day. Now he lay there looking at me with his big
yellow eyes, just beyond the golden circle of lamplight.

General Grant saw us out on parade two days ago and held up
the entire column while he got down off his horse to look at Bango. He was
always crazy about animals, even back in the old Georgetown days when I was a
boy and he was driving a logging wagon for his father. He said Bango was the
finest hound he'd ever seen.

You would
not know old Useless Grant if you saw him now. I keep reminding myself he is
the same one that came through home 20 years ago, just out of West Point that
time he drilled the militia. He trembled when he gave commands & was so
thin & pale, you could see he hated it. It’s even harder to connect him
with the man that came back from being booted out of the Army for drinking
&
 
all the tales we heard about him
in St Louis & out in Ill. The men all swear by him because he is a Fighter
— & I think we ought to be proud he is from Georgetown.

It was the operation against Belmont last October in
southeast Missouri across the river from Columbus, Kentucky, that first
attracted public attention to Grant. He attacked the Confederates and routed
them, but his men turned aside to loot the camp instead of pressing the attack,
and the Rebels cowering under the riverbank had time to catch their breath.
When reinforcements came from the opposite shore, they counterattacked and
Grant retreated.

This was no victory. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a
successful campaign. He just went out and came back, losing about as many as he
killed. But the fact that struck everyone was that he had marched in dirty
weather instead of waiting for fair, had kept his head when things went all
against him, and had brought his command back to base with some real fighting
experience under its belt.

By then we were pressing them all along the line. When
Thomas in the east defeated Zollicoffer, wrecking his army, Grant moved against
Middle Tennessee. Gunboats took Fort Henry by bombardment, and when that was
done Grant marched twelve miles overland to Fort Donelson and forced its
surrender in two days of hard fighting. The Rebels in the fort sent a note
asking for terms. Grant wrote back: "No terms except an unconditional and
immediate surrender can be expected. I propose to move immediately upon your
works."