What had happened, Grant—after sending the Q.M. captain with the note—had got impatient waiting for us and at two o’clock, when we still hadn’t come, he sent this major to see what was the delay. The major, surprised at not finding us on the road nearest the river (the left arm of the V) had spurred his horse and caught up with Wallace just in time to prevent our marching directly into the arms of the rebs. That was the first we knew of Grant's being pushed back toward the Landing.
When we got to the turn-around point, within sight of Stony Lonesome again, the sun had dropped almost level with the treetops and we were beginning to fag from the ten-mile hike. But there were six miles left to travel and we went hard, marching up the left arm of the V. Two more of Grant's staff officers were with us by then, Colonel Birdseye McPherson and Captain John Rawlins—I saw them when they doubled back down the column with Wallace. They were egging him and he was chafing under it.
The approach to Snake Creek bridge was through a swamp. By then the sun was all the way gone and we marched in a blue dusk. The boles of trees were pale and the backwater glistened. It was gloomy. Crossing the bridge we saw stragglers wading the creek, in too big a panic to wait for us to clear the bridge; they were in even too big a panic to wait for each other, crowding past with wet feet and flopping pants legs. When we shouted down at them, calling them skulkers and cowards, they yelled back: "You’ll see! You’ll find out!" and such like. They said Grant was whipped and we were marching in for the surrender.
It could have been true. The firing had died for the past hour, and now it was no more than an occasional sputter. We looked at each other, wondering. But when we were across the bridge, onto the flank of the battlefield, we saw that the army was still there, what was left of it, and Buell's men were coming up from the Landing.
Then the rain began. We were put in line on the right of Sherman, along the road we had marched in on. Sherman's men had tales to tell. Most of these were descriptions of how the johnnies had overrun them, but they told some brave ones too. They said a boy in an Ohio regiment had been wounded and sent to the rear but came back a few minutes later and said to his company commander, "Captain, give me a gun. This damned fight ain’t got any rear."
The rain came down harder and lightning flashed. It seemed like a year since we first left Stony Lonesome.
When we had scattered that Crescent outfit, taking a batch of prisoners, we stopped to re-form and then went forward again. It was that way from then on. They wouldn’t stand; they would just wait to ambush us, and every now and then they would come in a rush, screaming and yelling that wild crazy way they had. Sometimes it would shake us a bit, but generally not. They never really pushed it.
The squad worked in two sections: Sergeant Bonner with Klein and Diffenbuch, Amory, Pope and Holliday; Corporal Blake with myself and Pettigrew, Grissom and Lavery. About four o’clock Diffenbuch got hit in the shoulder and we left him leaned against a tree. Diffenbuch was always a quiet one, and he didn’t have much to say even then.
Raymond was coming and going but it wasn’t like in training, where you could knock off when he came down. Right after Diff got hit it faired off and the sun came through. We were walking in sunlight then, dead men all over the place, some left from yesterday, twisted in ugly positions but washed clean by the rain. At one point I saw a reb and a Union man lying on opposite sides of the road, both in the standard prone position for firing. Their rifles were level and they both had one eye shut. They had the same wound, a neat red hole in the forehead, and they were stone dead, still lying there with the sights lined up—they must have fired at the same time. Looking at them I thought of the terrible urgency they both must have felt in the last half-second before they both pulled trigger.
We were approaching the camp where Sherman's tents were standing. They had run from here yesterday morning and now we were back where it started. The rebels had formed a line along the ridge. We charged them, bayonets fixed.
That was where Pettigrew got his.
I have seen my share of men get hit (at Donelson we were caught in a tight and lost five out of twelve in less than ten minutes) but I never saw one catch it as pretty as Pettigrew did. It was quick and hard— not messy, either.
We had formed in this draw, down the slope from the hogback where the tents were pitched. The johnnies had formed in front of the tents, advanced down to what they call the military crest, and we got set to go up after them. Corporal Blake was on the right, then myself, then Pettigrew, then Lavery. Sergeant Bonner, with the other five, was over beyond Lavery.
Captain Tubbs walked up and down, checking the platoons. Lieutenant McAfee stood fiddling with his sword. Warning came down from the right to get set. We passed it along. Then we heard Colonel Sanderson bellering and the company officers picking it up all down the line: Charge! Charge! and we went forward. The underbrush was thick here, creepers and briery vines twined round the trees. They made a crashing sound as we tramped through.
Toward the crest they thinned and the going was easier. That was where they opened on us. The minies came our way, singing that song they sing, and that stopped us. We hugged the ground. "All right, men!" officers called. "All right!" We crouched in the bushes waiting for the word.
Corporal Blake looked straight ahead. Pettigrew on my left was half turned in my direction, the expression on his face no different from usual. When he saw me looking at him he grinned and said something I couldn’t hear because of the bullet’s singing and plopping into tree trunks and the rifles banging away across the draw.
While I was watching him it came: Charge! Charge! The whole line sprang up and started forward. I was still watching Pettigrew—I don’t know why; I certainly didn’t have a premonition. As he went into it, bent forward and holding his rifle across his chest, the minie struck him low in the throat (I
heard it hit, above all that racket; it was like when you thump a watermelon) and he pitched forward with his arms flung out, crucified.
When I stopped and leaned over him I saw that he was almost gone already. He knew it, too. He tried to tell me something, but all that came out was three words and a bubble of blood that swelled and broke:
"Tell my wife—"
Grissom was wounded just as they fell back. We had taken the ridge and they were retreating across the swampy hollow, almost out of rifle range, when one of them stopped and kneeled and pinked Grissom in the thigh. He sat down with his hands over the bullet hole and began to laugh and cry at the same time, like crazy. I think he was unnerved from seeing Pettigrew get it the way he did back there in the swale. They came from the same home town, grew up together. Pettigrew saved Grissom's life once by getting the drop on a sniper at Donelson. He sat there with blood oozing between his fingers, laughing and crying, both at once, saying he'd got himself a furlough to go home to Indiana and tell Pettigrew's wife how her husband caught one quick and easy.
It turned out that was the last attack of the day. Wallace sent word to hold up. That was enough, he told us. And if anyone thinks we weren’t glad to hear it, let him try pushing an army of rebels through three miles of scrub oak and briers. The johnnies formed a Line about a mile farther on. Probably, though, they were no more anxious to receive a charge than we were to deliver one. The way it looked to me, they were willing to call it a day if we were.
We sat on the grass along the ridge where Sherman's camp was. There was a creek and a bog in the draw, and all across the valley, both sides of the creek, there were dead rebs so thick you could cross it almost without touching your feet to the ground. Mostly they had been there since yesterday, and they were plenty high.
We were shifted around some then, being put in a defensive line, but there was no more fighting that day. While we were resting, the burial details went to work. The Union dead were buried by their own outfits, tagged and identified one by one and all together. But they buried the johnnies in groups near where they fell. It was interesting to watch, to see the way they did it. One of th
ese burial trenches was near where we halted and we watched them at work.
They dug a trench about a hundred feet long, so deep that when they were finishing all we could see was flying dirt and the bright tips of their shovels. Fast as the collecting wagons brought the rebel bodies (all with their pockets turned inside-out) they laid them face-up, head-to-foot the length of the trench, each corpse resting its head between the feet of the corpse behind. It wasn’t nearly as neat as it sounds, though—most of them had stiffened in awkward positions. I had noticed that many of them out on the field lay on their backs with their knees drawn up like women in labor. The diggers had to stomp the worst ones in.
The next row they laid in the other direction, still face-up but with their heads pointing the opposite way. They put them in like that, row above row, until the top ones were almost level with the grass. Then they threw in dirt—which was a relief; rebels generally rotted faster than our men. They turned blacker, too. Maybe the different rations had something to do with it. Or maybe it was just the meanness in them.
There was a big Irishman doing most of the shovel work. He seemed to enjoy it, and we got a laugh out of watching him. Throwing in dirt and smoothing it over, he would pat a dead reb on the face with the back of his shovel and say in a voice like a preacher, "Now lay there, me bye. Lay there quite till the doomsday trump. And don’t ye be fomenting no more rebellions down there where ye're burrning."
Winter and Pettigrew were dead, Diffenbuch and Grissom wounded. Thirty-three and a third percent is high casualties in anybody's battle. But as usual Squad Three had caught the brunt end of the stick. Some squads hadn’t lost a man. Out of one dozen hurt in Company G, four were ours, all from one squad. It just goes to show.
Bonner was a glory hunter. Anytime he could make himself look good by pushing us into a hot place, that was just what he did, and the hotter the better. Most squads liked to share the glory work, but not ours—we hogged it. Or Bonner did, which amounts to the same thing. I was talking to Klein and told him I had made up my mind to put in for a transfer.
"What ails you, Amory?" he said. "Ain’t you happy in your work?"
"Happy, hell," I said. "It's not fair. That’s what."
I knew it sounded foolish because I couldn’t express myself very well. But I still wanted that transfer.
Watching the way they buried those rebels didn’t help matters. I kept thinking maybe someday it might work out the other way round, so that the johnnies would be the ones doing the burying, and I sure didn’t want to be stuffed into any ditch like that, all packed together without a marker or anything, no one to say a prayer when they let me down, no one to tell them back home how bravely I died.
When a man gives his life for his country he wants to get the worth of it, if you see what I mean.
Just before sundown they marched us away. Sherman's men moved into their camps (without even a thank-you for us winning them back) and we went over to the far right and bivouacked near Owl Creek for the night. The mess crew came down from Stony Lonesome with our supper—beans again. Night closed in while we ate. We sat in a big huddle, dirty, dog tired. The moon, in its first quarter, came up early in a cloudy sky. We bedded down.
I was so tired my legs were twitching; I couldn’t even relax to go to sleep. We had paired off for warmth—Bonner and Joyner, Blake and Holliday, Klein and Lavery, Amory and myself—all lying on the leeward side of a blackberry clump. Amory had organized himself a strip of blanket from one of the cooks. It wasn’t much help to me, though. Soon as he went to sleep he began to roll, wrapping it round and around him. For a while I tugged back, wanting my share, but then I gave it up and just lay there. It wasn’t really cool enough for a blanket anyhow, though it probably would be before morning. In this crazy, no-account country a man could never tell what weather the next hour was going to bring.
I thought about Winter and Pettigrew lying out there dead in the woods unless one of the burial squads got to them before nightfall. I thought for a minute: What did those two die for? And the answer came back: Nothing. It was like a voice in the night: They died for nothing.
This war was so much easier for the Confederates. I could see how they would feel different about the whole thing, thinking they were fighting to form a new nation the way our grandfathers did back in '76 and believing they would go down among the heroes in the books. That was why they were so frantic in their charges, coming against our lines with those wild crazy yells, not minding their losses. With us it was not that way at all. They had dared us to fight and we fought. I thought it must be lots easier to fight for something than it was to fight against something.
But that was what the voice said. I also remembered what Corporal Blake said once. It was back in February, after Donelson; we lost six men in that fight, including one that froze to death. Blake said the rebels were really on our side. It sounded crazy but he explained it. He said they wanted the same things we wanted, the right kind of life, the right kind of government—all that—but they’d been misled by bad men. When they learned the truth they would stop fighting, he said.
As usual, though, when I began thinking stuff like that my mind got all confused, mixed up, and everything ran right back to the beginning. Winter and Pettigrew were lying dead out there in the woods and I was not. What right did I have thinking it was up to me to say why?
7
Palmer Metcalfe
Unattached
I had lost my horse in the charge at the Fallen Timbers. Now I held onto the tailgate of a wagon filled with wounded, letting it pull me along because my boots had not been made for walking. Rain fell in slanted, steely pencilings. There was a constant murmur, the groans of the wounded as the long slow agonized column wound between weeping trees and wet brown fields; just ahead I could hear their teeth grinding and even the faint scrabbling of fingernails against the planks of the springless wagon bed. It was the same road we had followed into battle, only now we were going in the opposite direction and there was no reappearing sun to cause the troops to quicken the step.
Country people, the men in gallussed jeans, the women in gingham, stood on their porches or came out into the rain to watch us pass. They had been there Friday and Saturday, while we were going in. Now it was Tuesday and we were coming out. We half expected them to look at us reproachfully, who had passed their way so recently with such high promises, but they did not. Their faces showed nothing at all, or almost nothing. Perhaps there was sorrow but certainly there was no reproach. Truth to tell, however, my boots were hurting me to an extent that didn’t encourage physiognomy.
The only face I was really conscious of was the face of a boy in the rear of the wagon; he looked out over the tailgate, our heads on a line and less than a yard apart. He wore a checkered homespun shirt which was half gone because of the way the surgeons had slit it when they took off his left arm. The skin of his face was the color of parchment, with deep azure circles under the eyes. When the jolts of the wagon were especially hard, I could hear his teeth grind and see the shape of them behind his lips. He looked at once young and old, like the boy in the tale who aged suddenly because of some unspeakable overnight experience in a haunted house. His head bobbed and weaved in time with the jogging of the wagon. He muttered to himself, saying the same thing over and over: "It don’t hurt much. Captain; I just can’t lift it." The stump, which was boneless, extended about four inches below his armpit. Wrapped in a rag, it swung there, a little bloody sack of bloody meat.
There were many like him in that column, men who had been wounded and lain in the woods sometimes for twenty-four hours, under the pelting rain and the shells from the gunboats, until they found strength to crawl to a collecting center or were discovered by the aid men and carried to one. From hilltops I could look forward and back and see the long column strung out for miles in both directions, twisting and squirming like a crippled snake. In almost every wagon there were men begging to be lifted out, to be laid on the ground beside the road and allowe
d to die in peace without the jolting. Their eyes were either hot and bright with fever or dull with shock. Whenever a wagon did halt it was only for a moment, to take out a dead one and go on again.
That was the first time I ever knew what it was to have to keep walking when everything in me said stop. About midafternoon I fell out beside the road and slit both boots at the instep with a pocket knife. That helped some, but not much. Wagons kept passing me, the mules in a slow walk, and finally I caught hold of one and let it tow me along. That way, without having to bother to do more than lift my feet and let them swing forward with the pull of the wagon, I found my mind went idle and I saw again General Johnston the way I had seen him at two o’clock Sunday afternoon, the last time I saw him alive.
One of Breckinridge's brigades had recoiled from a charge against a ridge in the Hornets Nest and the officers were having trouble getting them back into line to go forward again; they didn’t want any more of it right then. General Johnston watched this for a while, then rode out front. He had taken his hat off, holding it with his left hand against his thigh, and in his right hand he held the small tin cup he had picked up in a captured camp earlier in the day. As he passed down the line he leaned sideways in the saddle and touched the points of the bayonets with the cup. It made a Little clink each time.
"These must do the work," he said.
When the line had formed he rode front and center and turned his horse—Fire-eater, a thoroughbred bay —toward the crest where the Union troops were waiting.
"I will lead you!" he cried.
The men sent up a shout. General Johnston set spurs in his horse and the brigade went forward, cheering, at a run. Charging through the thickest fire I ever saw, they took the crest, halted to re-form, and stood there waving their flags and yelling so loud that the leaves on the trees seemed to tremble. The general came riding back with a smile on his face, teeth flashing beneath his mustache. His battle blood was up; his eyes had a shine like bright glass. Fire-eater was hit in four places. There were rips and tears in the general's uniform and his left bootsole had been cut nearly in half by a minie ball. He shook his foot so the dangling leather flapped. "They didn’t trip me up that time!" he said, laughing.