Chapter IV: Part II (3)

Beautifully clear and calm the Sabbath morning dawned, April 6th, 1862; rather chilly, indeed, for it was yet in the budding time of spring. But the sky was so blue and cloudless, the air so still, and all nature lay smiling so serene and fair in the glad sunshine--it was a day such as that whereon the Creator may have looked upon the new-born earth, and 'saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good;' a day as if chosen from all its fellows and consecrated to a hallowed quiet, the blessedness of prayer and thanksgiving, praise and worship.

Hardly a man in our division, I believe, but awoke that morning with a happy consciousness of long hours that this day were to be his own, and a clear idea of just how he should improve them. My programme was the general one, and simple enough it was. First, of course, to make ready for inspection, and, that ceremony well gotten through with, to enact the familiar performance of every man his own washerwoman and seamstress: the remainder of the day should be devoted to the soldier's sacred delight of correspondence--to completing a letter to Wynne, begun back at Columbia, and writing home. Out by the smouldering fire, where the cooks of our mess had prepared breakfast nearly two hours before, I was busily at work furbishing with the new dust-fine ashes the brasses of my accoutrements, when the boom of cannon burst on the air, rolling heavily from away to the southward up from what we knew must be the neighborhood of the camps at Pittsburg Landing. It was after seven o'clock. The sun was mounting over the scrubby oak copse behind our camp, and the day grew warm apace. Another and still another explosion followed in quick succession.

What could it mean? Only the gunboats, some suggested, shelling guerillas out of the woods somewhere along the river bank. Impossible; too near, too far to the right, for that. It could hardly be artillery practice merely; for to-day was the Sabbath. And the youngest soldier among us knew better than to give those rapid, furious volleys the interpretation of a formal military salute. Could it really be--battle?

Every man almost was out and listening intently. Louder and fiercer the reports came, though still irregular. Now and then, in the intervals, a low, quick crepitation reached us, an undertone that no soldier could fail to recognize as distant musketry. Ominous sounds they were, portending--what? What, indeed, if not actual battle? If a battle, then certainly an attack by the enemy. Were our comrades up at the Landing prepared for it?

The first cannon had been fired scarcely ten minutes, when General Nelson rode by toward headquarters, down in the busiest part of the town, aides and orderlies following upon the gallop. Presently came orders:

'Three days' rations in haversacks, strike tents, and pack up. Be ready to move at a moment's notice. They are fighting up at the Landing.'

There was no need for further urging. By ten o'clock every disposition for the march had been completed. Nearly three long hours more we waited with feverish anxiety for the final command to start, while the roar of that deathly strife fell distantly upon our ears almost without intermission, and a hundred wild rumors swept through the camp. General Grant had gone up the river on a gunboat soon after the cannonading began. It was not long after midday when we struck tents, were furnished with a new supply of cartridges and caps for our Enfields, and waited several minutes longer. At length, however, the column formed, and, though still without orders, except those which its immediate commander had assumed the responsibility to give, the Fourth division was on the march for Shiloh. The Tenth brigade had, as usual, the advance, and, in our regular turn, the Sixth came the third regiment in the column. We had just cleared the camping grounds, I well remember, when General Nelson rode leisurely down the line, his eye taking note with the quiet glance of the real soldier of every minutia of equipments and appearance generally. Some natures seem to find in antagonism and conflict their native element, their chief good--yet more, almost as much a necessity of their moral organism as to their animal being is the air they breathe. Such a nature was Nelson's. His face to-day wore that characteristic expression by which every man of his command learned to graduate his expectation of an action; it was the very picture of satisfaction and good humor. He wheeled his horse half around as the rear of our brigade passed him, and a blander tone of command I never heard than when, in his rapid, authoritative manner, he rang out:

'Now, gentlemen, keep the column well closed up!' and passed on toward the next brigade.

Gentlemen! how oddly the title comes to sound in the ears of a soldier!

From Savannah to the Tennessee, directly opposite Pittsburg Landing, is, by the course we took, perhaps ten miles. The route was only a narrow wagon-path through the woods and bottoms bordering the river, and the wisdom was soon apparent which had beforehand secured the services of a native as guide. Most of the latter half of the distance was through a low, slimy swamp land, giving rank growth to an almost continuous forest of sycamore, cottonwood, and other trees which love a damp, alluvial soil, whose massive trunks were yet foul and unsightly with filth and scum deposited by the receding waters at the subsidence of the river's great spring freshet a month before. Stagnant ponds and mimic lagoons lay all about us and in our very pathway, some of the deeper ones, however, rudely bridged. Very rapid progress was impossible. It had already been found necessary to send our artillery back to Savannah, whence it would have to be brought up on the transports. The afternoon wore on, warm and sultry, and the atmosphere in those dank woods felt close, aguish, and unwholesome. Not a breath of air stirred to refresh the heated forms winding in long, continuous line along the dark boles of the trees, through whose branches and leafless twigs the sunlight streamed in little broken gleams of yellow brightness, and made a curious checkerwork of sheen and shadow on all beneath. Burdened as we were with knapsacks and twenty extra rounds of ammunition, the march grew more and more laborious. But the noise of battle was sharpening more significantly every few minutes now, and the men pushed forward. It was no child's game going on ahead of us. We _might_ be needed.

We _were_ needed. A loud, tumultuous cheer from the Thirty-sixth Indiana came surging down through the ranks of the Twenty-fourth Ohio to our own regiment, and away back beyond to the Twenty-second and Nineteenth brigades in the rear. 'Forward!' and we were off on the double quick. General Nelson was at the head of the column; there a courier had met him--so at least runs the tradition--with urgent orders to hasten up the reenforcements: the enemy were pressing hard for the Landing. Unmindful of all impediments--trees and fallen logs, shallow ponds and slippery mire shoetop deep; now again moderating our pace to the route step to recover breath and strength; even halting impatiently for a few minutes now and then, while the advance cleared itself from some entanglement of the way--so the remainder of our march continued. It seemed a long way to the Landing, the battle dinning on our ears at every step. At length it sounded directly ahead of us, close at hand; and looking forward out through the treetops, a good eye could easily discover a dark cloud of smoke hanging low in mid air, as though it sought to hide from the light of heaven the deeds that were being done beneath it. Suddenly we debouched into a level cornfield, extending quite to the river's verge. The clearing was not a wide one, and the farther bank of the Tennessee was in plain sight--the landings, the bluff, and the woods above stretching away out and back beyond.

What a panorama! The river directly before us was hidden by a narrow belt of chaparral and the drift that had lodged along the banks, but the smoke stacks of three or four transports were visible above the weed stalks and bushes, and the course of one or two more could be traced by a distant, trailing line of smoke as they steamed down toward Savannah. The opposite bank rises from the river a steep acclivity, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet in perpendicular height, down whose sides of brownish yellow clay narrow roadways showed out to the landings below. Cresting the bluff, woods overlooked the whole, and shut in the scene far as the eye could follow the windings of the Tennessee. In their depths, the battle was raging with unabated fury. A short distance up the river, though completely hidden from view by an intervening bend, the gunboats were at work, and even our unpractised ears could easily distinguish the heavy boom of their great thirty-two pounders in the midst of all that blaze of battle and the storm of artillery explosions. Glorious old Tyler and Lexington! primitive, ungainly, weather-beaten, wooden craft, but the salvation, in this crisis hour of the fight, of our out-numbered and wellnigh borne-down left. A signal party, stationed a little above the upper landing and halfway up the bluff, was communicating in the mystic language of the code with another upon our side the river. What messages were those little party-colored flags exchanging, with their curious devices of stripes and squares and triangles, their combinations and figures in numberless variety, as they were waved up and down and to and fro in rapid, ever-shifting pantomime? The steep bank was covered with a swaying, restless mass of blue-uniformed men, too distant to be distinctly discriminated, yet certainly numbering thousands. 'Reserves!' a dozen voices cried at once, and the next moment came the wonder that our march had been so hurried, when whole brigades, as it seemed, could thus be held in idle waiting. We were soon undeceived.

Out into the cornfield filed the column, up the river, and nearly parallel to it, halting a little below the upper one of the two principal landings. Here there was a further delaying for ferriage.

'Stack arms; every man fill his canteen, then come right back to the ranks!'

Not to the Tennessee for water--there was no time to go so far--but close at hand, at a pond, or little bayou of the river; and, returning to the line of stacks, a few more long, unquiet minutes in waiting, speculation, and eager gazing toward the battle. And then we saw what was that dark, turbulent multitude over the river: oh, shame! a confused rabble, composed chiefly of men whose places were rightly on the field, but who had turned and fled away from the fight to seek safety under the coverture of that bluff.

Forward again, and the regiment moved, with frequent little aggravating halts, up to the point on the river where the Thirty-sixth Indiana had already embarked, and were now being ferried over. The Twenty-fourth Ohio crossed at the lower landing. There were a number of country folk here, clad in the coarse, rusty homespun common in the South, whose intense anxiety to see every movement visible on the farther side of the river kept them unquietly shifting their positions continually. One of these worthies was hailed from our company:

'Say, old fellow! how's the fight going on over there?'

He was an old and somewhat diminutive specimen, grizzle haired, and stoop shouldered, but yellow and withered from the effects of sun and tobacco rather than the burden of years. For a moment he hesitated, as though guarding his reply, and then, with a sidelong glance of the eyes, answered slowly:

'Well, it aren't hardly decided yet, I reckon; but they're a drivin' your folks--some.'

Evidently he believed that our army had been badly beaten. The emphatic rejoinder, 'D--d old secesh!' was the sole thanks his information brought him: the characterization, aside from the accented epithet, was doubtless a just one, but for all that his words were in no wise encouraging.

A minute later we passed a sergeant, whose uniform and bright-red chevrons showed that he was attached to some volunteer battery. He was mounted upon a large, powerful horse, and seemed a man of considerable ability.

'Do the rebels fight well over there?' demanded a voice from the column a half dozen files ahead of me.

'Guess they do! Anyway, _fit_ well enough to take our battery from us--every gun, and some of the caissons.'

Another soldier met us, unencumbered with blouse or coat of any kind, his accoutrements well adjusted over his gray flannel shirt, and his rifle sloped carelessly back over his shoulder. His eyes were bloodshot, and his face, all begrimed with smoke and gunpowder, wore an expression haggard, gaunt, and very weary. He was a sharpshooter, he told us, belonging to some Missouri regiment, and had been out skirmishing almost ever since daylight, with not a mouthful to eat since the evening before. His cartridges--and he showed us his empty cartridge-box--had given out the second time, and he was 'used up.' In his hat and clothes were several bullet holes; but he had been hit but once, he said, and then by only a spent buckshot.

'Boys, I'm glad you're come,' he said. 'It's a fact, they _have_ whipped us so far; but I guess we've got 'em all right _now_. How many of Buell's army can come up to-night?'

A hurried, many-voiced reply, and hastening on past a heterogeneous collection of soldiery--couriers, cavalry-men, malingerers, stragglers, a few of the slightly wounded, and camp followers of all sorts--we quickly reached the river's brink. The boat was lying close below. Twenty feet down the crumbling bank, slipping, or swinging down by the roots and twigs of friendly bushes, the regiment lost but little time in embarking. The horses of our field officers were somehow got on board, and, with crowded decks, the little steamer headed for the landing right over against us. Two or three boats were there hugging the shore, quiet and motionless, and there were still more at the lower landing. One or two of these the deck hands pointed out to us as magazine boats, freighted with precious stores of ammunition, and the remainder were now, of necessity, being used as hospital boats. The wounded had quite filled these latter, and several hundred more of the day's victims had already been sent down the river to Savannah. One of the gunboats, fresh from its glorious work up beyond the bend, shortly came in sight, moving slowly down stream, as though reconnoitring the bank for some inlet up which its crashing broadsides could be poured with deadliest effect, if the enemy should again appear in sight.

An informal command to land was given us presently, but many had already anticipated it. How terribly significant becomes the simple mechanism of loading a rifle when one knows that it is at once the earnest of deadly battle and the preparation for it! The few details which we could gather from the deck hands concerning the fight were meagre and unsatisfactory. They told us of disaster that befell our army in the morning, and which it seemed very doubtful if the afternoon had yet seen remedied; and their testimony was borne out by evidences to which our own unwilling senses were the sufficient witnesses. The roar of battle sounded appallingly near, and two or three of our guns were in vigorous play upon the enemy so close on the crest of the bluff that every flash could be seen distinctly. Several shells from the enemy's artillery swept by, cleaving the air many feet above us with that peculiar, fierce, rushing noise, which no one, I believe, can hear for the first time without a quickened beating of the heart and an instinctive impulse of dismay and awe.

At the landing--but how shall I attempt, in words only, to set that picture forth? The next day's fight was my first experience in actual battle, except so much of bushwacking as five months in Western Virginia had brought us, but those hours have no such place in my memory as have the scenes and sounds of this evening at the landing. I have never yet seen told in print the half of that sad, sickening story. Wagons, teams, and led horses, quartermaster's stores of every description, bales of forage, caissons--all the paraphernalia of a magnificently appointed army--were scattered in promiscuous disorder along the bluff-side. Over and all about the fragmentary heaps thousands of panic-stricken wretches swarmed from the river's edge far up toward the top of the steep; a mob in uniform, wherein all arms of the service and wellnigh every grade--for even gilt shoulder-straps and scarlet sashes did not lack a shameful representation there--were commingled in utter, distracted confusion; a heaving, surging herd of humanity, smitten with a very frenzy of fright and despair, every sense of manly pride, of honor, and duty, completely paralyzed, and dead to every feeling save the most abject, pitiful terror. A number of officers could be distinguished amid the tumult, performing, with violent gesticulations, the pantomimic accompaniments of shouting incoherent commands, mingled with threats and entreaties. There was a little drummer boy, I remember, too, standing in his shirt sleeves and pounding his drum furiously, though to what purpose we could none of us divine. Men were there in every stage of partial uniform and equipment; many were hatless and coatless, and few still retained their muskets and their accoutrements complete. Some stood wringing their hands, and rending the air with their cries and lamentations, while others, in the dumb agony of fear, cowered behind the object that was nearest them in the direction of the enemy, though but the crouching form of a comrade. Terror had concentrated every faculty upon two ideas, and all else seemed forgotten: danger and death were behind and pressing close upon them; on the other side of the river, whither their eyes were turned imploringly, there was the hope of escape and an opportunity for further flight.

Meanwhile, louder than all the din and clamor else, swelled the roar of cannon and the sharp, continuous rattle of musketry up in the woods above. There, other thousands of our comrades--many thousands more they were, thank God!--were maintaining an unequal struggle, in which to further yield, they knew, would be their inevitable destruction. Brave, gallant fellows! more illustrious record than they made who here stood and fought through all these terrible Sabbath hours need no soldier crave. There has been a noble redemption, too, of the disgrace which Shiloh fastened on those poor, trembling fugitives by the riverside. That disgrace was not an enduring one. On many a red and stubborn battle field those same men have proudly vindicated their real manhood, and in maturer military experience have fought their way to a renown abundantly enough, and more than enough, to cover the derelictions of raw, untrained, and not too skilfully directed soldiery.

There was a rush for the boat when we neared the landing, and some, wading out breast deep into the stream, were kept off only at the point of the bayonet. Close by the water's edge grew a clump of sycamores. Up into one of these and far out on a projecting limb, one scared wretch had climbed, and, as the boat rounded to, poised himself for a leap upon the hurricane deck; but the venture seemed too perilous, and he was forced to give it up in despair. The plank was quickly thrown out, guards were stationed to keep the passage clear, and we ran ashore. Until now there had been few demonstrations of enthusiasm, but here an eager outburst of shouts and cheers broke forth that wellnigh drowned the thunderings of battle. The regiment did not wait to form on the beach, the men, as they debarked, rushing up the bank by one of the winding roadways. The gaping crowd parted right and left, and poured upon us at every step a torrent of queries and ejaculations. 'It's no use;' 'gone up;' 'cut all to pieces;' 'the last man left in my company;'--so, on all sides, smote upon our ears the tidings of ill. Fewer, but cheery and reassuring, were the welcomes: 'Glad you've come;' 'good for you;' 'go in, boys;' 'give it to 'em, Buckeyes'--which came to us in manly tones, now and then from the lines as we passed.

We gained the summit of the bluff. A few hundred yards ahead they were fighting; we could hear the cheering plainly, and the woods echoed our own in response. The Thirty-sixth Indiana had already been pushed forward toward the extreme left of our line, and were even now in action. General Nelson had crossed half an hour earlier. The junior member of his staff had had a saddle shot from under him by a chance shell from the enemy, to the serious detriment of a fine dress coat, but he himself marvellously escaping untouched. Two field pieces were at work close upon our left, firing directly over the heads of our men in front; only a random firing at best, and I was glad when an aide-de-camp galloped down and put a stop to the infernal din. Amid this scene of indescribable excitement and confusion, the regiment rapidly formed. Our knapsacks--were we going into action with their encumbrance? The order was shouted to unsling and pile them in the rear, one man from each company being detailed to guard them. It was scarcely more than a minute's work, and we formed again. A great Valkyrian chorus of shouts swelled out suddenly along the line, and, looking up, I saw General Nelson sitting on his big bay in front of the colors, his hat lifted from his brow, and his features all aglow with an expression of satisfaction and indomitable purpose. He was speaking, but Company B was on the left of the regiment, and, in the midst of the storms of huzzas pealing on every side, I could not catch a single word. Then I heard the commands, 'Fix bayonets! trail arms! forward!' and at the double-quick we swept on, up through the stumps and underbrush which abounded in this part of the wood, to the support of the Thirty-sixth Indiana. A few score rods were gained, and we halted to recover breath and perfect another allignment. The firing in our front materially slackened, and presently we learned that the last infuriate charge of the enemy upon our left had been beaten back. We could rest where we lay, 'until further orders.' The sun sank behind the rise off to our right, a broad, murky red disk, in a dense, leaden-hued haze; such a sunset as in springtime is a certain betokening of rain. By this time cannonading had entirely ceased, and likewise all musketry, save only a feeble, dropping fire upon our right. Those sounds shortly died away, and the battle for this day was over. Night fell and spread its funereal pall over a field on which, almost without cessation since the dawn of daylight, had raged a conflict which, for its desperation and carnage, had yet had no parallel in American history.

On that field, freely and generously had been poured of the nation's best blood, and many a nameless hero had sealed with his life a sublime devotion far surpassing the noblest essay of eulogy and all the extolments which rhetoric may recount. Thank God, those sacrifices had not been wholly fruitless! The Army of the Tennessee, although at most precious cost, had succeeded in staying those living waves of Southern treason until the Army of the Ohio could come up, and Shiloh was saved. The next day saw those waves rolled back in a broken, crimson current, whose ebb ceased only when the humiliated enemy rested safe within his fortifications at Corinth.

AENONE:

A TALE OF SLAVE LIFE IN ROME.