Authors: Winston Groom
Shiloh, 1862 (26 page)
As the battle seemed to reach its most pitiless intensity, an order from Prentiss reached Hickenlooper’s battery directing, of all things, a “change of front to the right”—meaning that the guns should be turned 90 degrees, “a difficult movement to execute under fire,” Hickenlooper complained, “in woods filled with dense undergrowth, horses rearing and plunging and dropping in their tracks.” It was a mistake, said the battery captain, “which the enemy immediately took advantage of by a direct charge on our now exposed and defenseless left flank.”
Gladden’s—now Adams’s—men came on in three lines of battle, at last unmolested by Hickenlooper’s cannon fire. Infantrymen who were guarding the battery rose up and fired a volley, which at first caused the Confederates to waver and hesitate. But they soon recovered and came on again “with a Rebel Yell that caused an involuntary thrill of terror to pass like an electric shock through even the bravest hearts,” Hickenlooper said. Another volley from the infantry soldiers produced a similar result. Many Confederates fell, but the companies closed ranks and came on once more, “their colors moving steadily forward.”
Hickenlooper realized that it was time for him to get out, and had just given the order to limber up “when there comes a crashing volley that sweeps our front as with a scythe, a roar that is deafening, and the earth trembles with the shock.” Confederate artillery had been turned upon them. Every horse in that section of the battery went down—as well as most of the men—including Hickenlooper’s own horse, Gray Eagle, upon whom he had been mounted. The infantry guard arose and fled, “in wild dismay, leaving the wounded, the dying and the dead.” Using such horses as
remained,
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Hickenlooper managed to get away with four of his guns, abandoning the 6-pounders to the Rebels.
His flight was spectacular, with teams of horses hauling guns and caissons, “bounding through underbrush, over ditches, logs, each driver lashing his team.” Back they raced through their own camps, past the deserters and the stragglers and the wounded, until they found a line about a mile north where Prentiss had planted his colors and intended to make a stand near a peach orchard along an old wagon track that was later called the “Sunken Road,” Hickenlooper recalled, “for its having been cut for some distance through a low hill.”
On the heels of Hickenlooper’s mad dash Miller’s brigade also collapsed after officers warned that “the troops on our right [Peabody’s regiment] had given way, and we were flanked,” reported Leander Stillwell. He rose from behind his log and had started for the rear when, like Private Ruff, he saw “men in gray and brown clothes running through the camp on our right.” But also, he remembered, “I saw something else, too, that sent a chill all though me. It was a kind of flag I had never seen before; a gaudy sort of thing with red bars. The smoke around it was low and dense and kept me from seeing the man who was carrying it but I plainly saw the banner. It was going fast, with a jerky motion, which told me that the bearer was at the double-quick.” As he ran down his company street Stillwell considered retrieving his knapsack from the mess tent, but
“one quick backward glance made me change my mind. I never saw my knapsack or any of its contents afterward.”
Sixteen-year-old private George W. McBride of the 15th Michigan had an even more harrowing tale to tell. His regiment had arrived at Pittsburg Landing only the previous afternoon, and that morning as the fight heated up was led onto the battlefield on the extreme left of Prentiss’s division with no ammunition whatsoever. At one point they found themselves standing at ease and order arms when they observed several long lines of men in brown and gray coming down a slope opposite them. “The first line moves down the hillside, crosses the little creek, enters the clearing, halts, and fires into us,” McBride recalled. “Not a man in our company has a cartridge to use. A few men fall. We are ordered to shoulder arms, about face, and move back, which we do.”
After finally being issued ammunition, McBride’s regiment was put back into the fight. “There was the crash of musketry, the roar of artillery, the yells, the smoke, the jar, the terrible energy. At intervals we can see the faces of the foe, blackened with powder, and glaring with demonic fury, lost to all human impulses, and full of the fiendish desire to kill. Somebody calls out, ‘Everybody for himself!’ ”
As he ran back through the brigade camps, McBride reported that the Confederates “were sweeping the ground with canister; the musket fire was awful. The striking of the shot on the ground threw up little clouds of dust, and the falling of men all around impressed me with the desire to get out of there. The hair commenced to rise on the back of my neck. I felt sure that a cannon ball was close behind me, giving me chase. I never ran fast before, and I never will again. It was a marvel that any of us came out alive.”
Thus, the collapse of Prentiss’s line was complete.
The battle everywhere had now become so intense that it was unsafe in practically the entire battle area, not just where the troops were fighting. Many of the rifles could be deadly, though not accurate, at up to a mile. A rifleman in battle was supposed to be able to load and fire three aimed shots a minute. Theoretically, then, if every rifleman in a brigade fired three times a minute, that would put 12,000 bullets in the air in that single minute, and from that one brigade only. At Shiloh there were more than 30 brigades in the fight, so one can only imagine the amount of deadly metal flying through the air in any given minute.
Our Mississippi cavalryman, for example, who had been observing from his high vantage point on the Confederate left, explained the effects of artillery fire on men standing a mile or more from the main battle line. “We could hear heavy missiles whizzing around and above us; some of them too were distinctly visible. One great solid shot I shall never forget. As it came through the air it was clearly seen. Capt. Foote saw it as it ricocheted, and spurred his horse out of the way. Lieutenant T.J. Deupree was not so fortunate. This same shot grazed his thigh, cut off his sabre hanging at his side, and passed through the flank of his noble stallion which sank lifeless in his tracks. It also killed a second horse in the rear of Lieutenant Deupree and finally, striking a third horse in the shoulder, felled him to the ground without disabling him, and not even breaking the skin. The ball was now spent. My own horse, ‘Bremer,’ in the excitement and joy of battle raised his tail high, and a cannon ball cut away about half of it, bone and all; and ever afterwards he was known as ‘Bob-tailed Bremer.’ Many solid shot we saw strike the ground, bounding like rubber balls, passing over our heads, making
hideous music in their course. Colonel Lindsay at this time countermarched the regiment and took shelter in a neighboring ravine.”
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For Sidney Johnston and Beauregard the gunfire was music to their ears; by barely 10 a.m. the center of Grant’s position had been pushed back halfway to Pittsburg Landing. The slaughter had been appalling, but this was war. To destroy this Union army would produce repercussions far beyond the mere elimination of troops from the Federal forces. England and France would certainly be watching; a lifting of the Yankee blockade and freedom of international commerce were in the offing. But all that was wishful thinking. The battle raged and Sherman was now taking his turn at the meat grinder.
1
Neither army ate well in the field, but the Confederates seemed particularly ill fed, surviving on a diet consisting primarily of flour and grease—with molasses, if available. To prepare for a march, they fried bacon and used the grease and flour to make biscuits (“tougher than a mule’s ear”), which they wrapped in cloth and kept in their haversacks.
2
A Vivaldi opera in which the frenzied knight Orlando battles gorgon-like statues in a temple. It was not uncommon in those times for officers to show off their knowledge of the classics.
3
This was likely precipitated by the predawn Union reconnaissance patrol of the unfortunate Major Powell, including the German immigrant Private Ruff, which so defiantly held up the advance of Hardee’s left that General Prentiss had time to get his division in line to absorb the Rebel blow.
4
At the Battle of Austerlitz (1805) the French army advanced in early morning fog until at the last moment the legendary “sun of Austerlitz” ripped apart the mist and revealed so many of Napoleon’s soldiers that the Russian defenders fled in fright.
5
Berserkers (from which the word
berserk
descends) were old Norse warriors who dressed in wolfskin or bearskin shirts and worked themselves up to a trancelike frenzy when going into battle.
6
A diabolical projectile consisting of a can containing 27 iron spheres about the size of Ping-Pong balls, which turned the cannon into an enormous shotgun. Double-shotted meant they used two cans.
7
Short for minié ball, the standard bullet on both sides of the Civil War, a .52-caliber conical lead slug named after the French officer who developed it.
8
A Confederate officer later counted 59 of Hickenlooper’s horses “lying dead in their harnesses all piled up in their own struggles.”
9
There are Civil War stories, some, perhaps all, apocryphal, of the soldier who, seeing one of these apparently slow-moving iron cannon balls bound over the ground, sticks out his foot to stop it only to have the missile carry away the foot.
ALL THE FURIES OF HELL BROKE LOOSE
B
ECAUSE HE HAD CONSISTENTLY SNEERED AT REPORTS
of an enemy attack, Sherman was now forced to eat his words. But wisdom dictates the adage “If you have to eat crow, eat it while it’s hot.”
“It was a beautiful and dreadful sight,” Sherman admitted, almost in awe, “to see them approach with banners fluttering, bayonets glistening, and lines dressed on the centre.” Having watched his own orderly shot dead before his eyes (“the fatal bullet,” he said later, “which was meant for me”), Grant’s senior division commander ordered Colonel Appler of the 53rd Ohio to stand his ground, then galloped back to his headquarters at the Shiloh church, sounding the alarm to nearby commanders and sending warnings to Generals McClernand, W.H.L. Wallace, and Hurlbut, whose divisions were encamped in the rear, a mile or so north. Prentiss already knew.