Shiloh (17 page)

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 allowed 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.

This was the charge that began to break the
Hornets
Nest. I was sent with a message for Beauregard on
the other flank, telling him we were moving forward again, and when I came back
General Johnston's body was already stretched out for removal from the field.
They told me how he died—from a wound in the right leg, a hurt so slight that
anyone with a simple knowledge of tourniquets could have saved him. Doctor
Yandell, his surgeon, had been with him all through the battle, but shortly
before the final attack near the peach orchard, the general ordered him to
establish an aid station for a group of Federal wounded he saw at one point on
the field. When the doctor protested. General Johnston cut him off.

"These men were our enemies a moment ago," he
said. "They are our prisoners now. Take care of them."

When I heard this, that the general had died because of his
consideration for men who a short time before had been shooting at him and
doing all in their power to wreck his cause, I remembered what my father had
said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy
being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said:
incurable romanticism arid misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas
read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.

He enjoyed posing as a realist and straight thinker —war was
more shovelry than chivalry, he said—but he was a highly romantic figure of a
man himself and he knew it, he with his creased forehead and his tales of the
war in Texas, with his empty sleeve and his midnight drinking beneath the
portrait of his wife in that big empty house in New Orleans. He talked that way
because of some urge for self-destruction, some compulsion to hate what he had
become: an old man with a tragic life, who sent his son off to a war he was too
maimed to take part in himself. It was regret. It was regret of a particular
regional form.

I thought of these things while we rode beside the ambulance
taking General Johnston's body back to the headquarters where we had slept the
night before, where we had crawled from under our blankets at dawn to hear him
say that by dark we'd water our horses in the Tennessee—which, incidentally,
some Mississippi cavalry outfit did. Beauregard had ordered the fighting
stopped, intending to reorganize and complete the victory tomorrow morning.
Colonel Preston and the rest of the staff, believing they could be of little
use—since all that remained to be done (they thought) was to show Grant a solid
front and receive his surrender—decided to accompany the body to Corinth and
then by rail to St Louis Cemetery in New Orleans, where my own people had their
crypts.