Raintree County (95 page)

He was aware of a thin, high, human sound above the firing.

The Rebels were over the fence and running; they seemed to be sweeping forward in a great V with the point aimed at Corporal Johnny Shawnessy, but with more men at the wings. They were about three hundred yards away. They were yelling. Their bayonets flashed in the sun.

Johnny worked the musket frantically. He got in two more shots and then missed his ramrod. He must have left it in the gun and fired it. He turned around, frantic.

Flash Perkins' body jumped with the kick of his rifle. Natie Franklin was lying on the fence with his forehead touching the lowest rail, as if he were ashamed of something. A black puddle of blood was spreading out around his face. Johnny grabbed the extra rod and loaded again.

A hundred yards away, the Rebels had stopped. The officers were waving swords and pistols. The battery on the hill played directly on the Rebel lines. The Rebels fired a volley at the fence. It was like a gigantic whip flaying the ground around the fence. The whole Rebel line disappeared in the smoke. Johnny fired into the smoke again and again. His lips were caked with powder; his hands were blackened and smeared with sweat and powder. His eyes smarted, and one kept closing up with sweat and powdergrime, where he had run his finger through it to clean out the sweat. He had no idea how many shots
he had fired, but the gun barrel scorched his hands, his fingers were blistered.

A man on a horse appeared incongruously in front of the line. It was General Jake Jackson but not the same horse. He was shouting and shaking his chin at the creek and whipping the air with his sword. The officers were out in front and were all beating the air with hands and swords. Out of the corner of his eye, Johnny saw an officer make a gesture toward his company so strongly that he threw himself down and flung his head free of his body and lay, neck spurting blood.

—Forward!

The men stepped over what was left of the fence and went through the field, running and walking. The smoke seemed to dissolve. The Rebels had withdrawn to a fence at the far side. Johnny fired at the fence and stopped to reload. The man on his right stopped too, put the butt of his gun on the ground and leaned on it. His mouth was open; blood spurted in a thin, wavering jet from his neck. He let go of the gun, and one hand went slowly toward his neck. He went down to his knees as if to pray, his head dropped, he pitched over. Johnny fired again and kept on walking.

In front of him, now, he could see the Rebels retiring from the fence; then they were all out of sight in bushes, rocks, trees.

He was at the fence. The brigade stopped and went to the ground under heavy fire. Several bodies lay among the broken rails. Bushes, grass, and weeds were trampled and dabbled with blood. Where Johnny crouched behind the fence, a boy was lying on his back, shirt open at the neck, head rolled back, neck soft and flexible with a clear blue vein showing. His relaxed right arm with halfopen hand was flung out behind his head. His young face was stubbled with blond hairs. His eyes were open, moist and blue, but rolling out of focus. He was barefooted. His wellformed body, dressed in crumpled gray pants and a torn shirt, was lying across a rail, bending gracefully just at the point of the spine. He had only just then been alive. His voice had been making a sound in his throat as he ran up through the woods from the creek to this fence. He had been shot through the heart and lay like an animal newly felled. He had come a long way from somewhere to a little creek in Georgia and had run to a railfence and had got his death there in the autumn sunshine.

He was the Enemy.

Corporal Johnny Shawnessy was appalled. It was the first Rebel soldier he had seen up close. Here lay his gun and his broad hat. He was perhaps eighteen years old. The Battle took no account of him. For a little while, he had been in the Battle, he was the Battle, now he was gone from the Battle.

At any moment, at any unforeseeable point of time, Corporal Johnny Shawnessy might be plucked out of the Battle and out of the bright sunshine. The whole fabric of memories that made him a person beloved to himself and others would be torn up.

He had his second great moment of fear. He looked wildly around. General Jackson came riding up the line with his staff. He smiled and kept shouting in a hoarse voice,

—Fine work, boys, you restored the line!

Johnny was wondering what line.

A staff officer rode up. The General dismounted, knelt on the ground, and studied a map. He issued some orders and rode away.

Johnny began to fire across the fence into the woods. Now and then through an interval in the trees, when the smoke thinned, he could see where the road ran down to the creek. There was a white building there, and through the smoke he could see at times big black words on the front of it.

LEE & GORDON'S
MILLS

They touched him with an incredibly ancient memory, and he knew that it was the same mill he had seen before the fighting began in the morning.

Just after that, the brigade was ordered bade from the fence.

—What fer? asked Flash Perkins.

—To restore the line, an officer said.

As far as Johnny could see, their new position didn't bear any clear relation to any other they had occupied, and they were immediately obliged to abandon it and move back again. Someone said the Rebels were outflanking them and trying to get in their rear.

—What's the matter? What are we goin' back fer? Flash Perkins kept saying.

He was still on Johnny's right and close to the regimental colors.

His face was black as a devil's, his eyes bloodshot and glaring, his cap gone, his coat torn.

As soon as they began to go back, the little coherence and order that had been maintained up to that time disappeared altogether. The wood was full of walking wounded, stretcher-bearers, dazed stragglers, riderless horses, gun crews toiling with their pieces. In the thick bush and the crisscrossing ravines, what was left of Johnny's regiment got lost from what was left of the brigade.

As far as Johnny could see, the Battle was over on his part of the line. He staggered on through the woods, his head aching, his mouth full of the black taste of powder, his ears singing. He was so tired that what he saw no longer shocked him. He merely recorded it all for future reference. Already he had become accustomed to beholding war's insult to the integrity of the human form. He had seen heads blown off, lying with tongues out and eyes blackened. He had seen legs and arms lying separate from bodies, he had seen men flung about by shellbursts as if they were bags of old clothes. He had seen men die with a singular ease, as if nothing were so fragile as a human life. He had seen men living and walking with unbelievable wounds, one with what seemed the whole side of his chest sheared off, another holding an armful of his own guts. He had seen a man trying to say something with most of his face blown away.

In Raintree County, human blood had been an ichor. He had never before seen even a pint of it at one time. But on the banks of the Chickamauga, he had seen puddles of it, and men lying in them.

Back near the base of a ridge, the broken divisions were reforming. There had been a withdrawal of the Union right. General Jackson came through in the evening, riding a third horse. His head was bandaged. Dismounting, he strode among the troops. His eyes glared and his voice was strong as a bull's. He laughed and joked with the officers. He said that tomorrow they would show the goddam Rebs something. He said that his whole Corps was intact and never would have fallen back but for a miscalculation in the Center.

Johnny was so exhausted he could hardly eat. He lay on the ground feeling almost as broken as the bodies he had seen along the Chickamauga. He put his memories away, raw and bleeding, knowing that he would have to deal with them sometime. He went to sleep almost immediately and slept like one dead.

And yet he was somehow aware that all night long wagons were rattling on the roads in the darkness, men were marching up and past the bivouac, horses were thundering by. Apparently this volcano of violence and horror called a battle had not yet spent its eruptive force. The canvas had not yet been sufficiently daubed with blood to make it palatable to that great art critic . . .

(Epic Fragment from
Fighting for Freedom
)

History records no more savage conflict than that which raged all day at the crossings of the Chickamauga. By imperishable gallantry our forces had contrived to maintain their line intact before the impassioned charges of the Rebel hordes. Bloody but unbroken, the whole line retired at nightfall to the base of Missionary Ridge, leaving many a brave comrade lying by the little river of death. As those tired legions who had borne the brunt of the Rebellion's fanatical attack waited in the brow of the long ridge in the waning night, little did they know what fresh encounters of deadly consequence they would be forced to sustain upon the morrow.

On the following morning Nature was resplendently beautiful in ironical contrast with the dark human drama which was about to be reenacted in the valley of the Chickamauga. The sun was bright and warm, and fair soft breezes touched the cheeks of soldiers still weary from the extreme ardors of the preceding day's battle. The Rebels, greatly reinforced and outnumbering the Unionists nearly two to one, resumed the attack. In three columns they hurled themselves against the Union right only to melt away before the massed accuracy of the patriot fire. But then occurred one of those incalculable freaks of chance whereby battles and sometimes nations are lost and the whole course of History altered. While the exhausted troops who had stood the whole fury of the Rebel onset were being relieved and fresh troops brought up, the hordes of Treason, perceiving the confusion behind the Union lines, made a single irresistible rush and in the space of a few minutes . . .

Corporal Johnny Shawnessy was thoroughly confused. Somehow during the past half-hour, while he had been firing from a rocky nest at the head of a ravine, the brigade had melted away from around him. Flash Perkins was still with him, but something had happened. The firing had lessened down the line.

—Hey, Flash.

—Yeah.

—Hadn't we better fall back?

—Where's the Captain?

—I don't know. The brigade's retiring. If we don't go along, we'll get cut off.

The regiment had been fighting hard and holding its own all morning, cooperating in the repulse of several Confederate charges. Now, however, it seemed time to fall back. The Union lines were getting thin or non-existent in the woods here. Johnny and Flash started to the rear, hunting for a solid line. There were other men in squads and whole companies, moving slowly back through the woods. A sound of firing and yelling came from the right and the rear.

Johnny didn't know just how it happened.

He had lost the feeling of alignment, of solidarity with the Army, of coherence. As far as he could see, he was aligned on Flash Perkins and Flash on him, and the rest of the Army was swirling around in confusion. As they went back through the woods, instead of finding the brigade they were pushed out of the way by fresh companies who came up eager for the fight. Then a vast yelling and firing broke out in their rear and on both flanks. Johnny got out on high ground near a road. He was not even sure which direction the Enemy was coming from. He and Flash stopped and looked around.

They were surrounded by artillerymen, walking wounded, stretcher-bearers, dismounted cavalry, infantrymen who had not yet seen combat, officers looking for their commands, commands looking for their officers. The whole mass seemed vaguely worried, and although there were counter-currents, the tendency was to go back and find a point of reference farther to the rear.

Just where withdrawal became a rout Johnny didn't know. But there was a time when he ceased to believe that he and Flash Perkins were going to find a solid line of resistance. And there was a point where he stopped thinking of being a useful part of the Army and started to think of saving his skin. Somewhere along in there, he got separated from Flash Perkins. When that happened, he seemed to lose all ties with what had been the Battle and the Army. From then on he resumed his importance as an individual. He was persuaded that he had done his best. He seemed absolved from blame. When men around him began to run, he began to run. Somewhere along the way, he threw down his musket. He realized then that he
had thrown away the last symbol of resistance. He had admitted defeat. He ran faster then.

About four o'clock in the afternoon, he came out on a road which someone said led into Chattanooga. Along this road the whole right flank of the Union Army appeared to be trying to retreat all at once. Haggard bands of soldiers were herding down the road, cursing and reeling. Artillery caissons, ambulance carts, supply wagons, riderless horses, walking wounded jammed the road with a solid stream of agony and panic, constantly swollen by broken companies coming up from the battle area. Men said that whole divisions had been overrun, that there were thousands of yelling Rebels in pursuit, that they had seen whole companies bayoneted in a few seconds. Everywhere there was candid admission of defeat. Here and there, officers tried to curse order into the fleeing mass, but they were helpless.

Some way the hinge of the Army had been broken, and the Battle had been lost. The loosely integrated mass called ‘the Army' had ceased to touch in the important places. Now there was no Army at all, there were no regiments, there were no brigades, there were no divisions, there were no privates, there were no officers, there were only a lot of scared, desperate, wounded, sweating, cursing, unhappy men, absurdly dressed in blue uniforms, struggling along a road and trying to get to a place of safety.

Johnny didn't see why the Rebels didn't attack and annihilate the whole frightened mass.

As he went on, completely weary and exhausted, he had a dull feeling of despair as if he himself had been personally responsible for the defeat of the Army. Somewhere along the way, he had failed in courage or initiative. Somewhere along the way, he had agreed too easily to be defeated.