Authors: Shelby Foote
In the wagon the wounded were mostly too sore to brush the
sleet and hail away, or perhaps they had reached a stage where they didn’t
care. They lay with it piled between their legs and in their laps. It filled
the wrinkles in their uniforms so that the angry red of their wounds stood out
sharp against its whiteness. Up front, sitting with his back to the driver,
there was a man whose face I avoided. His jaw had been shot away but his tongue
was still there; it hung down on his throat like a four-in-hand tie.
The boy who had lost an arm was better now, as if the gusts
of rain and sleet and hail had cleared his mind. Above the circles of pain and
fatigue, his eyes were bright. He had begun to look around, first at the ones
in the wagon with him, then at the others walking alongside. Facing me over the
tailgate he suddenly seemed to realize where he was, that the column was
heading for Corinth. He wet his lips and looked at me. For the first time,
except for the raving, he spoke. "Lieutenant..." His voice was weak;
he tried again. "Lieutenant..."
"Yes?"
"Lieutenant—did we get
whupped
?"
I said I supposed they would call it that. He sort of shrank
back into himself, as if this was what he had expected, and did not speak
again. It was night now and the stars were out, though the moon had not risen. My
boots made a crunching sound in the sleet. Soon the lamps of Corinth came into
sight, and along the roadside there were women with hot coffee.
Note
Historical characters in this book speak the words they
spoke and do the things they did at Shiloh. Many of the minor incidents also
occurred, even when here they are assigned to fictional persons; I hope the
weather is accurate too. This was made possible by the records left by men who
were there — in the memoirs of Grant and Sherman, in the series of articles
collected under the title
Battles and
Leaders of the Civil War
, and particularly in the reports of officers,
forwarded through channels and collected in Volume X of
The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the
Union and Confederate Armies
. There you hear the live men speak.
General Johnston's biography, written by his son William
Preston Johnston and published by Appleton in 1878, remains the consummate
study of Shiloh. It was this book which first drew my interest and it was this
book to which I returned most often for information.
Section Five is based in part on a paper, "Forrest at
Shiloh," read by Major G. V.
Rambaut
before the
Confederate Historical Society of Memphis and published in the 19 January 1896
Commercial Appeal
. Robert
Selph
Henry's biography of Forrest, published by
Bobbs
-Merrill in 1944, contributed much to this section as
well as to others.
The two best modern studies of the battle are found in Lloyd
Lewis'
Sherman: Fighting Prophet
(Harcourt, Brace, 1932) and Stanley F. Horn's
The Army of Tennessee
(
Bobbs
-Merrill,
1941)—I have drawn on both.
Authorities at Shiloh National Military Park gave me the run
of the battlefield, surely one of the best preserved in the world, and were
invaluable in locating the scenes of action. Also I think no one who studies
our Civil War should make a list of acknowledgments without mentioning the
photographs of Mathew Brady and the writings of Douglas
Southall
Freeman.
—S. F.
About the Author
Although he now makes his home in Memphis, Tennessee, Shelby
Foote comes from a long line of Mississippians. He was born in
Cireenville
, Mississippi, and attended school there until
he entered the University of North Carolina. During World War II he served in
the European theater as a captain of field artillery. He has written six
novels: Tournament, Follow Me Down, Love in a Dry Season, Shiloh, Jordan County,
and September
September
. He was awarded three
Guggenheim fellowships during the course of writing his monumental three-volume
history, The Civil War: A Narrative.