Shiloh (6 page)

"Second Samuel, brother"—I could the same as see him
nod his head that positive way he had. "Says it's what the children of
Israel, God's chosen, was working toward. Yes: a place for them to lay down
their worries. Bible scholars interpret that it means the Place of Peace."
And he went on expounding.

Now mind
you Martha, no more reproaching me for not writing long letters that give all
the news about myself. Here are three pages of big sheets close written — you
cannot say again your husband never writes you long letters. Guard duty would
not be so bad if every man could spend it this way writing to the one he misses
most.

Its
a beautiful Sunday morn, the sun just coming up. I bet you
are sleep in bed. Remember what I said that last night about next time? All the
birds are singing.

Birds were tearing their throats out, hopping around in the
budding limbs, and there was a great scampering of animals out front in the
thickets. It was fine to be up at that time of the morning, even if it had
meant staying up on guard all the night before. I didn’t feel a bit sleepy, but
I knew it would come down on me that afternoon. For the first time, this
Southern country took on real beauty, or else I was a little drunk from lack of
sleep. I forgot about Colonel Appier and the way he was forever ranting because
I misspelled a few words in the regimental orders. The countryside looked so
good that it reminded me of spring back home in Ohio, when everything is
opening and the air is soft with the touch of summer and fragrant with rising
sap and bursting buds.

O my
dearest, if only you knew how much I lo

There was a rattle of sound all across the front of the
position, like snapping limbs, and another racket mixed in too, like screaming
women. Bango lifted his head, the big yellow eyes still glazed with sleep. I
recognized it as the sound of firing, and then there were the thudding booms of
cannon. Beyond the swale and through the screen of trees along the stream I saw
rabbits and fluttering birds and even a doe with her spotted-backed fawn. She
ran with nervous mincing steps, stopping frequently to turn her head back in
the direction she had come from.

Then I saw the skirmishers come through. They looked tall
and lean, even across that distance. Beneath their wide-brimmed hats their
faces were sharp, and their gray and butternut trousers were wet to the thighs
with dew. They carried their rifles slantwise across their bodies, like quail
hunters.

3

Private Luther Dade

Rifleman, 6th Mississippi

When I went to sleep the stars were out and there was even a
moon, thin like a sickle and clear against the night, but when I woke up there
was only the blackness and the wind sighing high in the treetops. That was what
roused me I believe, because for a minute I disremembered where I was. I
thought I was back home, woke up early and
laying
in
bed waiting for pa to come with the lantern to turn me out to milk (that was
the best thing about the army: no cows) and ma was in the kitchen humming a
hymn while she shook up the stove. But then I realized part of the sound was
the breathing and snoring of the men all around me, with maybe a whimper or a
moan every now and again when the bad dreams came, and I remembered. We had
laid down to sleep in what they call Line of Battle and now the night was
nearly over. And when I remembered I wished I'd stayed asleep: because that was
the worst part, to lie there alone, feeling lonely, and no one to tell you he
was feeling the same.

But it was warm under the blanket and my clothes had dried
and I could feel my new rifle through the cloth where I had laid it to be safe
from the dew when I wrapped the covers round me. Then it was the same as if they’d
all gone away, or
I
had; I was back
home with my brothers and sisters again, myself the oldest by over a year, and
they were gathered around to tell me goodbye the way they did a month ago when
I left to join up in Corinth after General Beauregard sent word that all true
men were needed to save the country. That was the way he said it. I was just
going to tell them I would be back with a Yankee sword for the fireplace, like
pa did with the Mexican one, when I heard somebody talking in a hard clear
voice not like any of
my
folks, and
when I looked up it was Sergeant Tyree.

"Roll out there," he said. "Roll out to
fight."

I had gone to sleep and dreamed of home, but here I was,
away up in Tennessee, further from Ithaca and Jordan County than I'd ever been
in all my life before. It was Sunday already and we were fixing to hit them
where they had their backs to the river, the way it was explained while we were
waiting for our marching orders three days ago. I sat up.

From then on everything moved fast with a sort of mixed-up
jerkiness, like Punch and Judy. Every face had a kind of drawn look, the way it
would be if a man was picking up on something heavy. Late ones like myself were
pulling on their shoes or rolling their blankets. Others were already fixed.
They squatted with their rifles across their thighs, sitting there in the
darkness munching biscuits, those that had saved any, and not doing much
talking. They nodded their heads with quick flicky motions, like birds, and
nursed their rifles, keeping them out of the dirt. I had gotten to know them
all in a month and a few of them were even from the same end of the county I
was, but now it was like I was seeing them for the first time, different. All
the put-on had gone out of their faces—they were left with what God gave them
at the beginning.

We lined up. And while Sergeant Tyree passed among us,
checking us one by one to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be,
dawn begun to come through, faint and high. While we were answering roll-call
the sun rose big and red through the trees and all up and down the company
front they begun to get excited and jabber at one another: "The sun of oyster
itch," whatever that meant. I was glad to see the sun again, no matter
what they called it.

One minute we were standing there, shifting from leg to leg,
not saying much and more or less avoiding each other's eyes: then we were going
forward. It happened that sudden. There was no bugle or drum or anything like
that. The men on our right started moving and we moved too, lurching forward
through the underbrush and trying to keep the line straight the way we had been
warned to do, but we couldn’t. Captain Plummer was cussing. "Dwess it
up," he kept saying, cussing a blue streak; "Dwess it up,
dod
dam it, dwess it up," all the way through the
woods. So after a while, when the trees thinned, we stopped to straighten the
line.

There was someone on a tall claybank horse out front, a
fine-looking man in a new uniform with chicken guts on the sleeves all the way
to his elbows, spruce and spang as a gamecock. He had on a stiff red cap, round
and flat on top like a sawed-off dice box, and he was making a speech.
"Soldiers of the South!" he shouted in a fine proud voice, a little
husky, and everybody cheered. All I could hear was the cheering and yipping all
around me, but I could see his eyes light up and his mouth moving the way it
will do when a man is using big words. I thought I heard something about defenders
and liberty and even something about the women back home but I couldn’t be
sure; there was so much racket. When he was through he stood in the stirrups,
raising his cap to us as we went by, and I recognized him. It was General
Beauregard, the man I'd come to fight for, and I hadn’t hardly heard a word he
said.

We stayed lined up better now because we were through the
worst of the briers and vines, but just as we got going good there was a
terrible clatter off to the right, the sound of firecrackers mixed with a
roaring and yapping like a barn full of folks at a Fourth of July dogfight or a
gouging match. The line begun to crook and weave because some of the men had
stopped to listen, and Captain Plummer was cussing them, tongue-tied. Joe Marsh
was next to me—he was nearly thirty, middle-aged, and had seen some battle up
near Bowling Green. "There you are," he said, slow and calm and proud
of himself. "Some outfit has met the elephant." That was what the ones
who had been in action always called it: the elephant.

They had told us how it would be. They said we would march
two days and on the third day we would hit them where they were camped between
two creeks with their backs to the Tennessee River. We would drive them, the
colonel told us, and when they were pushed against the river we would kill or capture
the whole she-bang. I didn’t understand it much because what the colonel said
was full of tactics talk. Later the captain explained it, and that was better
but not much. So then Sergeant Tyree showed it to us by drawing Lines on the
ground with a stick. That way it was clear as could be.

It sounded fine, the way he told it; it sounded simple and
easy. Maybe it was too simple, or something. Anyhow things didn’t turn out so
good when it came to doing them. On the third day we were still marching, all
day, and here it was the fourth day and we were still just marching, stop and
go but mostly stop—the only real difference was that the column was moving sideways
now, through the woods instead of on the road. From all that racket over on the
right I thought maybe the other outfits would have the Yankees pushed back and
captured before we even got to see it. The noise had died down for a minute,
but as we went forward it swelled up again, rolling toward the left where we
were, rifles popping and popping and the soldiers yelling crazy in the
distance. It didn’t sound like any elephant to me.

We came clear of the woods where they ended on a ridge
overlooking a valley with a little creek running through it. The ground was
open all across the valley, except where the creek bottom was overgrown, and mounted
to another ridge on the other side where the woods began again. There were
white spots in the fringe of trees—these were tents, I made out. We were the
left brigade of the whole army. The 15th Arkansas, big men mostly, with bowie
knives and rolled-up sleeves, was spread across the front for skirmishers,
advanced a little way in the open. There was a Tennessee regiment on our right
and two more on our left and still another at the left rear with flankers out.
Then we were all in the open, lined up with our flags riffling in the breeze.
Colonel Thornton was out front, between us and the skirmishers. His saber flashed
in the sun. Looking down the line I saw the other regimental commanders, and
all their sabers were flashing sunlight too. It was like a parade just before
it begins.

This is going to be what they promised us, I said to myself.
This is going to be the charge.

That was when General Johnston rode up. He came right past
where I was standing, a fine big man on a bay stallion. He had on a broad-brim
hat and a cape and thigh boots with gold spurs that twinkled like sparks of
fire. I watched him ride by, his mustache flaring out from his mouth and his
eyes set deep under his forehead. He was certainly the handsomest man I ever
saw, bar none; he made the other officers on his staff look small. There was a
little blond-headed lieutenant bringing up the rear, the one who would go all
red in the face when the men guyed him back on the march. He looked about my
age, but that was the only thing about us that was alike. He had on a natty
uniform: bobtail jacket, red silk neckerchief, fire-gilt buttons, and all. I
said to myself, I bet his ma would have a fit if she could see him now.

General Johnston rode between our regiment and the Tennessee
boys on our right, going forward to where the skirmish line was waiting. When
the colonel in charge had reported. General Johnston spoke to the skirmishers:
"Men of Arkansas, they say you boast of your prowess with the bowie knife.
Today you wield a nobler weapon: the bayonet. Employ it well." They stood
there holding their rifles and looking up at him, shifting their feet a little
and looking sort of embarrassed. He was the only man I ever saw who wasn’t a
preacher and yet could make that high-flown way of talking sound right. Then he
turned his horse and rode back through our line, and as he passed he leaned
sideways in the saddle and spoke to us: "Look along your guns, and fire
low." It made us ready and anxious for what was coming.

Captain Plummer walked up and down the company front. He was
short, inclined to fat, and walked with a limp from the blisters he developed
on the march. "Stay dwessed on me, wherever I go," he said.

"And shoot low. Aim for their knees." All up and
down the line the flags were flapping and other officers were speaking to their
men.

I was watching toward the front, where we would go, but all
I could see was that empty valley with the little creek running through it and
the rising ground beyond with the trees on top. While I was looking, trying
hard to see was anybody up there, all of a sudden there was a Boom! Boom! Boom!
directly in the rear and it scared me so bad I almost broke for cover. But when
I looked around I saw they had brought up the artillery and it was shooting
over our heads towards the left in a shallow swale. I felt real sheepish from
having jumped but when I looked around I saw that the others had jumped as much
as I had, and now they were joking at one another about who had been the most
scared, carrying it off all brave-like but looking kind of hang-dog about it
too. I was still trying to see whatever it was out front that the artillery was
shooting at, but all I could see was that valley with the creek in it and the
dark trees on the flanks.