River of Blood (Shiloh Series Book 4)

by Phillip Bryant

  With a sudden stirring, a quiet shuffling of hundreds of feet—unaccompanied by any cheer or yell—the brigades under McCown moved.

  “Move the brigade forward, keep the distance from Polk, quarter step,” General Wood ordered.

  The brigade stepped off with a feeling of abandon. Tucked away behind two other divisions, the soldiers could step off without the sense that at any moment a round might come plowing its way into a limb or a chest from some musket leveled directly at a target in the line.

  John walked along behind the staff, most of whom were mounted, and held on to his message pouch as it bounced lightly against his side. He felt naked without his musket—an infantryman always feels exposed without a weapon of some sort, and even though the musket could become an annoyance to carry after an hour of marching as the arms became fatigued, it was something one always held on to when moving about.

  The long lines of the regiments up ahead disappeared into the thickets of cedars, and the brigade crossed the Franklin pike. All was still quiet ahead. The enemy pickets had yet to be encountered, as not a single shot had been fired after fifteen minutes of route stepping through the open fields.

  There were ten thousand men in General Cleburne’s division alone, and John could see them spread out from right to left as far as the trees allowed him to view before the division’s front was swallowed up by the first cedar brake. There were tens of thousands more to the right; he had passed by them in the dark. He had seen them when the regiment moved along the Franklin pike days before, spread out behind breastworks and stretching all the way to the river and then beyond it. All of these men would be in motion soon, and a bloody day was in store for them all. Being with the brigade staff instead of the front ranks accorded some sense of safety, there were plenty of bumblebee catchers in front of him, men who would be struck first at the first fire.

  The first picket firing erupted off to his left from the direction of Liddell’s brigade, the leftmost of Cleburne’s line. The sound was worrisome. They were not supposed to be in the front line but behind McCown’s regiments. General Wood and his staff exchanged some anxious looks as a rider was sent off to investigate and the brigade emerged from the cedars and into an open field. Polk’s brigade was still in front of them and marching unconcerned about an enemy in their front.

  Then firing, more intense and directed, sounded off from the right—from the direction McCown’s line was to have been occupying. It was curiously close and almost to the rear of what anyone was expecting, as if the enemy was somehow slipping in behind Wood’s position and attacking. Volleys rang out, relieving the anxiety of when the fight would begin in earnest. The engagement proper was upon them all.

  John strained to see where the 3rd Confederate was and if he could make out Leach or any of the others. He spotted them on the left of the brigade line. If the others had tried to slip away and made it, they had not been detected or word would have made it to General Wood by now: Glenn, Grover, and Holly must still be in the ranks and Leach still with Captain Robertson. John had been reluctantly prepared to slip away, but now that it would just be him, he was even less motivated to make a go of it. The loneliness made up his mind to just wait for another opportunity to leave the war behind him, even if it meant a prison camp. Even then, he wanted it to be with his friends with him.

  He knew he could still find himself captured in some surprise development. It did happen—even if his side was flush with victory, one little mistake or miscue could mean all or part of the regiment or brigade might be taken apart in a deadly fight or be cut off and unable to escape.

  John’s first real hint that something was going horribly wrong came from the surprised tones from General Wood about what wasn’t supposed to be happening. The general racket brought about by combined artillery and musket fire in front of the division—from what was supposed to be the supporting line behind McCown—made it clear that Cleburne’s position was the front line, not the second.

  “Courier, quickly now,” General Wood motioned to John.

  “Prepare to halt and deploy skirmishers,” Wood dictated to his aide-de-camp, who scribbled down the missive on a crumpled square of paper upon his palm. “Send to each regiment.”

  John took the note and thrust it into his pouch. The canvas bag hung on his shoulder light and empty, an odd thing to carry for just a scrap of paper torn from a small notebook. The front regiments were still in motion, and John had to run hard to catch up to the 3rd Confederate marching on the far left of the brigade. In a brigade one always saw men and officers belonging to the other regiments and the brigade command and his staff, but you never felt a feeling of home until you were with faces you knew closely. For a brief moment, John was home as he approached Major Cameron and saluted.

  “Sir, message from General Wood,” John said breathlessly.

  “Private,” Major Cameron said as he returned the salute and handed the paper back to John.

  Then on to the next regiment. The firing in front intensified as thick clouds of smoke rose from the position of Liddell’s brigade on the far left, and then a loud cheering sounded as the whole brigade melted into the mist at a run, charging into a cedar wood. Johnson’s brigade next to them also moved forward, at a steady pace, firing as they went.

  By the time John had made his circuit of the other regiments, Polk’s brigade had also halted and was firing furiously at what appeared to be a solid line of blue supported by several cannon. Fire from the enemy artillery fell in the midst of Wood’s brigade, overshooting Polk’s position.

  As John made it back to General Wood’s position, another courier brought his mount to a halt with orders. Minié balls were zipping overhead, some clipping nearby trees as Wood’s brigade halted two hundred yards behind Polk’s position, waiting for the order to do something. That order had come.

  “Come with me,” Wood ordered John as he and several of the mounted staff moved off, forcing John to trot along on foot behind them. It was back to the 3rd Confederate again, but this time Wood was giving the order in person.

  “Major Cameron, prepare to file by the right and follow the 43rd Mississippi. The brigade is moving off to the right to plug a hole,” Wood shouted above the noise. The ranks of the 3rd Confederate were quiet, standing at order arms and watching the progress of the battle from a not-so-safe distance after all.

  John caught a quick glance of Phillip Leach standing idly by Captain Johnston. He gave Leach a quick nod. Leach looked miserable. Ahead, in front of Polk’s line of regiments, the banners of the enemy were visible through the smoke, waving proudly. A row of fences separated the two foes, and behind them, barely visible from where John stood, another line of the enemy waited patiently for the Confederates to close up. John counted only one stand of colors directly in front of the brigade: it was an unequal fight of four regiments to one.

  Before John could watch anymore, General Wood spurred his mount forward, and he had to catch up as the general made for the next regiment. Behind him John heard Major Cameron give the order to file by the right of companies. The whole brigade was to form march column and head east.

  This was a part of the war he’d seldom seen—the view from the rear. Watching the war envelop the division as he ran around behind the brigade commander brought him to a different world of command and control. He felt a sense of helplessness as he watched orders being given and obeyed but knew himself unable to affect anything. It was an infantryman’s dream to be out of the line when it came to marching forward into the mouths of cannon and rifles, and certainly John’s heart was not in the war for state or country, and yet here he was feeling left out, wishing he could just be one more soldier in the ranks and unaware of the progress of the battle from the larger perspective. It was far easier to just react to orders than to relay them knowing what was to come.

  General Wood and his staff completed the issuing of new orders and took a position at the head of the brigade column. Fighting was happening all around, the noise now
deafening where forty minutes before all had been quiet. Volley fire broke in loud, ominous cracks of thunder that echoed for moments at a time and roared over the continuous fire of at-will musket discharges. Cannon fire broke at intervals and swallowed all other sounds in its wake, shaking the ground and ringing the ears. In the midst of all of this came the babbling, cursing, shouting, yelling, and groaning of men: loud throaty huzzahs from the Union lines, shrill yipping cries from the Confederates.

  As the brigade stepped off, Polk’s brigade charged forward with a shout, each man yelling a repeating cry from the voice box that carried easily with the motion of running, and the solitary colors of the enemy fell to the ground, leaving a pile of dead and wounded along the fence line the Yankees had sheltered behind. The huzzahs of the Unionists, best given when stationary to buck up courage or when moving forward at a gentle walk, shouted defiance in return.

  John soon left these scenes behind as the brigade marched at the double-quick to fill a gap that had opened in the Confederate line between Cleburne’s division and that of Cheatham, who was to take up the march as Cleburne executed his string of right-wheel movements to keep on track with the grand right wheel of Bragg’s army. As the brigade cleared the rear of Polk’s position, the zip and zing of minié balls became constant. Even at five hundred yards, the range of fire was dangerous enough that John might be felled by a spent round.

  John was winded as General Wood brought the brigade to a halt and the regiments fronted. On their right, the left general guide of the 9th Texas Infantry of Smith’s brigade stood waiting for the order to move forward, his bayonet adorned with a red-and-white pennant with a single star in the center to help mark the leftmost company of the regiment.

  The man stood at shoulder arms as Smith’s whole brigade waited for Wood to come on line before stepping off. John envied him—a sergeant who had earned the rank and honor of being the general guide. It would have been something to attain to if circumstances had been different—if he’d actually been interested in this war enough to pursue higher laurels. The constant threat of ill will toward his family and the threats of punishment for slight infractions had warred against his sense of manliness and honor since the day he joined. These others, the men from Arkansas and Tennessee in the ranks of the 3rd Confederate, were there because they had truly volunteered to be there, and they had a sense of what they were going to do each time they faced the enemy. Not for them were questions of running or staying.

  Not for the first time, he considered that he could just give up and give in to the enforced call to arms. Give up trying to desert and embrace what was.

  With a sharp swing of General Wood’s sword and the shout of “Forward, march!” repeated by regimental commanders, the brigade stepped off. Boulders the size of small tables and just as flat, lying low to the ground, were everywhere, with cedars growing in the spaces between them where the local farmers had deigned to clear the boulders out of their fields. They formed low-lying barricades in places and seemed to grow up out of the ground like an unwanted crop of weeds, lining fences and running all along the thick cedar forests. Those too large to clear had just been left where the farmers found them, beacons in the middle of their cotton or cornfields, testaments to the way the land used to be. The stones were slippery in the morning dew, and many a man clattered over them with a curse as his footing gave way.

  Ahead three hundred yards stood a dense cedar thicket, and one hundred yards up was a fence line marking the Franklin pike, with an open field beyond that. Behind the fence was the movement, lots of movement, of men concealing themselves. Cannons in the line of trees far ahead billowed mushrooming discharges toward the advancing infantry lines in quick succession, their projectiles falling far to the rear. The immediate concern was the line of rifles that stood up out of the ground in a moment’s time, with the colors of the 101st Ohio Infantry borne in the center.

  From the safety of the rear, John could see the fluttering Stars and Stripes of the Yankee line. He had quickly become accustomed to counting stands of colors to assess what lay in his front when marching into battle. One national and one regimental color marked one regiment. Four or five marked a brigade. Just one color here, John noted again. For some reason known only to the Yankee colonel himself, this one regiment was in the advance of the others of its brigade, exposed to the entirety of Wood’s forces.

  The Yankees let loose with a volley, a thunderclap surprise that shook the entire line, and the skirmishers went to ground—all those who were not cut down by the fire delivered at point-blank range. A ringing “Hurrah!” followed the near-perfect volley, an instant where every musket had fired as if one.

  The enemy regiment almost spanned the brigade in frontage, except that his left flank was exposed with no one to anchor it. On their right, General Withers’s brigades had begun moving forward, and they were also meeting opposition.

  General Wood interrupted John’s spectatorship of the coming fight with new orders. “Send to Major Cameron, advance one hundred yards and take them Yankees in the flank,” he shouted over a ringing volley loosed by the 33rd Alabama in response to the Yankee fire—a crisply fired volley that tore into the wood fence rails and chipped flakes of the granite stones at the fence’s base.

  It was back to the 3rd Confederate that John ran with the note. Already there were men down, crawling away from the firing line and holding bloodied limbs. Artillery fire swept in from their far left flank, a battery or batteries firing across their front and taking down parts of the fence that ran parallel to the Franklin pike in large, splintery showers of wood and iron.

  Having delivered the message, John tarried behind the 3rd Confederate and watched as the regiment moved forward and drew the fire of the enemy regiments concealed in the wood ahead. The colors of the 3rd, a navy-blue background with a white center oval bearing the name of the regiment and their battle honors—Woodsensville, Shiloh, and Perryville—stenciled across its face, marched forward. John had hated those colors. When they trooped forward, it was a reminder of what he and his fellows had tried to avoid from the beginning. But watching them now, he felt stirred. It wasn’t mere bravado that brought these Arkansas and Tennessee men into harm’s way, nor was it at the end of a whip that they marched shoulder to shoulder. Though he and his fellows had been loath to keep fighting, John nonetheless felt some pride at witnessing the start of this engagement.

  The 3rd Confederate halted and fired into the cedars that bristled with rifles, double ranks sheltering at the forest’s edge prepared to respond in kind. The lone Yankee regiment confronting the 33rd Alabama at the fence fired for all they were worth, their line now misty with smoke from discharges. General Wood advanced his other regiments twice, closer and closer, and the Yankees clung to the fence and the rocks and continued to be stubborn. Artillery from the division ranged about in the rear, looking for places to go into battery, and several began to fire into the enemy emplacements to aid in the infantry attack. The level ground and the stands of cedars that grew in thick clusters forced the batteries to get closer to the fighting than artillery preferred. Once they unlimbered, solid shot from the enemy would begin to rain down on them. The enemy seemed to have artillery everywhere.

  John broke away and jogged back to the brigade command clustered about the center of the fighting against the 101st Ohio. The enemy held a naturally strong position but was hopelessly outgunned and outmanned. Off to the brigade left, Polk’s brigade was advancing and coming in at the right wheel; their path, if held constant, would brush up against the enemy in Wood’s front. Polk was confronting a brigade at right angles to the Yankee position opposing Wood, forming a hook anchored on the Franklin pike.

  John stood in awe of all of the movement around him: the immense pageantry of the deadly fighting composed of thousands of men under arms, all flowing forward with power. He felt an odd mixture of pride and loathing at the Stars and Bars that led each regiment forward in the war he didn’t want to be in. He shuddered.
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  Though he tried, John couldn’t fill his heart with hate toward those men carrying the colors forward or toward the many in gray or wearing gold stars upon their collars. None of these men had forced their will upon him. Only two men deserved that sort of response, and at this moment they were busy trying to hold Company K of the 3rd Confederate together.

  * * *

  Second Lieutenant James Campbell was busier than what he was accustomed to, and so by extension was Sergeant Thomas Wade. Already Captain Johnston and Lieutenant Howell were down, having fallen out at the first fire. Now Campbell was in command of the company and looked in a panic.

  It was not that Campbell lacked the determination and drive to become something—he had campaigned to be captain of the new company when it was mustered. No, it was that he really hadn’t a clue how to command a company of soldiers about on the field despite all the time he’d witnessed Captain Johnston doing it. The men who rode with Campbell before the war did so because his father was a man of importance around Helena, Arkansas, not because Campbell himself was an inspiring leader, though at times Wade was loath to admit even that to himself.

  With the other officers of the company down came the responsibility of leading the fifty Arkansas brigands about on the field, men who despised him for one reason or another but all because he’d played a hand in making their lives miserable.

  Leading a company was not that hard—any man could do it as long as he knew the commands and assumed the mantle of responsibility. As long as the company stayed attached to the rest of the regiment, one had only to parrot the last order given by the colonel. But a company also needed to be led by a man of conviction and personal courage, qualities Campbell was demonstrably lacking right now. At this moment, Campbell had also inherited Phillip Leach as his courier. James Campbell was in a tight spot.