March Toward the Thunder

by Joseph Bruchac

  Though the Irish Brigade was less Irish in its makeup, the songs of Erin’s Isle and the lilt of the Gaelic language were still everywhere—as was Irish nationalism. At times it seemed to Louis that the true enemy was not the South, but Great Britain, the pitiless nation that had turned the green soil of dear old Ireland into a desert and driven its finest sons into exile.

  I may come out of this more Irish than Abenaki.

  Then he shook his head, remembering the remark made to him that very morning by Joker Kirk.

  “Chief, you haven’t done a rain dance again, have you? We’d like to stay dry for once while we’re marching.”

  The jest hadn’t hurt his feelings, but it had reminded him yet again of who he was. His brown skin and Indian features would always make him stand apart from white men—even in this company of men who were becoming as close to him as brothers.

  He didn’t like being different. It made him feel less like a fighting man and more like a lonely boy.

  Come on, Songbird, Louis thought.

  It was better when Devlin was singing. It left less space in his head for him to think. But the hill was still steep and his red-haired friend clearly still cogitating.

  He needed something to take his mind in another direction. Then he remembered something his father had told him.

  “Do not just look at the world, my son, study its working. To know your way, see how things come together.”

  How things come together, that was it. Whether it was the building of a wigwam from bent saplings and bark or the makeup of an army, this Grand Army of the Potomac.

  Ten men make a squad. Two squads make a section. Two sections make a platoon. Two platoons form a company, plus one captain, two lieutenants, five sergeants, eight corporals, and two musicians.

  Company was about as far as most privates took it. Know your company and these three rules:

  Stick with your company.

  Follow your sergeant’s orders.

  If he goes down, listen to the corporal.

  Louis, though, had learned more of the makeup of the army.

  Ten companies made up a regiment. Five regiments make a brigade like our own led by Colonel Smyth. As brave a man as ever wore an officer’s bars, Sergeant Flynn says. “Our colonel’s words at the start of any fight will never be ‘Up and at ’em,’ but always ‘Follow me, men.’”

  Louis had seen Colonel Smyth just once, a big, broad-shouldered man with a thoughtful look to him. Mounted on a fine horse, he’d waved back at them all as he rode ahead of the line of march.

  “Ye’ll always see him like that riding in front of our own picket lines,” Sergeant Flynn said. “It’s a charmed life that fine brave man will have led if he comes out of this war alive.”

  They topped the hill now, went down the other side. As they trudged along, they passed a farmyard empty of all signs of life. Any livestock, from cattle on down to chickens, had “failed to give the password and suffered the penalty,” as Joker put it. Every soldier welcomed a change from the salt pork and hardtack that made up most of their meals.

  They were entering a cornfield now, further trampling down the already flattened grain. No rail fences standing to slow their progress. They’d been pulled down and chopped up as fuel for camp fires by the regiments that preceded them.

  Regiments. Five regiments make a brigade. Two brigades make a division. Two divisions to a corps. Every corps has twenty-five cannons, fifty ambulances, two hundred supply wagons. Two corps make an army. And that adds up to . . .

  Louis calculated in his head: 160,000 men or more.

  Going up an even steeper hill now, leaving the farmland behind. Aside from Louis, whose life on the road had accustomed him to walking great distances with a heavy pack on his back, most of the men were breathing hard. That was especially true of Bull Belaney, whose breath was coming in gasps that Louis could hear even though the suspected bounty jumper was a good hundred feet ahead of him. Bull had been placed in the first line of march by Sergeant Flynn.

  “No straggling, skulking, or skedaddling for you, boy,” Flynn had said when he caught Belaney trying to position himself at the back of the company.

  Kirk caught his heel on a rock and almost stumbled. Louis reached out a hand to steady him without breaking stride.

  “Thank ye!” Joker wheezed. “I take back what I said this morning. In this heat I’d be glad for a bit of rain.”

  One man farther over, Merry’s round childish face was as red as a beet, but he was laboring on. The weight of packs, muskets, bayonets, and cartridge boxes filled with forty rounds of ammunition was over thirty pounds. Some of their company had started off with even more weight than that. Prized personal possessions had been stuffed into their packs along with blanket rolls, three days of rations, and full canteens. After the first five miles, the sun beating down upon them, the new recruits had started to jettison that extra weight. All sorts of things, from spare clothing, knives, and compasses to books lay on the hillside.

  Something clanked under his foot. Louis looked down. It was a rounded plate of the sort some soldiers brought with them in the hopes that it might stop a minié ball.

  Probably the same one that I saw Wilson tying over his belly this morning, Louis thought, kicking the abandoned piece of armor to the side. Won’t lay here long.

  Sutlers were close behind them. They hovered like the turkey buzzards, fellow scavengers following the army. Hated for their presence and missed in their absence, the sutlers offered such high-priced necessities as tinned meat, whiskey, tobacco, newspapers, shoelaces, candy, and playing cards. Always ready to make a quick profit, they’d swoop in to pick up any cast-off items and add them to the goods they’d sell.

  Louis shifted his pack to swat at the air. His own load was five pounds heavier than most since he was carrying half of a shelter tent. He hardly noticed the weight, but couldn’t ignore the gnats that formed a cloud around his face whenever he stopped walking for more than a heartbeat.

  Downhill again, still not even the hint of a breeze. Hot as Hades, though it was only early May. Up north there might still be snow. But here roses as red as blood were in bloom by the roadsides.

  Being so far south, we are closer to the land where summer lives.

  There was a river ahead to cross. The name Louis had heard someone mention was something like the Rapid One. Most likely they’d just pitch their tents in the woods on the other side, set up camp, and go back into the endless, boring routine of bugle calls and drills.

  “The Johnnies are beat,” someone said from behind him in a rueful voice. Louis didn’t look back. He recognized the voice as belonging to Happy Smith. Happy’s nickname came from always being able to see the downside of every situation.

  “Dang it all!” Happy groused. “Them graybacks’ll give out complete afore we even get a chance to shoot off our guns.”

  A distant rumble came from ahead.

  Thunder?

  Louis listened close, trying to hear that sound again over the tromp, tromp, tromp of marching feet from his company and the hundreds of other men in front of them and behind.

  Ten paces ahead, Devlin coughed to clear his throat, took a deep breath, and began to sing the words that had finally come to him.

  “We’ve never swerved from our green old flag,

  Upborne o’er many a bloody plain;

  ’Tis now a torn and tattered rag

  But we will bear it aloft again.”

  Another rumble sounded again. Louder this time.

  Not thunder, Louis thought.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SMOKE

  Thursday, May 5, 1864

  The crackling sound was coming from somewhere on the other side of the confusing tangle of hills and forests in which they’d found themselves lost. Rutted roads so narrow that they seemed no more than trails led off in every direction. Not a marker to be seen anywhere. Whatever signs there might have been had been taken down by the Southern soldiers whose land they were inv
ading.

  Sounds like corn popping, Louis thought, wiping the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. But it’s not. It’s rifles.

  They’d advanced a mile or so since the battle began. It was nothing like what he had expected. Rather than ranks of Gray soldiers, all Louis had seen so far was tangles of cedars and vines, pines and heavy brush cut here and there by dirt trails and meandering streams. Midday sun hot on his shoulders. From the woods to his left came the familiar sound of a cardinal’s song, fweet-fweet-fweet, cheer, cheer, cheer.

  Louis sniffed the warm air. Smoke in it now for sure.

  Somewhere ahead of them General Hancock, the Second Corps commander, had given the order to keep advancing. They’d find good ground ahead. At least that was what the colonel who brought back the order told them before he rode off.

  Sergeant Flynn growled from the tree stump he was standing on to Louis’s left, trying without success to see more than fifty feet up the twisted trail.

  “Good ground for the Rebs, but not us. No way for the artillery to find them in these godforsaken woods. They’ll be shooting at us from behind every tree. Babes in the wilderness ’tis what we are!”

  Flynn was talking to himself in a low voice that he thought no one else could hear. He’d not yet learned just how sharp were the ears of the brown-skinned young man who made it a point to seem as if he were not listening.

  The wilderness. A good name for where we are.

  The sergeant hopped down from his perch. “Follow me, lads,” he boomed. “Stick like a burr to the men to the left and the right of ye. If ye get confused, just march toward the sounds of the guns.”

  Louis cocked his head. Something was coming fast from up ahead. Hoofbeats were thudding in their direction from one of those roads that disappeared into the woods.

  “Cavalry,” Louis yelled.

  “Off the road!” Flynn bellowed.

  The men of Company E scattered to every side. Hats and bedrolls went flying in their haste to avoid the hooves galloping down on them. Louis barely held on to his rifle as he dove and rolled, coming up against the sharp roots of a cedar that tore a hole in the right knee of his trousers.

  As quickly as they had appeared, the company of Union cavalrymen was gone. They left behind a cloud of dust, the echo of hooves and jingling spurs, the memory of gaily decorated horses, shining boots, spotless blue uniforms, and plumed hats . . . and more than a few curses.

  Louis rubbed his leg. It was bleeding just below his knee.

  My first war wound. But there are no medals given for damage done by members of our own army—if the cavalry can be called that.

  “And there go our thoughtful lads on their lovely great steeds,” Sergeant Flynn called down from the top of the pine stump where he had taken refuge. “Bless their mounted souls—if they have any.”

  Louis understood the irony in Flynn’s words. After only two weeks in uniform he shared the foot soldier’s lack of affection for the danged horsey boys. Cavalrymen could dash in and out of battle as they pleased without even losing the crease in their pants. Their feet didn’t burn from marching for hours without stopping or their backs ache from lugging a forty-pound pack. And every cavalryman seemed to take it for granted that the roads belonged to them. So what if they had to ride over a few common foot soldiers and make them eat mud?

  Cavalry’s job was to be the eyes of the army. Reconnoiter, report back on the strength of the enemy. But, after three years of war, the Union cavalry had earned the reputation of disappearing just when it was needed and then coming back with wrong estimates of the enemy’s numbers.

  Easier to hate the cavalry than the enemy. That was said by every infantryman from the lowest private on up to the top generals.

  Joker limped up to lean on Louis’s shoulder as he tried to dislodge the thorny branch wrapped around his ankle.

  “Have you heard there’s a reward being offered for dead cavalrymen, Chief?” Kirk said. “Five dollars if they’re wearing gray and ten if they’re in Union blue?”

  Louis chuckled.

  Joker poked him in the side. “Finally got you to crack a grin on that one.”

  Sergeant Flynn looked over the ranks of the company as the rest extricated themselves from the branches and brambles to re-form on the dirt track, three abreast. It took three men to pull out William O’Day, who’d once again justified his nickname of Bad Luck Bill by getting his foot jammed into a hollow tree.

  Corporal Hayes counted heads. “Nineteen,” he said.

  “Belaney,” Flynn barked at the man who was standing behind a tree to relieve himself. “Out and to the front. And don’t let me be finding ye bending down to tie a shoe and let the line go past ye. I know every trick in the book of malingering, boyo.”

  Flynn turned and nodded to Louis. “Nolette, thank ye for yer warning. So now let’s put ye to scout where ye can use those Indian eyes and ears of yers. Stay a hundred feet or so ahead and report back whenever ye see something.”

  The sergeant pointed up the road. “Unless our beloved cavalry comes back and tramples us all to death, we’ll be meeting the enemy just beyond those hills. Now forward, march!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  STRANGE CONVERSATIONS

  Friday, May 6, 1864

  If the sun rose the next day, Louis hardly knew it. The morning brought only a thin haze of light to the smoky landscape he squinted at as he stood on the picket line. He wiped his reddened eyes with his pocket kerchief. It came away smeared with black. Some was from the ashes in the air. More was from the powder and smoke of his own gun.

  Louis looked down at his weapon. How many times have I fired it?

  He cradled the Springfield in the crook of his left arm and felt inside his cartridge box, counting with his fingers.

  Six cartridges left out of forty.

  Probably the same for the other men who’d survived the fighting. They’d need more ammunition from the supply train before the next advance. Though they could also forage for ammunition from the cartridge boxes of the dead. Whether Gray or Blue, it didn’t matter. They all fired or were struck by the same .58-caliber rounds.

  How many dead?

  He shook out the kerchief and wiped his eyes again. They were watering something fierce. He wasn’t crying. Or maybe he was. It was hard to be sure. Just as hard as it was to keep straight all that had happened in the last sixteen hours. It seemed more like a dream than anything real.

  Who’s still alive in E Company?

  He looked over to his right. A slender figure barely visible in the mist and smoke raised a hand to him. Louis waved back.

  Merry.

  Merry, there on the picket line with him, had come through the fight unhurt. Maybe it was because he was so small. In the hail of bullets that struck all around them, not a one had touched him.

  Louis had escaped injury too, though a crease across the face of the brass box plate on his cartridge box showed how close a minié ball had come to finding his flesh and bone. The impact had knocked him off his feet. For a time he wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. Then another soldier in blue with a blackened face grabbed him by the hand and pulled him up. It had to be Songbird, for he was reciting poetry.

  “We miss full well a comrade’s smile, the grasp of many a friendly hand,” Devlin chanted. “Come on now, Nolette. ’Tis no time yet for a nap.”

  Devlin was alive too. But not Bad Luck Bill. O’Day’s head had been broken open like a melon by a spinning piece of shell. Nor was it likely that Shaky Wilson was still breathing. The last he’d seen Wilson, he was leaning on a fallen tree and trying to hold in a red writhing mass spilling like snakes out of his belly.

  Why is it that I see those men who’ve been killed so clear in my mind, but I can’t recall who else among us isn’t hurt?

  It was strange. Even stranger that all through the confusion of gunshot and smoke, shouts and screams and the sounds of men calling for water or their mothers, not once had he seen the face of an enemy soldier.r />
  One moment he’d been walking along, moving down the road that had become wider, though the surrounding woods were just as thick. Then he’d heard a sound from the forest. The cracking of twigs underfoot, the tinny sound of a canteen hitting a tree, the sound of a musket being cocked. No time to get back to the company just coming now around the bend. He took a deep breath, shouted.

  “Ambush! Get down!!”

  Then he was crouching down, crawling back to the company, the whole of the 69th under fierce fire from an enemy they couldn’t see. What they shot back at were the flashes of flame from rifles thrust out from behind trees and rocks. Louis loaded and fired again, loaded and fired again.

  “Follow me, lads,” Sergeant Flynn’s voice bellowed from somewhere in the smoke.

  Some were dead or too injured to stand, but the rest of them rose up to follow the green flag of the Irish Brigade. Through the smoke and the mist, the only ray of light visible was that bright design of a sun bursting through the clouds above an Irish harp and the words Faugh-a-Ballagh. “Clear the way.”

  Clear the way.

  Those words kept going through his mind as Louis ran and stumbled and fired, loaded and fired again at flashes of flame and gray shapes that wavered in and out of sight like ghosts.

  Then they were in another clearing, this one littered with what looked like sticks bleached white by the sun. Until O’Day spoke the words that made them all look again at the scattered piles.

  “There’s dead men’s bones all around us,” Bad Luck Bill yelled—just before the shrapnel found his skull.

  It was later that Louis learned how another terrible battle had been fought between Blue and Gray for the same wilderness a year ago. So bloody and brutal that the bodies of the dead were left unburied. As Louis pushed his way through the woods, he saw the ghastly remains of that struggle again and again. A rib. A long leg bone. A gap-toothed skull. Sometimes, next to those remnants of what had been a breathing human like himself, the rusted remains of a canteen, a bit of tattered cloth, the rotting bill of a cap too worn by the weather to say which side it was from. By the bank of a little creek, Louis came across skeletons of three horses half buried in sticky mud.