“I’m fine, Julius. Fine. My men are ready. Have been for an hour.”
“Then why do you look like you’re about to throw a tantrum?”
“Because this army is moving too slowly, Julius. Van Cleve’s men should be on the road and they’re still cooking breakfast! He has half a mile to go to the ford and then nearly two more on the far side of the river before he’ll be in position to strike the Rebel flank. With the time he’ll need to deploy, it will be three hours before he can attack. Meanwhile, our right is vulnerable to whatever Bragg chooses to do. If he moved early, there could be hell to pay very shortly.”
Garesché shakes his head. “Bill, I am going to recommend to the commanding general that he secure you an independent command. Your talents are lost leading a mere brigade.”
“Don’t mock me, Julius.”
“I am not mocking you. I am completely serious. Or you and I could swap places, since your advice would no doubt be much better than mine. Except, of course, that you lack some of the diplomacy required of a chief of staff.”
“Now you are mocking me.”
“No, I swear, Bill. But listen. General Rosecrans has anticipated these things and has chosen to sacrifice time for the additional strength that a hot breakfast will give the men. It is not sloth that determines our hour of advance.”
“And our right flank?”
“Our right flank is commanded by General McCook, a man in whom I know you have less than full confidence. But General McCook has specific instructions on how he and his wing are to conduct themselves. And whatever you may think of him, remember that he has excellent division commanders.” Garesché waits. “Does he not?”
Hazen shrugs. “I suppose they are acceptable. Davis and Sheridan are fighters.”
“And General Johnson?”
“Bandbox Johnson? He of the saber-swinging charges? I am not sure the army is the better for regaining his services. I might have delayed exchanging him until we had fought this campaign.”
Garesché laughs. “My God, you are a hard man, Bill! General Johnson is a fine officer. Not as well suited to the cavalry as perhaps he might have been, but I’m sure he will do admirably in his present position.” Garesché glances over his shoulder, sees Rosecrans preparing to mount Boney, his big gray gelding. “Now I must be off to join the general. He wants to get Van Cleve across the ford, then he’ll return to this portion of the field. You take care today, Bill. Let us meet this evening and you can review the performance of the army for me and the reasons your fears proved illusory.”
“Happily they will be, Julius.”
An orderly hurries forward with Garesché’s mount. Garesché takes the reins and swings up. He looks at Bierce. “Have you prepared your arsenal of literary quotes for the day, Lieutenant?”
Bierce smiles, almost shyly. “I have tried, Colonel.”
“Good. When all is done, perhaps you will find something more than irony in them. Gentlemen… .”
The hour is approaching six. Major General George Thomas steps from his tent resplendent in a new dress uniform. Although he has been entitled to the two-starred shoulder straps since the previous spring, this is the first time he has worn them. The omission represents his only superstition: that an officer should never assume a new rank until he is prepared to prove himself worthy of it on a day of battle. At Perryville he had been caught unprepared, wearing his brigadier’s stars. And like the army, he had made a botch of things. Today will be better.
His aides and orderlies stand to attention. Thomas surveys them, growls, “Well?” There are grins, polite applause. Thomas permits himself a grim smile. “Thank you, gentlemen. Let us be about our work.” He goes to his horse, sets his jaw, and swings up.
Dawn has chased the fears of Major General Alexander McDowell McCook, and he leans back comfortably in a chair salvaged from the Gresham house. An orderly finishes stropping a razor and begins applying lather to the general’s stubbly jaw.
At his headquarters west of the Gresham house, Brigadier General Richard W. Johnson, commanding Second Division on the far right of McCook’s wing, washes down griddle cakes with a tumbler of brandy. He accepts a cup of coffee, adds a deliberate lacing of brandy, and stares gloomily at the gray dawn, wondering if his older brother, a Confederate surgeon, is with Bragg’s army this day.
At 6:00 A.M., Captain Warren Edgarton, commanding Battery E, 1st Ohio Artillery, attached to Kirk’s brigade of Johnson’s division, studies the quiet woods beyond the narrow valley to his front. Behind him, the artillery horses stamp impatiently. He decides not to wait any longer and gives orders for watering half the horses at the slender, unnamed brook five hundred yards to the rear.
Down the line from Kirk’s brigade, Brigadier General August Willich and his senior regimental commander, Colonel William Gibson of the 49th Ohio, are likewise staring at the fog-shrouded cedars. Willich scratches his beard, shakes his big head. “They are so quiet out there that I guess they are no more here.”
“So it would seem,” Gibson says.
“Then I go see General Johnson a few minutes. You keep the boys from going larking.”
Gibson smiles. “By all means, General.”
Corporal Matthew O’Leary, one of Kirk’s pickets, opens the heavy watch given him by his father on the day the old man sent him off to war: 6:22 A.M. and the relief is late again. Snapping the case shut, O’Leary looks up to see a long line of butternut soldiers rising up out of the valley mist as if from the ground itself. Silent. Coming at the run.
CHAPTER 2
Wednesday, 5:00 A.M.–8:30 A.M.
December 31, 1862
The Confederate Left South of the Franklin Pike
Hardee has McCown’s and Cleburne’s divisions in position for the assault on Rosecrans’s right. McCown’s line will go first, the brigades of Brigadier Generals James Rains, Matthew Ector, and Evander McNair left to right. Cleburne’s division will follow five hundred yards behind McCown’s, the brigades of Brigadier Generals St. John Liddell, Bushrod Johnson, and Lucius Polk, left to right, with Brigadier General S.A.M. Wood’s brigade in reserve to Polk’s rear. Cleburne’s line will add weight to McCown’s attack and fill in any developing gaps, but its real purpose will come later when the great wheel to the right begins rolling up the Federal line. Sweeping around McCown’s left flank, Brigadier General John Wharton’s cavalry will spread havoc among the retreating Yankees, capturing those who surrender and pushing the rest north toward the Nashville Pike.
There is, however, a flaw in the Confederate dispositions. Hardee has been misled by the fires built beyond McCook’s right flank to disguise the terminal point of the Federal line. As a result, Rains’s brigade will strike only thin air, its forward progress unabated as it pulls McCown’s line to the west (left), throwing off Bragg’s great wheel and uncovering Cleburne’s unsuspecting line.
Brigadier General Richard Johnson’s division holds the right end of McCook’s line: Brigadier General August Willich’s brigade on the Franklin Pike; Brigadier General Edward Kirk’s brigade to his left; and Colonel Philemon Baldwin’s brigade in reserve a mile to the right rear. Next in line is the division of Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis, the brigades of Colonels P. Sidney Post, William Carlin, and William Woodruff, right to left. Sheridan’s division holds onto Davis’s left, the brigades of Brigadier General Joshua Sill and Colonel George Roberts in the front line and Colonel Frederick Schaefer’s brigade in reserve near the Harding house.
IT IS COLD, the men shivering in the damp wind as they wait for the dawn. A few of them have thought to secret a piece of hardtack or cornbread on their persons to chew in the long wait, but most are hungry. General Bill Hardee wishes he could give them a hot breakfast, hot coffee at least. The best he can provide is a jot of whiskey for each man.
Cleburne objects: the men have nothing on their stomachs and some of them—particularly the young ones—may become nauseous, even inebriated. Hardee chuckles. “You are a strange Irishman, P
atrick. I thought your race habitually went into battle with a glaive in one hand and a flagon in the other.”
Cleburne grimaces. “And lost many a battle through drunken stupidity. And this army risks the same disgrace in adopting the practice.”
“Come, General. We are giving the men a single small drink to warm them before battle. It is my decision and I take full responsibility.”
“Very well, sir. I shall give the order.” Cleburne jerks the head of his plowhorse to the right, causing the animal to toss its head in protest.
Hardee calls after him. “Patrick, did you ever hear it said that God made whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world?”
Cleburne turns, his face expressionless in the gloom. “No, General, but I expect it is so.”
Hardee smiles, shakes his head. For all his virtues, Major General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne is a young man utterly without a sense of humor. If we survive this day, Hardee thinks, I shall have to teach him something of the grace of laughter.
As the sky begins to lighten, Hardee rides forward to a vantage where he can watch the lines advance. A few minutes before 6:00 A.M., he dispatches an aide to tell McCown to advance. The order should not be necessary, but Hardee knows McCown’s timidity too well to trust a prompt execution of earlier instructions. He waits. My God, it is quiet, he thinks. How can so many men and horses occupy so small an area and yet make so little noise? He feels more than hears the first reverberation, a palpitation of the earth as of some dread thing coming awake from a long sleep. It is a sound like no other, this first tramp of an army advancing in cadence. And General William J. Hardee, like no other man alive, can claim the exact rhythm as his own, for it is the cadence he prescribed in Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics that will take so many into battle, so many to their deaths, this army to victory.
The reverberation deepens, Cleburne’s 6,000 stepping out to follow McCown’s 4,400 into the mist. Hardee counts the paces without thinking, hears McCown’s line go to the double-quick, then to the charge. Still no yelling, no cheering, no noise at all save the sound of all the thousands and thousands of feet pulsating the earth. He cranes, squints, can make them out: the long butternut lines rising out of the valley, the first winking of muzzle flashes ahead in the mist as the Yankee pickets open fire. Bill Hardee, who long ago gave up smoking at his daughters’ insistence, wishes he had a cigar to clamp in his teeth to arrest the quivering of his chin.
A stag comes first, trailed by two does, one a yearling, the other larger: perhaps its mother. They bound through the camp of the 34th Illinois, dodging among the cooking fires and the sleepy men still waiting for their coffee to boil. Men laugh. One soldier dives for the yearling, nearly catches it. Another grabs for his musket. A sergeant shouts: “Miller, you damned fool, you’ll shoot somebody!”
The rabbits come next, skittering this way and that among the men, who try to hit them with sticks and frying pans, all the while laughing. “Watch out!” a burly farm boy shouts. “There’s rattlers chasing ’em!” He takes a swing with a musket butt at one of a dozen snakes whiplashing in terror through the camp. Men scatter, then as suddenly forget the snakes at the first popping of musket fire from the picket line.
Captain Warren Edgarton, Battery E, 1st Ohio Artillery, who only moments before sent half the battery’s horses off to be watered, leaps atop a gun carriage, peers into the mist. The pickets are running, behind them a long butternut line of Rebel infantry. “Assemble!” he shouts. “Load canister! Get the horses up, for Christ’s sake!”
Battery E is an excellent battery, well trained, proud of its six tenpounder Parrott rifles. The gunners sprint to their tasks. Cut fuse, load, ram, prime … wait, wait. The pickets coming, running all-out. Infantry assembling behind the guns, the snick of ramrods in barrels, the cocking of hammers, the shouts of sergeants and officers. Men praying almost without knowing, sobbing, growling, panting as though they’d already fought hand-to-hand a thousand demons. And they have, fight them still, the demons that make any sane man want to run, to give way before this awful vision coming out of the dark valley and across the cornfield to the brigade’s front. As far as the eye can see in both directions, a thick line of butternut infantry—God, there must be ten thousand, twenty thousand, a hundred thousand—the rising surge of their footfalls sounding to one officer like a ramping surf. These Midwestern farmboys in blue know nothing of surf, nothing of the ocean, but they know of tornadoes, of the coming freighttrain roar of cyclonic doom, and hear it in the onrush of the butternut line while above and above it again and again, tearing at the nerves, at the very heart of even the bravest among the blue soldiers, the first quavering, ghastly wail of the Rebel yell. “Fire!” Edgarton screams as the pickets duck between the guns.
The canister makes the Parrotts into giant shotguns, each round spraying two dozen inch-and-a-half iron balls. Yet the butternut ranks seem to absorb the blasts without effect. The Yankee gunners swab, ram canister, fire. Men start dropping in the Rebel ranks. A round of canister strikes a bulge in the charging line where the 10th Texas has pushed out ahead a few yards, bursts it like an immense boil, showering disembodied limbs, heads, and shredded uniforms. From the Rebel line there comes a moaning grunt, as if from a single voice: a fighter struck hard in the midriff but still coming, boring in.
Brigadier General Edward Kirk, Edgarton’s brigade commander, shouts at Colonel Joseph Dodge of the 34th Illinois. “Hit that regiment on the flank, or they’ll take the guns and we’re finished!” Ashen, Dodge waves an acknowledgment, gives orders. Kirk pushes out in front—handsome, still boyish at thirty-four. The 34th is his old regiment and he will lead it now. He turns in his saddle, looks back at the ranks he recruited himself, at the soldiers who elected him colonel, shouts: “Illini! For your state and your flag, forward at the double-quick!”
Seventy-five yards into the cornfield, the 34th Illinois takes a blistering volley from the 10th Texas. Kirk is knocked from his horse, down with a mortal wound in the thigh that will take seven months to kill him. His horse bolts the field, streaming blood from chest, neck, and flank. Dodge takes command of the regiment, leads its survivors back to the guns. They hold there, firing and firing. The color sergeant drops, another man lifts the banner. Then he is down and another man grabs for the staff, waves the banner until he too is shot.
Edgarton is bringing in the horses now, trying to get the guns off. But four Rebel regiments are converging, and a tremendous volley sweeps the battery. Seventy horses are down in an instant, kicking, screaming, dying. The fourth color bearer has fallen, his place taken by a corporal with a shattered left hand and blood streaming from a ragged ear. Edgarton feels a leg go out from under him, knows he is hit, catches himself on the wheel of a limber. The Rebels are in among the guns, gaunt men, eyes flaming, slashing at the gunners with bayonets and rifle butts. The wounded corporal falls, the banner grabbed by a man in butternut. Edgarton tries to draw his revolver, but a Rebel hits him in the chest with a rifle butt and he goes down beside his smoking cannons.
Hundreds of men have fallen in the fight for the guns: half of the 34th Illinois, score upon score from the 11th and 10th Texas, the 4th and 30th Arkansas. Seven of ten company commanders in the 30th Arkansas are dead or wounded. Colonel J. C. Burks of the 11th Texas rides among his men. “Keep going, boys. Keep going,” he wheezes. “We’ve got them now.”
One of the Texans notes that Burks is riding hunched forward, coat hugged tight to his right side, his uniform soaked red from chest to knee. “Colonel, are you all right?”
The colonel smiles wistfully, shakes his head, and tumbles dead from his horse. A second soldier pulls the coat away from the wound. A canister ball has ripped through the colonel’s chest, shattering ribs and tearing away the lower half of a lung. “My God,” says the soldier. “How did he last so long?”
Out in the cornfield, among the dead and wounded, Private John Gorgas, Company A, 34th Illinois, lies staring at the rainy sky. He’d been on picket, had seen
the first Rebs rising out of the mist. And he’d run. God, how he’d run. He hadn’t bothered to fire his rifle, just dropped it and ran. I’m running to tell someone, he told himself. But that was a lie; he was just running. The first ball struck him in the hip, spun him around, and dropped him in the cornstalks. He staggered up, still managed to run. The second hit him in the left side of the neck, threw him forward into the stubble again. And again he staggered up, ran. “Whoa there, Yank! Halt!” a voice shouted behind him. He ignored it, and the third ball hit him in the side. After that, he couldn’t run but only lie and bleed and stare at the rainy sky. He closes his eyes, lets the darkness come, wondering if he will wake again. He will, and survives to marry and tell the story to children, grandchildren, and finally great-grandchildren born in a new century.
Ector’s brigade pours into the hole left by the 34th Illinois. Coming in on the right, McNair’s brigade strikes the 30th and 29th Indiana. The colonel of the 30th panics, orders his regiment to retreat. The 29th tries to hold, but its fire is blocked by fleeing pickets. It looses a single volley when McNair’s line is twenty yards away, gaining just enough time to turn tail and run. A Rebel private captured in the skirmishing the day before shouts: “What you runnin’ fer? Why don’t you stand an’ fight like men?”
A fellow prisoner snaps at him: “For God’s sake, Joe! Don’t rally the sons o’ bitches!”
As luck would have it, their own company comes trotting through the smoking Yankee camp. The sergeant shouts: “Well, I see you boys are still alive. Grab a rifle and come along. Like it or not, you’re back in Braxton Bragg’s army.”
The old man amuses Brigadier General Richard Johnson. August Willich seems a man absurdly out of time and place: a kindly German grandfather who should at this hour be lumbering into a warm kitchen, pausing to tousle the heads of grandchildren before accepting a steaming mug from his plump, gray Frau—a mug chipped and cracked and that she would throw out, save that it gives them both pleasure for her to tease him about it in the fondly irritable way of old couples. Settled at the head of the table, he would several times rebuff the pleadings of the grandchildren, finally giving in and telling them a tale out of the Brothers Grimm, something of wolves and winter woods to enliven their foggy walk to school with phantasmal shadows and delightful alarms.
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