Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  The warmth, the very poetry of the conjured scene rather thrills Johnson, gives him a better regard for the dripping morning. He extends his flask to Willich. “A small eye-opener in your coffee, General?” Willich hesitates, Johnson smiles. “It’s all right, General. We’re in for a quiet morning on this part of the line.”

  Willich shrugs his massive shoulders, accepts the flask. Off to the south there is a crackle of picket fire—nothing particularly unusual, since pickets are always finding excuses to discharge their weapons. Willich pours a tablespoon of the brandy into his coffee. The concussive roar of a battery of guns echoes from the south, then the crash of a volley of musketry. Willich leaps to his feet, old eyes squinting toward his distant line. Another crash of musketry reverberates over the distance. Heavy, many hundreds of rifle-muskets. “Mein Gott! Ve attacked be!” Willich shouts. He drops his cup, stumbles over a camp stool, runs on creaking joints toward his horse.

  Johnson stares at the place vacated by the old man, at the overturned flask leaking amber liquor onto the soft ground. No, there must be some other explanation. Not an attack, but… . He tries to summon a shout to call Willich back, but the sound of artillery and musketry robs him of voice.

  His chief of staff comes running. “General! What are your orders?”

  Johnson stares blankly at the man. Orders? He has no orders. Has received none since last night, when McCook forwarded Rosecrans’s order to hold the line if attacked, falling back inch by inch, defending not vigorously but warmly. No, there is something wrong here, something he is not remembering correctly. Not warmly but vigorously? Attack, not defend?

  “General, what do you want us to do?”

  Johnson reaches for the flask, shakes it—a modest drink left—puts on the cap, noting that his fingers do not shake but seem, rather, to have lost much of their tactile sense. “I have sent General Willich back to his brigade. I am sure General Kirk is doing his duty. Let us join Colonel Baldwin and the reserve.”

  “Yes, sir!” The chief of staff runs toward the headquarters tent, shouting commands.

  Johnson stands, feels surprisingly steady. That was not badly done, he thinks. I chose my words well and maintained a sense of calm. Calm, I must communicate that. He deposits the flask in a coat pocket, walks with only the slightest sway toward the line of horses where an orderly is hastily tightening the girth about the belly of the general’s horse.

  The survivors of Kirk’s brigade stream west through the woods into Willich’s position. The 39th and 32nd Indiana, hastily trying to muster, are swept up in the stampede as Ector’s Texans come howling through the woods, firing on the run. A big bearded man riding a lathered horse appears out of the smoke, shouts at a company of Texans. “Gott im Himmel, lads! Turn aboot. Turn aboot. It es not so bad. Ve can stop dem. But you must turn aboot.” A Texan officer sticks a pistol between the horse’s eyes and fires. The horse goes down, heaving the big man from the saddle. The Texan steps to Brigadier General August Willich, kneels to see how badly the old man is hurt. “You will note, General,” he says acidly, “that we wear different uniforms.”

  The 49th Ohio collapses next, its muskets still stacked and breakfast cooking. A Rebel infantryman noticing one Buckeye sitting by a breakfast fire, coffeepot still in hand, supposes the man frozen in fear. “Let me have a cup of that blackjack, son. I ain’t had nothin’ all morning.” The Yankee does not reply. Leaning close, the Rebel makes out a single red hole all but hidden in the lank hair falling over the man’s forehead. “Lookee here,” he says to a companion. “The boy’s shot through the brain just clean as you please. Went up yonder still trying to pour a cup of coffee.”

  Willich’s last two regiments try vainly to stem the Rebel onrush. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Hotchkiss, commanding the 89th Illinois, orders his men to lie down while the survivors of the shattered regiments flood through his ranks. He waits until the pursuing Rebels are within fifty yards and then shouts: “Stand, Eighty-ninth! Present! Fire!” The Rebel ranks recoil from the blow and the 89th gets off two more volleys. But Hotchkiss knows he cannot hold. Already Rebel regiments are enveloping both his flanks. He gives the order to fall back, hoping to join the 15th Ohio to his rear. But the 15th Ohio is belatedly trying to execute a parade-ground change of fronts. The onrushing Rebels catch it in the middle of the complicated maneuver and the regiment falls back, its lines hopelessly disordered. Yet it hangs together for a quarter mile, firing ragged volleys, until it hits a fence at the Smith farm.

  Many of the men had wondered about the fence when they’d come along the Franklin Pike the day before. The seven-foot picket fence stretches, apparently without purpose, nearly two-hundred yards along the southern edge of the Smith home site. In actuality, it is an expression of farmer Smith’s loathing for his neighbors, who have failed to buy the boards coming out of his small sawmill. And though the farmer and his fish-eyed wife have long ago left the area, the fence remains.

  The better part of the 15th Ohio piles up against the fence. A few soldiers manage to scramble over while others pry frantically at boards with bayonets and rifle barrels. An oncoming Rebel regiment halts, swings Enfields up for a volley. The Yankees throw down their Springfields or hold them up by the barrels in sign of surrender, all the while screaming: “Hold your fire. Hold your fire! For God’s sake, hold your fire.” But the volley rips through them, dropping dozens. A hundred pleading men manage to surrender.

  The survivors of Kirk’s and Willich’s brigades flee west toward Overall Creek through the fields and woods north of the Franklin Pike. Wharton’s cavalry is supposed to head them off, but there are too many Yankees and too few gray horsemen. Moreover, many of the Yankees are not panicked but angry. As they did at Perryville, they shout derisively at fleeing officers: “Sold again! We’re sold again!”

  A rheumatoid captain of the 32nd Indiana, so crippled that he has applied for a discharge, throws aside his cane and makes for the rear at an impressive speed. The stubborn remnant of his company hoots and jeers. “Come on, boys!” a sergeant yells. “Let’s give the Rebs a volley so the cap’n can get a head start.” At groves, fences, and farm buildings, knots of men turn to fire at the Rebels. Colonel William Gibson of the 49th Ohio rallies a few hundred men. Lieutenant Colonel Hotchkiss, who has managed to hold together four of the 89th Illinois’s ten companies, turns them repeatedly, their volleys slowing the Rebel pursuit. Other officers manage to gather companies of fifty or a hundred men too stubborn, enraged, or slow to run pell-mell.

  Sergeant Albert Sims of the 10th Texas is startled to see a Yankee color sergeant turn abruptly and start waving his banner furiously. “Rally, boys! Rally to the flag! We’ll hold the sons o’ bitches yet.”

  Sims dashes forward, plants his own battle flag at the Yank’s feet and grabs for the staff. “Surrender, Yank! Give me your colors!”

  The Yank pushes him away. “Not a chance, Johnny! I’ll kill you first!”

  They grapple. Minié balls hiss about them, pulling at the colored silk of the flags, almost giving the impression of a breeze. Much of the fire is unaimed and it is impossible to say whether Rebel or Yankee bullets—or both—strike the sergeants. They go down on their knees, desperately holding up their respective banners. Their grappling gives way to an embrace as they sway like drunken men. Then they fall in each other’s arms, the flags draping about them in bloody, garish folds.

  Cleburne’s line pushes toward the Franklin Pike, the hour approaching seven, the sun up but the mist still heavy, twilight hanging on in the woods and gullies. Despite—or perhaps because of—his years in Her Majesty’s 41st Regiment of Foot, Cleburne dislikes military pomp. No bands play as the division advances, and there is only the steady tramp of the ranks to be heard beneath the cacophony of the battle to the front.

  About him, Cleburne’s staff is quiet, knowing from the general’s scowl that he is listening. In the smoke, fog, woods, ravines, and bedlam of most of the battlefields in this war, more often than not generals mus
t make their decisions on the evidence of sound, and Cleburne has learned to listen.

  Irish Pat Cleburne is always amazed by how much of this land is still wilderness—almost all of it, by the standards of his homeland. At Shiloh, his brigade came to a swamp, the ranks dividing without orders to go around it. But he had countermanded the country wisdom of his men, ordered them to maintain the line. He had ridden his horse forward to show them that the bog could be crossed. But the horse sank to its knees, stumbling and snorting. He jammed in his spurs, bellowed at the horse, demanded obedience. And the damned horse, a temperate mare that had given him little trouble, reared, threw him into the muck. The men laughed, because in this army no one, no matter what rank, is spared ridicule. He labored up, summoned dignity, tried to march out of the bog. But dignity was impossible, and he clung to the mare’s tail as she wallowed to dry ground.

  That night, while Bishop Polk rode a shrieking crone, and Beauregard clutched his pet bird, crooning to its tiny fragility, and Bragg wrote to his wife, complaining of myriad ills and injustices, Cleburne sat apart from his staff, eyeing the mare. He considered shooting her for disobedience, but decided that course would smack of Irish superstition. He gave her to one of his staff and found a new horse ignorant of his small competence in the handling of horses and men.

  Cleburne learned to command men and himself far more readily than he learned to manage horses. At Richmond, Kentucky, he fought the Yankees of Bull Nelson in the dusk graveyard, a small part of himself fearing that ghosts might rise from graves and tombs, disturbed by the obscenity, the sacrilege, of battle on holy ground. But by then Cleburne understood that a general fights himself in battle as much as he fights the enemy. Where he had been hot before, he became cold, calculating. The battles at Richmond and Perryville won him promotion over two senior brigadiers, Bushrod Johnson and St. John Liddell. He knows they are bitter, but they are both highly competent soldiers, and he can weather their dislike.

  As Cleburne’s line begins the clockwise wheel to strike the Franklin Pike at a narrow oblique, he is most concerned about what he does not hear. The sound of heavy fighting ahead has dwindled away in the direction of Overall Creek. Is McCown no longer encountering significant resistance? Can victory have been so easy?

  Crossing the road, Liddell’s Arkansas brigade passes through Willich’s desolate camp. The Ohio soldier shot through the brain still sits by the smoking embers of his fire, the coffeepot still clutched in his hand. The line parts around him, the men commenting in wonder as they pass. One soldier sticks out a boot and rocks the man, then tips him over. The coffeepot clanks, spills, remains clutched. “Why’d you go and do that, Fowler?” another asks.

  “’Tweren’t decent. Man should have enough sense to fall over when he’s dead. Even a Yank.”

  Bushrod Johnson’s brigade advances across the field to the front of Kirk’s camp, stepping over the bodies of the dead and wounded. There are many of both, mostly butternut at first but then more and more in blue. The wounded cry out not to be trampled, beg for water. A few of Johnson’s men pause to lend canteens, are told to move on by the file closers. Infantrymen can take little time for pity. There are litter-bearers and hospital orderlies to look after the wounded, burial parties to inter the dead. The infantry must push on.

  Cleburne’s line clears the camps, moves on through the woods on either side of Gresham Lane. The wheel has put Liddell’s brigade west of the lane, Bushrod Johnson’s astride it, Lucius Polk’s brigade of Tennessee and Arkansas regiments to the east of it. Cleburne is handed a note from Hardee: Cheatham is slow getting started. I have ordered Wood to fall in to the right of Lucius Polk to close the gap with Loomis.

  Forty feet ahead of Cleburne, a man stumbles and goes down. Half a dozen men to the left, a soldier clutches at his groin, cries out, falls writhing. Quickly, three or four more men are down in the ranks. My God, Cleburne thinks, we are under fire! Where the devil is McCown? He shouts to Johnson. “Halt the line. Shake out skirmishers. It appears that we have become the front line.”

  He jogs his plowhorse down the line to the right to Lucius Polk’s brigade. The Bishop’s nephew has been a general for only two weeks, having succeeded to command of First Brigade when Cleburne took charge of the division. Polk has taken half a dozen casualties and his men are kneeling now, peering into the thickets ahead. “McCown must have missed a pocket of Yankees, General,” Polk calls to Cleburne. “They’re quiet now, but we took heavy fire for a few minutes.”

  “I don’t think General McCown came through here at all, Lucius. It looks like he aimed too far to the west and then neglected to wheel to the right to stay in front of us.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Push forward skirmishers. Be cautious until you’re sure what’s ahead and then go in hard. Sam Wood is coming up on your right?”

  “Yes, sir. We just saw him.”

  “Good. I’ll go talk to him. You should go in together.”

  Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis, commanding First Division, McCook’s right wing, would far rather attack than defend, as those who witnessed his slaughter of Bull Nelson can certainly attest. As Richard Johnson’s division dissolves under McCown’s assault, Davis dashes down his line in a raging fury. Why must the Rebs always get in the first lick? Shiloh, Corinth, Perryville… . Christ! Don’t we ever learn? Goddamn Rosecrans! Goddamn McCook! Goddamn Johnson! Goddamn idiots, every one!

  He draws up hard behind the brigade of Colonel P. Sidney Post at the far end of his division line. “Post, could you see anything of the fight?”

  “No, sir. But it sounded like all hell was coming through. Colonel Housum brought the 77th Pennsylvania in on our right. He says he’s all that’s left of Kirk’s brigade and that Willich’s is gone too.”

  “Then you’re the right flank of the army. Pull your men back and get astride Gresham Lane, find a good field of fire, and set up your guns. Then hope like hell we get some reinforcements before the Johnnies envelop our flank.”

  “But won’t General Johnson send in his reserve to cover the flank?”

  “God knows what the stupid bastard will do! You’re the flank, Colonel. Do your best and hold on for your very life.” Davis spins his horse, gallops back to the center of the division, ferocious beard whipping over his shoulder.

  Like much of his brigade, Post is inexperienced, but he has about him a reassuring calmness. In twenty years of practice before the Illinois bar, he has seen that most errors in and out of court are made in haste or panic. Already this morning he has stopped the 5th Wisconsin Battery from firing on Lieutenant Colonel Peter Housum’s 77th Pennsylvania, left behind by Kirk’s brigade and hurrying through the woods to join Post’s brigade.

  As his staff shifts nervously about him, Post takes a long minute to gaze into the woods to the brigade’s front. “All right,” he says to his chief of staff, “we’ll pull back in echelon, Colonel Housum’s regiment first. Maintain a continuous line.” He looks to Captain Oscar F. Pinney, commanding the Wisconsin battery. “Captain, put your guns west of the lane. Beyond that I leave it to you to select our new position with your field of fire in mind.” He shakes a finger at Pinney. “But, Captain, remember what happened a while ago when your boys nearly fired on Colonel Housum’s men. When the fight begins, I want you to be sure of your target. The Rebs will kill enough of us without our helping them.”

  Blushing, Pinney snaps a salute and hurries to his battery. Within minutes, the guns are limbered and trundling north along Gresham Lane. Post mounts, gazes into the woods to the south once more, wondering how much time he has, and then canters over for a word with Colonel Housum.

  Brigadier General Bushrod Rust Johnson waits for Cleburne’s order to resume the advance. Ohio-born but long a resident of the South, Johnson became a college professor and militia officer following his resignation from the regular army after Mexico. In this war, Johnson has fought with distinction in nearly every major battle in the West. So he was deeply stung w
hen Cleburne, who is more than a decade his junior, was promoted over his head to command the division. Johnson blamed Bill Hardee’s desire to advance a disciple. Oh, he agrees that Cleburne is a fine soldier: cool, precise, indefatigable, implacable. Yet shouldn’t there be more to a Confederate major general? Some cultivation, some politeness in the old sense? Cleburne has none of this; is a dreary, taciturn companion. Johnson suspects that there simply isn’t much for Pat Cleburne to reveal; that the man is without true intellect or culture but is only Hardee’s grotesque, an Irish man-wolf who will do what Hardee commands without fail or misgiving.

  A staff lieutenant comes cantering down the line. “General, you can advance. General Cleburne reminds you to keep contact on left and right with Generals Liddell and Polk.”

  Johnson nods, gives the order to advance. The brigade pushes into the woods beyond Post’s abandoned camp. An occasional minié ball hisses overhead, but whoever was shooting at them before has apparently slipped away. Johnson rides behind the center, wondering who he knows among the officers on the other side this day. Thomas and Rosecrans, of course, and he has heard Garesché is chief of staff. Tom Wood is commanding a division, trying to keep old Senator Crittenden’s son out of trouble. Olly Shepherd has a brigade of regulars… .

  He pulls himself back to the present. I should concentrate on my work, he thinks. Perhaps that is why they chose Cleburne, for he never thinks of anything else. How can he? He has no friendships, no ideas, and only a small past of no significance. Hardee’s werewolf.