Fort Pillow

by Harry Turtledove

  “Have to try,” Bradford said. But how much good would trying do?

  Matt Ward's mouth was dry as the Egyptian desert when the bugle sounded the assault. From the barracks buildings the Confederates had captured, Fort Pillow up on its bluff seemed as towering and indomitable as Goliath the Philistine must have to the children of Israel.

  But Goliath fell, brought down by David's sling. Bedford Forrest thought Fort Pillow would fall, too. Instead of a sling, Ward had his Enfield. And he had friends who would scale the bluff with him or die trying. (He wished he hadn't thought of it that way.)

  “Come on! Move out!” Confederate officers and sergeants shouted, all along the line from the Mississippi to Coal Creek. The better, braver ones added, “Follow me!” Where a superior went forward, the men he led couldn't very well hold back.

  The cougar yowl of a Rebel yell filled Ward's throat as he rushed toward the bluff and scrambled up it. Where rush stopped and scramble started he wasn't sure, then or afterwards. What seemed like all the Federals in the world were shooting down at him and his comrades. The muzzle flashes that burst from their rifle muskets stabbed out like dragonfire in a book of fairy tales.

  He wanted to shoot back. Here and there, some of Forrest's troopers did. Sergeants swore at the men who pulled trigger. Matt understood why, and held his fire. Stopping to reload on this steep slope was asking to get shot. But if a man didn't reload, he had only his bayonet or his clubbed rifle musket with which to face the enemy once he got to the top.

  A Mini? ball hit the ground a few inches in front of Ward's face with a wet splat. Bits of dirt kicked up into his face. He did stop then, to rub at his eyes with grimy fingers. He might have done more harm than good. He was still blinking frantically and shaking his head when he resumed the upward climb.

  Here and there on the muddy slope, Confederates tumbled down or sprawled motionless instead of going forward. Their screams mingled with the battle cries and the gunfire to produce a cacophonous din mercifully unknown outside of war. Ward tried not to hear it, tried not to heed it, but it made him afraid even so.

  Screams also rose from the men in blue who fired down at the on-storming Confederates. For a moment, Matt Ward wondered how so many enemy soldiers were getting hurt while his own comrades held their fire. Then he realized the troopers posted on the knolls-he'd been up on one of them himself for a little while, before hurrying forward-were taking a steady toll on the U.S. soldiers at the top of the bluff.

  He also realized something else: a galvanized Yankee or even a Negro shrieking for his mother or simply howling out his pain to the uncaring world sounded just the same as a luckless Confederate doing the same thing. Were he a different person, that might have persuaded him of the essential brotherhood of man. Instead, it made him want to hear the foe making those noises instead of his own comrades.

  At the top of the bluff, just outside their earthen parapet, the Federals had dug a ditch ten or twelve feet wide and even deeper than that. They likely hadn't dreamt any attackers could come so far, but, like any military engineers who knew their trade, they interposed a final barrier between themselves and the enemy. Or they thought they did.

  Some of the Confederates reaching the top of the bluff tried to leap the ditch and scramble up onto the earthwork beyond. Matt Ward didn't see anyone who succeeded; that would have been a formidable jump even for a man not burdened with a rifle musket and enough cartridges to do a deal of fighting.

  Most troopers showed better sense than to try to imitate a mountain goat bounding from crag to crag. Instead of jumping over the ditch, they dropped down into it. Ward was one of those. The bottom of the ditch was all mud and puddles; the ooze tried to suck the shoes right off his feet. But he was here, at the top of the bluff. Panting, he paused a moment to catch his breath and try to figure out what to do next.

  Were the earthwork that protected the Union troops thinner, they could easily have shot down into the ditch and slaughtered the attackers. Instead, they had to crawl out on top of the bank of dirt to fire into the ditch. When they did, they exposed all of themselves to the distant sharpshooters' deadly fire.

  “Now that we're here, that damn earthwork does as much for us as it does for the Federals,” said a man near Ward. “We can't get at them, and they can't get at us, neither.”

  “But we don't need to be here, “ Ward said. The wet squelching as he shifted his feet underlined the point. “We need to be there.” He pointed to the far side of the parapet. “Long as the bluebellies hold us out, they win.”

  “Well, it don't look like them sons of bitches is gonna be able to do it much longer,” the other trooper said. “Look there.”

  In the age of chivalry, when knighthood was in flower, besieging an enemy castle was an everyday part of war. Soldiers no more thought of going into battle without scaling ladders than without their pants. Bedford Forrest's troopers knew little of days gone by. They had to improvise if they wanted to get out of the ditch. They had to-and they did.

  It all started without orders, which made it seem more marvelous to Ward. Here and there, at the bottom of the muddy ditch, men went down on their hands and knees. Others swarmed up onto them, using them as human scaling ladders to get up to where they could reach the rampart and break into Fort Pillow.

  For the first little while, things didn't go smoothly. The would-be ladders didn't perform well. Time after time, they toppled before they got very tall. Then a couple of sergeants who had some idea of what needed doing started yelling their heads off. Most of the time, Matt Ward had no use for sergeants. Just because they had stripes on their sleeves, they thought they were entitled to throw their weight around. Here, though, they turned out to be worth something after all.

  With loud, profane encouragement, they got big men on the bottom of what turned out to be human pyramids instead of human scaling ladders. They put smaller men in the next layer up, and smaller men still above them. They still had a couple of collapses…

  “God damn you, Riley, you stupid, clumsy son of a bitch, why the hell did you have to go and wiggle then?”

  “I'm sorry, Sarge. Stinking bug landed right on my eyelid, so help me Jesus. What the devil was I supposed to do?”

  “Likely tell,” the sergeant said. But he didn't waste any more time scorching the luckless Riley, so if he didn't exactly believe, he didn't exactly disbelieve, either. It wasn't as if he didn't have plenty of other troopers to scream at.

  The first Confederate who made it up so he could rush the rampart got shot in the face the instant he showed himself. He tumbled back into the ditch, dead before he splatted into the mud.

  “Move!” the closest sergeant bellowed to the men in his pyramid. “That Yankee bastard's gotta reload. If you can get up there before he does — ”

  More and more men went up. A few of them were hit, and fell in the ditch again. Most, though, gained the narrow strip of ground between the ditch and the earthwork. They crouched there, ducking down behind the piled dirt, waiting for their orders. Matt Ward scrambled up himself. He saw Colonel McCulloch no more than ten feet away, waiting like everybody else.

  “Be ready, boys!” McCulloch called. “We're almost there!”

  On the other side of the rampart, the Federals had mostly stopped shooting, too. They waited tensely for whatever happened next.

  “At my order!” someone shouted-a Confederate, Ward thought, though accent was no help in telling the sides apart with so many Tennesseans on both. The C.S. trooper clutched his rifle musket and braced himself, not that that would do any good if a minnie hit him.

  “Is that General Chalmers?” whispered the soldier next to him. “Beats me,” Ward whispered back.

  “Now!” shouted the officer, whoever he was.

  Mack Leaming's saber blade glittered in the sun. He'd never dreamt he might have to fight with his officer's sword. The saber in the scabbard was a mark of his rank, nothing more, and an occasional nuisance that thumped against his leg. But at close q
uarters a slashing saber was a weapon not to be despised. He wished he had a better notion of how to fight with it, for the coming fight would be at quarters as close as a man could imagine in his direst nightmares.

  “Are your pieces loaded?” a Federal officer called to the colored soldiers under his command.

  “Yes, suh,” they said, and, “Sure is, suh,” and, “We ain't afraid of no Rebs.”

  Leaming wondered why they weren't. He was desperately afraid himself, and trying hard not to show it. Not knowing fear seemed impossible. Carrying on in spite of it… A mere mortal might aspire to that.

  Somewhere not nearly far enough away, a wounded U.S. soldier howled. While Bedford Forrest's troopers just outside of Fort Pillow mostly held their fire, the sharpshooters on the rises that looked down into the Federal position kept popping away at the soldiers in blue. Every so often, a round struck home.

  “This is our big chance, men!” Major Bradford shouted. “If we hold them out now, they're whipped!” Bradford pointed up to the big U.S. flag floating above the fort. Several minnies had punched holes through the Stars and Stripes, but they still proudly waved. “That flag will never come down! Never, do you hear me?”

  Together, white cavalry troopers and colored artillerymen raised a cheer. Bradford seemed over the worst of the jitters that afflicted him earlier in the day. Leaming hoped it wasn't too late. He shrugged. Jitters or not, Bradford had done about as well as any man could after Major Booth fell. His adjutant didn't see what he could have done differently if he didn't intend to surrender.

  Oh, things might have gone better. If they had, the Federals would have been able to fire all the barracks buildings, not just those in the first row. Then Forrest's men would have had fewer places from which to shoot at the fort from close range. And, more important still, the Olive Branch and the other steamboats might have been able to land their soldiers. The Confederates were out there in large numbers. Leaming didn't know whether Booth's 1,500 or Bradford's 7,000 was a better guess, but the garrison was badly outnumbered either way. Reinforcements would have helped the U.S. cause.

  If Forrest hadn't sent men to the mouths of the ravines below the fort to scare off the steamships… Leaming still thought he shouldn't have got away with doing that under flag of truce, even if it was a truce about which the soldiers aboard the Olive Branch knew nothing. No matter what Leaming thought, it was over and done with now.

  “Be ready, boys! We're almost there!” a Confederate bawled.

  “At my order!” another Rebel shouted. Both voices carried an officer's authority. Perhaps two heartbeats later, the second one cried, “Now!”

  All along the earthen rampart, Bedford Forrest's troopers popped up, rifle muskets and pistols at the ready. Every Federal soldier with a loaded weapon fired at the same time, at point-blank range. Dead and wounded Rebs spun and tumbled back into the ditch. Screams filled the cool air.

  But then the Confederates loosed a volley that dwarfed anything the soldiers in blue could give them. Far more enemy soldiers pressed against the outside of the earthwork than there were Union troops to defend it. Not all of Forrest's men pulled trigger-some held back, so they could shoot when they needed to. But even so, the attackers who fired outnumbered the men inside.

  Mack Leaming didn't know how many bullets cracked past him in that hellish instant. He also didn't know how they all managed to miss him. Thank you, Lord! ran through his head. Maybe he said it out loud. Maybe he didn't. He never could sort it out afterwards.

  He did know that far too many Federals weren't so lucky. All along the earthwork, wounded men reeled back and dead men dropped. The defenders might have taken a sharp right to the chin in a fistfight.

  If they went down now, they would never rise again. “Fight!” Leaming shouted. “Fight, God damn you! If we don't fight, we all die!” Maybe if we do fight, we all die anyway, some mad and hopeless fragment of his mind jeered.

  The Confederates roared and bellowed and screeched their savage battle cry. Leaming had heard people say it was worth a division in battle. Now he understood what they meant-at close range, the Rebel yell made the hair stand up on the nape of his neck and threatened to turn his blood to water. It made him want to run, even if he didn't.

  Forrest's men ran-forward. They scrambled up onto the broad rampart and dashed across it, then leaped down into Fort Pillow. Some of them used the bullets they'd held back before. Others stabbed with bayonets or swung their rifle muskets club-fashion.

  Whites and Negroes in blue uniforms met them side by side. They didn't need Leaming or any other officer to tell them they had to hold out that swarm of enemy soldiers if they wanted to go on breathing. The colored artillerymen at the center of the U.S. line might not have had much practice with the bayonet, but that didn't keep them from using it when they had to. They fought with the wild courage of men who had nothing to lose. And so they were-the Confederates howled “No quarter!” and “Black flag!” at the top of their lungs.

  No doubt the Negroes would have been wiser not to mock Forrest's troopers during the earlier fight, and especially during the truce. Their jeering came back to haunt them now. But, even at close quarters, they showed discipline and courage beyond anything Lieutenant Leaming expected of them. Whites could do no better-the whites from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry fighting alongside them were doing no better.

  “Hurrah! Hurrah!” Leaming ran at the Confederates, not away from them. Next to the Rebel yell, the Union battle cry seemed flavorless in his mouth, but it was what the Federals had, so he used it.

  He slashed at a trooper in muddy butternut. The Confederate brought up his Springfield (or was it an Enfield?) to block the blow. Sparks flew as iron blade struck iron barrel. Another Reb lunged at Leaming with his bayonet. The lieutenant had to leap back in a hurry to keep from getting stuck like a hog. A saber was all very well, but a long bayonet at the end of a long rifle musket had the reach of a spear.

  He slashed again, this time at a trooper running by with blood already on his bayonet. The man didn't even seem to see Leaming till the blade bit into his arm. He howled like a wolf and dropped his rifle musket. As blood spurted from the wound, he said, “You son of a bitch! What the hell did you have to go and do that for?”

  Instead of answered, Leaming cut at him again. The Confederate scrambled back and tripped over his own feet. Another soldier in butternut (in fact, the man's trousers were blue: surely plunder from a dead Federal) stepped on him. He howled again, and cursed the man on his own side even more foully than he'd sworn at Leaming.

  “This way! This way!” an officer in blue shouted, doing his best to rally the Negro troops he led. A moment later, he groaned and crumpled, clutching at a bullet wound in his side.

  With him or without him, the colored artillerymen went on fighting. Leaming saw one of them bayonet a Confederate trooper in the belly. The man who fought for Forrest shrieked like a damned soul as he fell. A moment later, a pistol shot at point-blank range blew off half the Negro's face. With a bubbling scream of his own, he went down beside the man he'd speared. Neither of them had a prayer of living.

  Forrest's troopers shot down another white U.S. officer, and then another. They seemed to make a special effort to pick off the men with shoulder straps. No doubt they thought the Negroes would fall to pieces without white men to lead them. Before Mack Leaming saw the colored soldiers fight, he would have thought the same thing. Now? Now he had to change his mind.

  He wounded another Confederate, and heard another minnie snap past his head, perilously close. Forrest's men brawled ahead. No matter how well the Negroes fought, would it do them any good at all?

  When the assault came, the half-dozen gaps cut through the rampart to let the guns of the Sixth U.S. Heavy Artillery (Colored) offered Bedford Forrest's men easy ways into Fort Pillow-or so they thought. Three of them rushed straight for Ben Robinson's twelve-pounder.

  He fired the piece himself. Sergeant Clark was down with a leg wound. Un
like some earlier rounds, this one didn't go to waste. Canister blew the Confederates to red rags. One of them managed a wail. The other two.. simply ceased to be.

  Sandy Cole whooped. “Bury them buckra in a jam tin!” he shouted. “Blew 'em right out a their shoes!” Sure enough, several shoes still stood in the gap. One of them had a foot left in it.

  “Reload!” Captain Carron shouted. But there was no time. Not all of Forrest's men were rash enough to charge straight into the muzzle of a gun. Many more, great swarms of them, scrambled over the earthwork and into Fort Pillow. Using the worm, swabbing out, shoving in another powder bag and then another round of canister… The Rebs would shoot or bayonet them all before they finished the job.

  When Robinson grabbed the worm, then, he didn't grab it to pull smoldering bits of wadding from the twelve-pounder's barrel. Instead, he used it like the butt of a spear, or perhaps more like a quarterstaff, driving the twin iron corkscrews at the end into a Secesh soldier's chest. They didn't pierce the Rebel-but, with a startled squawk, his arms flailing, he fell back into the ditch from which he'd climbed.

  “That's the way to do it!” Sandy Cole was laying about him with a sponge. It wasn't a weapon that would kill any Rebs, but he had enough reach with it to keep them from bayoneting him where he stood. He knocked a Confederate trooper off his feet, then kicked him in the face as he started to rise. After that, the Confederate stayed down.

  Carron's pistol barked-once, twice, three times. In the chaos, Sergeant Robinson had no idea whether the white officer hit anybody. More and more men in butternut dashed up over the rampart and sprang down into Fort Pillow.

  Robinson clouted one of them in the head with the worm. It made a much better weapon than the sponge. The C.S. trooper toppled, his face a mask of blood. Robinson snatched up the bucket of water in which the sponge rested when it wasn't swabbing out the twelve-pounder. He threw the water into one startled Confederate's face, then flung the bucket at another.