Fort Pillow

by Harry Turtledove

  Yet another Reb fired at him from perhaps six feet away-and missed. The soldier swore and lunged with the bayonet. Ben Robinson beat the blade aside with the worm. “Black flag!” the Confederate shouted. “We're gonna kill us every goddamn nigger we catch!”

  “You couldn't catch the clap in a whorehouse,” Robinson retorted, cautiously thrusting with the worm.

  “Only thing you know about whorehouses is your mama worked in one,” the Secesh soldier panted.

  “Leastways I know who my mama is. She didn't leave me out fo' the hogs to eat,” Robinson said. “Or is you one o' them hogs your ownself?”

  The Confederate stared at him with eyes and mouth open as comically wide as a surprised Negro's were said to be. Ben Robinson almost laughed, even though Forrest's cavalryman might kill him yet. The white never dreamt a man he wished he owned might have the nerve to talk back. Well, tough luck for him. Life gave you all kinds of things you never dreamt of. Anybody who'd been bought and sold could testify to that.

  And the trooper stayed so surprised, Robinson's next lunge with the worm caught him in the pit of the stomach and folded him up like a lady's fan. Robinson wanted to finish him off. The artillery sergeant wished he had a weapon that could finish off the Reb. He looked around to see if someone had dropped a rifle musket.

  Sure enough, several lay on the muddy ground. Robinson snatched one up, only to realize he would die quickly if he stayed where he was to fight with it. Sandy Cole and Charlie Key were still on their feet and fighting, but the rest of the gun crew was either down or fled. Confederates poured past them on either side. Here and there, knots of Union troops still struggled, whites and blacks battling side by side, color forgotten. But Bedford Forrest's men were over the rampart and inside the fort, and God only knew how the Federals were going to throw them out.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest raised a polished brass spyglass to his eye to get a closer look at the fight for Fort Pillow. Distance fell away. As with everything else, he paid a price: the image was upside down. He was used to that, and it didn't faze him. The fringes of unnatural red and blue around the edges of things bothered him more.

  “Lousy cheap thing,” he muttered. He'd had better telescopes, ones where the fringes weren't nearly so bad. But almost three years of constant travel left them water over the dam. He shrugged. This one, borrowed from a Confederate patriot in Jackson, showed.. enough.

  He watched his men go down into the Yankees' foolish, useless ditch and then, only minutes later, scramble out on the far side. He watched his sharpshooters pick off two or three Federals who leaned across the earthwork or crawled out onto it so they could shoot down at the troopers in the ditch. He chuckled a little as he watched; in the spyglass's inverted image, the soldiers on top of the rampart looked as if they were about to fall off the edge of the world.

  A moment later, he chuckled again, grimly. The homemade Yankees and runaway slaves inside Fort Pillow weren't really ready to fight, even if they thought they were. They could have made things much nastier for his men if they were bright enough to light the fuses on some shrapnel rounds and toss them over the rampart and down into the crowded ditch. The troopers trapped in there wouldn't have enjoyed that at all.

  But neither Major Booth nor any of his officers had the brains to do it. The Federals didn't have long to think of such things, and now, with his own men into place right outside the rampart, it was too late. War didn't give you second chances.

  Even across close to a quarter of a mile, the volley the Confederates fired into Fort Pillow sounded like a thunderclap. It must have hit the defenders the same way. Bedford Forrest was sure of that, even if he couldn't see into the fort. That wasn't the sorry spyglass's fault. Several hundred rifle muskets and pistols going off at once didn't just make a thunderclap. They also made the cloud from which it might have sprung. His troopers vanished into that cloud as they swarmed over the rampart and into the fort.

  More shots rang out, these spaced far enough apart to be heard individually, not just as part of a greater roar. Through the gunfire, Rebel yells and other cries and the screams of wounded men rang out. “If we get in, them bluebellies is dead meat,” said a soldier near the general, pausing for a moment as he reloaded.

  “That's about the size of it, Reuben.” Forrest nodded. “And I'll tell you something else, too-we're going to get in.”

  “Well, hell, yes.” Reuben had no doubt in his mind.

  Neither did Bedford Forrest, not really. He made hand-washing motions, feeling like Pontius Pilate again. Well too bad, he thought. If the Federals didn't have the brains to quit when he gave them the chance, weren't they asking to get crucified? He nodded again. They were, and his troopers would give them what they asked for.

  “Come on, men! We can do it!” Major Bradford shouted. He heard other officers and sergeants in blue yelling the same thing. He really believed it. They'd fought so well for so long. Bad luck Major Booth stopped a bullet, but even so…

  He never would have dreamt the niggers up from Memphis could fight the way they did. Were they as brave as white men? He still didn't know if he wanted to go that far-he was a Tennessee man himself, after all, even if he did fight for the Union-but they stood by their guns, they fired over the rampart, and they didn't run. What more could you ask?

  “We can do it!” he yelled again.

  Then the Confederates crouched down on the far side of the earth-work rose up like Lazarus and fired a volley that smacked into his men like an uppercut from a prizefighter. As soon as he saw soldiers — black and white — reel away from the rampart, some wounded or slain, others simply terrified, he knew how dreadful the danger was.

  “Get back to the earthwork!” he shouted. “We have to keep them out!” He ran forward and shoved at a trooper from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry, a man he knew well. “Get back, Jojo!”

  Jojo wasn't inclined to listen. He wasn't inclined to remember military discipline, either. “Get stuffed, Bill,” he said, and pushed past his commandant. He hardly seemed to know where he was going anywhere to get away from the howling, yowling Confederates swarming up and over the rampart.

  Bradford could have shot him in the back. A man deserting his post, a man disobeying his superior in combat… Nobody would say a word about it, even if anyone from the garrison was lucky enough to be in a position to write reports about what happened here today. Bradford didn't fire. Maybe Jojo would come to his senses in a little while and start fighting again. A dead man wouldn't, not till the Day of Resurrection.

  And besides, Major William Bradford knew too painfully well how close to cutting and running he was himself.

  Try as he would, he couldn't make himself go right up to the rampart and battle it out with the Confederates hand to hand. He did shoot at one of them who jumped down into Fort Pillow and ran at him with rifle musket clutched by the barrel and swung up over his head. He aimed for the Reb's midsection, but hit him in the left shoulder. His Army Colt pulled up and to the right when he fired.

  With a howl of pain, the trooper reeled away. He dropped the rifle musket with which he would have clubbed Bradford to clutch at himself. Bright blood welled out between his fingers. Then a colored soldier hit him in the side of the head with the butt of his Springfield. The blow wasn't sporting, but it was damned effective. The Confederate swayed like a tall tree almost cut through, then fell at full length in the mud. Bradford half expected someone to yell, Timmmber!

  Another Confederate shot the Negro. He too crumpled, both hands flying to his belly. The best he could hope for was a quick death. Belly wounds almost always killed, if not from the force of the bullet itself then from the fever that followed punctured bowels.

  Bradford fired at the soldier in butternut. Even at point-blank range, he missed. A moment later, another black man tackled the trooper. They rolled on the ground, punching and kicking and kneeing and biting in a spasm of hatred and fury.

  “Come on! Keep fighting them! As long as they don't get in, w
e can whip them!” That voice, so like his own, made Bradford's head whip around. His brother Theodorick was still very much in the fight. Theo had a pistol in one hand and one of his blue wigwag flags in the other. He fired at a Reb. The man went down.

  “That's the fucker who was signaling the gunboat!” shouted another Confederate-a major. “Nail the lousy son of a bitch!”

  Half a dozen of Bedford Forrest's troopers fired at Theodorick Bradford at the same time. At least three bullets struck home-in the chest, in the belly, in the leg.

  “Theo!” Bill Bradford cried. He shot at one of the Confederates. The pistol ball caught the Reb just above the bridge of the nose. The man went down without a word, dead before he finished falling.

  But Captain Theodorick Bradford was also down, feebly thrashing in the mud. For once careless of his own safety, Bill Bradford knelt beside his brother. “Hurts,” Theo choked out. Blood bubbled from his nose and ran from the corner of his mouth. “Hurts bad.”

  “It'll be all right, Theo,” Bradford said, knowing too well it wouldn't.

  His brother tried to answer, but only blood poured from his mouth. His eyes rolled up in his head. His chest heaved once, twice, as he fought for air. Then it was still. Bill Bradford smelled a harsh stink. Theo's bowels had let go. It was over.

  For those few seconds, no one tried to murder Bradford as he bent over his brother's body. That wouldn't, couldn't, last. No matter what Bradford wanted to do for Theodorick, he had to stay alive or he'd never get the chance. He scrambled to his feet and fired again. The Colt clicked on an empty chamber. He threw it down, snatched up the one Theo had dropped, and fought on.

  IX

  Matt Ward hadn't thought much of the Federals garrisoning Fort Pillow. Half renegade Tennesseans, half coons-what kind of fight could people like that put up? He figured they would throw up their hands and surrender as soon as that first terrific volley tore into them. Of course, from what he heard, Bedford Forrest had thought they would surrender when he sent in the flag of truce.

  Forrest proved wrong, and so did Ward. The soldiers in blue fought with as much courage as anyone could want to see. Maybe that was the desperation of cornered rats. Whatever it was, they showed no signs of yielding even if they were badly outnumbered, even if that blast of gunfire killed or wounded quite a few of the men at the rampart.

  If they wouldn't give up, they had to go down. A big colored man in a blue uniform swung his clubbed Springfield at Matt Ward's head. Ward ducked just in time. The rifle-musket butt knocked the slouch hat off his head, but didn't knock out his brains. He swore all the same; he liked that hat.

  He stabbed at the Negro with his own bayonet. The black man sprang away. But then he swung again, trying to knock the Enfield out of Ward's hands. Ward wasn't an experienced bayonet fighter. He didn't think any soldiers except former U.S. Army Regulars were expert with the bayonet. But he held on to his weapon, and the black man's swipe left him hideously exposed and unable to get away. Only a sandbag on a practice field could make a more inviting target.

  Like anybody who grew up on a farm, Matt Ward had slaughtered and butchered his share of livestock. He knew the soft resistance flesh gave to a knife, knew the feel of a blade grating off a rib and then sliding deeper. But there was all the difference in the world between sticking a hog and sticking a man.

  The Negro's eyes opened enormously wide. “Do Jesus!” he screamed. Then he let out a bubbling, wordless shriek of pure agony. He jerked away from the blade and from Ward. An experienced bayonet fighter would have held the lunge and gone on stabbing, twisting the blade to make sure he had a killing stroke. Ward thought the black man would fall over dead. The blood pouring from his side made that seem likely.

  Likely or not, it wasn't so. Once free of the bayonet, the Negro went right on fighting-not against Ward, but against a nearby Confederate trooper. That wound had to kill him sooner or later-Ward drove more than a foot of steel into his chest-but it wasn't finishing him fast. As Ward had by the barracks below the bluff, he found out how hard human beings were to kill.

  Not far from him, a black soldier threw down his Springfield and fell to his knees in front of a couple of Bedford Forrest's troopers. “Don' shoot me!” he shouted. “Please don' shoot me! I surrender! Ain't gonna fight no mo'!”

  “You a runaway, boy?” one of the Confederates asked. Most of the Negroes who fought for the U.S.A. were. By the way this bluebelly talked, he sure didn't come from Massachusetts or New York.

  He hesitated a split second, but had to realize lying would do him no good. “Yes, suh,” he admitted. “You kin send me back to my massa. I don' care, so he'p me Jesus.”

  Most of the time, the Yankees complained because the Confederates treated captured colored troops as reclaimed property, not prisoners of war. Forrest had offered to treat the blacks in Fort Pillow as prisoners like any others-he'd offered, and the U.S. commander turned him down. Now the bill for such folly came due.

  “I'll send you to your master, all right,” the Confederate said. “I'll send you straight to the Devil, because you belong in hell!” He shot the black man in the head from no more than a yard away. Blood and brains and bits of the Negro's skull blew out. The black toppled and lay twitching in the dirt.

  “That's telling him, Hank!” said the other C.S. trooper in butternut. “I should've bayoneted him in the guts, let him die slow,” Hank said. “Shooting's too good for a mad dog like that.”

  “If you can kill 'em fast, you better do it,” Ward broke in. “I stuck one, stuck him good, and he's still on his feet, the son of a bitch.”

  “Niggers is like rattlesnakes-they don't die till sundown.” Hank stirred the man he'd just shot with his foot. “Well, this here one's a goner. Bastard's dead as a stump. But Lord only knows when I'll get a chance to reload.”

  If you didn't carry a repeater or a revolver, that was the rub, especially in a close-quarters fight like this. If you fired too soon, you might come to a point where you desperately needed a bullet but didn't have one. If you waited too long, somebody on the other side was liable to shoot you before you pulled the trigger.

  Without a minnie in his own rifle musket, the question was as academic for Ward as it was for Hank. When the Federals mounted a counterattack, he defended himself with bayonet and butt because they were all he had. He might have been one of Julius Caesar's legionaries, except their spears were lighter and longer and less clumsy than his.

  But some of his comrades still had loaded weapons. They shot a couple of white officers, after which the Union charge faltered. “Come on!” Ward said. “There ain't enough of 'em to hold us out, no matter how hard they try!”

  He waded into the fight. A white Tennessean in a blue uniform tried to bayonet him. He tried to bayonet the homemade Yankee at the same time. His bayonet punched into the enemy trooper's thigh. The Federal's thrust missed him. The Tennessean who fought for the U.S.A. yowled and sat down hard, trying to hold the wound closed with his fingers. Ward never found out what happened to him, whether he bled to death, whether some other Confederate killed him, or whether he ended up getting taken prisoner.

  Ward also stopped worrying about what happened to the Tennessee Tory the instant after he bayoneted him. A great cheer rose from the Confederates, a hardly smaller moan of dismay from the Union troops.

  The large U.S. flag that had floated over Fort Pillow since dawn's early light was down. If that didn't mean the fort was falling, nothing ever would.

  Sergeant Ben Robinson groaned when the Stars and Stripes came down. That was his flag, not any of the ones the Confederates used: not the Stars and Bars, not the Stainless Banner that replaced it because from a distance it looked too much like the flag it sought to supplant, and not the Confederate battle flag with its blue X on red. If he belonged to the United States, he had a chance to be a man, an American, a person in his own right. If he belonged to the Confederate States, what was he but a slave, a piece of property, a thing? Nothing, nothing at all.


  If he wasn't very lucky, he feared he would be a dead man soon. A glance at the sky told him the sun had hardly moved since the Secesh soldiers swarmed over the rampart. He wasn't Joshua, to hold it back in its course. The hand-to-hand fighting inside the earthwork hadn't lasted long-no more than fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside. It only seemed to go on forever.

  Well, no matter how it seemed, it wouldn't last much longer. The colored artillerymen and Tennessee troopers inside the fort had done everything flesh and blood could do to hold out Forrest's men, and everything flesh and blood could do wasn't enough. Some people were saying thousands and thousands of Rebs had got into Fort Pillow. Robinson wasn't so sure about that. But he was sure there were more men in butternut and gray than in blue wherever he looked.

  “What is we gonna do, Sergeant?” Sandy Cole shouted. He and Robinson and a few other Company D men, Nate Hunter and Charlie Key and Aaron Fentis, formed a little knot of stubborn resistance against the oncoming Confederate tide. Key had served the twelve-pounder; the other two Negroes hadn't. They were riflemen who'd fired over the earthwork at the Confederates. With the gun useless and the earthwork lost, they were all in the same boat. Yes, they were all in that boat, all right, and it was sinking.

  “We got to fight,” Robinson answered, bending to pick up a fist-sized rock and throw it at the nearest Rebel. “We don't fight, they kill us fo' sure.”

  None of the other colored soldiers could argue with that. Cries of “No quarter!” and “Black flag!” still rang out. Forrest's troopers were murdering Negroes who tried to lay down their arms and surrender. They were also murdering men from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry who did the same thing. Their blood was up, and they cared about nothing but slaughter.

  “Watch yourself, Aaron!” Charlie Key yelled. Aaron Fentis started to turn. He was a squat, broad-shouldered man, strong as an ox but not very fast. He didn't have a chance of knocking away the Confederate bayonet pointed straight at his midriff.