The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  They knew it, too. They milled about, just out of good shooting range. But then they came on once more. Now the officers had no trouble with balky men. They knew they had to break through if their corps was to survive.

  “Fire low!” Caudell shouted as the blue wave again surged toward the breastwork that dammed its progress. As the Confederates had three times before, they shredded the charge. No Yankee could come within fifty yards of that rude wall and live. The captains and lieutenants who headed the rush fell bravely, leading their men. Like most troops on both sides in the war, the common soldiers took heart from the example their officers set. Without that example, most of those who could made for the rear and at least temporary safety.

  A couple of bluecoats stood where they were, their empty hands high in the air. “Don’t shoot, you rebs!” one of them shouted, his northern accent sharp in Caudell’s ears. “You done caught us.”

  Caudell looked around. “Where’s that lieutenant?” he asked, seeing no one of higher rank than himself.

  “He got shot,” Mollie Bean answered laconically.

  “Oh.” Without showing more of himself than his head, Caudell called to the Federals, “Come ahead, Yanks. Make it pert, though—if we have to start shooting again, you all will be right in the middle.”

  The Northern men sprinted toward the barricade. More shouted directions from Caudell took them out of the roadway and through the edge of the Wilderness. Caudell listened to them scrabbling over the lower fieldworks there; they disappeared from sight until they came back out onto the Brock Road. The Confederates promptly relieved them of their haversacks and whatever money they had on them. “Shoes, too, Yanks,” a barefoot private said. “One of you might could be my size, and if you ain’t, I’ll wear one pair anyways and pass the other on to somebody else.”

  The prisoners did not protest.” You just take what you want, rebs,” one of them said as he pulled off his stout marching shoes. “I’m so glad you’re not shooting at me anymore, I don’t care about anything else. The way the bullets came at us, I figured you had a million men back here, maybe two.”

  The Confederates grinned at that. Caudell sent the two Federals to the rear. He stayed by the barricade, waiting to see if the Union men would mount yet another attack. The firing to the south was coming closer—that had to mean Longstreet was doing well. The firing to the north grew louder, too, or rather deeper; more artillery was mixing with the rifles there.

  The sun sank, a blood-red ball looking down on blood through tangled branches and curls of smoke from gunpowder and brushfires. The fifth Yankee attack had not come. As darkness gathered, the sound of fighting to north and south began to slacken. It also eased in the woods east of the Brock Road, though it never died away altogether, and would flare up every so often in a brief spasm of ferocity.

  Caudell looked up and down the breastwork. But for Mollie Bean, he saw no one he recognized. Any battle was liable to tear up a neat line of march; battle in country like the Wilderness made such disorder a sure thing. He asked, “Melvin, do you know where the rest of the boys from the 47th are?”

  Mollie pointed east.” Some of’ em’s over in the thickets yonder, maybe half a mile. I was with ‘em for a while. Then I heard all the shootin’ over here and figgered I’d come lend a hand.”

  “Things are dying down for the night, seems like,” Caudell said. “Let’s see if we can’t bed down with our regiment.” She nodded, and followed him as he headed into the undergrowth. Pushing through the rank second growth of the Wilderness was even worse in the evening twilight than it had been during the day. A red Indian would have laughed himself sick at Caudell’s noisy, stumbling fight with thorn bushes and cedar saplings.

  “Who’s there?” a nervous voice called from up ahead.

  “Two men from the 47th North Carolina,” Caudell answered quickly, before the nervous owner of that nervous voice started shooting. Behind him, Mollie Bean chuckled softly. He ignored her; he had to think of her as a soldier now, not a woman. He called back, “Who are you?”

  “Fifteenth North Carolina—Cooke’s brigade,” the still invisible fellow answered. He sounded less nervous now. “Y’all are out o’ Kirkland’s brigade, right?”

  “That’s us,” Caudell agreed gratefully. At least he was talking with someone from his own division.

  “Keep goin’ east. You’ll find ‘em.”

  Caudell kept going east. He never did see the man who’d given him directions. He and Mollie were challenged twice more in short order. He also challenged a couple of small groups of men himself: soldiers heading west, looking for their regiments. He was certain what they were before he opened his mouth. He challenged anyhow. In the Wilderness, certainty meant little.

  That half mile took close to half an hour to cover. Then, to his disgust, Caudell learned he’d somehow gone right past his regiment and had to double back. Had Mollie scolded him for that, he would have sworn at her. But she said only, “The goin’s rough hereabouts, Nate.” Nodding a grateful nod she probably couldn’t see, he pushed on.

  He stumbled into a tiny clearing. Some soldiers were sitting around a campfire. One of them looked up. It was Dempsey Eure. “I will be damned,” he said. “We reckoned you was buzzards’ meat, Nate.”

  “I thought so myself, a couple of times.” Caudell sank to the ground, footsore and weary. “You even managed to hang on to your plumed hat, Dempsey. I lost mine straight off.”

  “Wouldn’t lose this beauty, Nate.” Eure doffed it to Mollie. “Glad we didn’t lose that there little beauty, either.”

  “You shut up, Dempsey, you hear?” she said. “Don’t want no officers catchin’ the wind from your big flappin’ mouth.”

  “Sorry, uh, Melvin,” Eure said contritely.

  “Any water close by?” Caudell asked, shaking his empty canteen. “I’m bone dry.”

  Eure jerked his thumb to the north. “There’s a little creek down that way, couple minutes’ walk.”

  Hoping the couple of minutes would not stretch as the trip to find his regiment had, Caudell went off to look for the creek and to answer a call of nature which Mollie Bean’s presence had forced him to suppress until now. Such modesty was a foolish thing, but it was his own; he sighed with relief as he unbuttoned his trousers.

  He found the water by stepping into it. He took off his shoes and bathed his tired feet before he filled the canteen. Once he’d drunk, he felt better. He knew his comrades were only a few yards away, knew tens of thousands of Federals and Confederates were within a few miles, but for all he could see of them, he might as well have been alone in the Wilderness.

  His ears told him otherwise. In spite of full darkness, firing went on between rival pickets. But the cries of the wounded were worse. In the tangle through which both armies had pushed their lines, a hurt man had a hard time getting to the rear, nor could his mates easily rescue him—or sometimes even find him. Wails, shrieks, moans turned the thickets to the haunt of tormented ghosts. Most of the sounds of pain came from the south, which meant they rose from Yankee throats. But Confederates also shouted out their hurt to the world.

  Caudell shivered as he made his way back to the clearing, though the night was warm. What, save luck, had kept his tender flesh, rather than someone else’s, from pouring out its blood in the unwelcome track of a bullet? Nothing of which he was aware. He patted himself, as if to prove he was still whole and unholed. How marvelous that each hand grasped, that each foot moved confidently in front of the other!

  Once sitting again by the fire, he shared some of his food and the spoil from captured Yankee war bags with men who’d already gobbled the rations they were supposed to carry. A couple of soldiers went to sleep, their hats either over their eyes or under their heads as pillows. More, though, stayed up awhile to smoke and to hash over the battle and try to draw a bigger picture from the tiny pieces they’d seen.

  Plainly, Lee had trapped a big chunk of the Federal army between Hill’s corps and Longstreet’s
.’ Mollie Bean said, “Reckon we’ll go on and try poundin ‘em to pieces come mornin’.”

  “That’s clear enough,” Otis Massey agreed. The corporal patted the AK-47 that lay on the ground beside him. “With these repeaters, might could be we’ll even do it, too. Be a nasty butcher’s bill to pay for certain if we was usin’ muzzle-loaders instead.”

  “You’ve got that right, Otis,” Caudell said as a general murmur of agreement rose from the soldiers.” A Yankee said we weren’t fighting fair.”

  Dempsey Eure spat into the fire. “Fair didn’t stop their cavalry from usin’ their repeaters against single-shot muskets. Now they see what the shoe’s like on t’other foot.”

  Talk about repeaters reminded Caudell he hadn’t yet cleaned his. With more fighting ahead tomorrow, he wanted the rifle as ready as he could make it. He stripped the AK-47 and dug out a rag and the gun oil that had come with the weapon. The little black oil bottle said Break Free CLP. The sweet, almost fruity, smell of the oil mixed with the odors of coffee, food, and woodsmoke.

  He was in the middle of putting the repeater back together when someone came crashing through the brush toward the clearing. Mollie Bean and a couple of other privates reached for their rifles, in case it was a Yankee who needed capturing. But it wasn’t a Yankee—it was Colonel Faribault.

  “Turn those aside, boys, if you please,” he said when he saw he was looking down the barrels of several repeaters. “However much I admire Stonewall Jackson’s memory, I have no desire to share his fate.” The rifles were hastily lowered. But for accidents like that which had befallen Jackson, only a bad officer risked bullets from his own men. Faribault was a good one.

  “What’s the word, Colonel?” Caudell asked.

  “Tomorrow morning, five o’clock, we go after Winfield Scott Hancock again,” Faribault said. “God willing, we may put an end to the whole Federal II Corps. General Heth told General Lee we are driving them beautifully; I heard him say it myself.”

  The men round the campfire grinned and nodded to one another, pleased at the news and, as common soldiers have a way of being, proud they’d already figured out what their officers had planned for them. Caudell said; “How are we doing up by the Orange Turnpike?”

  “We pushed them hard there, too, all the way back to the Germanna Ford Road—they don’t care for our repeaters, not a bit of it,” Faribault answered, and a couple of soldiers yowled with glee. But the colonel held up a hand. “I think the Yankees have all the artillery in the world set up in the clearing around Wilderness Tavern. General Ewell tried mounting an assault on it, but the Federal guns knocked his men back into the woods.”

  Soldiers’ talk is sometimes curiously bloodless. Caudell did not need any sanguinary speech to picture the storm of shells and cannon balls, case shot and grapeshot, that must have greeted the onrushing Confederates—or the torn and broken bodies that bombardment must have produced. He’d heard the big guns start to roar late in the afternoon. Now he knew why.

  “What’re they going to do up there, Colonel?” Otis Massey asked.

  “That I can’t tell you, Otis; for I don’t know,” Faribault said. “I shouldn’t worry, though; I expect General Lee will come up with something.”

  “Reckon you’re right about that, Colonel,” Massey said. Caudell thought so, too. Lee had a way of coming up with something. The 47th North Carolina had joined the Army of Northern Virginia after Chancellorsville, but he knew how Lee had divided his outnumbered army and then divided it again, to fall on Joe Hooker’s flanks and drive him back over the Rapidan in dismay’ and defeat. Not even all the artillery in the world could long contain a man with the nerve to devise a scheme like that. Caudell was sure of it.

  “Want to sleep here tonight, Colonel?” he asked. “It isn’t fancy hospitality, but it’s what we have!’

  Faribault’s laugh sounded more tired than amused. “I thank you, First Sergeant, but I’ve a ways to go before I think of sleep. If I’m to lead the regiment tomorrow, tonight I must learn where this day’s fighting scattered the men and let them know what is required of them. Thus far I’ve found less than a quarter part. I expect I shall be busy well into the evening.”

  “Yes, sir,” Caudell said. He expected that Faribault wouldn’t sleep at all tonight, not if he intended to track down the whole 47th in the jungle of the Wilderness. He also saw Faribault knew that. It was part of what went with being a colonel if one aimed to make a proper job of it, as Faribault plainly did.

  “May we succeed tomorrow as we did today, and may God keep all of you safe, through the fighting to come,” Faribault said. He limped off into the woods. Before long, the occasional spatters of picket firing and the. never-ending groans from the wounded swallowed the sounds of his footsteps.

  “He’s a good colonel,” Mollie Bean remarked.

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Caudell said as he clicked the receiver plate back into place on his rifle. “He sees to his men before he worries about himself.” He spoke as if he were giving a lesson back in the classroom; he wanted Otis Massey to listen to him. Though a corporal had fewer men in his charge than a colonel, he needed to look out for them, too. But if Massey was paying attention, he showed no sign of it.

  Caudell’s sigh turned into a yawn. He undid his blanket roll, wrapped himself up, and fell asleep by the fire.

  The long roll woke him early the next morning, or so he thought until he realized where he was. The rattle was not drumsticks on snares; it was gunfire, the reports bunched tighter together than the fastest drummer could hurry his sticks. The fighting had begun again, even if sunrise still lay ahead.

  No time to boil water for a desiccated meal. Caudell choked down a couple of Yankee hardtack biscuits. He clicked off the AK-47’s safety, clicked again to fire single shots. The private who’d been on watch in the clearing woke the men too worn to rouse even for the racket of battle close by.

  “We don’t have an officer with us,” Caudell said. That was nothing new; after the third day’s fighting at Gettysburg, three of the 47th’s ten companies had been commanded by sergeants. He went on, “Remember, though, the Yankees are likely in worse shape than we are, because we whipped their tails yesterday. Let’s go get ‘em.”

  One by one, the Confederates climbed over the rude barricade of branches and earth and stones behind which they’d fought the day before. They spread out into a firing line, though not one of the parade-ground sort, not in half-light in rugged, overgrown country.

  A rifle fired, not far ahead. It was a Springfield. Caudell burrowed deep into the brush he’d been cursing till that moment. He crawled forward. Twigs and thorns grabbed at his clothes like children’s hands.

  The Springfield boomed again. He peered through bushes, waited. Something moved—something blue. He fired. An instant later, a bullet buzzed past his head, so close he felt the wind of its passage on his ear. It had not come from the man at whom he’d shot—a couple of Yankees were working an ambush, and he’d stumbled right into it.

  He scuttled backwards toward a fallen log he’d seen a few yards away. Another bullet zipped by him before he got there, and no sooner had he taken cover than another flew by, just over his head. He buried his face in the musty dirt. A twig the last Minié ball had clipped fell on the back of his neck. It tickled. He did not brush it away.

  After half a minute or so, he slid sideways toward the far end of the log. He still could not see the Federals who were shooting at him, but the smoke that lingered in the cool air under the trees told him where they might be. He fired several times in quick succession, blessing his repeater all the while. He didn’t know whether he’d scored any hits, but a thrashing in the bushes ahead said the Yankees were getting out of there.

  Or he thought it said that. These Yankees were sneaky customers. He advanced with infinite caution. Only when he’d gone past the clump of oak saplings where they’d hidden did he dare believe he’d really driven them off.

  He pushed farther sou
th. Once or twice, Federals shot at him. He shot back. Again, he had no idea whether he hit anyone. That was hard enough to tell on a battlefield where the foe stood right in front of you. In the Wilderness, it was impossible.

  He rejoined Otis Massey and several other soldiers with whom he’d spent the night. The firing ahead grew ever more intense. A few minutes later, he discovered why: the bluecoats were fighting from behind a breastwork of their own. Hereabouts, it stood at the far edge of a cleared space. Even with the AK-47 in his hands, his mouth went dry at the prospect of charging those blazing rifles.

  “Form your line here in the woods, men,” an officer said. Most of the Confederates stayed low, on their knees or their bellies. The officer walked up and down as if on a Sunday promenade. Minié balls made branches dance all around him, but he affected not to notice them.

  As he strode past the stump behind which Caudell crouched, the first sergeant recognized Captain John Thorp of Company A. Thorp was a slim, little fellow with nondescript features. He wore a thin line of mustache that tried to give him the air of a riverboat gambler but couldn’t quite bring it off. However he looked, though, his courage was beyond reproach.

  “Make sure your banana clips are full, men,” he said, and paused to let the soldiers stuff in as many bullets as they could. “At my word, we’ll give them a good shout and go for their works. Ready?…Now!”

  Yelling like fiends, the rebels burst from cover and dashed toward the barricade. Half—more than half—of Caudell’s yell was raw fear. He wondered if that was true of the men to either side of him, or if, like Thorp, they were immune to the disease. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than the private on his right spun sideways and crashed to the grass, blood spurting from his thigh.

  Caudell squeezed the trigger again and again and again. His aim was poor, but he put a lot of bullets in the air. With the AK-47, he could shoot and move at the same time. No more stopping to reload under remorseless enemy fire, no more ramrod slipping through sweaty fingers, no more jabbing it against the ground or hitting it with a rock—if you could find a rock.