Then shots came from the right front, not heavy rolling volleys mixed with artillery where General Ewell’s men were already hotly engaged with the Federals, but a spattering of skirmisher fire. “Grant’s looking to flank us,” Allison High guessed. “He’s got men and to spare to try it.”
“If he didn’t lose three for our one in the Wilderness, I’ll eat my shoes,” Caudell said.
“And if he did, he still has more men than we do,” High answered, which was so manifestly true that Caudell could only click tongue between teeth by way of response. He tasted wet dust when he did.
The regimental musicians beat a brisk tattoo on their drums. “By the right of companies into line!” Captain Lewis echoed, shouting as loud as he could so the whole company could hear him. With a certain relief, Caudell strode off the dust-filled roadway into the field to one side of it. The air would be fresher, at least for a while.
General Kirkland’s whole brigade was shifting into battle formation, 44th, 47th, and 26th North Carolina forward, with the 11th and 52d going into line behind them. Regimental and company flags took the lead as color-bearers stepped out in front of their units. Caudell looked leftward for the banner of Company E of the 44th North Carolina; it was his favorite in the whole brigade. He grinned when he spied it, though it was too far away to seem more than a tiny green square. He knew its device—a snapper with mouth agape—and the company nickname, TURTLE PAWS, spelled out below.
“Skirmishers forward!” Colonel Faribault yelled. Men from every company trotted ahead of the main line.
“Get a move on, Nate,” Rufus Daniel called when Caudell failed to advance with the rest of the skirmishers. “Lieutenant Winborne done got hisself shot, so they’re your boys.”
Caudell was glad for the thick coat of dust on his face; no one could see him turn red. He’d completely forgotten that, with the third lieutenant wounded, the skirmishers fell to him. A couple of them laughed as he dashed up to join them. “Make sure your pieces are loaded and ready,” he growled. The skirmishers paused to check, which took their attention off him for a moment.
They hurried forward, each man a couple of yards from his neighbors to either side. “Do we aim to go straight toward the shooting?” somebody called. Caudell didn’t know the answer.
Third Lieutenant Will Dunn of Company E did. “No, we’re to move to the left of it,” he answered. “If there’s a hole there, we’ll plug it till the rest of the brigade comes up.”
A few minutes later, three people sang out “Yankee skirmishers!” at the same time. Wishing for his lost hat, Caudell raised a hand to shade his eyes. Sure enough, a thin line of bluecoats, tiny as insects in the distance, was approaching the thin gray-clad line of which he was a part. Behind them, a cloud of dust masked more Federal soldiers.
The Yankees were still too far away to make worthwhile targets. They spotted the rebels at about the same time they were seen. Caudell watched them adjust their line. He admired the way they shifted; they might have been on the parade ground, exercising for an inspector general rather than maneuvering on the field of battle. Polished rifle barrels and bayonets revealed the men who kicked up so much dust to their rear.
Lieutenant Dunn carried a pair of field glasses on a leather strap around his neck. He lifted them to his face for a better look at the foe ahead. When he let go with a cry of outrage, Caudell and all the Confederates in earshot stared at him. The field glasses had already fallen to his chest again. Pointing ahead, he shouted, “You know what those are up ahead, boys? Those are nigger troops!”
A couple of rebels started shooting the second they heard that. At a range still close to half a mile, they did no harm Caudell could see. Whatever color they were, the Federal skirmishers had the discipline to hold their fire. Caudell’s jaw tightened. Escaped slaves and free Negroes—they would have no reason to love Southern men any better than he and his comrades loved them.
The bayonets on AK-47s were permanently secured under the barrel by a bolt. Caudell hadn’t brought his forward at any time during the Wilderness fighting. Neither had any other Confederates he remembered seeing. Now several men paused to deploy them. With black men ahead, bullets were not enough for them. Seeing black men in uniform made it literally war to the knife.
As far as Caudell was concerned, any man with a rifle musket in his hands, be he white, black, or green, was a deadly enemy so long as he wore a blue coat. Still as if on parade, half the Yankee skirmishers—now they were close enough for Caudell to tell they were Negroes with his unaided eye—brought their Springfields to their shoulders in smooth unison and fired a volley at Caudell and his comrades.
The range was still long; had Caudell been leading that Federal skirmish line, he would not have had his men shoot so soon. Even so, a couple of men from the skirmish line fell, groaning and cursing at the same time. The Negroes who had fired began to reload; those who had not raised their weapons to volley again.
“Give it to ‘em!” Caudell shouted. All the other company skirmish leaders yelled orders that meant the same thing.
Caudell raised his own rifle and started firing while he advanced on the Negro skirmishers. They began to drop as the Confederates’ repeaters filled the air in their neighborhood with bullets. The blacks still on their feet, though, kept loading and firing as coolly as any veterans. A couple of white men with swords—officers, Caudell supposed—shouted commands to them. Those officers soon fell. They would have been natural targets on any skirmish line and were all the more so here because of whom they led. But even after they went down, their black soldiers continued to fight steadily.
“Jesus God almighty!” shouted a private named Ransom Bailey, a few feet away from Caudell. He pointed toward the oncoming line of battle behind the colored skirmishers. “They’s all niggers! Looks like a division of ‘em!”
“Worry about them later,” Caudell told him. “These ones up front are enough trouble for now.”
Skirmish lines seldom came to grips with each other. One would usually retreat because of the other’s superior firepower. The Confederates badly outgunned the black Union troops, but the Negroes would not retreat. They made charge after charge against the Southerners’ merciless rifles. Only when just a handful of them were still on their feet did they stubbornly withdraw.
By then, they did not have far to go; the regiments of which they were a part had almost caught up with them. The black troops’ line was wide and deep. Because their regiments were new and untried, they had far more men in them than units which had already seen hard fighting. They deployed with the same almost fussy neatness the skirmishers had shown.
Behind Caudell, behind the whole brigade, cannon went off with a crash. Round shot and shells began landing among the Negro soldiers. A cannon ball knocked down a whole file of men. The Negroes did not break. Their front rank went to one knee; the second rank raised rifle muskets above their comrades, heads. They volleyed as smartly as had the Federals rushing up the Brock Road to attack the breastworks there.
The 47th North Carolina was not behind a breastwork now. It had been hurrying forward to get round the Federals’ right; Grant had sent these blacks to stop Lee’s advance. Where they collided, they would fight. Officers shouted, “Advance!” Bugles echoed the command. After that blast of fire from the Negroes, though, some Confederates would never advance again.
Yankee artillery was on the field, too. A shell shrieked past Caudell, exploded just in front of the main rebel battle line. The blast and the fragments blew a hole in it. The men on either side who had not been hit closed ranks and came on.
The third and fourth ranks of black soldiers stepped forward, while the first and second reloaded. Their volley was not as neat as the first one had been; fire from the Confederate repeaters tore at their line. Officers went down one after another. In most units, North and South alike, officers commonly wore outfits like those of their men, —but for insignia of rank, the better to avoid drawing the enemy’s eye to them. But the
men who commanded the black troops stood out not only because of the color of their skin but also for their fancy dress. “Shoot the nigger-lovers before the nigs!” a private not far from Caudell shouted. Many of his comrades seemed to be taking his advice.
After that second volley, the Negroes raised a cheer—a wild shout much closer to a rebel yell than to the Northern white soldiers’ usual hurrah—and advanced on Kirkland’s brigade at the double-quick. Caudell and his fellow skirmishers fell back into their own front ranks, to keep the main body of Confederates from shooting them in the back.
Between shells and rifle fire, the battle din was deafening. A near miss from a shell knocked the man beside Caudell into him. He fell over. Somehow he hung on to his repeater. Two men stepped on him before he managed to get to his feet. He looked down at himself, hardly daring to believe he was still intact. Muttering a prayer of thanks, he started shooting again.
The black soldiers were frighteningly close. They’d taken dreadful casualties, but still they came on. Even as he did his best to kill them, Caudell admired the courage they showed. It occurred to him that George Ballentine might have fought well, if anyone had given him the chance—and if Benny Lang hadn’t made him want to run away instead.
Because their regiments started so large, the colored troops greatly outnumbered the rebels at the start of the engagement. That meant they still had men left when their battered line and that of the Confederates crashed together. They threw themselves on the Southerners with bayonets and clubbed muskets.
The Confederates wavered. Their AK-47s were not made to double as spears. But they could still shoot. Black men fell, clutching at chest or belly or legs. Screams and curses almost overwhelmed the thunder of gunfire.
Right beside Caudell, a colored soldier drove a bayonet into a Southerner’s belly. The Confederate shrieked. Blood dribbled from his mouth. He crumpled to the ground as the Negro ripped out the bayonet. Caudell fired at the black man. His rifle clicked harmlessly. He’d fired the last round in his clip without noticing. Grin flashing whitely in the middle of a black face made blacker by gunpowder stains from Minié ball cartridges, the Negro spun toward Caudell, ready to spit him, too.
Before he could thrust with the bayonet, a rebel landed on his back. The two men went down in a thrashing heap. The Confederate tore the Springfield from the colored man’s hands. He heaved himself up onto his knees, rammed home the length of edged steel that tipped the musket. The Negro screamed like a lost soul. The Southerner stabbed him again and again and again, a dozen times, a score, long after he was dead. Then, grinning like a devil that seizes lost souls, he got to his feet.
“Thanks, Billy;” Caudell gasped. “That was bravely done.”
“Shitfire, Caudell, you don’t got to thank me none for killin’ niggers,” Billy Beddingfield said. “I do that for my own self.”
Hand-to-hand fighting seldom lasted long. One side or the other soon found the punishment too much to bear. So it was with the black Federal troops now. They broke away from their foes and retreated to the north. The Confederates raked them with heavy fire from their repeaters. That was finally enough to make the Negroes run, though even then some turned back to shoot at the Southerners.
A fresh magazine in his AK-47, Caudell took his own pot shots at the colored soldiers. Rescuing him like that was the sort of thing that could earn Billy Beddingfield his corporal’s chevrons again. As long as the regiment was in active combat, he was as good a soldier as any officer could want. Trouble wits, he’d already shown he couldn’t hold his temper in camp.
Kirkland’s brigade—Heth’s whole division—pushed ahead, trampling down early wheat and corn as they advanced. The very precision of the blacks who opposed them cost those Negroes dearly. Their officers still handled them as if they were in a review rather than a battle, and used extra time to make every maneuver perfect. Meanwhile, the ragged Confederates took a heavy toll with their repeaters.
A few Negroes tried to surrender when the rebels overran them. Caudell brusquely jerked the muzzle of his AK-47 southward; two frightened blacks babbled thanks as they shambled away. A few seconds later, a rifle barked behind him. He whirled. The colored men lay twisted on the ground. Their blood spilled over cornstalks and soaked into the dirt. Billy Beddingfield stood above them, that devilish grin on his face once more.
“They’d given up,” Caudell said angrily.
“A nigger with a rifle in his hands cain‘t give up,” Beddingfield retorted.
Before Caudell could answer, Captain Lewis tapped him on the shoulder.” An ammunition wagon just came up,” Lewis said, pointing. “Pullout as many of your skirmishers as you can find, then have each man draw two or three clips’ worth of cartridges. Make for that stand of plum trees up there.” He pointed again. “From there, you ought to have a fair shot at that Yankee battery that’s been tearing us up.” Even as he spoke, another shell whistled overhead, to land with a crash an instant later.
Caudell looked from the plums to the distant battery. The Federal artillerymen were busy at their pieces, working together with drilled precision. “Even that’s long range,” he said dubiously.
“I know it is,” Lewis said. “I wouldn’t send you out there if we still carried our old muzzle-loaders. But these repeaters let us send enough bullets their way that some are likely to hit.”
“All right, sir.” Caudell rounded up four men who’d been on the skirmish line with him. They got their extra ammunition and made for the plums. One was wounded before he got there. He staggered back to the rebel line. Caudell and the other three reached the little grove.
Up ahead, the artillerymen were still at their trade. One soldier Set ball and powder inside a Napoleon’s muzzle. Another rammed them down to the bottom of the barrel. A third jabbed a wire pick through the vent to pierce the bag that contained the powder. Still another attached primer and lanyard. That same man yanked on the lanyard and fired the piece. The fellow with the rammer swabbed it down. Back at the limber that held the ammunition chest, two more soldiers handed another bag of powder and a ball to a third, who carried them at a run to the man who loaded them into the smoothbore. The process began again.
Caudell and his comrades began to interrupt them and the other five gun crews that made up the battery. “Take your best shots,” he told the skirmishers. He and they stood behind stout tree trunks, not so much for protection as to give themselves cover. “We aren’t going to hit all the time, but we’ll do them some harm.”
A gunner went down, then another. Caudell kept firing steadily. Still another man reeled away from his cannon. A few seconds later, a rammer was hit as he ran up to the muzzle of his piece with a soaked sponge. Replacements took over for men wounded or killed. They began to fall, too.
Although the Confederates were shooting from cover, the muzzle flashes of their rifles quickly gave them away. Someone pointed toward the plums. Artillerymen leaped to a Napoleon’s handspike, began swinging the twelve-pounder toward the stand of trees. Even from half a mile, the gun’s bore, though only a bit more than four and a half inches wide, seemed a huge and deadly cavern to Caudell.
“Take out that crew!” he shouted—needlessly, for the skirmishers had already started shooting at the gunners. The corporal or sergeant who stood behind the Napoleon to gauge the range clapped a hand to his face and toppled. A rammer fell, grabbing at his leg. Another man snatched up the swab-ended. pole and carried on.
The brass cannon belched flame and a great cloud of thick white smoke. A round shot smashed a tree not twenty feet from Caudell with a noise like a giant clapping hands. The artillerymen began their drill once more. Two more of them went down before they could fire again. This time they chose a bursting shell. “My arm!” a skirmisher wailed. The Federal artillerymen stolidly resumed their appointed tasks. When yet another man was hurt, one of the drivers from the limber crew replaced him.
Another shell exploded in the grove. Fragments thumped against the trunk which sheltered
Caudell. He fed bullets into a banana clip and hoped the next shell would be a dud. Federal gunners, unfortunately, used better fuses than their Southern counterparts.
But the next shell did not come. The depleted gun crews fired a last couple of shots, then rushed to attach their cannons to the limbers. Some of them snatched out pistols and began to fire them. The drivers urged teams into motion.
Four of the guns in the battery made good their escape. Caudell shouted with delight as rebels advancing from the southeast swarmed over the other two. One of those was the Napoleon that had been trying to blast his comrades and him out of the grove. “We did something worthwhile, boys!” he yelled to the other skirmishers. “We kept ‘em too busy to run till it was too late for ‘em anyhow.”
The Yankee infantry was pulling back too, north and east along the line of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. The black foot soldiers did not run like a frightened mob, but they did not show the same extraordinary stubbornness they had displayed earlier in the day, either; against the Confederates’ repeaters, that had only gotten more of them killed.
Caudell sent a fatigue party out to a stream not far away. He waited to eat until they came back; he wanted to boil water for a desiccated meal. Most of the Castalia Invincibles did not bother to wait. After plundering the haversacks of the black troops they’d fought, they had plenty of hardtack and salt pork. The rich smell of brewing coffee soon filled the night air around the campfires. More than a few Confederates sported new blue trousers or new shoes—more spoil from the battlefield.
“They sent them niggers out carrying’ everything but bake ovens on their backs,” Rufus Daniel said. He had a new pair of pants himself.
“Niggers.” Otis Massey spat as he said the word. “Niggers with guns. That’s what the Yankees want to do with us—goddam niggers with guns, allover the South.”
A general mutter of agreement rose from the soldiers who heard him. Dempsey Eure said, “Heard tell the Yankees’d given ‘em guns. But you give a man a gun, that don’t mean he can fight with it. Never reckoned in all my born days that if you give a nigger a gun, he’d fight the way them fellers did.”
The Guns of the South Page 19