Shattered Nation

by Jeffrey Brooks

  As he listened to the distant shouting of regimental officers, their voices filled with determination and confidence, Johnston was satisfied that his army would be marching forward into battle with its morale at a high pitch.

  He turned to Mackall. “No, we cannot wait. Issue the orders for the march north to commence. And have Fleetfoot saddled up. I intend to ride at the head of the army.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  September 28, Morning

  McFadden awoke. At first everything was hazy and uncertain, as if he had one foot in the real world and one foot in the realm of his unconscious dreams. For a moment, he wondered if he was dead. Perhaps the light that was now flooding his eyes was the great light of the Lord which everyone said you were supposed to see when you passed from one world to the next. He figured he couldn’t be dead, though, for his head was throbbing with a pain that he thought quite out of place in the afterlife.

  As his senses gradually came back, he realized he was lying on the ground. He focused his eyes and could finally see that he was a few hundred yards behind Battery Bate, or rather what was left of it. Much of the woodwork had collapsed after being burned to a cinder and the ramparts of some sections had been pounded into dust by the relentless Union artillery barrage. McFadden saw, with infinite relief, that the Confederate flag still waved above the remnants of the redoubt.

  The absence of the sounds of musket fire or artillery made it eerily quiet. The sun was well up in the sky, shining down on him. He assumed it had to be mid-morning. He tried to sit up, but the act of moving caused more pain to scream through his head. Instinctively, his hands moved to grasp his temples in the hopes that light pressure might ease the agony.

  “Oh, you’re alive,” an unfamiliar voice said.

  His eyes focused on a black man looking down on him, an amused grin on his face.

  “Good thing you woke up when you did. Otherwise, we might of carted you off with all the dead bodies. You could have been tossed in a mass grave and covered over with dirt.”

  McFadden wasn’t able to do anything other than grunt. Very slowly, he sat up, feeling as though every muscle in his body had been subjected to brutal punishment. He suddenly realized that he had been lying amidst several dozen corpses, laid out in neat rows. Had he been fully conscious, he would have found this unsettling, but all his mind could focus on was the throbbing pain in his head.

  “Water?” the slave asked.

  McFadden nodded. The man had been carrying a bucket of water, presumably on his way to the wounded, and held out a ladle. McFadden took the ladle in his hand and drank the water gratefully. He could almost feel the hydration flow to his aching muscles. Having spent most of the previous day fighting in the midst of a hellhole without so much as a sip of water, it was as though the slave with his bucket was an angel sent from heaven. The black man smiled, nodded, and moved on.

  He stood up, looking about. Black laborers were walking back and forth, some carrying wounded soldiers on stretchers toward the rear while others were laying corpses out for later disposal. A good many of the dead and wounded, McFadden noted, wore blue uniforms rather than gray or butternut ones. He supposed this was something to cheer about, yet he didn’t.

  Along what was left of the redoubt’s parapet, a line of tired and dusty-looking Confederate soldiers stood quietly, gazing out across the ground in front of Battery Bate. McFadden wondered what they were looking at, and forced himself to start walking over to find out. Each step was painful, but as he moved he felt the achiness gradually seep away.

  He clambered up the ramp that had been the scene of the charge the night before and soon reached the parapet. As hardened a veteran as he was, what he saw caused him to gasp in shock. For hundreds of yards in front of Battery Bate, in every direction, there lay a sea of Yankee corpses. He had seen the aftermath of many a ferocious battle over the past few years, but he had never seen so many dead bodies in a single place.

  Moving out there among them like little ants were teams of stretcher-bearers. A truce had obviously been agreed upon so that the Yankees might collect their wounded. Burying the dead would likely take much longer, such was the sheer number of bodies. Disturbingly, flocks of buzzards were descending for the traditional post-battle feast.

  “Oh, McFadden,” a voice said. “I thought you were dead. Saw you lying out there with the corpses.”

  He turned to see General Granbury among the Confederates viewing the enemy bodies. He said the words without warmth, as though the fact that he still lived was of only a passing interest to the commander. McFadden took no offense.

  “Quite alive, sir.”

  “Well, that’s good. Wish I could say the same for the rest of the brigade.”

  “Oh?”

  Now a hint of sadness crept into Granbury’s eyes and he shook his head. “I doubt there’s even a hundred men left alive from any of our eight Texas regiments.”

  McFadden nodded. He was greatly saddened, even though it was what he had expected. Having been in the thick of the fight at both the Battle of East Point and the ferocious combat in Battery Bate, how could it have been otherwise? The men of Texas had shed more than their fair share of blood in the struggle for Atlanta.

  McFadden did the math in his head. If the law of averages held, what Granbury said would mean that there were perhaps ten or so survivors of the entire 7th Texas. He wondered whether Pearson or Montgomery were among them. If not, then he himself would be the only survivor of the Lone Star Rifles.

  “The brigade took a lot of Yankees down with it, by the look of things,” McFadden said.

  Granbury nodded. “Yes. Eighteen hours of continuous combat. They just kept coming at us, throwing regiment after regiment after regiment at this battery. The damn redoubt changed hands five times over the course of the night!”

  “Five times?” McFadden asked, incredulous. He tried to imagine the fighting that had to have raged for hours around his unconscious body. It was a miracle that he hadn’t been killed.

  “The men are calling it the Blood Bucket.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Blood Bucket,” Granbury repeated. “It’s what the men have nicknamed Battery Bate, since it sort of looks like a bucket. Appropriate, don’t you think?”

  “A waste,” McFadden said. “A god-awful waste. All those men dead. And for what?”

  The other Southerners on the rampart eyed McFadden somewhat warily. He decided to stop talking further.

  Granbury went on. “The Yankees requested a truce to gather their wounded when the sun came up. No attacks anywhere along the line, though we have seen lots of their troops marching south in the far distance.”

  “Maybe the Yankees have had it,” suggested someone that McFadden didn’t recognize. “Maybe they realize they can’t capture the city and they’re retreating.”

  “Not likely,” said another. “If they were retreating, they’d be heading north, not south.”

  For the first time since waking, a positive thought entered McFadden’s mind. “It’s Johnston,” he said firmly.

  “What do you mean?” Granbury asked.

  “Johnston. Brought up the rest of the Army of Tennessee on the railroad as far as he could. Now he’s marching north to help us and Grant’s going south to meet him.”

  Granbury shrugged. “Maybe. Hard to tell, really.”

  McFadden shook his head. “No, it’s Johnston, sure as hell. Old Uncle Joe has come back to Atlanta.”

  *****

  September 28, Morning

  Grant rode at the head of a division of the Army of the Cumberland as it marched south, throwing up a tremendous cloud of dust. On either side of the marching column floated a cloud of cavalrymen whose job it was to protect their commander. General Howard and General McPherson rode beside him, along with the ubiquitous collection of staff officers. Grant had an irritated and disappointed look on his face.

  “I am afraid I have to admit that the rebels are not playing the role which I
had assigned them when I initially drew up my plan” Grant said glumly.

  “Sadly, no,” Howard replied.

  “I had hoped to be in Atlanta days ago. Certainly long before Johnston would be able to return to the vicinity of the city with his army. The stubborn resistance of the defenders of Atlanta is proving most difficult to overcome.”

  McPherson nodded tiredly, his head almost jerky. Grant looked over at him sympathetically. Not only was McPherson exhausted, having scarcely slept for several days and now subsisting only on nervous energy, but he was in shock at the high casualties his army had sustained during the assault on Battery Bate. The Army of the Tennessee had launched a series of ferocious attacks on the key position. Despite enormous casualties on both sides, the rebels had managed to hold on until mutual exhaustion had finally brought an end to the fighting shortly before sunrise.

  Grant had seen a similar look on the faces of many of his commanders before. When he had led the Army of the Potomac into battle against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the spring, he had fought three ferocious battles in less than a month. The Battle of the Wilderness had cost seventeen thousand men, the Battle of Spotsylvania nearly twenty thousand men, and the Battle of Cold Harbor had seen seven thousand men lost in less than an hour. The heavy casualties had strained the nerves and spirits of the generals to the breaking point.

  What he had seen in the looks of his corps commanders then he saw on McPherson’s face now. Grant knew his subordinate was haunted by the enormous loss of life, so many men sent into battle to be slain on his orders. Although he had done his best, Confederate flags still waving defiantly from the rampart of Battery Bate testified to his failure. Heavy casualties were bad enough when the outcome was a victory, but were hardly bearable when it was a defeat. Grant did not blame McPherson for the repulse and had tried to console him by pointing out that heavy casualties had also been inflicted upon the enemy. McPherson was a sensitive man. Grant knew that he would hear the screams of his dying men in the dark corners of his mind for the rest of his days.

  Grant fumed, curling his lips around his cigar in an annoyed frown. He had to momentarily turn his attention away from Atlanta. The buildup of Southern forces at Palmetto could no longer be safely ignored. He had hoped that the cavalry raids on the Atlanta and West Point Railroad would have been sufficient to delay the return of Johnston, but they had apparently been ineffectual. Grant recalled Sherman’s warning that the mounted arm of the Western armies was worse than useless and certainly no match for the Confederate troopers.

  If he had continued to assault the defenses of Atlanta, Grant knew that he would have eventually overrun them, even if it took a day or two longer. However, with a rebel force estimated to be about thirty thousand strong coming up from the south, he could not risk doing so without suffering a devastating attack from that quarter. If Johnston were bold enough to attack him from the rear, Grant’s forces might be caught between him and the defenders of Atlanta. Johnston’s threat had to be eliminated before Atlanta could be taken.

  He had therefore ordered Howard to withdraw two corps of the Army of the Cumberland from the north and northwest sides of Atlanta and march them around the city to the south, leaving a single corps in place to protect the bridges over the Chattahoochee that were now serving as the critical supply line for all Union forces in the area. McPherson had similarly been ordered to leave his most battered corps in a defensive position south and southwest of the city, keeping Cleburne’s men hemmed inside, and move his two other corps to link up with Howard’s men.

  It had taken some doing, and the tired men had grumbled about marching such a great distance in the dark. Things were now finally coming together. Grant was moving south against Johnston with a total force of four corps, two from each army, numbering perhaps forty-five thousand men. That would give him a significant numerical advantage.

  Would a numerical advantage be sufficient? Grant knew that the morale of his men was shaky after the many days of combat around Atlanta. Nothing strained the nerves of infantrymen more than assaulting heavily fortified defensive positions and the men of his two armies had been doing exactly that for the past few days. They had suffered heavy casualties and not gotten much rest. As with his generals, Grant had seen the way the strain of constant combat in Virginia had reduced the fighting strength of his infantry. Might the same be true here and now?

  Grant knew the battle toward which he was marching would be perhaps one of the most important he would ever fight, for it would determine whether or not Atlanta fell and, therefore, determine who would win the upcoming election in the North. The fate of the country hung in the balance of what was about to happen. Yet he found that he was strangely unconcerned. He knew that he would do his best, he knew that Howard and McPherson would do their best, he knew that the foot soldiers stomping through the dust of the Georgia countryside would do their best. Beyond that, what else could they do?

  The outcome, after all, was in the hands of fate.

  *****

  September 28, Morning

  “Five thousand?” Cleburne said, incredulous. “That’s all?”

  The staff officer, one of the men Cleburne had inherited from Hardee, sadly nodded. Of the eighteen thousand men who had manned the defenses of East Point and Atlanta when Grant had begun his offensive less than a week before, not even a third of that number had answered the roll call that morning. The rest had been killed, taken prisoner, or were now crowding the nightmarish hospitals in the center of the city. The once proud corps had been reduced to a shadow of its former self.

  Even worse, those who still held their muskets were exhausted and nearly broken. Cleburne had seen it when he had ridden out along the lines that morning. Many of the survivors of the fighting in the Blood Bucket appeared to be mentally and emotionally shattered. He had seen uninjured veterans of regiments that had charged into battle on over a dozen battlefields lying on the ground in fetal positions, rocking themselves gently back and forth. Not every war wound was physical, as Cleburne well knew.

  He looked around at the staff officers trying to maintain some semblance of order in the Atlanta City Hall. It was almost useless. For one thing, casualties among the corps and division staffs had been horrible. More than half of the corps staff officers were gone, either killed, wounded, or missing. Moreover, there was very little organization left to manage. The constituent units of the four divisions were hopelessly intermingled with one another. Some regiments had literally vanished off the face of the earth, every man a casualty. Simply getting an accurate count of the number of men still under the colors that morning had been a difficult task.

  Cleburne stopped what he was doing for a moment and listened. For the first time in several days, there was no sound of artillery fire. When the assault on Battery Bate had finally ceased, the Yankees had also silenced their artillery batteries all along the lines, which had until then been pouring fire into both the Confederate defenses and the city beyond. The officers on the ramparts had reported that most of the Union batteries were now being withdrawn. The silence that had descended over the city was comforting and ominous at the same time.

  Major Benham arrived, looking dusty and exhausted. Behind him was a captain Cleburne didn’t recognize, whose head was wrapped in a bandage stained with blood.

  Benham wasted no time with pleasantries. “General, this is Captain David Hay. He says he rode in from General Johnston’s headquarters with dispatches.”

  “Does he?” Cleburne said, his tiredness fading for a brief moment. “Are you all right, Captain?”

  The man saluted. “Got nicked by a Yankee ball on the way in, sir. Otherwise, I’m tolerable.” He handed over an envelope, which Cleburne quickly opened.

  General Cleburne,

  I have been notified of the wounding of General Hardee and your assumption of command. Be advised that the main body of the Army of Tennessee is now in Palmetto and moving north to your assistance. There must be no thought of surrende
ring or abandoning Atlanta to the enemy. For God’s sake hold on. Help is coming.

  General Johnston

  Cleburne read the message through twice more. The news was not entirely unexpected, but it still rejuvenated him like a welcome splatter of water on his face. Since the moment the enemy shell had incapacitated Hardee, Cleburne had felt more alone than he had ever felt in his life. It had seemed as though the entirety of his universe had been encompassed by the defenses of the city and that nothing outside of them actually existed except in his own imagination. To receive a message from General Johnston gave him confidence and reminded him of the existence of the outside world.

  “Major Benham, please draw up a circular for distribution among all commanders. Tell them the contents of this message.” He handed over the paper and Benham headed directly for the nearest table.

  “Captain Hay, if you’ll go to the surgeon’s tent outside, they can take a look at that head wound of yours.

  Hay nodded. “Thank you, General.”

  “It is I who thank you, Captain, for bringing a message that shall restore hope to the defenders of Atlanta.”

  It was important, Cleburne thought, that the men be informed of General Johnston’s efforts to relieve the besieged city. It would give them hope that their struggle would soon have a victorious outcome. Without such hope, the men would still have sold their lives dearly before the Yankees overwhelmed them, but Cleburne had been a soldier long enough to know that hope was a better motivator of men than was despair.

  As Benham wrote out the circular, Cleburne thought things over. Johnston’s arrival at Palmetto explained the halt in Union attacks and the withdrawal of their artillery batteries. Although no scouts had been able to get out of the city through the Union siege lines, many officers had observed large formations of Federal infantry in the distance, circling around Atlanta to the west before heading south. Obviously, Grant was moving the bulk of his forces into a position to strike at Johnston.