Shiloh (10 page)

But Captain Munch began to sing out commands, and from then
on it was hot work, ram and prime and touch her off, roll her back and load
again. All six guns were going full time, throwing big balls of fire and smoke
out over the battery front, and we were cheering while we fired. I couldn’t see
it very well but the captain was bringing us in on a regiment drawn up at the
far end of the field. We had the range, about a thousand yards, and we could
see the flags go down fluttering and the men milling around while the balls
chewed up their ranks.

During a pause, while I stood at the trail and the rest were
out front swabbing the bore, I looked over to the right and saw the gun in the
next platoon lying on its side, one of its wheels splintered to the hub and the
other one canted up at an angle. I couldn’t think what had done that to it,
except maybe a premature, when all of a sudden the ground between the two guns
flicked up, throwing dirt at me the way water would splash if you slapped it
with a plank, and when I opened my eyes there was a little trench scooped out,
about eight inches wide and maybe half that deep, and I knew what did it. Nothing
but a cannonball did that—there must be a rebel battery ranging in on us. But
if I wasn’t sure then I knew it soon after, for here came another one and I saw
it coming: a ricochet—it bounced along, whooing and bouncing, hitting the
ground every twenty feet or so. I got the wild idea it somehow had a mind of
its own.

That’s coming
my
way, I thought. That one's for
me
.

But it struck in front, took an extra hard bounce, and
sailed right over the gun, exactly down the line of the tube and the trail—I could
almost feel it in my hair. It made a
whuffing
sound
going over; I could see the fuze lobbing around on one side of it, sputtering.
I looked to see where it was going and saw it go past Captain Munch on the
bounce, spinning him around sideways like a man hit by a runaway horse, and go
on into the woods, rooting and banging the trees till it went off with a big
orange-colored flash, the fragments singing, clipping leaves and twigs. Captain
Munch just laid there and directly some men ran over and picked him up and
carried him off to one side.

Then there were infantry running between the guns. Some
looked back over their shoulders every now and then as they ran, but most of
them had their heads down, going hard for the rear without their rifles. Their
faces were pale as paper, their eyes kind of wild-looking, like a child's when
you say Boo at him coming round a corner. There were horses mixed up in it (I
had forgot there were horses in war; it seemed all wrong) and Sergeant
Buterbaugh had me by the arm, shaking me, and I could see his mouth moving but
the words did not get through. The horses kicked and plunged and I saw what it
was. They were limbering for a displacement. I snagged a caisson getting under
way and held on tight while it jounced and rattled across the furrows of a
field. I was so busy trying to stay on (—we lost two that way; they flew off,
arms outstretched like big birds, and landed in the dust, not making a sound) I
didn’t see where we were going. Next thing I knew, we were off to the side of
the road preparing for action again, only this time we had four guns instead of
six and now Lieutenant Pfaender was battery commander.

"Action rear!" Sergeant Buterbaugh was yelling.
The horses were lathered and blown. "Action rear!"

But it was the same thing again, the same identical
business. By the time we got off a few rounds, the infantry began passing us
with that scared look on their faces. And there was the same
mixup
when the johnnies got our range. The horses came
plunging up with the bits in their teeth, and then we were limbered and off
again. The only real difference was that this time we didn’t lose any guns or
men. It seemed that just when we got set to do some good, word came down to
clear out or be captured.

The third position was different. It was near midday by then
and General Prentiss had drawn the whole division in a line along an old sunken
road that wound through the woods. What was left of our battery was split in
two, one section two hundred yards beyond the other, both just in rear of the
road and the Line of infantry. They had their dander up now, they said; they didn’t
intend to give up any more ground. Every man built a little pile of cartridges
beside him and lay down in the sunken road with his rifle up on the shoulder.
"Let 'em come on
now
'' they
said, talking through their gritted teeth. Their mouths were set kind of
rigid-like but there was still a worried look around their eyes. I wondered if
they meant it.

They meant it. We were there four hours, and surely that was
the hardest fighting of this or any war. This time it was almost the way I had
imagined it would be. They came at us in rows, flags flapping and everything,
and we stood to our guns and cut them down. When we gave them a volley, rifles
and cannon, their line would shake and weave from end to end like a wounded
snake, and they would come on, trampling the blackberry bushes until we thought
this time they were coming right over us, but then they would break and fall
back over their dead and there would be a lull, but not for long, and they
would come at us again. It didn’t seem to me that they were men like us, not
only because of the way they were dressed (they wore all kinds of uniforms;
some even had on white—we called these their graveyard clothes) but mostly
because of the way they wouldn’t stop. They took killing better than any
natural men would ever do, and they had a way of yelling that didn’t sound even
partly human, high and quavery, away up in their throats, without any brain
behind it.

After we had been there three-four hours I began to notice
that the gun was harder and harder to roll back into position. Fighting like
that, you expected casualties. But then I saw that all the missing ones weren’t
leaving because they’d been wounded. A man would stand there during a lull and
there would be something come over his face like you see on the faces of
children just before they bust out crying—sort of bulged around the mouth and
shifty-eyed—and then he would start walking, not even looking round, not paying
any attention to anyone that called out to him. He was heading for the rear;
he'd had enough. He'd had enough and he didn’t care who knew it.

Corporal Keller was cussing and calling them cowards (it was
during a lull; two more had just walked off) but Sergeant Buterbaugh said no,
they weren’t necessarily cowards; they were just demoralized from losing
confidence. He was always coming out with something like that, serious,
high-sounding —Butterball's jawbreakers, we called them. But this time he
really hit the nail on the head. What he said stayed with me from then on,
stayed in my mind, especially later when I was making for the rear myself.

I never would have done a thing like that, never in all the
world, but when word came to prepare to displace again, it seemed like all the
spark went out of me. Maybe it was gone already but I think not. I was proud of
the way we'd held them—I think that did it more than anything: to think you’d
done so well and then to be told it was all for nothing. All of a sudden I felt
dog-tired, miserable.

Sergeant Buterbaugh was looking at me a peculiar way, and I
knew my face was showing the same thing all those other faces had showed. And I
began to walk to the rear. Lieutenant Pfaender was calling after me:
"Flickner! Flickner!" but I went on, through the blackjack scrubs. He
called me again: "Flickner! Flickner!" but I went on. I suppose by
then he saw I really meant it, the same as all the others, and then he didn’t
call me anymore.

My daddy took pride in telling how my grand-daddy had fought
against Napoleon in the old country. It disappointed him that I never showed
any interest in such things, that I wouldn’t even bother to learn the language.
I'd explain: "This is a new country. We don’t need those stories from the
old one." It seemed so wrong, so out of place, hearing about Napoleon,
when I could see right through the living-room window the big rolling Minnesota
prairie with the tall wheat shimmering in the sunlight. But it made him sad,
hearing me say that; he'd shake his head from side to side and stroke his beard
with a hurt look in his eyes, muttering German.

When I joined up and came home with the enlistment paper to
show him, he took the watch and chain off the front of his vest and gave it to
me, showing me how to wind it in two places, one to make it keep time and the
other to make it strike the hours. Two of my brothers had already signed up and
left but he hadn’t given it to them. "Here," he said. "Wear
this. Otto. It was your
grossfather's
that he wore
when he went against the man you don’t want I should mention. I hope you will
do as well with it against this
Jeffy
Davis." You’d
have thought it was a gun or a sword or something.

I swapped the chain for a trip down the line in St Louis and
hung the watch on a string around my neck. It was safer that way anyhow. And as
I went back through the woods on the way to the Landing, feeling it bump
against my chest beneath my jacket, I wondered if it ever ticked off any
seconds for my granddaddy when he was running from Napoleon. You think strange
things when something has happened to you that you know is going to change your
life. But I took some comfort remembering what Buterbaugh had said. Those men weren’t
cowards, he said; they were just demoralized from losing confidence. And that
was the way it was with me, exactly.

As I got nearer the place where the roads came together to
lead down to the Landing I saw more and more men making for the rear. We had
all come up this way, debarking from the transports, and we remembered that
high bluff (some I suppose had been remembering it ever since the first shots
fired that morning, the way it reared up a hundred feet tall between the river
and the fighting) and when the going got too rough, that was the one safe place
that stood out in our minds. Some had been hurt, carrying an arm buttoned into
the front of their jackets or crippling along with a musket for a crutch or
wearing a shirtsleeve for a bandage like a turban round their heads. Every now
and again there would be a well man helping a hurt one, but generally they
walked alone, not looking at the others. I got a notion they were not only
trying to get away from the fighting, they were trying to walk right out of the
human race.

Roads led from all corners of the battlefield up to a place
on top of the bluff where they came together to form one road giving down to
the Landing. We could see the water from there, steamboats at the wharf and two
gunboats anchored upstream with cannons run out and sailors loafing on deck to
watch the fun. The way we came together at the top of the bluff, going downhill
on that one road, we were like grains of sand passing through a funnel. But
that was only for a time. Once we were past this place, the spout of the
funnel, we fanned out again, spreading up and down the riverbank, and sat there
watching the others.

Of course I had been expecting I would find a lot of men
back here—after all, I had been watching them make for the rear all day, one
after another, fast as they became scared or discouraged at the way the fight
was going. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. Upstream and down, far as I
could see, they crowded the space between the bluff and the bank, sitting on
the sand and looking at the river, watching sunlight flash on the choppy waves
and wishing like Jesus they could walk on water. A few hadn’t stopped with just
wishing: they were out in the river, hanging onto logs and bundles of
driftwood, paddling across to the opposite bank.

It was lower over there. I could see a great mass of men
drawn up in columns, waiting while some of their number—engineers, I
suppose—cut a road down the low overhang so they could board the steamers. The
Michigander said they were Buell's army, come from Columbia to save the day. He
snorted when he said it, though, and he screwed up his eyes. "Save the day
hell," he said. "Wait till they get up there. Then we'll see what
they save. They’ll be right back here with the rest of us. Mind what I say. They’ll
save their hides; that’s all They’ll save."

By the time the first boatload of them got across, it was
past sundown. The sound of firing had drawn in until it seemed directly above
us, on the bluff. Soon now the rebels might be looking over the rim and
shooting down like into a flock of sheep. Through the fading light I watched as
Buell's men came off the steamboats and onto the wharf, picking their way among
the rows of wounded laid there to be taken across to safety when the chance
came.

They had a hard time of it, those wounded. Retreaters had
stepped on them with muddy shoes to reach the end of the wharf, in hopes that a
boat might come to take the casualties across and they could crawl aboard among
them. That wasn’t all, either. Cables had been raked over them by the sailors,
scraping some of them off into the river and fouling the rest with slime from
the river bottom. You couldn’t tell the dead ones from the living— they’d
turned black with mud from the boots and cables and with blood from their
reopened wounds. It made me sick at the stomach just looking at them.

Retreaters were packed so close where the steamboats put in,
Buell's men had to open a path with their bayonets. They cussed the men on the
bank, calling them scoundrels and cowards while they shoved them aside with
their rifles.