Shiloh (8 page)

My bayonet had gone in under his jaw, the hand-guard tight
against the bottom of his chin, and the point must have stuck in his head bone
because he appeared to be trying to open his mouth but couldn’t. It was like he
had a mouthful of something bitter and couldn’t spit—his eyes were screwed up,
staring at me and blinking a bit from the strain. All I could do was look at
him; I couldn’t look away, no matter how I tried. A man will look at something
that is making him sick but he can’t stop looking until he begins to vomit
—something holds him. That was the way it was with me. Then, while I was
watching him, this fellow reached up and touched the handle of the bayonet
under his chin. He touched it easy, using the tips of his fingers, tender-like.
I could see he wanted to grab and pull it out but he was worried about how much
it would hurt and he didn’t dare.

I let go of the rifle and rolled away. There were bluecoats
running across the field and through the woods beyond. All around me men were kneeling
and shooting at them like rabbits as they ran. Captain Plummer and two
lieutenants were the only officers left on their feet. Two men were bent over
Colonel Thornton where they had propped him against a tree with one of his legs
laid crooked. Captain Plummer wasn’t limping now—he'd forgotten his blisters, I
reckon. He wasn’t even hurt, so far as I could see, but the skirt of his coat
was ripped where somebody had taken a swipe at him with a bayonet or a saber.

He went out into the open with a man carrying the colors,
and then begun to wave his sword and call in a high voice: "6th
Mississippi, wally here! 6th Mississippi, wally here!"

Men begun straggling over, collecting round the flag, so I
got up and went over with them. We were a sorry lot. My feet were so heavy I
could barely lift them, and I had to carry my left arm with my right, the way a
baby would cradle a doll. The captain kept calling, "Wally here! 6th
Mississippi, wally here!" but after a while he saw there weren’t any more
to rally so he gave it up. There were a little over a hundred of us, all that
were left out of the four hundred and twenty-five that went in an hour before.

Our faces were gray, the color of ashes. Some had powder
bums red on their cheeks and foreheads and running back into singed patches in
their hair. Mouths were rimmed with grime from biting cartridges, mostly a long
smear down one comer, and hands were blackened with burnt powder off the
ramrods. We'd aged a lifetime since the sun came up. Captain Plummet was
calling us to rally, rally here, but there wasn’t much rally left in us. There wasn’t
much left in me, anyhow. I felt so tired it was all I could do to make it to
where the flag was. I was worried, too, about not having my rifle. I remembered
what Sergeant Tyree was always saying: "Your rifle is your best friend.
Take care of it." But if that meant pulling it out of the man with the
mustache, it would just have to stay there. Then I looked down and be
durn
if there wasn’t one just like it at my feet. I picked
it up, stooping and nursing my bad arm, and stood there with it.

Joe Marsh was next to me. At first I didn’t know him. He didn’t
seem bad hurt, but he had a terrible look around the eyes and there was a knot
on his forehead the size of a walnut where some Yank had bopped him with a
rifle butt. I thought to ask him how the' Tennessee breed of elephant compared
with the Kentucky breed, but I didn’t. He looked at me, first in the face till
he finally recognized me, then down at my arm.

"You better get that tended to."

"It don’t hurt much," I said.

"All right. Have it your way."

He didn’t pay me any mind after that. He had lorded it over
me for a month about being a greenhorn, yet here I was, just gone through
meeting as big an elephant as any he had met, and he was still trying the same
high-and-mightiness. He was mad now because he wasn’t the only one who had seen
some battle. He'd had his big secret to throw up to us, but not anymore. We all
had it now.

We were milling around like ants when their hill is upset,
trying to fall-in the usual way, by platoons and squads, but some were all the
way gone and others had only a couple of men. So we gave that up and just
fell-in in three ranks, not even making a good-sized company. Captain Plummet
went down the line, looking to see who was worst hurt. He looked at the way I
was holding my arm. "Bayonet?"

"Yes sir."

"Cut you bad?"

"It don’t hurt much, captain. I just can’t lift it no
higher than this."

He looked me in the face, and I was afraid he thought I was
lying to keep from fighting any more. "All
wight
,"
he said. "Fall out and join the others under that twee."

There were about two dozen of us under it when he got
through, including some that hadn’t been able to get in ranks in the first
place. They were hacked up all kinds of ways. One had lost an ear and he was
the worst worried man of the lot; "Does it look bad?" he kept asking,
wanting to know how it would seem to the folks back home. We sat under the tree
and watched Captain Plummet march what was left of the regiment away. They were
a straggly lot. We were supposed to wait there under the tree till the doctor
came.

We waited, hearing rifles clattering and cannons booming and
men yelling further and further in the woods, and the sun climbed up and it got
burning hot. I could look back over the valley where we had charged. It wasn’t
as wide as it had been before. There were men left all along the way, lying
like bundles of dirty clothes. I had a warm, lazy feeling, like on a summer
Sunday in the scuppernong arbor back home; next thing I knew I was sound
asleep. Now that was strange. I was never one for sleeping in the daytime, not
even in that quiet hour after dinner when all the others were taking their
naps.

When I woke up the sun was past the overhead and only a
dozen or so of the wounded were still there. The fellow next to me (he was hurt
in the leg) said they had drifted off to find a doctor. "Ain’t no doctor
coming here," he said. "They ain’t studying us now we're no more good
to them." He had a flushed look, like a man in a fever, and he was mad at
the whole army, from General Johnston down to me.

My arm was stiff and the blood had dried on my sleeve. There
was just a slit where the bayonet blade went in. It felt itchy, tingling in all
directions from the cut, like the spokes of a wheel, but I still hadn’t looked
at it and I wasn’t going to. All except two of the men under the tree were leg
wounds, not counting myself, and those two were shot up bad around the head.
One was singing a song about the bells of Tennessee but it didn’t make much
sense.

"Which way did they go?"

"
Ever
which way," one
said.

"Yonder ways, mostly," another said, and pointed
over to the right. The shooting was a long way off now, loudest toward the
right front. It seemed reasonable that the doctors would be near the loudest
shooting.

I thought I would be dizzy when I stood up but I felt fine,
light on my feet and tingly from not having moved for so long. I walked away
nursing my arm. When I reached the edge of the field I looked back.

They were spread around the tree trunk, sprawled out
favoring their wounds. I could hear that crazy one singing the Tennessee song.

I walked on, getting more and more light-headed, till
finally it felt Like I was walking about six inches off the ground. I thought I
was still asleep, dreaming, except for the ache in my arm. And I saw things no
man would want to see twice. There were dead men all around, Confederate and
Union, some lying where they fell and others up under bushes where they’d
crawled to keep from getting trampled. There were wounded men too, lots of
them, wandering around like myself, their faces dazed and pale from losing
blood and being scared.

I told myself: You better lay down before you fall down.
Then I said: No, you’re not bad hurt; keep going. It was like an argument, two
voices inside my head and neither one of them mine:

You
better lay down.

—No: you feel fine.

You’ll
fall and they’ll never find you.

—That’s not true. You’re just a little light-headed. You’ll
be all right.

No you won’t.
You’re hurt. You’re hurt worse than you think. Lay down.

They went on like that, arguing, and I followed the road,
heading south by the sun until I came to a log cabin with a cross on its
ridgepole and a little wooden signboard, hand-lettered: Shiloh Meeting House.
It must have been some kind of headquarters now because there were officers
inside, bending over maps, and messengers kept galloping up with papers.

I took a left where the road forked, and just beyond the
fork there was a sergeant standing with the reins of two horses going back over
his shoulder. When I came up he looked at me without saying anything.

"Where is a doctor?" I asked him. My voice sounded
strange from not having used it for so long.

"I don’t know, bud," he said. But he jerked his
thumb down the road toward the sound of the guns. "Should be some of them
up there, back of where the fighting is." He was a Texan, by the sound of
his voice; it came partly through his nose.

So I went on down the road. It had been a line of battle
that morning, the dead scattered thick on both sides. I was in a fever by then,
thinking crazy, and it seemed to me that all the dead men got there this way:

God was making men and every now and then He would do a bad
job on one, and He would look at it and say, "This one won’t do," and
He would toss it in a tub He kept there, maybe not even finished with it. And
finally, 6 April 1862, the tub got full and God emptied it right out of heaven
and they landed here, along this road, tumbled down in all positions, some
without arms and legs, some with their heads and bodies split open where they
hit the ground so hard.

I was in a fever bad, to think a thing like that. So there's
no telling how long I walked or how far, but I know I came near covering that battlefield
from flank to flank. It must have been a couple of hours and maybe three miles,
but far as I was concerned it could have been a year and a thousand miles. At
first all I wanted was a doctor. Finally I didn’t even want that. All I wanted
was to keep moving. I had an idea if I stopped I wouldn’t be able to start
again. That kept me going.

I didn’t notice much along the way, but once I passed an
open space with a ten-acre peach orchard in bloom at the far end and cannons
puffing smoke up through the blossoms. Great crowds of men were trying to reach
the orchard—they would march up in long lines and melt away; there would be a
pause and then other lines would march up and melt away. Then I was past all
this, in the woods again, and I came to a little gully where things were still
and peaceful, like in another world almost; the guns seemed far away. That was
the place for me to stop, if any place was. I sat down, leaning back against a
stump, and all the weariness came down on me at once. I knew I wouldn’t get up
then, not even if I could, but I didn’t mind.

I didn’t mind anything. It was Like I was somewhere outside
myself, looking back. I had reached the stage where a voice can tell you it is
over, you’re going to die, and that is all right too. Dying is as good as
living, maybe better. The main thing is to be left alone, and if it takes dying
to be let alone, a man thinks: All right, let me die. He thinks: Let me die,
then.

This gully was narrow and deep, really a little valley, less
than a hundred yards from ridge to ridge. The trees were thick but I could see
up to the crest in each direction. There were some dead men and some wounded
scattered along the stream that ran through, but I think they must have crawled
in after water—there hadn’t been any fighting here and there weren’t any
bulLet’s
in the trees. I leaned back against the stump,
holding my arm across my lap and facing the forward ridge. Then I saw two
horsemen come over, side by side, riding close together, one leaning against
the other. The second had his arm around the first, holding him in the saddle.

The second man was in civilian clothes, a
boxback
coat and a wide black hat. It was Governor Harris;
I used to see him when he visited our brigade to talk to the Tennessee
boys—electioneering, he called it; he was the Governor of Tennessee. The first
man had his head down, reeling in the saddle, but I could see the braid on his
sleeves and the wreath of stars on his collar. Then he lolled the other way,
head rolling, and I saw him full in the face. It was General Johnston.

His horse was shot up, wounded in three legs, and his
uniform had little rips in the cape and trouser-legs where minie balls had
nicked him. One bootsole flapped loose, cut crossways almost through. In his
right hand he held a tin cup, one of his fingers still hooked through the handle.
I heard about the cup afterwards—he got it earlier in the day. He was riding
through a captured camp and one of his lieutenants came out of a Yank colonel's
tent and showed him a fine brier pipe he'd found there. General Johnston said
"None of that. Sir. We are not here for plunder." Then he must have
seen he'd hurt the lieutenant’s feelings, for he leaned down from his horse and
picked up this tin cup off a table and said, "Let this be my share of the
spoils today," and used it instead of a sword to direct the battle.