Soldier's Heart (6 page)

“Charley, you're going to wear that rifle out,” a man named Campbell told him one
night while they sat by the trench stove. They had learned how to dig a trench a foot wide and a foot deep along the floor of their shelter, then out under a wall and into the open. The trench was covered with flat rocks and a barrel placed over the opening outside to make a passable chimney. When the men built a fire in the trench inside the log hut, the rocks would become hot and heat the whole shelter.

Charley looked up at Campbell, then back to his rifle. He had forgotten none of what had happened. He knew it would come again. It had to come again because they were here. You did not have an army without a battle. It was what the generals wanted, what they needed: a battle to use their armies. On both sides it was all up to the generals, the officers. If it was left up to the men who did the killing and dying there would be no war.

Death would still come.

“I'll be needing this rifle.” He spoke down, as if talking to the weapon. He did not like to
look at people as much as he once did. He did not like to learn about them. It was better if he didn't know them, become too friendly with them. They died so fast.

“
Pshaw!
We'll be in this camp all winter. They ain't going to fight when it's cold.”

Charley said nothing but he remembered a night on guard duty. Down along the river he was put on picket duty, making sure there would be a warning if the Rebs on the other side of the river decided to attack. That night he was hunkered down behind an oak to get out of the wind—it was so cold he was reminded of Minnesota—and he heard a voice come from across the river, low and in a soft drawl.

“Hey, Union, can you hear me?”

Charley didn't answer.

“Blue belly, are you deaf?”

Oh well, Charley thought, why not talk to them? “What do you want?”

“Just to talk, maybe do a little trading.”

“Trade bullets,” Charley said. “That's all you want.”

“Naw—it's too cold to fight. I've got me some good cut tobacco over here. You got any coffee? We're down to burned oats for coffee of a mornin'.”

As it happened Charley had an extra half pound of coffee beans he'd been issued that afternoon. For months they hadn't had coffee at all and had been using burned oats themselves for a hot morning drink, but when ration came, as usual the army would get it wrong and issue triple rations. Now there was a glut of coffee.

Charley didn't use tobacco but he knew men who did, and Southern tobacco was much better than the foreign tobacco available to the Union army now that the South had seceded. He could trade the tobacco for bread, pies and leather to fix his shoes.

“How we going to trade?” Charley called back.

“I got me a plank. I'll throw a line over to your side on a rock and you pull the plank across with the tobacco and I'll pull it back with the coffee. Don't you shoot me when I stand up.”

“I won't.”

There was a half-moon and Charley peeked around the oak and watched as a slight figure stood up across the river. He was dressed poorly, his feet wrapped in what looked like sacks and his coat tattered and worn. Even in the moonlight he could see that the boy's face was dirty. He thought, I probably look the same. But the Reb looked even younger than Charley.

“Mind the stone,” the boy called, and threw a rock with a string tied to it. The river was forty feet wide and the string snarled on the first toss and he had to retrieve it and toss it twice more before the rock made it. Charley moved from behind the oak and picked up the string. He kept low—couldn't help it—but in a
few minutes he had pulled the board across the river and found the tobacco wrapped in a cloth. He wrapped his coffee beans and put the package on the plank.

“All right—pull it back,” he called, and the piece of wood made its way back across the water. Charley watched it until it reached the other bank and then he moved behind the oak, squatted down out of sight and tucked the tobacco inside his coat.

“Hey, blue belly—you still there?”

“I'm here.”

“This coffee looks good. Can you get more?”

“Some.”

“Let's trade again tomorrow night. I can get all the tobacco you need.”

“All right.”

There was another silence, then: “Where you from, Union?”

“Minnesota.”

“Where's that?”

How could he not know where Minnesota was? “Up north—north of Iowa.”

“Oh. I'm from Alabama. You a farmer?”

“I worked on farms.”

“Me too. What do you grow?”

“Potatoes, corn, squash, wheat and oats and barley.”

“Same as us except we have greens and 'baccy and some rice in the bottoms. This is right stupid, ain't it?”

“What?”

“Here we be, both farmers, talking and trading goods and tomorrow or the next day we got to shoot at each other.”

I hope, Charley thought, you don't hit me.

“Ain't it stupid?” the boy asked.

“Yes.”

“I've got to go now. My trick is near up. I'll yell for you tomorrow night.”

And that was it. There was no further talk or
trading because an officer had heard Charley and jumped him about speaking to the enemy, and the same must have happened to the Reb because the next night Charley leaned against the oak and somebody fired from the other side of the river and drew splinters off the tree four feet over his head.

The truce was over.

WINTER

H
e felt alone now. Always alone. He existed in a world that he believed—no,
knew
—would end for him soon. In the middle of the unit, drilling, eating, listening to the officers with men sitting packed all around him, he was alone.

Charley was one of the men detailed to provide beef for the sick men in the hospital—another school building the army had temporarily commandeered—but there were no cattle available.

“Look to the Rebel horses,” the doctor said. “The men have to have meat.”

There had been a brush with the Confederate cavalry along the river. A Rebel unit had made a discovery raid early one morning and had the bad luck to run into a full company of Union soldiers with loaded rifles already arranged in firing order for a defensive drill. The outcome had resulted in many empty Rebel saddles and eleven captured horses.

Normally the horses would be used to pull artillery—the death rate for horses in combat was worse than that for men because they were a much bigger target.

But in this case it was decided to kill the horses to get meat for the sick men, and Charley and three other soldiers were ordered to slaughter them.

It did not bother Charley to kill beef or pigs or poultry but having to shoot each horse in the head and cut its throat and gut it and skin
it put him on the edge of mutiny. He had been raised with workhorses and had come to love them. Killing the horses—watching them drop as they were shot in the head—made him almost physically ill.

It was a miserable day. They lied to the sick men and told them it was beef but those men knew. Horse fat is yellow, yellow as butter, and beef fat is white, and the men knew the meat was from horses. They ate it anyway, and were grateful, but the whole day struck a sour note that added to Charley's general gloom. At four the next morning, when they were called out into formation to march south, he was in a foul mood.

They had had no warning of the impending movement, and rumors flew: There was a big battle coming; there had been a big battle and they were going to march all the way to Richmond; the South had lost the war; the South had
won
the war.

Charley stomped around at first, still angry over slaughtering the horses. But it was a fine morning, so cold that the muddy roads were frozen and made for easy walking, and the troops made good time.

They walked all day—Charley thought it must have been close to twenty miles. After a while the men were too tired and winded to talk and there was silence. At just after three in the afternoon Charley heard the sounds of artillery booming about two miles off.

He had a practiced ear now for the tools of combat and knew from the frequency of fire—a constant thunder—that there were a lot of guns, which meant a lot of targets. As his unit drew closer he heard the rattling-ripping sound of thousands of rifles being fired. Soon, he knew, he would be involved in the fighting.

He checked his cartridge box as he walked, making sure his rifle was loaded and capped, and felt the fear building. Always the fear.

The men marched down a country lane in
the late afternoon. At any other time it would have been a beautiful place. Trees lined the roadway and though their leaves were gone the bare branches bent over the road, creating a cover. The sun shone through and dappled the road in light but Charley saw none of it.

The sounds were louder now, much louder, and the chattering of the rifles was continuous.

Half a mile, he thought—it's just half a mile to the fighting. He listened expertly while they marched. The lane ended a quarter mile ahead in a T. Some of the firing was off to the right, but most was to the left. They would probably be told to move left—into the worst of the firing.

For a change Charley was wrong. At the end of the T they were stopped.

“Throw down your packs and bedrolls. Carry only your rifle, cartridges, bayonet and canteens. Form line-of-battle to the right! To the right!” sergeants yelled.

The officers on horses dismounted and with
the sergeants directed the men down the road until they were stretched a quarter mile, then across a rail fence into a field of grain stubble.

Always a field, Charley thought—there's always fear and always a meadow.

Once out in the open he could see more of the battle. In front of him, for the moment, there were no soldiers, Rebel or Union, just a field that stretched away a quarter mile to a line of trees. There was no foliage in the trees but even as bare as they were he could see no Rebel troops or artillery to their front.

Off to their left, well away—close to a mile—an absolute inferno raged. Artillery from both sides covered the battlefield with smoke, and the din of cannon and rifle fire was constant and deafening. Whenever the smoke cleared in small gusts of breeze he could see men dropping by the hundreds, broken and crumpled and falling.

Nothing, Charley thought as he watched the
fight, absolutely nothing could live through that, and he was grateful that it was happening to others and not him.

“There they are!” somebody near him cried. “In the trees …”

Charley squinted and saw them. Not infantry this time. But assembling back in the trees were troops of cavalry, the horses jostling each other and kicking as they were pulled alongside each other.

“They're going to come at us! They're sending horse against us!” somebody yelled.

“Ready on line!” An officer in front of them walked back and forth with a saber. “Do not fire until directed and then fire at will. On my command the first time! Front ranks kneel.”

Charley was in the second rank and he stood while the front rank kneeled. The horses moved out of the trees, walking forward in a line.

Close on a hundred of them, Charley
thought, watching. They're a hundred and they're going to try to ride over us. He saw the glint of sun on cavalry sabers and carbines. They were still three hundred yards distant but he could see the shine of horses' hair and the splash of light off bridle hardware and chest straps. The horses began to walk faster, and then trot, the men holding them in good line.

“Present arms!” officers and sergeants called, and men raised their rifles, cocking the hammers.

“Wait for it … wait for it. Not yet, boys, not yet.” A sergeant in front moved back into the ranks to get out of the line of fire. “Aim for the horses. When you get the command, aim low—hit the horses to break the men.”

More meat for the sick, Charley thought, and felt bad for having to kill the horses. He didn't fret the men at all. They were going to kill him and he didn't mind killing them first. But he hated shooting the horses.

They started to canter. Two hundred yards now. A hundred and fifty.

“Ready!”

One hundred yards. The Rebel troopers were screaming that chuttering, high-pitched Rebel yell, and the horses were full out, eating the distance.

Fifty yards. I could hit them with a chucked corncob, Charley thought. Spit flying out of the horses' mouths, hooves rumbling against the frozen ground; we'll never stop them, Charley thought, no way in Hades can we stop them.

“Fire!”

At no more than thirty yards, over six hundred men fired in a volley at a hundred charging horses. The result was devastating.

Charley held high and took a trooper full in the chest, but most of the other men held on the horses and not one animal came through unhit. In a great cloud they went down, somersaulting, rolling over the troopers on their
backs, breaking themselves and the men; and the screams—the screams of the wounded horses hit by soft, large-caliber expanding bullets, horses with heads blown open, horses with jaws shot away, horses with eyes shot out or with intestines tangling in their hooves, horses torn and dying—screamed louder than a thousand, louder than a million men.