One thing he was appallingly sure of. If every soldier in the Union Army felt as milky, sick, and helpless as he did, the game was up. The Republic was finished.
About nine o’clock, General Jake Jackson came riding along the lines with his aides. Instantly a cheer went up, in which before he knew it, Johnny had joined. Here at least was a completely confident figure.
General Jackson was hatless, black locks streaming out behind. He bestrode a beautiful, fast horse, and he was smiling as if he expected something wonderful to happen. He stopped a short way from where Johnny was.
—Boys, he said, we may have an attack any time now. We aren’t just going to sit around and let ’em come on. We’ll meet ’em head-on. Aim for their guts, and give ’em hell.
He stopped and exchanged a few words with an officer. Then he rode up to Johnny’s regiment and said,
—I understand you men have never been in battle before. That right?
—Yes, sir. That’s right, General, several voices said.
—You’re not scared, are you?
—We ain’t skeered, General. We’re just frightened to death.
The General laughed, and everyone in hearing distance laughed. Johnny laughed too, dismally.
—You boys will be all right, the General said, shaking his chin and his fist at the creek. You’re from Indiana, I hear. Well, Indiana boys don’t break under fire. Let’s give those bastards a thumping they won’t forget!
The men gave a cheer. As it faded in the woods, there came from the left a series of deep throaty sounds that rolled in thick waves along the valley of the Chickamauga.
The General jerked his horse straight up, whirled and . . .
(Epic Fragment from Fighting for Freedom)
The battle began with heavy shelling of the Union Center. The Rebels followed with an infantry assault in their characteristically impetuous manner, as if they expected to carry the field in a single charge and go thundering right on through to Chattanooga. The fighting began to move down the line to the right, where the Third Corps, not yet fully in position after the forced marches of the days preceding, was lying on its arms. The Union right now sustained an attack of great magnitude, the details of which it would be fatiguing to recite, but suffice it to say that . . .
Corporal Johnny Shawnessy tried to see beyond the distant fence, but trees and bushes blocked his vision.
—Can you see anything, Jack? Flash Perkins said.
—Not a thing.
—Hey, Captain, where are the Rebs?
—You’ll see them soon enough.
The noise of the shelling had become louder. Johnny and the others were yelling at the tops of their voices.
A staff officer rode up and said something to the brigade commander. They held a map in their hands and pointed excitedly. The commander jerked his chin up and down forcibly several times. He pointed toward the creek. The staff officer nodded vigorously, saluted, and rode off down the line to the left.
The brigade was ordered forward in line of battle.
—Hell, it’s about time, Flash Perkins said. They’re fightin’ right where we was this mornin’. How come they moved us away?
No one else said anything. The men walked forward through the woods. Johnny’s company was to the left of the regimental colors. The brigade went forward in two lines, the men almost shoulder to shoulder. The noise from the creek grew. Smoke began to roll up the hill. Rifle fire was continuous.
Men are being killed there, Johnny said to himself. Men are being killed down there by the creek where I was this morning.
He had never in his life before seen a man killed.
Bullets sang through the forest like angry bees, socking trees. Johnny hunched over. He wanted to throw himself on the ground and dig under. A round shot crashed through near-by trees, a brutal chunk of pure chance, lopping off branches. Johnny saw the spent ball, as big as a man’s head, roll harmlessly down a little hill.
—Gosh! a boy said. That might’ve hit somebody.
No one laughed.
Every now and then a spray of leaves suddenly relaxed and sank to the perpendicular or floated gently to the ground.
At the edge of the wood, the brigade halted at a railfence and everyone went to the ground. A battery of Union guns was firing from a little hill about fifty yards to the right. Around the nearest gun the men made quick, methodical movements, then broke away to left and right. There was a stiff white stream of smoke standing out from the muzzle of the gun. A second later the report struck like a slap on the ears. The gunners ran forward, laid hold of the handspike and spokes and ran the gun back into position.
Johnny lay on the ground, mouth open, panting, though he had only been walking. He felt that if the noise should all abruptly cease, his fear would become audible. But, in a way, the noise of the Battle was the noise of his fear.
There was a little fluttering sound seemingly in the air overhead but growing louder. It ended suddenly, and a hundred feet away in front of the fence, the earth spurted in a fountain mixed with black smoke. Dirt rained all over the men in Company A.
—What the hell! Flash Perkins yelled at Johnny, as if he had a personal grudge against him, what’re they doin’! How come we don’t git in there and whop ’em? We ain’t jist gonna sit here and let ’em shell hell out of us, are we?
Johnny lay at the base of the railfence, panting and praying. The fluttering, whining sound came again and again as more shells fell in the field in front of the brigade.
Any one of these shells, Johnny was thinking, any one of these bullets might be for him. He seemed to have an infinite capacity for being afraid. He feared each shell and bullet and he feared them all. He feared them before they were shot and while they were being shot.
Suddenly he was lifted and thrown by the ground. A strong stink and blinding flash stunned him. A shell had landed close by. Someone was hit. He could hear a man saying in a low voice over and over again,
—Please. Please. It’s me.
—Stand up, boys! Stand up!
Men were getting to their feet all up and down the line. Johnny got up. The officers were standing in the intervals of the companies.
—They’re comin’, someone said.
The open field in front sloped to a wood on the far side. Out of this wood men came running, stopping now and then to fire their muskets back toward the creek, then biting cartridges and ramming as they ran. One of the men lay down gently on his face. Another stopped abruptly as if he had just seen a yawning hole at his feet. He teetered exactly like a man reluctant to go over a precipice, dropping his gun and swinging his arms for balance. Then he collapsed backward.
—Them’s our men.
—Yeah, but the Rebs are back there too.
Men in Union uniforms kept coming out of the woods. They were not withdrawing straight back toward the Third Brigade, but to the left and right.
Suddenly, Johnny realized that he was seeing men killed. While he had been standing here, half a dozen men had lost their lives in the field before him.
—Load! Load at will!
The word went up and down the line.
Johnny bit a cartridge and rammed it down the barrel. All up and down the line the rammers rang in the barrels, the gunlocks clicked.
—I don’t see anything.
—Where are they?
—I don’t know. I can’t see a thing.
Just then Johnny saw several men in gaps of smoke, approaching the fence at the far end of the field. His first impression was that they didn’t have uniforms. There were twenty, and then fifty, and then a hundred, and then all along the line of the fence, coming up from the creek, hundreds of them. Flags emerged from the woods. The men were in groups rather than lines.
Johnny took a rest on the railfence and sighted on a man approaching the distant fence. The figure became incredibly small at his rifle’s end and was blotted out by the sight.
—Fire!
He squeezed off, and the but
tguard socked his shoulder. He coughed with smoke in his eyes, and started to load again. He bit the twist of the cartridge too close, and dropped his rod. Panic rushed over him. He bit another cartridge and managed to ram it home.
He was aware of a thin, high, human sound above the firing.
The Rebels were over the fence and running; they seemed to be sweeping forward in a great V with the point aimed at Corporal Johnny Shawnessy, but with more men at the wings. They were about three hundred yards away. They were yelling. Their bayonets flashed in the sun.
Johnny worked the musket frantically. He got in two more shots and then missed his ramrod. He must have left it in the gun and fired it. He turned around, frantic.
Flash Perkins’ body jumped with the kick of his rifle. Natie Franklin was lying on the fence with his forehead touching the lowest rail, as if he were ashamed of something. A black puddle of blood was spreading out around his face. Johnny grabbed the extra rod and loaded again.
A hundred yards away, the Rebels had stopped. The officers were waving swords and pistols. The battery on the hill played directly on the Rebel lines. The Rebels fired a volley at the fence. It was like a gigantic whip flaying the ground around the fence. The whole Rebel line disappeared in the smoke. Johnny fired into the smoke again and again. His lips were caked with powder; his hands were blackened and smeared with sweat and powder. His eyes smarted, and one kept closing up with sweat and powdergrime, where he had run his finger through it to clean out the sweat. He had no idea how many shots he had fired, but the gun barrel scorched his hands, his fingers were blistered.
A man on a horse appeared incongruously in front of the line. It was General Jake Jackson but not the same horse. He was shouting and shaking his chin at the creek and whipping the air with his sword. The officers were out in front and were all beating the air with hands and swords. Out of the corner of his eye, Johnny saw an officer make a gesture toward his company so strongly that he threw himself down and flung his head free of his body and lay, neck spurting blood.
—Forward!
The men stepped over what was left of the fence and went through the field, running and walking. The smoke seemed to dissolve. The Rebels had withdrawn to a fence at the far side. Johnny fired at the fence and stopped to reload. The man on his right stopped too, put the butt of his gun on the ground and leaned on it. His mouth was open; blood spurted in a thin, wavering jet from his neck. He let go of the gun, and one hand went slowly toward his neck. He went down to his knees as if to pray, his head dropped, he pitched over. Johnny fired again and kept on walking.
In front of him, now, he could see the Rebels retiring from the fence; then they were all out of sight in bushes, rocks, trees.
He was at the fence. The brigade stopped and went to the ground under heavy fire. Several bodies lay among the broken rails. Bushes, grass, and weeds were trampled and dabbled with blood. Where Johnny crouched behind the fence, a boy was lying on his back, shirt open at the neck, head rolled back, neck soft and flexible with a clear blue vein showing. His relaxed right arm with halfopen hand was flung out behind his head. His young face was stubbled with blond hairs. His eyes were open, moist and blue, but rolling out of focus. He was barefooted. His wellformed body, dressed in crumpled gray pants and a torn shirt, was lying across a rail, bending gracefully just at the point of the spine. He had only just then been alive. His voice had been making a sound in his throat as he ran up through the woods from the creek to this fence. He had been shot through the heart and lay like an animal newly felled. He had come a long way from somewhere to a little creek in Georgia and had run to a railfence and had got his death there in the autumn sunshine.
He was the Enemy.
Corporal Johnny Shawnessy was appalled. It was the first Rebel soldier he had seen up close. Here lay his gun and his broad hat. He was perhaps eighteen years old. The Battle took no account of him. For a little while, he had been in the Battle, he was the Battle, now he was gone from the Battle.
At any moment, at any unforeseeable point of time, Corporal Johnny Shawnessy might be plucked out of the Battle and out of the bright sunshine. The whole fabric of memories that made him a person beloved to himself and others would be torn up.
He had his second great moment of fear. He looked wildly around. General Jackson came riding up the line with his staff. He smiled and kept shouting in a hoarse voice,
—Fine work, boys, you restored the line!
Johnny was wondering what line.
A staff officer rode up. The General dismounted, knelt on the ground, and studied a map. He issued some orders and rode away.
Johnny began to fire across the fence into the woods. Now and then through an interval in the trees, when the smoke thinned, he could see where the road ran down to the creek. There was a white building there, and through the smoke he could see at times big black words on the front of it.
LEE & GORDON’S
MILLS
They touched him with an incredibly ancient memory, and he knew that it was the same mill he had seen before the fighting began in the morning.
Just after that, the brigade was ordered bade from the fence.
—What fer? asked Flash Perkins.
—To restore the line, an officer said.
As far as Johnny could see, their new position didn’t bear any clear relation to any other they had occupied, and they were immediately obliged to abandon it and move back again. Someone said the Rebels were outflanking them and trying to get in their rear.
—What’s the matter? What are we goin’ back fer? Flash Perkins kept saying.
He was still on Johnny’s right and close to the regimental colors.
His face was black as a devil’s, his eyes bloodshot and glaring, his cap gone, his coat torn.
As soon as they began to go back, the little coherence and order that had been maintained up to that time disappeared altogether. The wood was full of walking wounded, stretcher-bearers, dazed stragglers, riderless horses, gun crews toiling with their pieces. In the thick bush and the crisscrossing ravines, what was left of Johnny’s regiment got lost from what was left of the brigade.
As far as Johnny could see, the Battle was over on his part of the line. He staggered on through the woods, his head aching, his mouth full of the black taste of powder, his ears singing. He was so tired that what he saw no longer shocked him. He merely recorded it all for future reference. Already he had become accustomed to beholding war’s insult to the integrity of the human form. He had seen heads blown off, lying with tongues out and eyes blackened. He had seen legs and arms lying separate from bodies, he had seen men flung about by shellbursts as if they were bags of old clothes. He had seen men die with a singular ease, as if nothing were so fragile as a human life. He had seen men living and walking with unbelievable wounds, one with what seemed the whole side of his chest sheared off, another holding an armful of his own guts. He had seen a man trying to say something with most of his face blown away.
In Raintree County, human blood had been an ichor. He had never before seen even a pint of it at one time. But on the banks of the Chickamauga, he had seen puddles of it, and men lying in them.
Back near the base of a ridge, the broken divisions were reforming. There had been a withdrawal of the Union right. General Jackson came through in the evening, riding a third horse. His head was bandaged. Dismounting, he strode among the troops. His eyes glared and his voice was strong as a bull’s. He laughed and joked with the officers. He said that tomorrow they would show the goddam Rebs something. He said that his whole Corps was intact and never would have fallen back but for a miscalculation in the Center.
Johnny was so exhausted he could hardly eat. He lay on the ground feeling almost as broken as the bodies he had seen along the Chickamauga. He put his memories away, raw and bleeding, knowing that he would have to deal with them sometime. He went to sleep almost immediately and slept like one dead.
And yet he was somehow aware that all night long wagon
s were rattling on the roads in the darkness, men were marching up and past the bivouac, horses were thundering by. Apparently this volcano of violence and horror called a battle had not yet spent its eruptive force. The canvas had not yet been sufficiently daubed with blood to make it palatable to that great art critic . . .
(Epic Fragment from Fighting for Freedom)
History records no more savage conflict than that which raged all day at the crossings of the Chickamauga. By imperishable gallantry our forces had contrived to maintain their line intact before the impassioned charges of the Rebel hordes. Bloody but unbroken, the whole line retired at nightfall to the base of Missionary Ridge, leaving many a brave comrade lying by the little river of death. As those tired legions who had borne the brunt of the Rebellion’s fanatical attack waited in the brow of the long ridge in the waning night, little did they know what fresh encounters of deadly consequence they would be forced to sustain upon the morrow.
On the following morning Nature was resplendently beautiful in ironical contrast with the dark human drama which was about to be reenacted in the valley of the Chickamauga. The sun was bright and warm, and fair soft breezes touched the cheeks of soldiers still weary from the extreme ardors of the preceding day’s battle. The Rebels, greatly reinforced and outnumbering the Unionists nearly two to one, resumed the attack. In three columns they hurled themselves against the Union right only to melt away before the massed accuracy of the patriot fire. But then occurred one of those incalculable freaks of chance whereby battles and sometimes nations are lost and the whole course of History altered. While the exhausted troops who had stood the whole fury of the Rebel onset were being relieved and fresh troops brought up, the hordes of Treason, perceiving the confusion behind the Union lines, made a single irresistible rush and in the space of a few minutes . . .