This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  Butler had been told that Hindman had been evacuated, and even then was on his way back to Corinth.

  It was two-thirty. The weary survivors of the re-formed Arkansas regiments again charged the Union position. Word was they were calling it the Hornet’s Nest—for every time a Confederate formation attacked it, the result was the same: a buzzing, painful, and devastating response.

  Instead of crossing the open Duncan field, now the Arkansans approached up the thickly wooded slope. Slipping among the trees, the gray-clad men wound past fallen heaps of dead and dying men. Gibson’s Louisiana volunteers. They had tried and failed to break the Yankee line but an hour past.

  As he rode in the rear, Butler’s throat had gone dry. To either side, hidden behind the trees, the crackling hell of battle could be heard. And here, moving up among the boles, he was aware of the irregular tight whirring of bullets as they cut the air and smacked into wood and leaves.

  Somewhere the woods were on fire, a fact known only by the sweeter smell of wood smoke and presence of ash that whipped and whirled through the relentless Confederate advance.

  Butler clamped his eyes shut, hard and tight, left hand tightening on Red’s reins as if to squeeze them like soft mud between his fingers. Beneath him, his horse trembled. Danced sideways around a bled-out corpse that lay facedown in last year’s moldy leaves. And stilled at Butler’s insistent tug.

  He opened his eyes, and the vision remained the same: men dressed in gray and brown, staggering forward through the rough-barked trees and hanging vines. Ghosts, they intertwined and separated from the smoke and noise and stench of battle. Like hunters they proceeded in a half crouch, their rifles held low until, at an instant, they would straighten, shoulder, and fire. Each shot but a single snap in the popping, crashing cacophony of banshee sound and banging explosions. With each discharge came another puff of the vile and sulfurous blue-gray smoke that blew around like corrupt and hellish mist.

  Afterward, the men slowed, ripped a cartridge from their box, bit off the paper tail. The sides of their mouths bore a darker streak left from the powder. Eyes half panicked and wide, they poured the charge into their still smoking rifles and shotguns. The clatter of the ramrods was drowned in the deafening roar as they seated the ball or shot. Fumbling a cap onto the nipple, or priming a pan, the man would start forward again in his half crouch, his eyes fixed on the drifting smoke ahead. He advanced with his face slightly averted, shoulder up, as though edging into a frightful storm.

  As they went, they stepped around or over gray-and-butternut-clad bodies: the wreckage of Gibson’s previous assault. Some dead, lying in puddles of darkening blood, others crawling in the grass, leaves, and twigs, heads up, mouths open in screams that were devoured by the clatter of musketry, the shouts of officers, and the calls of terrified men.

  A Federal soldier stumbled out of the smoke-wreathed hell of splintered trees. Bareheaded, blood streaming from a long cut that had laid the right side of his head open above the ear. With both hands he struggled to hold his intestines inside his belly by using the torn fabric of his shirt as a sort of basket.

  Colonel Shaver’s First Brigade paid him no heed, as if he were nothing more than a vaporous apparition. A spectral phantom conjured of a nightmare.

  As though stunned by that very realization, the Federal dropped to his knees in the trampled leaves. The impact defeated his groping hands. An instant later he toppled onto his face, only to vanish into the swirling smoke as the snorting and trembling sorrel carried Butler beyond sight of the wretch.

  A shell burst above Butler’s head, the shrapnel almost musical as it tore and twisted through the air and pattered like absurd hail onto the ground around him. Two men fell, hit by the hissing fragments. Branches clattered down where they’d been severed from their anchoring trunks.

  A shriek ripped the air away beside Butler’s left ear. The passing shot batted at his head, blowing his hair, mustache, and goatee sideways. His hearing popped painfully on that side.

  Cannon.

  Solid shot.

  A finger’s width from his ear.

  Damn, that was close!

  The image of Hindman’s horse exploding replayed in his tortured brain. He should have been terrified.

  Instead he was numb. His thoughts ex-corporeal.

  Just ahead, calling encouragement, Lieutenant Colonel Dean of the Seventh Arkansas followed behind his line of men. The ground rose before dropping into a sunken track at the crest. There, behind a mat of brush, a large force of Federals had fortified themselves: Prentiss. He had stubbornly been holding up the entire Confederate advance on Pittsburg Landing.

  Is this where it ends?

  So far, word was that the morning had gone well. The wretched two-day march up clogged roads—though tedious, and infuriating with its delays, bogged wagons, and mismanaged movement—had been a success.

  That morning Hardee’s Third Corps had taken Prentiss’s Sunday morning encampment by surprise. Hindman’s brigades had routed Peabody’s panicked troops and driven them in a desperate flight that had reminded Butler of flushing quail.

  Then had come the disastrous assault at Duncan Field.

  They’d restocked their ammunition from the plundered Union camp, and been ordered here, to these woods, to dislodge some general named Wallace and his stubborn Iowans.

  “Stay with the brigade! You are my eyes and ears!”

  Butler watched the approaching tree line across the sunken road; the smoke was brushed back as though by the breath of a providential God.

  The first elements of his massed brigade, maintaining a solid line, were no more than fifty yards from the trees. The demarcation was clearly seen by the piles of dead left after Gibson’s previous assault.

  Oddly, the rattle of guns slowed, the battle gone quiet to the point that Butler heard the Yankee commander’s order: a plaintive voice from the other side of the brush that cried, “Have at ’em, boys! Fire!”

  Magically, a rank of dirty blue-clad forms—faces powder-blackened, their hair unkempt—popped up like manikins on strings. Their rifles clattered against each other, so closely were they packed. The silver of fixed bayonets gleamed in the afternoon light.

  Then the entire line vanished in a wall of flickering orange fire and spewing smoke. The sound of it, like hell’s own hail, hit with the impact of a hammer. And in it, the tortured air screamed with the whiz of the bullets. Red bunched, spooked, and seemed to hunker beneath a great dark weight.

  Butler heard the volley as it tore through the Arkansas infantry, popping into flesh, pocking through rifle stocks and skulls, clacking as hot lead struck metal.

  A great moan went up from the troops ahead of him, and the ranks literally wavered and melted as men dropped, curled, pitched sideways, or threw up their arms, weapons flying.

  “Onward! Forward, Arkansas!” Dean’s bellowed order was picked up and relayed by the captains and lieutenants. “Onward, Arkansas!” the shout rose.

  Guns popped, the ranks stepping over or around the piles of fallen, as though the formation were a great and ponderous snail-like creature. They were close now, the smoke rising enough that Butler could discern the Iowans, ramrods clattering as they reloaded. Capped their guns, and leveled them.

  “Forward!” Dean screamed again, his sword held high as he followed his men. “Onward, Ark…”

  The great wall of curling orange fire, sparks, and rolling smoke was accompanied by the crackling hammer of sound.

  As another pattering impact tore the Arkansas regiments apart, Colonel Dean spun, his sword cutting a corkscrew pattern out of the smoky air. For the briefest instant, Dean’s eyes met Butler’s, and then he was down, sprawled on the trampled grass.

  Red stopped short, trembling as if about to burst.

  Butler glanced up from the colonel’s limp body. Fixed on the falling soldiers—at the gaping holes in the ranks. He could see the indecision as men slowed, firing, glancing this way and that.

  Filling
his lungs, he was about to shout encouragement, take up Dean’s cry.

  Impossibly, the Iowans dropped, falling flat into their sunken road. It was so surreal that Butler hesitated, another of the lulls having gone quiet enough that his order would carry down the entire line.

  The woods behind the Federal line erupted in cannonfire. The air screamed as canister and grape tore into the massed Arkansans. Concentrations of men burst into red haze. Entire ranks vanished into a flying melee of arms, heads, hands, broken rifles, flying cloth, and wide-splayed ribs. One severed leg flipped on high, twisted toward the afternoon sky; a shoe flew off the foot before the limb thudded down onto cowering soldiers.

  The line stopped, stunned at the impossibility of what it had just endured.

  Butler could feel it, as if the massed ranks of men were an organism—some primordial beast with a horrified conscience of its own.

  Before the beast could react, the Iowans rose from the dirt and gore. Their guns swung level, heads bending to the stocks, squinting eyes on the sights. A wall of sound, fury, and flame again blasted into the Rebel line. The slapping of the bullets as they blew through cloth, skin, muscle, and bone was dazing in its effect.

  Butler watched his soldiers falling out of ranks the way corn might be cut when a hundred workers slashed randomly through a field with cane knives.

  “Fire!” one of the Seventh Arkansas sergeants bellowed, and from the decimated lines, a ragged and irregular staccato of musketry hammered at the Iowans. The men in blue knew their jobs. They’d dropped flat, the majority of the Confederate balls smacking harmlessly into the wall of ruined timber behind them.

  “Forward!” Major Martin cried.

  Butler saw him, perhaps thirty yards to the west as he tried to exhort his men to the attack.

  Too much time had been lost. The advance had stalled.

  An Iowan screamed, “Down!”

  The Federals dropped like rocks.

  The Federal gunners hidden back in the trees had reloaded. Again the howitzers and rifled cannon blasted their wrath into the stumbling Confederate ranks. Men vanished in another red haze of flying body parts, bits of them spattering in all directions to bounce off the leaf mat, to rain down on their cowering fellows, or to catch in gruesome patterns to hang from the splintered branches in shot-broken trees.

  Butler gaped at one such display: a man’s entrails strung like Christmas bunting in the jagged branches of a hickory.

  As quickly the Iowans leaped up from behind the brush, their rifles leveled. Another popping and crackling wall of flame shot from their muskets, the balls ripping through the broken and dazed formations.

  What remained of the Seventh Arkansas, groups and individuals, turned and ran. Some managed to hang on to their guns, others just threw them down, arms pumping as they fled the insane wreckage of human flesh that had been piled in mangled heaps. Hundreds of voices rose in screams, pitiful wailing, and pleas for help, as wounded soldiers crawled among the broken, bleeding pieces of dead human beings, and reached out to the backs of their fleeing comrades.

  Behind them, a shout of victory rose from the Yankee lines, as men waved their hats, shook fists, and held up rifles.

  Butler froze, disbelieving eyes on the bleeding piles of meat and splintered bone strewn over and around the dead and dying that still had human form.

  Is this real? Or am I living a deluded nightmare?

  The impossibility of the scene before him defied … defied comprehension. Let alone belief.

  Someone pulled at his stirrup, breaking the trance. Butler glanced down, saw a panic-crazed man, saw him drag at Butler’s pant leg. The man’s mouth was working as though he were shouting, but nothing permeated the ringing scream in Butler’s ears.

  The man jerked again at his leg, as if trying to pull him from the saddle. The action spurred Red, who turned away. As she did, something slashed through the air where Butler’s body had been but an instant before.

  The spell, the horror, whatever it was, broke, and Butler heard the Federal balls ripping through the air around him.

  The man now clasped his leg, screaming, his eyes crazy, and refused to let go. Then a minié ball blew the back of his head off; the man dropped as if his strings had been cut.

  Butler jammed his spurs into Red’s side, and let her carry him down the slope. He was faintly aware that at least two men were knocked flat in the horse’s terrified flight. And then, ducking and weaving, he and Red were through the trees.

  Butler heard whimpering, as if from a distance. The sobs were soft, like those of a child whose beloved dog had just died. The forest through which he rode shimmered, going silver in his vision.

  23

  April 8, 1862

  Doc Hancock blinked the fatigue from his eyes. He steadied the capital saw in his grip, nodded at John Mays, and began his first cut.

  At the feel of the saw on bone, the young man on the table cried out, “Oh God!”

  Doc ignored it.

  “No! Not my leg!” The young man’s face, gleaming with sweat, had a look of absolute horror. He swallowed hard, the Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. The wide brown eyes had an almost angelic softness. He broke into whimpers, his other limbs bucking against the straps Augustus Clyde had adapted out of harness.

  The saw ate its way through the lower femur, and the youth’s shattered knee rolled loose under Doc’s left hand.

  Augustus flung the useless and bloody lower leg into the pile in the corner where it added its leaking gore to the pool in which the other amputated limbs lay. With the rongeur Doc dressed the rough edges of bone, pausing only to wipe the sweat from his brow.

  Augustus had already wrapped the surgical suture silk around the hook-shaped tenaculum, and Doc used it to pull the arteries free of the severed muscle. Dropping the ligating loop around the arterial end, Doc tied it off.

  The boy on the table was quivering like a desperate rabbit as Doc worked his fingers to relieve the stiffness. His hands ached, his fingers cramped from fatigue. Outside the rattle of wagons and the shouts of men announced the arrival of another load of wounded.

  Hurry. Got more to do.

  How many more? Where was the end of it? He’d been working straight through since Sunday morning when the fighting started.

  It dawned on him that the crackling and banging of battle had grown louder. That things were not going well for the Army of the Mississippi.

  General Albert Sidney Johnston was dead. The story from Dr. Yandell—after he had finally been led to Johnston’s body—was that the commanding general had bled to death. The irony was that all the while the general had had a field tourniquet in his pocket.

  The boy on the table—for he was little more than that—had ceased crying, his expression pale with shock. Doc battled against the trembling in his fingers as he stitched the flap closed as best he could. The caked blood, thick on his fingers, made matters worse. He didn’t have the “feel” he needed for elegant stitches.

  Damn it, these things needed time to do right. Sloppy. So damned sloppy. But the suture held after Doc nodded, and John Mays carefully released the tourniquet.

  “Next,” Doc called, wondering when his voice had gone hoarse. Wasn’t there anything to drink? Just a cup of water?

  Mays and Clyde undid the straps and lifted the boy from the bloodstained table.

  Two men bore another, hanging between them, as Mays and Clyde carried the boy out. Doc stared dully at the bloody oak tabletop. Once it had been the center of family life, graced with holiday feasts in a better day. His brain had that fiery feeling that came of fatigue, stress, and too many hours awake.

  With care the two men eased their sagging burden onto the table. Doc’s clot-thick fingers eased the blood-soaked wool jacket open. The seeping wound was just under the man’s armpit. Doc put a hand over the man’s gaping mouth, noticed the gray deep behind the expanded pupils, and then touched the right eye. No reaction.

  “Too late,” he said wearily. �
�Next!”

  “No, suh,” one of the ragged soldiers said. “You fix my brother.”

  Doc focused on the chestnut hair, the freckled skin, and the round chin. The family resemblance to the man on the table couldn’t be missed. “I can’t do anything for him.”

  The younger of the two reached down, slipping his hand under the flap of his holster, drawing out a revolver and leveling it with deadly intent.

  “You save my brother! You’re a doctor. Damn it, fix him!”

  The older brother blinked, as if confused. He glanced at the trembling pistol, and then at Doc, worry and hope welling.

  Doc raised his hands as Clyde and Mays stepped in and stopped short, staring in disbelief.

  “I promised Mother!” the pistoleer cried. “We all did! We have to go home!” Tears now glistened, then streaked down his dirty powder-blackened face. The hazel eyes widened.

  “Son, put the gun away.” Doc reached out, pressing the long barrel down. “I can’t bring back the dead. He was gone before you brought him in here. I’m sorry, son. Just plain damned sorry.”

  The younger brother’s head tilted, the confusion back, his mouth working as if struggling for words. Not finding them.

  The older brother, blinking and stunned, reached out and ran fingers along the dead man’s cheek. “Put the gun away, Tad. Andy’s dead. Got to go bury him now. Nothing more we can do.”

  “But we told Maw!”

  “I know. Damn it all, I know!”

  The pistol slowly wobbled back into its holster. Tad seemed to sway, his blood-smeared jacket hanging open to expose a filthy white shirt. He stared emptily at the tracked-through blood coating the floor. “But we promised…”

  The older brother reached out, knotting his fingers in the dead man’s jacket. Dragging the body through the tacky gore, he shouldered the burden. Then he turned, staggering under the load, and plodded for the door.

  A moment later, the young one, still struggling with disbelief, turned, almost stumbling as he followed.

  Clyde took a deep breath. “Damn, Doc. That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”