This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  “What the hell are you doing, Doc?” Andy McNeish’s face shoved close, his ragged gray kepi at an angle on his blond head.

  “He just learned his fiancée married another,” James said.

  “Thought that was your sister!”

  James sounded miserable. “Just … leave it be, okay?”

  “Goddamn,” one of the other men holding Doc declared. “If Doc, of all people, can give up like this? Ain’t none of us safe.”

  Doc felt his shoulders shaking, and reached out desperately, pleadingly, for the Yankee guard up on the walk.

  The man was watching him, rifle raised, waiting for him to set foot on the deadline. A slight smile lay on the guard’s lips, his aiming eye bright with anticipation over the rifle’s sights, the other squinted closed.

  “Just let me go,” Doc pleaded.

  “You ain’t thinkin’ right, Doc,” McNeish growled into his ear. “You kept too many of us alive to let you squander yourself like this.”

  They jerked him to his feet, keeping their hold. A ragamuffin crowd had formed, delighted for this break in the ceaseless boredom. Now they waited, watching to see what would happen next.

  As James, McNeish, and Ab Smith dragged Doc back toward the barracks, the guard up on the walk sighed and lowered his rifle. At Camp Douglas there was always another chance to kill a prisoner. He need only wait.

  37

  September 19, 1863

  Bully for General Bragg. He’s hell unleashed when it comes to a retreat. That was the joke in the Army of Tennessee.

  And right now, we could use a little retreat, Butler thought.

  The day’s fighting had been a bloody seesawing through the thick Georgia forest southwest of Chattanooga. Men shot, ducked behind trees to reload, and popped out to shoot again. A mayhem of bullets hissed through wreaths of smoke, the smacking of lead into hardwood. Falling branches and leaves—ripped from on high by shot and shell—came raining down from the thick canopy above. Masses of men had struggled to maintain their formations as they clambered over fallen logs, around tree trunks, through brush, and a nightmare of vines. It had been primitive and bloody.

  Butler’s decimated Company A tried to sleep where they’d stopped at nightfall. Whipped, demoralized, and shamed, they now suffered as the temperature dropped to freezing.

  No fires allowed.

  Just wolf down cold rations—assuming you had any. The smart ones had grabbed Yankee haversacks and packs from the dead as they passed. Confederate commissary sure as spit and fire couldn’t be trusted for a meal.

  To Butler’s relief, Kershaw had seen to the posting of pickets. They hid out there in the darkness, not more than fifty yards from where Butler stood looking out at the cold forest.

  He could hear the pleas of the desperately wounded men lying just out there beyond the pickets. They all could. Between the lines. Gut shot, legs broken or shot off, hit in the head or spine shot, they called piteously for water, rescue, or their mothers or wives. The only answer to their pleas had been the Yankee axes as the Federals a couple of hundred yards farther to the west built breastworks.

  Butler lifted shaking hands to his head, trying to block the sound. Like ice picks, they seemed to pierce his skin, muscle, and bones.

  “Stop it,” he whispered. “In the name of God, please make them quiet.”

  Tears streaked down his face, his stomach tickling with the urge to throw up.

  “Played hell today, didn’t we, Cap’n?” Kershaw asked as he stepped up beside Butler.

  “It’s so different,” Butler whispered hoarsely as he struggled to hide his trembling in the Cajun’s presence. “I’m used to being on the staff, to knowing what’s happening around the battle. Here, I just have such a small piece of it. Orders coming down, just my little piece, the men around me.”

  Dear God, he felt lost.

  Just hold it together.

  That’s all he had to do. Cobble his courage into some semblance of a backbone.

  The men are depending on you.

  “Reckon, Cap’n, we done had us better days. Had ’em right smart this maw’nin when we started driving the Yankees north past Brotherton Road and Winfrey field.”

  Butler closed his eyes, the cries of his dying and wounded from that morning mixed with those out in the darkness. “It all came apart this afternoon, though, didn’t it?”

  Govan’s Arkansans had been routed by an enfilading vise of blue-coated troops. They’d fled through the forest in a disorganized frenzy.

  “Got the boys back together,” Kershaw told him, his dark form shivering in the frosty night. “Reckon they’ll be more’n ready to make up for it tomorrow.”

  Butler thought back to that precipitous retreat. When had he ever felt as desperate? Had it not been for Red following the retreat, he’d have died there on the field, tears streaking down his face. It was as if he’d lost himself. His brain and body had shut off. He couldn’t shake the image of his men falling, shot down, as they ran from the hideous blue line.

  “This is Shiloh all over again.” Both of Butler’s hands were shaking. He thought he saw lights glimmering out in the forest. But when he blinked, they were gone. “We pushed them back all morning long, chasing them through the forest. Only to have them throw us back in the afternoon.”

  “Tomorrow, we whip ’em,” Kershaw told him firmly. “The difference dis time? We got Longstreet’s Corps. À vue de nez. It gonna do foah us what Buell did foah Grant at Shiloh. You see.”

  Butler looked out into the forest darkness, smelling smoke and blood on the night breeze. “Bloody as today was, tomorrow’s going to be worse, Sergeant.”

  There, again, he saw the lights. “Do you see them, Sergeant? Right out there in the night?”

  “See what, Cap’n?” Kershaw was squinting, following Butler’s pointing finger.

  “Like little twinkles. Sort of like stars. They’re just…” He blinked again, and felt foolish. “Now they’re just … gone.”

  “Didn’t see nothing out der, Cap’n.”

  “Maybe it was just the souls of the dead,” Butler whispered under his breath.

  “You all right, Cap’n? Maybe you’all otta get some shut-eye. Been a long hard day, suh.”

  “Maybe I should.”

  Butler hunkered down, back to a tree, his gaze on the dark battlefield with its cold smell of blood, smoke, and death. Tomorrow they would once again march into the enemy’s guns.

  How many of his men would die?

  And you can’t save them, the voice seemed to hiss from the darkness around his head.

  “You don’t hear that, do you?” Butler asked.

  “Hear what, Cap’n?”

  “Echoes of hell in the darkness.”

  “Speaking of hell, Cap’n, what happened to that preacher? Dat one who give dat blood-and-guts sermon on de march up here? I hear’d most of it. Damning Yankee Puritans fo’ witch-burning bastards, and how God gonna chase der souls through fire and brimstone? Last I hear, he say if’n he but have a gun, he ride into the fight with us, non? Dat we be de chosen of God. Dat any man who fall, he gonna be eating supper in heaven at de Lord’s right hand.”

  Butler’s trembling lips bent in a smile. “Yep. I heard all that, Sergeant. The ol’ reverend was with us right up to the moment a Federal shell exploded in the tree above him. As the fragments whistled past his ear, he turned a vacuous shade of pale. Then a couple of balls whistled past his ear, and he reined that horse around and lit for the rear. Word among the ranks was that the good reverend had taken on a sudden case of the stomach flu and wished to excuse himself from supper from here on out.”

  Kershaw chuckled, then sobered, listening to the ominous sounds coming from the darkness.

  God, I wish I could excuse myself, too.

  All Butler had to do was bind himself together. Just one more day. He could do that, couldn’t he?

  38

  September 20, 1863

  Butler leaned, panting, against the ro
ugh bark of a hickory tree, thankful for the thick copse of woods that hid him and what was left of his tattered and exhausted Arkansas volunteers.

  He rubbed the sleeve of his dirty uniform across his mouth and wished for a drink of water. Any water. Even the bloody, fouled, and muddy stuff rolling down Chickamauga Creek. It lay just a half mile over east, screened by woods, and behind the sounds of battle.

  Terrified, he stared up at the thick and sinuous branches overheard. The fall-dark leaves stirred in the breeze—the sound of their rustling drowned by the hammering crackle of musketry, the banging of artillery, and sharp cracks of exploding shells.

  The sound was more of a tearing thunder, a ripping staccato, as if the world’s very fabric were being sundered. Rising and falling, the demonic crackle was accented by irregular bangs, many of them deafening.

  Even here, so far into the timber, gray wisps of smoke, like phantom wraiths, brought the acrid smell of burned powder to his nostrils.

  Butler’s reeling brain kept replaying the things he’d witnessed: men’s bodies jerked comically as they exploded. Gore-spattered and maimed limbs were sent wheeling through the air as if ripped and flung from torsos. Decapitated heads just seemed to pop up as the bodies disintegrated beneath them. Entrails burst from ruptured flesh and clothing, or were strewn in the grass where cruel shells had tossed limp and broken fragments of men.

  He couldn’t stop his hands from trembling.

  Butler blinked hard, as if by clearing his sight, he could also clear the horrors playing so vividly in his mind. Chickamauga’s scenes mixed. Flowed together. And parted. Haunting memories.

  Or were they from Shiloh?

  Or perhaps from frozen Prairie Grove?

  Impossible to tell after the eternity of the last two days.

  Among the haunting visions, Private Newsome—so young and vivacious—with midnight hair, soft brown eyes, and a round, freckled face—kept grinning widely as he looked over his shoulder at Butler. Captured in the instant that a minié ball hit him in the back of the head. The soft lead had mushroomed and blown Newsome’s brains out through the center of his face.

  Or it might be Harper Angrue, the fast-talking wheelwright’s son from Chicot County, Arkansas, who was thin faced with slick brown hair. Yankee canister had torn the lad’s belly open, slinging ropes of his intestines this way and that like macabre, whipping strings of sausage to slap onto the cringing men closest to him.

  My men. My soldiers.

  Who said that?

  Where did the words come from?

  He kept hearing obscene voices as they formed out of the nearby racket of battle. Like devil’s talk, they hissed through the trees, riding upon the acrid smoke. Could be heard as syllables in the rising and falling chatter of musketry. If he concentrated, picked out the cadence, the voices had an almost female tone.

  Had to be the names of the dead.

  Mocking him. Mocking his incompetence at command.

  Chickamauga.

  Even the sound of it boded of no good.

  “What do we do, Cap’n?” Sergeant Amos Kershaw asked, his dark Cajun face blocky and grim under his sweat-stained kepi. Starbursts in the powder grime around his eyes betrayed how he’d been squinting.

  Butler raised his hands from the bark, pressing hard against his ears, trying to shut out the guns, the screams of the wounded and dying out there just beyond the trees. Shut out the voices that hung just below his hearing.

  Think! If I could just think?

  His men were cowering among the trees. Panting and scared. Looking to him for salvation after the mauling they’d taken as they charged around the Federal right in a supposed flanking movement—and marched right into massed Federal guns.

  We fell apart, fled the only direction we could: west, into the trees behind the Yankee lines.

  In the melee, Butler’s company—his lieutenants shot dead—lost track of the rest as they skedaddled through the smoky maze of dense hardwoods, clambering through thickets, dodging among dangling vines. They’d crawled over tangles of deadfall, clawed through brush, and plunged through low-hanging smoke and mist to this small clearing. If it could be called such.

  South! the voices seemed to say despite his plugged ears.

  “South?” he questioned, wondering if the words in his teetering and exhausted mind had been whispered past the devil’s lips.

  “Why south, suh?” Kershaw asked. “We’s a’hind the Yankee lines.” His crowsfeet deepened as he considered, and nodded his head as if in understanding. “I see, suh. C’est bon.”

  See what? Butler was still struggling, too many voices whispering in his head, the words confusing to him, woven as they were into the cackle of gunfire.

  Kershaw was putting it together. “Most of the battle is just over east. The rest off to the west a mile or so. Reckon y’all thinks there be a hole a’tween, right, suh?”

  Was that what he thought? He nodded faintly, cocking his head in an attempt to hear the voices as they called to him from the hot air with its reek of sulfurous smoke.

  “Got to be careful, though,” Kershaw said, nodding. “On yor feet, boys. The cap’n done figgered us a way out. Corporal Pettigrew, you follow on along behind. Make sure nobody lags.”

  “Yes, sir,” Willy Pettigrew told him, cradling the Yankee Springfield he’d carried since picking it up on the battlefield at Shiloh. “C’mon, y’all.” He waved the tired men to their feet.

  Butler took a quick count. Twenty-seven. He had only twenty-seven left. He’d seen nearly a hundred die in the last day and a half.

  Dear God, tell me the rest are with the brigade.

  “We all capped and loaded?” Kershaw asked. “Check yor guns, boys. We stumble unexpected-like on Yankees, I want volley fire. Only my number ones shoot. Number twos, y’all wait till the ones step back to reload. Only then aim, take yor time, and shoot.”

  All along the line the men nodded, faces hard, jaws clamped. Some wore kepis, others had shapeless felt hats atop their heads. Their coats were threadbare. Some carried Yankee knapsacks picked up here and there. Others kept their meager possessions in cloth sacks hanging from their belts or rolled in their blankets. The various rifles might have been battered and hard used, but what was left of Company A kept them well cared for. Cartridge boxes on their belts were unsnapped and ready. Their caps within reach.

  “Cap’n?” Kershaw asked.

  Butler’s heart trembled in his chest. What if he were wrong?

  “Move out,” he whispered as he made a fist of his right hand to keep it from shaking.

  “Phil, y’all take the lead,” Kershaw ordered. “Ten paces ahead, and aim us a’tween the fighting. We don’t want to stumble into no pile of Yankees here.”

  “Just ’cause I’m half Injun?” Vail, a tall boy with cinnamon hair, gave him a grin.

  “You be all Injun for me today, boy,” the burly Cajun told him.

  “Yes, suh!” Vail clipped off a salute, his smile exposing white teeth in a soot-encrusted face.

  Twice during that long and twisting passage through the woods, Vail raised his arm. Both times Kershaw copied the move, and when Vail slashed his arm down, the whole command dropped to the forest floor, merging with the sticks and old leaves.

  Each time, a panicked group of Yankees went crashing past. So fixed were they on escape, they never so much as glanced sideways in their flight.

  Sticking to the west side of a small creek, they crossed two beaten roads and had proceeded maybe a mile before Vail raised his arm, ducked down, and went still, his head cocked.

  Butler’s small command could have been a Cherokee raiding party the way it hunched down in the brush or melted behind trees. With a hand signal to wait, Vail slithered off into the thickening honeysuckle and currants.

  A nasty battle was taking place less than a mile to the west. Great crashes of musketry kept firing in volleys that rolled over the sporadic background of shooting. And through it all, the popping bark of the howitz
ers and the sharper bang of the rifled cannon spoke of massed artillery.

  This sounded worse than the Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh.

  Just give us a hole to creep through. That’s all I ask, dear Lord.

  If he could just save these remaining men, it would be enough. He could resign his commission, find another way to serve. Perhaps in the commissary or supply. Anything to relieve himself of the knowledge that he’d failed so many of these boys who trusted him to …

  Vail barely shifted the brush as he stepped out and grinned. “We’re saved! Just ahead. They’s Humphrey’s brigade of Longstreet’s Corps.”

  Turning he led the way, parting the stiff branches like Moses through the Red Sea and out onto a road packed with Mississippi volunteers. There wasn’t any mistake given the actual matching uniforms, the better-fed look, and modern Enfield rifles on their shoulders.

  “Who’re y’all?” one lieutenant called.

  “Company A, Second and Fifteenth Arkansas,” Kershaw answered proudly, though the words were drowned by a swelling thunder from the battle just behind the trees.

  Looking that way, Butler could see the thick pall of battle smoke that wreathed a treed ridge and blew slowly off to the northeast.

  “Arkansas?” a voice called, and Butler turned to see a horseman, his uniform splotched with mud and smoke. “Butler? Is that you?”

  “Jerome?” Butler gaped at Hindman’s aide-de-camp. For the first time that day, he felt his heart go light in his chest. God had indeed delivered him. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for a lost company.” Wilson propped a gloved hand on his hip as his horse, a white-footed sorrel, sidestepped. “Thought Govan was on the right?”

  “We were. Once,” Butler told him with a grin. A great weight lifted from his soul. His men were safe. He’d done it.

  “The general will be delighted to see you. That all of your men?”

  “I hope there’s more up north.”

  Jerome Wilson looked at Butler’s little command, calling out, “How about it, boys? Will you make one last fight for Tom Hindman and Arkansas?”