This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  “Hoorawww!” his boys shouted. “Show us where, Lieutenant Wilson!” They were raising their rifles, showing off for the Mississippi troops.

  “By God, we’ll drive them sons of bitches off that hill now!” Wilson crowed. “Follow me.”

  “But I need … Wait!” Butler’s words died as his men, of their own volition, headed off after Wilson and wound their way through the Mississippi volunteers.

  Should he protest?

  Voices laughed in the air around him as he followed, feeling confused, as if his thoughts were as tangled as the forest they’d just crossed.

  Across Kelly Road, they threaded their way through hickory, gum, oak, and maple forest, until they encountered massed gray infantry milling among the trees.

  Butler glanced uneasily at the tens of wounded—soaked in their own blood—who were laid out in a line broken only by the trunks of trees. A regimental surgeon, pompously dressed in a full, and blood-saturated, uniform was pointing out cases for his assistants to haul off in captured Yankee field litters.

  “Grab up what cartridges you can,” Wilson called at a captured Yankee wagon.

  Inside the wagon a sergeant—an older man with a gray beard and filthy uniform—handed down boxes of cartridges, calling, “Twenty rounds to a man!”

  Butler’s men surged forward, reaching out with grimy and blackened hands. The cartridges came in bundles of ten, each rolled in paper with an extra twist that held twelve caps. His men were grinning, each man stuffing the largess into his mostly empty cartridge box.

  Butler watched with an eerie distraction, as if he were a spectator inside his own body. The disembodied voices were all chattering at once, adding to his confusion. Panic shot electricity through his breast, as if, when each of his soldiers laid his hands on the ammunition, the man’s face turned into a skull, his arm going skeletal.

  Was that real? Did he really see that?

  “I don’t want to do this,” he said, words partially drowned by a crescendo of firing up on the smoke-wreathed ridge.

  Kershaw, standing beside him, gave him an off-balance smile that displayed his crooked teeth. “Word is the Yankees is breaking all up and down de line. We win dis, we destroy Rosecrans’s army. Do dat and the Federals is gonna have to rethink dis whole thing. Might win us de war, suh. C’est bon!”

  “I don’t want a disaster, Kershaw. I’ve lost too many as it is.”

  Kershaw hesitated, looking hard into Butler’s eyes, seeming to read his soul. “Cap’n, yor in c’mand, mais oui?”

  Go! Run! the voices whispered.

  He was taking a breath to order just that, when Tom Hindman himself appeared through the trees. A bloody bandage swathed the neck of the “Lion of the South,” his glass-blue eyes agleam with pain and the thrill of battle.

  “Butler? Who’d have guessed. Whose men are these?”

  “Why … mine, Tom. Company A, Second and Fifteenth Arkansas.”

  “Hello, General!” Willy Pettigrew called out with a wave. “We’s come to drive them damn Yankees off yonder hill fer ye!”

  “Then, by all means, get to it, gentlemen,” Hindman cried. “Front and center! Double quick! The last charge is forming as we speak. Today, my fellow Arkansans, we win the war!”

  The hearty cry that rose from his men sent a shiver of fear through Butler’s breast, but he could do nothing except follow along behind as his decimated company trotted forward, guns at the ready. Passing through the confusion of the rear were more wounded being carried back. Butler saw soldiers, sitting, gazes empty, shoulders fallen, seemingly in a daze.

  On Hindman’s order a captain put them in line between two of Anderson’s Mississippi companies.

  Shells screamed in from the Federal guns on the heights and exploded with loud pops overhead. Fragments of metal tore several of the Mississippians apart in the ranks off to Butler’s right.

  “Forward at the quick step!” The order came down the line, and Butler, his heart pounding, his throat frozen, stood mutely.

  “Cap’n?” Kershaw demanded, awaiting his order.

  Unable to stop himself, Butler said, “Forward.”

  Drowned by the swelling cheer, Kershaw waited until he could be heard to bellow, “Arkansas! Forward at the quick step!”

  Like some slothful monster the ponderous gray line started, a surging thousand men, pouring around the trees while branches, leaves, and fragments of hot metal came falling from the savaged skies.

  As they approached the edge of the trees, musket balls began to whiz past, cracked into the tree trunks. A few thudded into men; others hit damp soil with a phutt.

  Then they were out, pouring across the Vittetoe Road. The real storm broke with an explosion of musketry from the crest of the ridge before them. The zipping and meaty impact of the minié balls staggered the entire line. Men fell. Others ducked or flinched. But onward they went, crouching down as if against a hard sleeting rain.

  “Forward!” Kershaw’s bellow carried over the screaming men. “At ’em, boys! Arkansas!”

  With an ululating scream, Butler’s men charged up the slope, past the splintered and fallen trees, scrambling over branches, stepping on and over mounds of dead and dying men who’d tried and failed at previous assaults.

  Another blast of musketry flashed up on the crest—chained sparks of lightning amid the billowing of smoke. Butler saw Simon, Deveroux, McCreedy, and Smith fall.

  Panting, he raced after his men as they ran full-bore up the slope. Into the Yankee guns.

  Twenty-three left.

  The devil’s voice keened in his ear, as though the beast rode upon his shoulder.

  The slope here was torn—leaf mat, shattered wood, bruised leaves all making footing treacherous. Butler slipped on a dead man’s bloody intestines. Fell flat, just as a Federal howitzer unleashed a charge of grape that tore a swath in the air above his back.

  As he thrashed his way to his feet, he felt the wet sprinkles, and instinctively glanced up at the late afternoon sky. Found it clear beyond the haze of smoke. Realized the light patter was blood and little bits of tissue blown out of his men by the grapeshot.

  They lay before him, broken and bloody, some still, others writhing and kicking as they died. He stared. Barnabas O’Toole’s entire jaw was missing.

  “Cap’n!” Kershaw was pulling on his arm, the man’s voice, disembodied, seeming to echo in Butler’s head. The Cajun pointed up the slope. “They’s breaking! We got ’em on the run!”

  Butler scrambled up the slope and over the bleeding bodies of his men. Vail, Pettigrew, Baker, Templeton, and some of the others were just ahead of him. The crest was so close.

  On either side, the Mississippians were screaming, shooting, some stumbling or falling as they were shot down.

  Thick clouds of stinking smoke darkened the sky, the smell of burned powder, blood, damp soil, and bruised vegetation choked his nostrils.

  An eerie howl broke Butler’s lips as he charged past the first dead Yankee soldier, and then there were others, blue-coated, blood-soaked, some in piles. He leaped across a rudimentary breastwork, locking eyes with a wounded Federal private who crouched down, eyes wide with terror, his gun across his lap.

  Fragments of hot metal sliced the air past his head as Butler charged into the Union rear. Saw the blue line ahead of him stop in its flight. Even as he watched, the line re-formed. A Yankee captain, sword out, ordered his men to stand.

  The Yankees leveled their rifles.

  “No!” Butler screamed.

  Perhaps twenty feet separated them as the volley flashed fire from the muzzles. Smoke jetted out along the line. Bullets smacked into flesh and bone. Butler’s soldiers stumbled and fell.

  As Butler staggered, tried to see who remained, the Yankees shouted and charged.

  This is the last.

  A keening sounded in Butler’s ears; his pistol, like an extension of his hand, steadied as he raised it. Time seemed to slow into an inexorable eternity.

  Kersha
w paused beside him, ramming another load into his rifle. Pettigrew’s gun was up, flashing fire and smoke as it rolled the man’s shoulder back in recoil. Parsons was still running forward as a Yankee rose from the earth like a perverted lotus and thrust with a bayonet. Its point lanced upward through Parsons’s chest. The Yankee planted the butt of his rifle and Parsons’s momentum carried him up and over in a full arc that ripped the rifle from the Yankee’s grip and planted Parsons face-first in the trampled grass.

  A clubbed rifle caught Matthew Johnson across the face, knocking his head back, flinging him off his feet.

  “Fall back!” Butler screamed as he cocked and triggered his Colt, snapping shots at the Federal line. “Fall back!”

  Kershaw capped his rifle, drew it to his shoulder, and discharged it into a Yankee private’s face just as the black-haired man took aim at Butler’s chest.

  At the same time Kershaw shot, he jerked, rose up on his toes, and staggered sideways. The Cajun’s piercing black eyes fixed on Butler’s. A question hung behind them, as though he were asking for an explanation. His knees buckled and blood spurted from his mouth; Kershaw was trying to say something as he smacked onto the ground.

  Dead! You’ve killed them all!

  Throwing down his pistol, Butler dropped to his knees and clapped his hands to his ears, shouting, “Quiet! Damn you all, quiet!”

  He blinked, aware that the Yankees had stopped, staring, eyes wide. At their feet lay the torn and mangled bodies of Butler’s men, all intermingled with the corpses of their foes.

  “I couldn’t save them,” he pleaded to the Yankees. “I would have. Tried.”

  You killed them!

  “Shut up! Stop it! Don’t talk to me anymore! It’s not my fault!”

  The world had turned into crystal, brittle and clear, each detail so perfectly rendered. He could see the sweat trickling down beneath the Yankees’ kepis, streaking their smoke-stained faces. See their damp mustaches and each individual hair in their beards. The separate threads of their uniforms. The intricate hide patterns on their leather belts. The polish on their buckles and the smudges on their elbows, sleeves, and jackets.

  Movement broke the spell.

  “Cap’n?” Peterson was crawling, trailing blood across the grass, a heavy rasping audible with each breath he drew. He reached out to Butler with a smoke-blackened and bloody hand.

  One of the Yankees followed Butler’s gaze, pulled out a pistol, and shot Peterson in the back of the head. The young man from St. Francis County jerked and went limp.

  Still on his knees, Butler reached out and pulled Jimmy Peterson into his lap, heedless of the blood that leaked out the hole in the back of the man’s head.

  “You can go home now, Jimmy. You and your brother. You, too, Kershaw. Baker? Pettigrew? You can all go.” He choked on a sob. “All of you, go home.”

  Then he looked up at the stunned Yankees who surrounded him, rifles half raised, bayonets sleek and silver. “Go home. All of you just goddamned go home!”

  They stared, as if in awe.

  “Are you stupid? We can’t keep them alive! What’s the point?” Butler swallowed against a lump in his throat and screamed, “I told you stupid bastards to go home!”

  A Yankee major stepped forward, a Colt .44 Army in his right hand, his left out in a calming gesture. “It’s all right, Captain. My boys have to stay here. But we’re going to have to get you off the line. Can you come with me?”

  “I didn’t save my men,” Butler said weakly, Peterson’s head heavy, the blood sticky on his fingers.

  “We’ll tend to them, Captain. But we’ve got to get you out of here.”

  “I have to save my men.” Butler dropped his head into his hands, weeping and empty. “I have to save my men!”

  39

  October 1, 1863

  Doc studied Private Nelson’s foot as he massaged the swollen member. He stood in the hospital as the Federal private lay belly-down on the operating table. The sound of coughing could be heard from the beds just outside the door. Typhus was loose again. A slanting yellow shaft of sunlight illuminated motes of dust floating in the still air.

  With each ministration Doc drained a foul-smelling pus from the trocar puncture he’d made in the sole of Private Nelson’s foot. Again he took a two-handed hold and squeezed.

  “Jesus! Son of Mary!” Private Thomas Nelson screamed through gritted teeth. “Damn and hell, that hurts!”

  “You ask me, Tom,” surgeon’s assistant Percy Anthony said from the side, “you’re a heap better off with Doc squeezing that corruption out of your foot than having Dr. Sullivan cut it off.”

  “Hope you’re right, Percy.” Nelson squirmed on the table, twisting his head around to gaze suspiciously at Doc. Sweat beaded on the young man’s face, his blue uniform looking incongruous on the table where Doc had examined so many Confederate prisoners dressed in rags.

  Nelson swallowed hard. “You making it hurt worse just ’cause I’m a Yankee?”

  Doc smiled his amusement. “Sorry, Private, but it would hurt just as bad if you had a Rebel foot as it does with a Federal one.”

  He glanced at Anthony, who watched from the side. The physician’s assistant had paid attention to every move Doc had made, followed by the occasional question. The young assistant had arrived as green as a pine tree. Hadn’t known a suture from a probe. Doc thought that with a little training, Anthony had the makings of a first-class physician.

  “Glad I sent for you,” Anthony told him. “Sullivan’s off to see his family in Springfield. He’ll be back in a few days. Said he’d take off Tom’s foot when he got back.”

  “It was just a nail!” Nelson cried. “That’s all. Nothing to lose a foot over.”

  “No guarantees,” Doc said softly. “But so far all I’m seeing is infection. Not necrosis. Erysipelas isn’t gangrene, though it can lead to it. See, Percy? How this is red and swollen, but not dark and lined? And the odor of the effluvium, while bad, isn’t tainted by the smell of decomposition?”

  Percy leaned forward and sniffed, his nose quivering. “That’s why I sent for you, Doc.” He glanced around warily. “But remember, not a word of this. I could get in real trouble. But I didn’t think Tom’s foot was bad enough to amputate.”

  “Jesus help me, no,” Tom Nelson agreed.

  Doc left the foot alone and let Anthony wipe up the effluvium. He was encouraged by the clear pus now draining from the wound. “Where you from, Tom?”

  “Moline, Doc. A town over west on the river. Pap has a hardware store. Mama was so delighted that I was sent here to guard Rebs. Figured I’d be safe from getting shot or killed.” He made a face. “And then I step on a nail. A single, solitary nail, and they’re talking about taking my foot! What kind of life would that be? Huh?”

  Nelson turned, eyes pleading as he lowered his voice in mimicry, “’Where’d you lose your foot, son? Antietam? Gettysburg?’ And all I can answer back is, ‘Walking across the infirmary yard at Camp Douglas!’ I’d be a laughingstock.”

  Anthony crossed his arms. “I’d tell ’em Chickamauga with Thomas, saving the Union center.”

  “I can’t lie, Percy.” Nelson dropped his head back on his arm. “Man’s gotta have some sense of honor. Ain’t that right, Doc?”

  “I suppose. Though this damn war makes me wonder sometimes if whatever you want to call honor isn’t being used as a weapon by the political bosses to turn us all into animals.”

  “You mean Jeff Davis?” Anthony asked.

  “Him and Abe Lincoln. And the congresses in Washington and Richmond. And the generals on both sides. Let’s not leave them out.”

  “Both sides?” Nelson asked.

  Doc hitched his butt onto the table to take the weight off. “Back when the war started, I read the papers from North and South. All the fiery editorials. Each side was going to save the Constitution, defeat tyranny, and ensure freedom and democracy. One side wanted to stop Yankee despotism, and the other wanted to stamp out seces
sionist despotism. How could the North and South each be fighting for their freedom and the ultimate salvation of democracy and in defense of the same constitution?” He shrugged. “I guess I found that little philosophical problem worthy of Socrates himself.”

  “What about slavery?” Nelson asked. “That’s at the root of all this, isn’t it? You Rebs want to keep slaves.”

  “The high and mighty do.” Doc sighed. “Those politicians we were talking about? The rich ones? They’ve jiggered this whole thing. Most people in the South don’t want to run out and get shot just so that the landed gentry and slave traders can keep Negroes in bondage. They’d rather be left alone to raise their crops, see their children grow, and enjoy their lives.”

  “My mama didn’t want me getting shot in the process of freeing no niggers, neither,” Nelson asserted. “Everything’s different in the war now that Lincoln announced that emancipation.”

  “Should have been a way to keep from fighting a war over it,” Anthony said softly, his eyes distant. “What about you, Doc? You for slavery, or against it?”

  “Against. Prior to the war, a growing number of Southerners were of that opinion. That’s changed some since the fighting started. Hardened what was once reasonable discourse. Death and destruction make people kind of crazy.”

  “So, what would you have done different?” Anthony asked.

  “Let the South go. The market for Confederate cotton is in Europe and New England where slavery is despised and revolution and human rights is in the air. I’d bet that in less than a decade the cry for free-labor cotton would be so persuasive the slave owners would be figuring a way to pay Negroes rather than own them. And it would be a hell of a lot cheaper than fighting this damn war, and lot more humane for the Negroes making the transition.”

  “You’re not so bad a feller for a Rebel, Doc,” Private Nelson told him. “Don’t know how I’m gonna explain that I owe my foot to a dirty louse-infested prisoner.”

  “Louse-infested!” Doc protested. “I stand before you as a fine Arkansas physician and surgeon. One that not even the most impetuous louse would dare to infest.”