Disabled in the extremely precarious position on the crest, De Mar thought of his own parents. He looked at his watch. It was 1645 hours. Forty-five days, not minutes, seemed to have passed. Now no Americans at all seemed still to be firing, and he could see none except dead and wounded. “What am I going to do?” he asked himself, trying to stay calm. He decided to wait, head as flat on the ground as he could push it. It would soon be dark. His leg was numb and he’d lost a lot of blood, but he knew he could crawl. A figure slithering down the hill in the dark would most likely be finished off by his own troops, who would take him for a Jap, especially at night when they were the only ones to move. He didn’t even have that night’s password. But those were problems for later; now he could only lie where he was, still surprised and dismayed by the dense, accurate Japanese fire from big guns, small arms, hand grenades, and mortars.
Some time later, he heard a whisper. “De Mar, you hit bad? Can you crawl?” Although he didn’t recognize the voice of the man risking his own life for his, the sense of comradeship gave him an incredible lift.† “Can I crawl?” he whispered back, his head still half buried in the mud. “I can crawl back to the States.”
A good smoke screen was laid down—from smoke shells fired by the surviving tanks, De Mar would later learn. He started down. Someone joined him from behind and cut off his pack to ease his crawling. Finding a little ditch, he squeezed into it for cover and kept crawling until his hand touched the body of a rifleman from his platoon—who had a bullet hole between the eyes. He tried to pull the body with him, but the helper behind urged him to just get down off the hill for now. Although it would have been a four-minute stroll from summit to bottom, the incomprehensibly intense enemy fire made their progress painfully slow.
Soon he came upon Lieutenant Bair, badly bleeding from his wounds but trying to get his machine gun operating. De Mar tossed him his pistol because he believed he had some hand grenades left for any Japanese who might try to hurl satchel charges against the tank he hoped would take him back. Reaching it, he saw Little Bit’s body lying alongside, where it had been pulled by Jim Chaisson, the man who’d run to the command post for reinforcements, then run back up the murderous hill to help his buddies. A tank man quickly dressed De Mar’s wound, but Mommy refused to move until all known wounded had been brought down from the hill.
Then he was hoisted up onto the turret, where another wounded man was soon placed beside him. Recognizing the youthful voice of the “tanker” who’d rescued him from the hill, De Mar took out his battle dressing, leaned toward him, and asked where he’d been hit. Five fast rounds cracked out. Four hit the “expeditionary can”—five gallons of spare water or oil on the turret inches from De Mar’s head. The fifth hit his savior behind the ear, splattering blood and brains all over De Mar. Gripping the now grievously wounded boy as the tank roared off, he reached for his grenades and found he had none; his pouch had been shot off.
When the tank made it back to Fox Company’s command post, the young tank driver was dead. A sergeant asked how things were going. “Pretty rough on that goddamn hill,” answered Mommy, not suspecting how much rougher it would become. The full strength of the defenses was still beyond his imagination—or that of any American, including General Buckner.
Those were the first assaults on Sugar Loaf Hill, as it would be christened two days later (when Lieutenant Colonel Woodhouse would call it by a name he’d used for objectives during training exercises on Guadalcanal). No more were made that day, for the battalion commander, now aware that the objective was far more difficult than originally believed, withdrew G Company and called for air strikes. Starting the next day, the sequence of attacks became so confused, with so many Americans cut off from their units, that it was impossible to keep track of who reached the summit before he fell.
Besides, holes from both sides’ shelling were so large that men who crouched in them couldn’t see members of other units yards away. What was known for certain was that five of De Mar’s 3rd Platoon were killed and ten wounded on May 12, a casualty rate of 50 percent. Other platoons lost even more men. On May 14, G Company’s three rifle platoons with their machine-gun sections had to be consolidated into a single platoon— whose lieutenant would be killed that night. Sustained losses like this would quickly prostrate the 6th Division.
The hated hill looked to most Americans less like anything involving sugar than a rectangular loaf of coral and volcanic rock. Stebbins and De Mar weren’t alone in wondering how such an object, seemingly less significant than the Kakazu Ridge finally taken by the Army, could cause such slaughter. To the 6th Division staff, it was merely a minor midway station wanted as a platform for fire support against a higher hill called Kokuba about a mile farther south.
Sugar Loaf’s three hundred or so yards of frontage rose abruptly to a height of sixty feet from an area of plain before it, an unhappy feature to those who had to cross that open country, about the size of six football fields. The hill itself was low enough, especially in relation to the others in view of it, including the Shuri heights, to appear almost negligible—a “pimple of a hill,” as one Marine would call it forty years later, still trying to fathom how it could have been so evil. A young man in the good shape of all infantrymen could run to its crest in three or four minutes. Yet it would cost more casualties than any other single Pacific battle, on Iwo Jima or elsewhere.
* * *
† That was too common among Marines to deserve mention except to restate that their training’s most important product was a sacred sense of comradeship. Medical corpsmen who tended the Marines developed the same sense of obligation and almost never failed to respond to calls from the wounded except when ordered not to because the fire was too intense. In many such instances, the officers and noncommissioned officers who issued those orders themselves went out into the killing zone to reach the wounded.
Chapter Seventeen
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
By Ambrose Bierce
In the first story in this book, Lisa Purcell introduced one of America’s most talented writers of the Civil War era turning his great prose to historical events. For Ambrose Bierce, the Battle of Shiloh was an event observed first-hand, and he was writing in an auto-biographical mode. Here, we see Bierce turning his talents to fiction, with a Civil War short story that has been rewarding readers for ages. Bierce was a lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. His life of observing and writing about whatever interested him ended in 1913 when he travelled to Mexico to observe rebel troops during the Mexican Revolution. He was never seen again.
—Lamar Underwood
I
A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees. Some loose boards laid upon the sleepers supporting the metals of the railway supplied a footing for him and his executioners—two private soldiers of the Federal army, directed by a sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff. At a short remove upon the same temporary platform was an officer in the uniform of his rank, armed. He was a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as “support,” that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest—a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at the centre of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends of the foot planking that traversed it.
Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then, curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground—a gentle activ
ity topped with a stockade of vertical tree trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon commanding the bridge. Midway of the slope between bridge and fort were the spectators—a single company of infantry in line, at “parade rest,” the butts of the rifles on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground, his left hand resting upon his right. Excepting the group of four at the centre of the bridge, not a man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless. The sentinels, facing the banks of the stream, might have been statues to adorn the bridge. The captain stood with folded arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates, but making no sign. Death is a dignitary who when he comes announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect, even by those most familiar with him. In the code of military etiquette silence and fixity are forms of deference.
The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good—a straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead, from which his long, dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well-fitting frock-coat. He wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers; his eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin. The liberal military code makes provision for hanging many kinds of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded.
The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing. The sergeant turned to the captain, saluted and placed himself immediately behind that officer, who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the cross-ties of the bridge. The end upon which the civilian stood almost, but not quite, reached a fourth. This plank had been held in place by the weight of the captain; it was now held by that of the sergeant. At a signal from the former the latter would step aside, the plank would tilt and the condemned man go down between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgment as simple and effective. His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his “unsteadfast footing,” then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift—all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by—it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each stroke with impatience and—he knew not why—apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.
He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. “If I could free my hands,” he thought, “I might throw off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving I could evade the bullets and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods and get away home. My home, thank God, is as yet outside their lines; my wife and little ones are still beyond the invader’s farthest advance.”
As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man’s brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant stepped aside.
II
Peyton Farquhar was a well-to-do planter, of an old and highly respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner and like other slave owners a politician he was naturally an original secessionist and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with the gallant army that had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction. That opportunity, he felt, would come, as it comes to all in war time. Meanwhile he did what he could. No service was too humble for him to perform in aid of the South, no adventure too perilous for him to undertake if consistent with the character of a civilian who was at heart a soldier, and who in good faith and without too much qualification assented to at least a part of the frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.
One evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of water. Mrs. Farquhar was only too happy to serve him with her own white hands. While she was fetching the water her husband approached the dusty horseman and inquired eagerly for news from the front.
“The Yanks are repairing the railroads,” said the man, “and are getting ready for another advance. They have reached the Owl Creek bridge, put it in order and built a stockade on the north bank. The commandant has issued an order, which is posted everywhere, declaring that any civilian caught interfering with the railroad, its bridges, tunnels or trains will be summarily hanged. I saw the order.”
“How far is it to the Owl Creek bridge?” Farquhar asked.
“About thirty miles.”
“Is there no force on this side the creek?”
“Only a picket post half a mile out, on the railroad, and a single sentinel at this end of the bridge.”
“Suppose a man—a civilian and student of hanging—should elude the picket post and perhaps get the better of the sentinel,” said Farquhar, smiling, “what could he accomplish?”
The soldier reflected. “I was there a month ago,” he replied. “I observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a great quantity of driftwood against the wooden pier at this end of the bridge. It is now dry and would burn like tow.”
The lady had now brought the water, which the soldier drank. He thanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband and rode away. An hour later, after nightfall, he repassed the plantation, going northward in the direction from which he had come. He was a Federal scout.
III
As Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state he was awakened—ages later, it seemed to him—by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fibre of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well-defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of nothing but a feeling of fulness—of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud plash; a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The power
of thought was restored; he knew that the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck was already suffocating him and kept the water from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a river!—the idea seemed to him ludicrous. He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw above him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible! He was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was a mere glimmer. Then it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he was rising toward the surface—knew it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable. “To be hanged and drowned,” he thought, “that is not so bad; but I do not wish to be shot. No; I will not be shot; that is not fair.”
He was not conscious of an effort, but a sharp pain in his wrist apprised him that he was trying to free his hands. He gave the struggle his attention, as an idler might observe the feat of a juggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid effort!—what magnificent, what superhuman strength! Ah, that was a fine endeavor! Bravo! The cord fell away; his arms parted and floated upward, the hands dimly seen on each side in the growing light. He watched them with a new interest as first one and then the other pounced upon the noose at his neck. They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside, its undulations resembling those of a water-snake. “Put it back, put it back!” He thought he shouted these words to his hands, for the undoing of the noose had been succeeded by the direst pang that he had yet experienced. His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire; his heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to force itself out at his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish! But his disobedient hands gave no heed to the command. They beat the water vigorously with quick, downward strokes, forcing him to the surface. He felt his head emerge; his eyes were blinded by the sunlight; his chest expanded convulsively, and with a supreme and crowning agony his lungs engulfed a great draught of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek!
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