The Shiloh Series: Books 1-3

by Phillip Bryant

  His pards brought him little clarity. Theo Mueller, whom everyone called Mule (except Sammy, who called him “the wretched papist”) was hungry as ever and always ready to challenge Philip’s faith. Samuel Henson, a born and bred Ohioan who took great pleasure in tormenting Mule, was a little more reserved after the battle, having had some of the reality of what they would face from now on kicked into him. Philip could always count on Sammy to enliven any situation.

  Marching next to him in column formation was John Henderson, a transplanted New Englander who had a steady way about him and whose ardent abolitionist leanings were always bringing on some argument from Sammy. Slavery was far away from Ohio’s Miami River Valley, but across the Ohio River into Kentucky and marching through Tennessee, the issue was unavoidable. They were from Germantown and surrounding villages, and save for Mule, were in his church. He’d not known them as closely before the army, just as familiar faces. These were the men Philip made mess with and marched beside and fought shoulder to shoulder with, men he’d not know what to do if and when any were to fall. There was no question of that today: just a glorious retreat from the memories left on the fields around Pittsburg Landing.

  The march was easy and the ground unspoiled by a large army presence, with clean air and fresh wind. Making camp was like holiday as each man felt the oppressive odor lift from them like a heavy load from the mind. Men laughed again, and pranksters felt the need to play Tricky Pete on their unsuspecting pards.

  With camp thrown up and fatigue details seen to, Philip found himself for one evening with no wounded calling out his name and no need to try to assuage some dying soul. The company fire crackled pleasingly, and his company pards sat around the glow with contented faces and lively hearts. His, though lighter, was still heavy.

  “Mule, did you save any o’ them crackers I give you?” Sammy asked just as Mule was about to sit.

  “Crackers?” Mule asked, surprised.

  “Hardtack, Mule; the hardtack I gave you.”

  “You didn’t give me no hardtack, Sammy,” Mule protested.

  “I sure did; I give it to you to hold for me while I was on picket since I wouldn’t be there for ration issue,” Sammy replied sharply.

  “Sammy, I don’t have no extra hardtack! I got what was issued t’other day. I swear by the Holy Mary you never give me none.” Philip could see Mule working out in his mind whether he really had gotten extra food after all but had forgotten.

  Mule was the biggest of the four, broad-shouldered and fair-skinned, with a towering frame that would look intimidating if he squared off to anyone. Yet Mule had the simplest of temperaments and never raised his voice in anger that Philip had ever witnessed.

  Philip and Johnny exchanged glances, both knowing where this was going. Mule also had an insatiable appetite and was constantly bumming food from anyone who looked like his load of foodstuffs was a burden.

  “You mean to tell me you ate my hardtack, Mule?” Sammy stood and jabbed a bony finger in Mule’s direction.

  Confusion and distress filled Mule’s face. His Aryan cheekbones worked hard as his jaw clenched and relaxed, a battle to remember being fought behind his eyes.

  “Sammy, I swear by the Virgin I didn’t get any hardtack from you, honest!”

  “I think our papist here done stole our hardtack ‘cause the division priest run out of wafers fer that there transubstantiation thing what they do,” Sammy said, and contained a giggle.

  Philip broke into a smile.

  “Sammy,” Mule cried, a hurt look creasing his brow. “You know I wouldn’t steal from anyone! I resent the accusation and your constant ribbing ‘bout the faith.”

  The 24th Ohio was predominantly Protestant, with Lutherans, Methodist Episcopal, and some Baptists interspersed with a few Catholics like Mule. The regimental chaplain was a Lutheran, and those who wished to partake of the Eucharist needed to wait until the division priest made his rounds of the brigades.

  Mule was a long suffering friend who took the constant needling good-naturedly but had not yet found his limit over what he was going to take at Sammy’s hand. Sammy, for his part, took advantage of Mule’s good nature, and Mule unwittingly went along—most of the time.

  This time, Mule was clearly unable to remember if he had or hadn’t taken any hardtack from Sammy and was conflicted. Sammy quickly winked at Philip and Johnny and then resumed his stern glare.

  Mule silently stood and then returned with his haversack. Plopping down next to Johnny, he commenced to empty it of hardtack, his eyes growing large as he retrieved brick after brick and a sheepish grin broadening his face. “Sorry, Sammy, I don’t remember taking any hardtack from you, but by the Pope I can’t account for these extra!”

  Philip stifled a laugh. His pards were always together, and he knew Sammy wouldn’t give Mule anything to hold for him, especially food.

  “I’m sorry, Sammy. I guess I did get your extra hardtack after all.”

  “Well, Mule, as long as you still have it, I won’t mind the trouble and will reclaim what I gave you.”

  After all of the spare hardtack Mule had bummed over the year, this was but small tribute repaid. Mule sat and puzzled as he handed over brick after brick to Sammy, who stuffed the bricks into his own well-filled haversack. Sammy stopped Mule from donating all of his ration when he’d gotten back what he’d surreptitiously hidden in Mule’s haversack earlier.

  Philip brooded over a letter he held on his knee, pencil in hand but only the greeting to his father started. He’d written hastily after the battle to let his father and his brother know that he was safe and unharmed. He’d been too busy to write since. Lights out would be sounded soon, and he’d wanted to write something for weeks now. The words were there—but so was a tinge of doubt. Doubt about a choice, about the thing that had driven him from ministry in the first place.

  “You still ain’t wrote that letter yet?” Johnny asked, nudging Philip.

  “No, I got as far as ‘Dear Sir,’ and that’s it.”

  “You going to do it? You going to ask for recommendations?” Mule asked, glad to have attention off of himself for the moment.

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking on,” Philip replied.

  “You going to ask for a commission for a chaplaincy?” Mule asked.

  “If I can get the letter written,” Philip said, and looked back down at the blank sheet.

  “The bishop of Dayton’s gonna have to see it?” Johnny asked.

  “Probably; regulations say I need the recommendation of the denomination and three other ministers to vouch for me before I’d even be considered,” Philip replied with futility.

  “Why you want to go back?” Sammy asked.

  “Can’t escape it,” Philip said. “The time at the hospital and that day after the battle with Lee Harper sort of brought me back to what I left.”

  For his part, Philip had needed only to officiate the funeral without saying what everyone really knew—that Lee’s brother was headed for no place but hell for his worldly behavior. But that did not suit Philip any, and to a shocked congregation, he had let it be known that Robert Harper was not being buried to rise again at the last day with the trumpet sound, but was destined for Hades. The Harpers saw to it that the bishop weighed in, and Philip had resigned his office and volunteered with the other young men from Germantown when the 24th Ohio was being formed.

  “So, you been wishing you’d never left?” Mule asked.

  “No, but seems I might be more useful carrying my Bible than a musket if that’s what people need when faced with the ultimate end,” Philip replied.

  “So what’s the problem?” Sammy asked, looking down at the blank sheet of paper.

  “Do not want to get Father’s hopes up, and having to beg for my collar back from the bishop.” Philip’s expression was grim.

  “Took a big man to admit you done wrong to Harper; you reconciled something out of all of that,” Johnny added. “That should count for somethin’.”

>   Philip nodded in agreement. It had not been easy to admit his wrong, even if Lee Harper had been dying.

  “So, write the letter. The bishop can only say yes or no, and then you’ll know if it was the right thing to do,” Sammy said.

  Philip had burned many bridges, including with his father, when he volunteered and resigned his collar without a full hearing by the assembly. He had gladly resigned his office and might have done it even if the bishop hadn’t intervened. He needed his father’s influence with the other church ministers if he was to regain his collar. Regulations were only that the chaplain be a minister in any recognized denomination and have the recommendation of three others. But he wasn’t in the Methodist Episcopal Church any longer.

  “What regiment would you go to?” Mule asked, a hurt expression on his face. Though Philip and Mule had little in common in faith or background, Mule still looked to Philip as the closest thing to God next to the division priest and the Pope. He was the only man whom Mule trusted to do what was right, even when he had been in the wrong with his open feuding with Sergeant Harper.

  “Don’t know that I get a choice, Mule. Depends on what Ohio regiments have an opening for a chaplain.”

  “So probably not in the 24th,” Mule said sadly.

  “Probably not, unless our chaplain resigns for some reason,” Philip replied with a shrug.

  “It’s just a matter of days before we march on Corinth, an’ I hear the Rebs have it fortified but good. If we attack, it’ll be certain death for us all,” Johnny said.

  Certain death for us all. The words rang around Philip’s ear like an uncomfortable and unwanted memory. The fortifications around Nashville had been extensive and only lightly defended when Buell’s Army of the Ohio occupied them in the wake of the Confederate retreat from Bowling Green earlier in the year. There had been no need for an assault. Everyone knew the advantage was with the defender, especially if he were dug into well-prepared earthworks. The army had been spared that eventuality. Yet, here it was again. The Confederates had retreated into Corinth and closed the door behind them with miles of works. Rumor was that Beauregard was also reinforced and could hold Corinth against an attack by twice the Union army that had defended Pittsburg Landing. The fight was not a thing to look forward to.

  No one had yet assaulted a fortified city in the war. Generals had gone to pains to avoid such folly. Yet it was in the cards, the reason the Army of the Ohio had marched across half of Tennessee to get to Pittsburg Landing in the first place: to drive the Confederates out of Corinth, Mississippi.

  The assaults uphill into the muskets and cannon of Cheatham’s Confederates in the open had caused carnage and death on a scale none of them had witnessed before. What would it be like to march into those same weapons behind secure breastworks?

  “General Nelson’s taken care of us so far; don’t see the general making some fool chances with his division. And Colonel Ammen won’t forget he was our colonel, so I don’t think we in any danger of being wasted in some doomed assault,” Sammy said at length.

  “An’ sure nice we get our tentage once again!” Mule added. “Was gettin’ tired of sleeping out in the open.”

  “Yore jus’ glad you got yer regular supply of crackers an’ pork,” Sammy chided.

  “You could’ve slept in a tent,” Philip said.

  “Those tents smelled of death an’ had so many holes, might as well sleep out in the open in the rain. We seen them carry all them bodies out of them tents. You sleep in a house after someone’s died in it? Them savages would burn their wigwams after someone died in one. No, I weren’t about to sleep in them tents.”

  “Well, we got our tents now, just in time to pack them up again and move,” Philip said wryly.

  The letter he was composing in his head was not coming together any more than it was on the page. It was only to his father, but it was as if he were begging for money. Philip had disappointed him before and was about to ask for another chance.

  His father was still a pillar of the community, continuing to minister to all of the churches in and around Germantown. His ability to travel to several each Sunday was limited—another thing that had needled Philip after leaving the collar behind. The societies further out from Germantown had to make due with every other Sunday for a message and with home classes on the off times for study and fellowship. If Philip had disappointed his father, it was in not carrying his legacy. There had been little Philip could do about it, really. It was resign or be publicly censured, though in a town the size of Germantown, they were almost the same—there was not a soul who did not know of the defrocking, even if it had been voluntary. There was little to be done about it now but to attempt to make reconciliation with the church leadership.

  As the evening drew its veil over the camps along the Tennessee, Philip stared at a darkening page. There was nothing to do but ask. Leaving Germantown behind had been an impulse. The community of soldiers would be his home, but somehow, God had found him and cast him into the elephant of war until he should obey the calling. He’d heard this calling before. The days combing the hospital grounds looking for those seeking some spiritual guidance had felt natural, not like trying to pastor a church full of people with their own agendas or litany of personal foibles, but like shepherding men who stood on the brink of eternity and looked for some hope. If this was his true path, and he failed to work up the courage to ask, he was about to march away once more in the wrong direction.

  Chapter 9

  Middle Hamburg and Corinth Road, May 2, 1862

  Regular mail was becoming a pleasant habit after weeks—months, even—when the mails were slow. The two weeks along the Tennessee River saw letters and parcels arriving with such frequency that a soldier could become accustomed to it. That was until reveille and the issue of three days’ rations and ninety rounds of ammunition per man, sure signs that the army’s sojourn was about to be rudely interrupted. Strike tents was sounded, and the fields of canvas white melted into the earth as if a sudden heat wave had melted all of the snow at once. The once majestic rows of tall Sibley tents, the trees of the army forest along the open fields, were in one moment sucked to earth, leaving an open vista and only the green of trees to obscure one’s vision of the Lick Creek camps. Another few moments and the white canvas was rolled into bundles and carried to the division wagon trains. The 10th Brigade was ready to take up the march once more.

  Corinth was to be invested and surrounded, taken, but the grand designs of the generals were a mystery to the infantry. It was a repeat of the march from Nashville: march a short distance, and then spend the day repairing a bridge and felling trees for corduroy roads running to and from the bridges and anywhere else there wasn’t a suitable road to carry artillery and wagon traffic. Each brigade supplied fatigue details for the work. If you weren’t chopping wood or wading in cold streams, you were marching along muddy roads. For Philip and his pards, it was marching and resting, waiting for artillery or supply trains to make way, and a halt in a cornfield after making only nine miles. No enemy made his presence felt on this first day of the grand campaign. There was only the tramping of feet and the incessant halts for reasons unknown to those in the rear. The corduroy roads being cut in the thick forests and the streams leading all the way back to Pittsburg Landing were to be the lifeline of the armies, and Philip and the others spent their day repairing several of the roads. The engineers had been busy for weeks on bridge repair and building the roads that now had to be maintained and protected if Corinth was to be sufficiently invested.

  The division established itself on the south side of Lick and Seven Mile Creek. Having learned on the way from Nashville that the trains would not always catch up, Philip and his pards pooled their rations in their mess and tried to make them stretch—the food issued before a march was never enough for a full three days of marching. The roads leading to Corinth were small country lanes often leading into creek and marshlands becoming impassable after several thousand men passed tha
t way. The 24th commenced to felling trees and constructing corduroy roads across these lowlands and making pontoon bridges at fordable places along Seven Mile Creek.

  ****

  Major Woolsey, the major of engineers, was testy. How could General Nelson expect him to get the bridges over Seven Mile Creek ready when they had spread his men all over creation?

  The work on the bridge over Seven Mile Creek was going too slowly. The need to repair it and get supplies moving over it was forcing him to allow too much to cross, nearly bringing the superstructure down into the creek more than once. Woolsey was tasked with keeping the main lifeline of the Army of the Ohio, the Hamburg and Corinth road, in good repair for the supply lines and advance. Seven Mile Creek meandered roughly parallel to the road, but its tributaries crossed the road no fewer than four times, and a great swampy area almost as long as Seven Mile Creek emptied into it called Nichol’s Swamp, a stretch of narrow lowland, with the Pittsburg road, the Corinth road, and Farmington Road crossing it at various points. The roads needed to be expanded through the swamps to handle extra traffic, and they were the center of Buell’s advance toward Corinth.

  “Sir, my engineers are too spread out,” Major Woolsey complained. Every other day he made the trek to General Nelson’s HQ at Mount Olivet Church only to be stonewalled by his staff. The general appropriated a home and lived large within its walls, but the furthest Woolsey ever got was a tent on the grounds occupied by low-level staff officers. The tent was stuffy, his mood aggravated by the ride and the colonel quietly smoking in front of him.

  “Major, you’ve thirty miles of creeks and narrow lanes to improve to meet the division’s assigned frontage; I suggest you make due or improvise,” Colonel Winters said, tapping lightly on his cigarette.

  “With what?” Woolsey flung his arms wide and let them fall hard against his sides.