The Shiloh Series: Books 1-3

by Phillip Bryant

  Firelight by the creek and the shouting of men drew their feet forward in hurried, slippery steps until they could see soldiers working on the bridges across the Pittsburg road, the bridges they’d tried to save in the torrent—now down to a respectable stream in size and current. By the light of fires, engineers were feverishly struggling to repair the damage. Logs were being processed with saws and hatchets, and new pontoons were waiting to be lashed together and floated into the water. Just down this road, the 24th Ohio would be encamped—home. Giving the activity one more quick glance, Philip and Sammy headed down the road, their steps lively.

  Chapter 10

  Camp Near Chambers Creek Bridge, May 7, 1862

  The order to make camp was both welcome and disappointing to Philip. The march this day, over the newly reconstructed bridges over Lick and Seven Mile Creeks and through rugged Tennessee forest, had taken all day and gotten the regiment no nearer to the enemy than they had been before. It was just another day for tramping in the damp, rain showers and soggy brogans, muddy roads, and waits for artillery an battery to dig itself out of the muck. Cavalry regiments idled by the sides of the road or in open fields where they’d been camped for days, ordered to stay put and take up any and all open pasture land for fodder and forage for their mounts, such food being of limited supply in the creek- and ravine-cut landscape the army was maneuvering through.

  There seemed to be little point in it all. Move here and camp and throw out work details to repair the corduroy roads after a day’s use, and fell more trees and make new fords across yet another creek. Their enemies were damp feet that never dried and the constant cold feeling from wool that didn’t either. The Confederates were somewhere else, someone else’s problem. This camp too would be temporary, but would entail more endless, backbreaking labor with the saw and ax. Further, with the late struggle at the ruined bridges, the 24th Ohio was angry.

  Good men were being lost every day to small skirmishes all along the lines of march as the army made its way toward the enemy entrenchments around Corinth. Enemy vedettes around each and every useable ford and bridge brought danger, but at least there was purpose in those casualties. They might not have been lost in a gallant rush and heroic charge, but there was purpose to the losses all the same. The losses at the bridge had been pointless. Five good men were now missing from the ranks. For Philip, at least one loss was personal. Captain Bacon had been found downstream, dazed but alive, but Mule was never found. Four others were also missing, presumed washed into the Tennessee. The losses would be considered negligible on a roster that counted tens of thousands, but for the 24th they were significant.

  The reunion for Philip and Sammy was subdued. A face was missing from their mess. Mule’s belongings were collected and sent home, and his traps were turned in to the quartermaster.

  Round another fire, the company sat and poked at the embers, waiting for tattoo to be sounded. The fire was warm and welcoming, as was the coffee. Philip kept his focus on that warmth. The faces of his pards were weary and discouraged. Were he the chaplain, what would he say? Something more poignant than the Robert Harper funeral, something that would bring sense to senselessness. He would say his friend Mule had surrendered his life to God, as they all had when they volunteered. Personally, he was angered that anyone had died. Had Major Woolsey been the one to survive and none of the others there might have been a mutiny in the company if more work under the man were to be asked. It was an ignominious way to die, drowned in the rushing water for no reason. His own reason was replaced with angry, hateful thoughts toward the major.

  Johnny, his usually clean-shaven cheeks now covered in the unruly growth of the past week’s labors, stared into the flames as if transfixed by some object that only he could see in the yellow dance. Lifting his eyes and taking in Philip’s glance, he said, “What would you do, Philip, as chaplain?”

  Philip silently cursed him. “I don’t know, John.” He didn’t feel like using the familiar—no one did.

  “What does it matter? We should just count ourselves blessed we are still here at all,” Johnny continued.

  “Ain’t no use ignoring it,” Sammy burst out. “We lost two good men from the company.”

  Philip brooded. It was not a “tell the truth” moment.

  He was a little too angry to say what he really thought. “I’ve nothing to say,” Philip admitted. “War is an evil, even if it is for some common good.”

  “That Woolsey was a sore spot on our service. He’d probably blame the bridge on us if he were still alive,” Sammy said.

  “I disliked the man as much as anyone,” Philip said at length and tossed a piece of bark into the flames, flying sparks reflecting his emotions.

  “Not a man in the company what didn’t hate him,” Johnny replied.

  “Hate him or hate working under him? I’d imagine a great distinction there,” Philip said.

  “I hated him,” said Sammy.

  “See, isn’t that the rub? Are we supposed to hate another? Do we hate the enemy? We hate they are the enemy and that we’re here dying because of them, but do we hate them?” Philip asked.

  “No one can blame anyone for hating that man, or for wishing him ill,” Johnny said.

  “I can blame myself for what I should not have done—harbored ill will toward another. Christ told his disciples that if you hate a man in your heart you are just as guilty as if you murdered him. The law said to the Israelites it was a sin to take the life of another out of greed or jealousy, but the new standard was to not harbor hate in your heart either. You know he probably saved my life? He dragged me out of the water, just before the pontoons broke apart and threw everyone into the water. I stayed afloat.”

  “Don’t make him any less a reprobate,” Sammy said.

  “No, but that I hated him enough to wish him ill is flesh enough,” Philip replied.

  “If that’s your standard, no one should be able to wear the cloth,” Johnny said.

  “Mule would say something right about now in my defense in his way of mistaking me for one of his priests.”

  “He may have been a papist and an incorrigible beggar, but he knew of what he spoke,” Sammy said with a frown. “And always had something to say.”

  It had finally been spoken. The fantasy that Mule was there and just unusually silent was now broken, and the space was truly empty. As after Shiloh, the missing names in the ranks were final. The men looked away from one another, stared into their coffee cups, didn’t speak.

  Arriving at conclusions that did not comfort the soul, Philip wished for something further to explain the loss and sense of finality. Soldiers die or go home, they end their service or their lives, and no one carries on for them. They are gone. There was nothing to recompense the loss of friendship, the lack of begging for another hardtack or the innocent filching of food from the common mess. Helping dying men come to grips with mortality had made it all seem so clear again. But the loss had not been personal. Now it was personal, and he had nothing to say, not even to himself. He’d expected more from his choosing to seek the collar once more, that relevance was there to be had in the choice, that God would suddenly make him feel something new.

  The next morning brought them another day of roadwork and toil and the constant shifting of logs along the corduroy roads. The tramping of feet along their course was the only indication that somewhere, a part of the army was inching closer to the enemy. No echo of rifles or cannon fire came to their ears; the enemy was not contesting the advance. No battle lay on the horizon.

  Rumor was that the enemy entrenchments were only five miles away, but no sounds of conflict told of that reality. Only the hewing of logs and the rolling of wagons. Those coming back from picket told of nothing seen but ticks and chiggers, wagons and horses.

  On the third day of camp something happened.

  “Corporals, draw rations an’ mail,” commanded First Sergeant Fisk.

  The morning roll had been called and the fatigue assignments ma
de when Fisk ended with the delight of any infantryman: “Mail.”

  “Pearson,” the corporal said. He thrust the letters out and moved on to the next man.

  Philip thumbed the envelopes.

  “What’d you get?” Sammy asked.

  “Two from father,” Philip replied.

  “Ahh, your commission maybe?” Johnny said and frowned.

  “Don’t know, afraid to open it,” Philip confessed.

  “Don’t be a fool! Open it and get it over with,” Sammy said. “B’sides, we want to hear if you don’t!”

  Philip opened one and skimmed it quickly. It was the usual personal and formal information from his father, who always wrote as if he were writing official pronouncements to the assembly of churchmen.

  Opening the second, his eyes ran across the page, taking every line in as his pards waited impatiently for him to make some declaration.

  “Well, out with it!” Johnny said and grabbed for the page.

  “Fall in, fall in! Light marching order, fall in!” called First Sergeant Fisk as the long roll sounded in the camp.

  Philip thrust the letters into his sack coat’s inner breast pocket and rushed to gather his traps. He could hardly believe what he’d read, but perhaps it wasn’t what he thought it said.

  “Well?” Sammy asked Philip as the company lined up.

  “They drawing up the 36th Indiana too; and Mendenhall’s Battery; this ain’t going to be no fatigue detail,” Johnny said as the 36th Indiana was the first to march out onto the road.

  “Huh?” Philip replied. The order to come to attention came, and then the order to right face set the company to motion, leaving Philip to his thoughts—not of the letter itself but of the import of the sudden change and hurry to prepare for something momentous.

  Drawn up in march column, the brigade stepped off in quickstep with the regimental drum corps beating a cadence and the fifers playing “John Brown’s Body,” a regimental favorite.

  For a time the column of march was jovial, motivated by the strains of the marching song, but as the miles progressed the soldiers lost interest in further singing and became lost in individual thoughts. “I’d almost forgotten what this felt like,” Sammy said and broke the silence as he marched to Philip’s left in the column of fours.

  “You mean a fight?” Philip asked.

  “Issue rounds and rations an’ take the quickstep; we might find the enemy up this road. I confess I kinda look forward to somethin’ other than digging.”

  “Battle seems like somethin’ not to hope for.”

  “Beats fighting the mud,” Johnny said from behind.

  “Do seem like we might be about to do some good instead of wasting away on fatigue,” Philip said.

  “Good to go an’ kill us some Rebs finally,” Johnny added.

  Others around them nodded. An army was built to fight, and this part of the army was about to join in.

  “Is it evil, Preacher, to want to go an’ kill Rebs?” a man named Bunt asked.

  “Not if it’s God’s will, an’ if you’re here, it’s God’s will. Murder is evil.”

  “We sing ‘John Brown’s Body’; was John Brown evil?”

  “Yes,” Philip replied and winced.

  “John Brown was not evil!” Johnny exclaimed. “There’s a reason we sing that song. That song is why we’re at war.”

  “Brown was evil for the things he did before Harper’s Ferry; he was a murderer an’ used the Good Book to justify it,” Philip replied.

  Johnny’s abolitionist upbringing was not going to allow any ill word to be said of Brown or his crusade, but the man had been wrong in how he went about his work.

  “John Brown’s death at the hands of despicable slavers for inciting insurrection was not worthy; he was the first martyr of this war, no different from Ellsworth,” Johnny insisted.

  In the middle of the internecine war between Missourian and Kansan groups over the Kansas state’s constitution as a slave or free state, Brown and his sons had hacked pro-slavery farmers in Kansas to death. In New England circles, Brown had been one of the few willing to take up a rifle instead of a podium in the war on slavery.

  For Johnny, there was no other reason for the war. The evil of slavery demanded it.

  “Brown paid for his sins on this earth; God knows what his reward was,” Philip said. “But on earth he was punished for what he’d done. Ellsworth was shot by a Rebel civilian while removing the Rebel banner from a hotel in Alexandria, Virginia. Ellsworth was a martyr ‘cause he hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  “That ain’t nothing to celebrate, dying for some stupid desire to haul down a flag. Brown was leading slaves to a God-given natural right to freedom. That is something to be remembered!” Johnny exclaimed.

  “Is we killin’ fer them darkies, or is we killin’ to punish the Rebels?” Bunt asked.

  “We’re fightin’ for the Union, of course,” Sammy replied.

  “I ain’t killin’ fer nobody but me.” Bunt said.

  “Well, that don’t make a heap of sense,” Sammy replied. “You volunteered for some reason. Johnny thinks that anyone who isn’t in the army to free the slaves is a misguided fool.”

  “Just you,” Johnny retorted.

  Arrival at their destination silenced the conversation.

  Drawing up by regiments, the 24th posted itself alongside the battery in line of battle, each man straining to see what it was they were expecting to find.

  “Where’s Pope?” Sammy asked aloud as the 24th stood at ease in the sun.

  “They was here. This is the other bridge over Seven Mile Creek, no?” Philip replied.

  The lieutenant with his annoying questions and the tired-looking engineers were nowhere to be seen.

  “This be the bridge,” Sammy replied. “We were here.”

  There wasn’t a soul to be seen. As skirmishers pushed out, the gunners of the battery soon lost interest in anything but finding shade underneath their carriages. The creek was back down to its normal levels, but trees uprooted by the torrent still lay in the creek or across it.

  “At ease!” came the command, and the company was able to relax a little, though still in company front.

  Philip retrieved his letters and read, this time more slowly. There it was, one part of the news he’d been waiting for.

  “Bishop approved my request for reinstatement,” Philip said. “Now it’s up to the governor.”

  “What you gonna do when you hear?” Johnny asked, his eyes and face shaded by his slouch hat.

  Philip dropped his arm, clutching the letters tightly. “Go home, see Father, then go up to Columbus to meet Governor Tod and find out what regiment I’m assigned to.”

  “Will be nice to be home,” Johnny said. “Be nice to sleep in a bed.”

  “You going to be a high and mighty officer,” Sammy chided.

  “I read that the army doesn’t know what to do with chaplains, an’ they don’t last long in the field,” Philip replied. Being an officer—being back in the service of God, at least from the perspective of most people that a minister and only a minister was in this service—he wasn’t sure what he felt about it. Elated, an odd feeling to have at the thought of being accepted back into a fold he’d left. If the governor accepted his request, he would be a soldier’s minister, the best of both worlds. Then again, it also meant a measure of sorrow. He could see it in their faces: he was going to leave them, and another man from their mess was going to be missing. They were sad to see him pursue something else but were hiding it better than he.

  “If I thought I had a chance at getting officer’s pay, I’d leave you two behind an’ spend the rest of the war in a tent on a cot!” Sammy said with a laugh.

  “And deal with halfwits and braggarts like yourselves?” Philip shot back.

  “How hard can it be to open the Good Book an’ sound all pious about some lofty, unattainable goal?” Johnny added.

  “I can regale you with the evils of pride and coarse jes
ting right here and now,” Philip threatened.

  In the letter, his father was elated at the news from the bishop and that his son was reconciling his struggles with the past and the future of his calling. Normally a somber man in his letters, this was a pleasant departure.

  “If you can, get out. Won’t be no one to blame you if you do so with honor,” Johnny said.

  “You did your part in the fighting so far. War ain’t over, but you can do the rest of your part as a chaplain,” Sammy said.

  “This feels right, fellows. When they issued us ammunition this morning and marched us here, I thought it was the final act; we were going to have to face the enemy again. I don’t know if we’re living a charmed life or what, but I won’t argue with having no engagement. When I’d go to the hospital and see to some departing soul, it would light the man’s face just to hear something from the Good Book. At those moments I’m not sure it was even I they wanted to see; they just wanted to hear something to comfort their journey. It felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, bringing someone peace. It felt good even in those horrid moments as someone slipped away.”

  “So what does it matter if you’re a chaplain or a private? If it be the words from the Good Book that men need to hear, you can do that just as easily shouldering the rifle as wearing a collar,” Sammy said.

  “It’s a state of practice,” Philip said. “Sure, I can pray with someone and give a dying soul comfort, but most of the time I’m not. I’m doing fatigue duty or picket or jawing with you in the line of march. Perhaps I can better focus on the spiritual health of a regiment by leaving the rifle behind.”

  “This war drags on, an’ the enemy show no sign of relenting. We all living charmed lives to this point. To each his own,” Johnny said.

  The afternoon passed and evening came, and still no evidence of Pope’s forces nor anything of the enemy. The 24th Ohio, 36th Indiana, and Mendenhall’s Battery turned about and marched back, arriving in camp at three in the morning, spent.