The men in the line dutifully came to shoulder arms and stepped off. Every moment someone found reason to fall out of line. Michael, still behind the formation, pushed his way forward through the men and out into the open. His place was a few paces behind his colonel and out into the maw of the beast. Any closer, and they would either have to break into a headlong rush or stop and be annihilated. Smoke was hanging heavily over the Ohio regiments, whose thin lines were thinning rapidly, the haze blurring the brown of the battery walls.
****
Fuller’s Ohio regiments, confronting Moore’s Confederates, were having problems of their own. Lieutenant Browning of the 63rd Ohio, who had barely escaped one trap in the dark of the night the evening before when they encountered the Rebel artillery and captured its commander only to almost be overrun by his infantry probing forward, was now being cut to pieces by converging fire from both flanks. Further, Captain Brown of Company G was wounded, and company command devolved upon a sergeant. If he hadn’t liked Brown’s decisions last night, he wasn’t at all keen on having to make them now himself.
The enemy had already come forward in a bold fashion to contest the possession of the battery, and the 63rd Ohio rose up and stunned them with a volley. Companies B and G occupied the left of the regimental line, Browning’s company connecting with the leftmost A Company of the 23rd Ohio. The sergeant now in command of Company G was himself newly striped and was playing the nervous Nellie, constantly interrupting Browning with worries and questions none of which mattered if the regiment did anything but stand and fight.
“Aim low, aim low; watch your recoil; don’t want to fire over their heads; aim low; check that you fired, don’t double load; aim low; watch your recoil,” Browning droned on as he paced up and down his company line. The men had their heat up, faces aflame with passion despite the morning chill, and the firing was continuous. Above their heads, twenty feet away, rifles poked out of the battery and fired, and Browning could swear he could hear the whiz of the projectiles as they sailed past.
The enemy was coming on again, this time moving closer, but he didn’t seem to be dissuaded by further punishment. The men were loading and firing as rapidly as they could, each man knowing that his life depended on the lives of those around him and those of the whole regiment. As long as the men were kept in close contact with their fellows on either side, elbow to elbow, they had a sense of protection and corporate fate.
“Cover down, cover down; fill the holes up, cover the holes,” Browning heard himself shouting, but the holes were coming too fast to fill. The enemy halted, delivering a destructive fire into the 63rd’s ranks, and the men fell by the second in twos and threes, some never to move again. Browning’s company was being punished now by those regiments in his front and those further to his left as fire plowed into his company from the enemy advancing on the 43rd Ohio. Men were crawling away to die singly, no two or three men to a wounded man in his company—all seemed to know that every rifle was needed in the formation, as if they themselves knew that if they failed, the whole battle was lost.
Browning looked down the regiment, and everywhere it was the same. Gaps in the line and bloodied men crawling away from the danger zone, having already done all they could. Some companies were reduced in a matter of minutes to a single line of men. The colors were falling to the ground as another color sergeant was struck down and the whole guard itself was reduced to corporals who stood to their posts ready to defend the colors should the enemy come close enough to attempt the cold steel. Death was the reward for their diligence as the remaining guard were being cut down moment by moment.
Company commanders still left raged up and down their company lines, shouting encouragements and orders to keep their men from breaking, but the outcome had been decided already. The regiment was weakened by attrition, exhausted from yesterday’s forced march, and caught in a firefight against unequal numbers. It was distressing to witness. There are regiments who brave unequal fire and stand before it, and there are others who melt away at the first fire of the enemy. The 63rd Ohio had never quit the field while there was still an enemy close enough to fire upon. But there seemed few now to stand and fight, and there would be few left if the enemy made a lunge for them.
“To the rear, march! To the rear, march! To the rear, march!” came the command from Colonel John Sprague as he ran down the regimental line, trying to get the attention of his company commanders. The noise was such that one had to get up on the ear and shout to be understood. Browning caught sight of the colonel as he ran from man to man, and he didn’t need to hear what was being said. They were getting out of the killing zone.
“Company, to the rear! To the rear!” Browning shouted. He grabbed men by their cartridge slings and dragged them backwards. They were so intent on fighting the enemy in their front that few understood what he was saying. The other companies in the line were marching or backwards-marching and firing as they went; it seemed to be every company for themselves. Browning was having to grab each man to get him to see that they were falling back.
When the enemy is close enough to punish you, there is little way to pull out of the line when in danger of being wiped out without telegraphing that to your enemy. Falling back and pulling out of a fight was always a bad state to be in, and as soon as the first companies started to move backwards, the enemy to a man leaped forward. Now it wasn’t just a race to save the skin, but to save oneself from capture as well. The hole being made in the defensive line also put everyone else in danger of being flanked, but Colonel Sprague had a responsibility to preserve his regiment foremost.
Browning got his company moving, but Company G to his left was still standing and firing away.
“Get your company back!” Browning shouted at the sergeant. The discipline of his company and his own presence had lulled them into a stupor, or they were all just too busy loading and firing to notice his shouts, but it was about to end in captivity if they didn’t get away. Browning grabbed the sergeant from behind and swung him round. “We’re falling back! Get your company back!”
The sergeant, in an almost calm state, ordered a simple to-the-rear march and led his company at the quick step.
Browning ran back to his own company as it was backwards-marching and firing all the while. A ditch surrounding the battery some twenty yards to their rear was filled with wounded, and for the first time Browning noticed that there was another regiment behind them, lying down and waiting for them to get out of the way. Browning felt somewhat embarrassed to be passing over them, as if they had failed to do all they could do. Ceding the field of battle was never a comfortable thing to do if one had any sense of unit honor, but all he heard from these men as he passed over, men of the 11th Missouri who were not even in his brigade, were words of admiration and encouragement. They might not have been eager to pitch into the fray, but they had witnessed the 63rd Ohio make a gallant stand and be cut to pieces doing it. Had they received first fire and then turned about, abuse would have been heaped upon their heads as they passed over these Missouri fellows.
The regiment was being rallied behind the walls of the battery, and as the last of the 63rd was out of the way, the 11th Missouri rose up and marched forward to take their place in line. As Browning climbed through the ditch, he looked back as the 11th came to a halt and delivered a volley into the faces of the oncoming enemy. He was glad to have gotten out with his life. The scenes of suffering in the ditch and all along the way were heartrending as he saw men he knew who were now dead, or would soon be, from head or gut wounds. At least the survivors were safe now, or so he thought.
****
“At the double quick, march!” shouted Colonel Rogers. Phifer’s regiments were surging forward, and the enemy was falling back through the battery and beyond it. The prize, with eight-foot-walls and cannon now silent, scores of wounded lying in front of the work and in the ditch surrounding it, was in the process of being abandoned. Michael echoed Rogers’s command and stepped off, th
e cheering and shouting from the 2nd Texas urging them all on despite the heavy fire that was still directed on them from within the battery and from the 27th Ohio.
The only thing to do to keep the feet moving was to scream and shout and cheer; Michael turned to urge his men on, but they were practically nipping at his heels. They didn’t need further encouragement. The attack was succeeding, the enemy fleeing, the town about to fall. Taking and holding the battery would mean the enemy was cut off from control of the railroad center of the town, the battery being in command of the westward rail line running all the way to Memphis and the Memphis pike as well as the Mobile and Ohio railroad. Fortify and hold this position, and the enemy would be forced to abandon Corinth. Michael could taste it, victory. It felt good. It just might make up for all of Rogers’s distrust and for all of the blood shed to date.
The rush and the collapse of the 63rd Ohio swept their feet forward and the battery was to be theirs, but Michael also saw the clouds of dust approaching from the east along the Memphis road and the reappearance of the enemy line further to the left, the line that had once been taken by Colonel Gates’s brigade of Hébert’s division. Their banners had gone streaming back to the rear just as Moore’s brigade was making headway. Rogers was still rushing forward, urging on the color guard to follow closely, pulling the entire regiment forward with him. If Rogers saw Gates give way, he didn’t seem to care. Michael noticed.
Attacking an enemy is about respectable distance. The fire being delivered is meant to cripple or dissuade the enemy from standing a moment longer. When the enemy line is solid, infantry and artillery are both throwing lead. When an enemy looks like they are about to break, the opportunity to finish the job presents itself, and the charge is ordered. All unit cohesion collapses as the men run forward, intent only on gaining the prize. As a former artilleryman, Michael understood what that meant for an infantryman: to capture a gun or guns from the enemy was a mark of distinction, just as it was a mark of shame to lose a gun. The field artillery batteries were already pulling back with the retrograde movement of their infantry supports. What remained was to take the former positions of the enemy and prevent him from coming back. This was always a tall order.
But the lines were surging forward, Phifer’s and Moore’s. The 42nd Alabama on the 2nd Texas’s right had already come up to the battery and were trying to scale its high, steep walls.
Michael plunged into the ditch first and scrambled up to the opposite side just as Rogers was doing the same a few yards ahead of him. The ditch was meant to be an obstacle in any frontal assault on the battery, trapping anyone who made it that far and putting them at a disadvantage as the steep walls of the battery rose up from the far side, allowing defenders to fire down on those scrambling about below. Only there were no defenders.
As the 2nd Texas and the 42nd Alabama crowded into the ditch and tried to scale the walls, they were instead subjected to fire coming from further left, where Gates’s brigade should have been if Hébert’s division still held the line of entrenchments they had earlier captured. Seeing this happening as he led his wing into the ditch, Michael felt a sudden pang of dread, they were about to be isolated without support from their left.
“Up, up the walls! For Texas!” shouted Rogers as he waved the color-bearers forward.
Embrasures on the battery where the guns were rolled forward to fire were within Michael’s reach as he climbed up, but the battery itself was just a mound of dirt built at a slope, making getting a hand and foothold difficult. The rear of the fort was a narrow opening in the walls, just enough to allow a team of horses in but nothing more, guarded too by high walls. The key to the fort was to rush in from the rear entrance, not just make a frontal assault on the walls.
The 42nd Alabama was firing volleys at anyone sticking his head around any of the embrasures, and from the sounds of the shouting and the screaming of horses coming from the other side of the walls, they were having a terrible effect.
Michael slid back down the slope and ran over to Captain Wyrich.
“Follow me, we’ll take B and G Companies and work around the rear,” Michael shouted in his friend’s ear. If Rogers hadn’t seen the retreat of Hébert’s division, the flank was going to be in the air, and if he didn’t act now, the momentum lost. If Michael could get several companies into the rear of the fort, they might be able to prevent the enemy from closing the gap.
“Corporal, tell the colonel I’m taking B and G Companies to work around to the rear entrance and take the fort from the inside.”
Slapping the man on the back, Michael turned and ordered his leftmost companies to follow him back out of the ditch. The 15th Arkansas was also trying to crowd up the slopes of the battery with half the regiment while the other half was trying to fend off the return of the 43rd Ohio. The Ohioans had retreated back behind the battery, and what Michael saw as he and his companies came out of the ditch was a crowd of blue in a mass of disorganization—some in formations and others streaming out of the rear of the battery through the exit he wanted to insert himself into.
They were situated on a hill, and Michael at once saw that what he wanted to do was going to be impossible. Coming around the ditch and skirting the rim of it, the 43rd Ohio was pressing forward and beyond the side that the 42nd Alabama, 2nd Texas, and 15th Arkansas were attacking. Phifer’s front was also now being assailed by the rallied 63rd Ohio. Though men were still running out of the battery position via the rear entrance, his defending infantry were attacking in force.
A fluttering of banners and a rush of light blue legs and dark blue coats brought a most unwelcome sight as Federal infantrymen of the 43rd Ohio, with a cheer, marched forward and came around the rear face of the battery and swung like a door. Shouting “Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!” the Federals came on, their colors bending toward their foes provocatively. Executing a left-wheel movement, the enemy was swinging through the opening Michael had just led his companies through. The rear of the fort was still a stampede to get out, and though men of the 2nd Texas were mounting the parapets, Michael knew the grand reversal was happening. Glory be damned, he thought as he decided he was too late.
Michael halted his two companies and swung them thirty degrees so as to engage the 43rd Ohio. Caught half in and half out of the ditch, the 15th Arkansas was in trouble, and it was through this trouble that Michael would have to pass. The door to the battery was forever closed; now Michael had to get his men back out of what he’d led them into. The Ohio regiment was standing off one hundred yards and firing into the open flank of the 15th Arkansas, and a battery of artillery was rumbling toward them to make the position more tenuous. Far from being beaten, the enemy appeared to be rallying quickly.
Several cannon reports startled Michael as he hurriedly looked for their origin; the 15th Arkansas was falling back, trying to fight as they went, but the moves by the 43rd Ohio and the battery of artillery cutting across their path of escape animated their movements.
On the parapet of the battery, appearing for the barest of moments, the colors of the 2nd Texas were planted. For that brief moment there appeared a line of rifles firing down upon those still crowding into the battery for protection. But that space was being swept with fire, both from inside the fort and from without, and those colors and men who were undaunted enough to stand upright and return the fire were just as soon knocked off their perch. The colors fell.
“To the rear, march!” Michael shouted and rushed to the front of his companies. The Arkansas boys were scrambling out of the ditch and running to catch up with the other half of their regiment, who were already many feet away from those who’d been trying to climb up the walls. There was little time to waste in trying any further to scale the height. Michael ordered the double quick and ran.
The artillery battery belching canister after the 15th Arkansas and into the ditch in front of the battery was cutting anything down that was unfortunate enough to be in the way, and the 43rd Ohio was advancing to take anything left in
the flank. Again men appeared on top of the walls, and the colonel himself rose up to grasp the colors and wave his struggling men up when he too tumbled back down the walls.
For a brief moment, Michael’s first thought was that his troubles were over. Rogers, if not dead, was wounded and would have to relinquish command. His next thought: he was now in command, and what was he going to do! The regiments were in a trap that was fast closing, and the hundreds of men milling about the battery face trying to climb the walls would not be easily started to the rear again. Seeing the colors and Rogers fall struck Michael as an unsuitable epitaph for the 2nd Texas’s death upon those earthen walls. The shame of Shiloh erased, but at a cost too horrible to recount.
“Fall in as best you can!” Michael shouted to Wyrich and ran over to the companies still in the ditch and on the walls, now hugging the battery for dear life.
“Fall back, on me, fall back on me!” Michael ran down the length of the ditch, shouting to his company commanders. The colors tumbled down once more from the parapet, as did the last of those whose temerity equaled their lack of luck on this day. Phifer’s regiments were in full flight on Michael’s right and the enemy was advancing upon them, leaving their right open. With the Arkansas regiment falling back on their left, the 2nd Texas was the only regiment still on the wall of the battery.
“C’mon, fall back! Out of the ditch and re-form!” Michael shouted. He began grabbing men out to throw them into ranks. Captains and lieutenants scrambled out and tried to restore some order, but the companies were mixed and jumbled, and as the enemy closed in on both sides, it was useless to try to forestall the panic. Men climbed out of the ditch, and it only took one brief look around to know that to re-form and march out in order would be foolishness. Once free from the obstacles, most chose to keep running.
Colonel Rogers was lifted severely wounded from the ditch, and those bearing him away might have saved themselves and brought away the dying Rogers if successive reports of cannon fire had not showered the edge of the ditch with canister. Scores were cut down, as were those attempting to carry Rogers away. Michael could only watch with incredulity at the final act and the shredding of Rogers’s sides as the canister fire did its work. There was no time to organize another attempt to carry Rogers’s body away.
The Shiloh Series: Books 1-3 Page 95
