Talons of Eagles

by William W. Johnstone

  Jamie obeyed orders and held his position.

  In the center of the Union line, General Prentiss was forced to surrender more than twenty-five hundred of his men, all that he had left after more than a dozen bloody charges against his position. Troops from Iowa began to show the white flag. They were cut off, surrounded, out of ammunition, and their situation was hopeless.

  General Grant kept looking toward the rear, where more than six thousand fresh troops, under the command of General Wallace, were expected to come marching in. It was five o’clock in the afternoon of this Bloody Sunday. Wallace would not show up until almost three hours later. He had received the wrong orders and then, when he got that straightened out, had taken the wrong road.

  At the river, hundreds of Union soldiers, confused and leaderless, were swimming across to the other side, having thrown away or lost their rifles. Fresh Union troops, almost forty thousand strong, who had just arrived on the scene, could not understand what was happening.

  Union cavalrymen tried to beat the frightened men back with the flat sides of their swords, but were soon overwhelmed by the hundreds of retreating soldiers.

  Union chaplains prayed for the men to turn around and fight. That ended when one nearly exhausted Union veteran told a chaplain, “Get out of my way, you damned fool. I’ve been to hell and it’s right across the river.”

  The chaplain and the infantryman got into a fist fight on the east bank of the Tennessee River.

  There is no written record as to who won the bare-knuckle altercation.

  As for the soldiers, both Union and Confederate, they were completely exhausted as night fell. Most had not eaten in twenty-four hours, and they just simply could not go on. The fighting for that day was over.

  * * *

  It was a horrible night. Neither side had adequate medical teams or a way to transport the wounded, and both sides were fearful of snipers. The wounded, hundreds of them, lay on the cooling ground along a five-mile stretch. They cried, begged, moaned, screamed, and many mercifully died as a cold rain began falling. Yankee and Rebel wounded found each other and huddled together for warmth and some degree of solace during the night.

  “Where you from, boy?”

  “Iowa. You hard hit?”

  “I reckon. My left leg’s shot off at the knee. I done stopped the bleedin’ by bindin’ it up tight, but it hurts somethin’ fierce.”

  “I’m belly shot,” the Union soldier spoke around the awful pain in his stomach. “And it’s bad. I don’t think I’m gonna make it.”

  “I know I ain’t. I’m from Alabama.”

  “Pleased, I’m sure.”

  “Hell of fight, weren’t it?”

  “For a fact, Alabama. Say, what’s that awful chomping sound coming from over there near the woods.”

  “Them’s hogs, Iowa. They’re rootin’ around, eatin’ on the dead. Hog’ll eat damn near anything.”

  “You believe in God, Alabama?”

  “Hell, yes! Don’t you?”

  “I guess. You believe in the Hell-Fires?”

  “I seen that today.”

  “Yeah. Me, too. Everything is fading, Alabama. I think I’m about to pass.”

  “I’m right behind you, Iowa.”

  They were found the next morning, arms wrapped around each other, the Bloody Blue and the Bloody Gray, brothers, finally, in death. They were too stiff to separate, so they were buried together. They had found something in common after all.

  14

  The next morning brought a sight that none of the combatants had ever before witnessed. Even Jamie, who had seen scores of Mexican soldiers piled up in death outside the Alamo, was shocked.

  Surgeons had worked all night sawing off limbs, and outside of makeshift hospitals, severed arms and legs were piled head high. Both sides had to post guards to keep the hogs from nearby hurriedly abandoned farms away from the amputated limbs. The badly wounded were laid out in neat lines among the stiffening dead, the doctors knowing they could do nothing for them.

  Bloody Sunday was about to move into Bloody Monday as the two sides rose as one and stared across the battle lines at each other.

  Both sides were disorganized and scattered. But even in disorganization they were soldiers, and soldiers fought. They fixed bayonets and took ammunition from the dead and made ready to resume the fighting.

  During the night, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jamie had dressed in captured Union uniforms and, with a group of their men, slipped into the Federal camp. Both were stunned at what they saw. Both raced back to inform their generals of the news.

  “Thousands of Yankees are massing over yonder,” Forrest told several Rebel generals.

  “If we don’t mount an attack right now,” Jamie said, “we’re done.”

  “Go tell Beauregard,” was the reply.

  But Beauregard could not be found. The searchers went to Beauregard’s tent, but General Bragg was sleeping there. No one thought to look in Sherman’s abandoned headquarters. Had they done so, they would have found Beauregard, sound asleep in Sherman’s bed.

  On the other side of the battle lines, Grant spent the rainy night under a tree, wrapped in a greatcoat against the elements, a cigar clamped between his teeth. “We’ll be victorious in the morning,” he told his aides, then went to sleep.

  Forrest began cussing the missing Beauregard, loud and long, calling him some very uncomplimentary names, not giving a damn who heard him do it.

  “I’ll be on the right, near the river,” Jamie said.

  “I’ll be on the left,” Forrest said, shaking hands with the guerrilla colonel.

  The first skirmish of the day came just at dawn, while the mist was still clinging close to the ground. The Federals beat them back.

  Grant had over fifty thousand men, twenty-five thousand of them fresh troops. Beauregard could muster up no more than eighteen thousand troops. By mid-morning, the Union forces had retaken much of the ground lost on Bloody Sunday. By mid-afternoon, the Rebels had sustained huge losses and were falling back to the south, many of them to protect the road leading to Corinth, Mississippi.

  “Tell Forrest and MacCallister to act as rear guard,” Beauregard ordered. “Tell them to round up as many stragglers as they can to assist them.” Beauregard slumped in the saddle. “Retreat,” he said softly, the words bitter on his tongue.

  The Union troops, flush with victory, charged down the road leading to Corinth. They were met by some three thousand men with two dozen cannons, two thousand of the Rebels under the command of a Colonel Jordan, and the Rebels held at the road long enough to let their comrades retreat in a soldierly and orderly fashion. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when the retreat started.

  Jordan ordered Forrest and Jamie to pull out, and he held while they made their retreat.

  The retreat did not lay as heavy on Jamie as it did with the others, for Jamie had been trained well in the guerrilla fighter’s credo: he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.

  But he did understand and sympathize with the Rebels’ feelings. The Federals were about to push, or attempt to push, deep into homeland. Jamie also had a hunch that the Union army had not seen the determination and fierce fighting that they would meet deeper in the South.

  Grant ordered his troops not to pursue the retreating Confederates. . . for several reasons: It would soon be dark and the sky threatened rain. His own troops were exhausted. And Grant knew once he entered the domain of the deep South, the fighting was going to be brutal—his men were simply not up to that. Yet.

  * * *

  The entire town of Corinth was turned into a hospital once the retreating troops arrived. At least six thousand wounded were sprawled all over the town, in every building and on the boardwalks and even in the streets and alleys. The piles of amputated limbs seemed to be everywhere waiting to be gathered up and burned. Two out of every three amputees died of infection. At the height of a dysentery and typhoid epidemic the number of men officially liste
d as sick was more than sixteen thousand.

  At Shiloh battlefield, stiffening and bloated bodies lay so close together that a man could walk for long distances without his boots ever touching the ground. The stench of hundreds of human bodies and nearly a thousand dead horses and mules was more than many in the burial detail could stomach.

  The exact number of dead on either side could never be accurately tallied. But it was close to being equal. Each side lost approximately two thousand dead and approximately nine thousand wounded. Four thousand dead and eighteen thousand wounded, total.

  On April 8, Island Number Ten, near New Madrid, Missouri, finally fell to Union hands after more than a month of fighting. That action opened the Mississippi River toward Memphis.

  Grant, whom many held responsible for the near defeat at Shiloh, was relieved from duty as a field commander, and General Halleck took over—and more than lived up to his nickname of Ol’ Cautious.

  Halleck did not attempt to take the town of Corinth until his troops had been heavily reinforced, and that took almost a month. When he had just under a hundred and twenty thousand men and several hundred cannons, Halleck proceeded to overtake the Rebels . . . very, very slowly. It took him twenty-five days to march the approximately twenty-two miles to Corinth. When he arrived, the town was almost deserted. Jamie and his Marauders had been sent up into East Tennessee. Nathan Bedford Forrest had been sent away on special assignment.

  Beauregard pulled his troops away from the town, and Halleck’s two-day shelling and then the taking of Corinth was nothing to write home about.

  But a very vital objective on the Memphis and Charleston railroad had been taken. Now the Union forces could turn their attentions to East Tennessee.

  Bloody Shiloh had been a terrible blow to the South. Many Federal officers felt sure the South would surrender after Shiloh. Those who thought that vastly underestimated the fighting spirit of the Confederates.

  It was said that the South never smiled again after Shiloh.

  When Colonel Jamie MacCallister heard that, he said, “Who the hell says you have to smile when you fight?”

  15

  Central Tennessee was now under firm control of the Union army. The Mississippi River was in Union hands all the way down to just north of Memphis. Vital rail lines had been taken by the Yankees. But if the Federals thought that the war was nearly over (and many did) they were badly mistaken.

  East Tennessee was a hotbed of pro-Union feelings, with civilians and soldiers alike prone to taking potshots at each other. Neighbor feuded with neighbor over the war, and as in other parts of the divided country, families would be forever split.

  Jamie and his Marauders had made it through East Tennessee on the way west without incident. It was much different this time. The four companies of Marauders had been ambushed by civilians half a dozen times on their way to Chattanooga, and to a man, they were getting damn sick and tired of it. Just across the Tennessee border, Jamie received orders by wire to turn his Marauders around and ride back to northeast Alabama. The Yankees were burning civilian homes in retaliation for attacks on Union held railroad lines.

  “Now that is evil,” Captain Jennrette said.

  Jamie agreed. “We’ll see if we can’t do something about that.”

  For a very brief period of time, the North had come up with its own version of the Marauders, a group of Union soldiers led by a spy named Andrews. They called themselves the Raiders. But they weren’t too successful at the guerrilla business. Early in April, they did manage to steal a Confederate train in Georgia and drive it to within about twenty-five miles of Chattanooga. There, their luck ran out. They were stopped and captured, and the leader of the Raiders and half a dozen of his men were hanged as spies.

  The Union just didn’t quite have this business of guerrilla warfare down pat as yet.

  But Jamie MacCallister did.

  “This Yankee bastard come up to our house,” an elderly man told Jamie, pointing to the burned-out hulk of what had once been a modest house. “Said there had been an attack on a train. Said we was gonna have to suffer the consequences. The son of a bitch then kilt our cows and hogs and chickens, stole our horses, and then burnt down our home. He and his men been doing that all over this part of the country.”

  “Does he have a name?” Jamie asked, feeling rage building deep within him. If the Yankees wanted to fight this war in such a despicable manner, Jamie would show them that both sides could play at this game.

  “General Ormsby Mitchell and some foreign-talkin’ bastard named Turchin. We call him the Turd.”

  Colonel John Turchin had been born in Russia and spoke heavily accented English.

  “So they’re making war on civilians?” Jamie asked.

  “You bet,” the old man replied. “And that ain’t all. Turd Turchin turned his men loose over in Athens, and the Damn Yankees looted the town and raped women. Now they’ve started hangin’ men.”

  Jamie gave the old couple some food from the Marauders’ supply and led his men up the road for about a mile, then halted them.

  “Sparks, take some men and find out if what that old man said is true. If it is, we’ve got a little score to settle.”

  With a grin, Captain Sparks and a dozen men rode off.

  “The Yankees had no call to do harm to that old man and woman,” Captain Dupree said, anger evident in his tone. “Just no call at all.”

  “No,” Jamie replied. “But for every home they burn, we’ll kill ten Yankees. For every town they loot, we’ll kill fifty, for every man they hang, we’ll kill a hundred, and for every woman they rape, we’ll kill two hundred. And that is a promise.”

  The next few weeks were going to be bloody ones in North Alabama.

  * * *

  Jamie sent a messenger to Beauregard, telling him of the atrocities committed against civilians. Beauregard was furious. He sent the messenger back with orders for Jamie to “Act as you see fit against the Yankees who are waging war against civilians in North Alabama.”

  Captain Sparks had returned and verified that Union troops were indeed looting and burning and terrorizing and sometimes raping Southern women in retaliation for Rebel raids against the railroad.

  Other men Jamie had sent out reported back that the commanding general of the Army of the Ohio, Major General Carlos Buell, knew nothing of the rapine and rape taking place by some of his troops.

  “He will before long,” Jamie vowed. “When he starts finding shot, hanged, or horse-whipped Yankee soldiers.”

  The words were spoken with such a cold hardness that the men close to Jamie had to suppress a shudder.

  Jamie walked off, his back stiff with anger.

  “He’s takin’ this right personal, ain’t he?” Sergeant Major Huske said.

  “Rape has touched his family, I believe,” Captain Dupree said. “And his home has been raided more than once by renegades. Yes. He takes such things very personally.”

  Beauregard’s message to Jamie concerning the unsoldierly like behavior of some Union troops, and Jamie’s disposition of the same, was one of the last orders he would give as commander of the Army of the Mississippi. Davis replaced him early that summer with General Bragg.

  Jamie sent scouts out to locate the camps and the strength of those troops who seemed to take satisfaction in the looting of towns and the raping of women and the hanging of civilians. Two days later, he had the locations of ten camps, and the information checked and verified.

  One camp was less than eight miles away from Jamie’s present location. His companies had been broken up into small units so they could better hide in the brush and timber. With his scouts back, he had gathered all his men together.

  “What is the strength of this unit here?” Jamie asked, pointing at the map.

  “Two companies, Colonel.”

  Jamie was thoughtful for a moment. Then he smiled a very hard curving of the lips. “We’ll hit them late this afternoon. Just when they’re settling in for supper. We t
ake everything we can, and what we can’t, we burn. Those left alive we strip naked and tie them in a line and put them on the road.”

  Captain Jennrette chuckled. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  Just as the sun was beginning to set over the horizon, Jamie and his Marauders had walked their horses to within easy striking distance of the Union camp. This particular bunch of Yankee renegades were so confident their guards were careless and not very alert. They were standing at their posts, rifles on the ground, eating supper.

  The Marauders hit the unfortunate camp from four sides, screaming like banshees and striking hard. The Federals must have thought the devil had unleashed his demons from hell; for many of them, that was their last thought as the Marauders shot and cut and slashed their way through the camp.

  These troops were accustomed to ordering unarmed civilians about; they were used to taking what they wanted by brute force. Up to now, they had seen no real combat. The survivors would know the horror of it and remember it for the rest of their lives—as well as the humiliation that was about to follow.

  The attack had been so sudden and so completely unexpected, Jamie’s companies suffered only four wounds, and they were minor. The two companies of Federals sustained more than fifty dead and at least that many wounded, some of whom would not last out the night.

  When the Federals saw the battle flag of the Marauders, a few of them became so frightened they dropped to their knees and began praying.

  The battle—if it could be called that—lasted for less than two minutes.

  Jamie’s men worked swiftly. They loaded up the supplies on pack horses, tore down the tents, and threw the blankets and spare clothing onto the growing pile.

  Jamie faced the line of prisoners. “Strip,” he told them. “Right down to the buff.”

  “I’ll do no such thing!” an officer blurted, his face red from anger and embarrassment.

  Jamie hit him in the mouth with the butt of a Sharps rifle with such force several teeth were knocked out and the officer hit the ground, unconscious.