Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  The Bishop smiles placidly at him. “Then I suppose we should get an attack underway. Kill a few Yankees, and worry about the commanding general’s impolitize later.”

  “I’ll im-poli-tease him, that’s for goddamn sure. But first I’m going to show him how a real man fights, how a Tennessean fights.”

  “Go to it, General.”

  Cheatham starts for his horse, hesitates. “General, shall I send in my division all at once, or by brigade?”

  “By brigade, General. Otherwise you risk being stretched too thin in some places, while in others you will have a needless superfluity of men. Strike successively by brigade, find where the Yankee line is vulnerable, and concentrate there.”

  Cheatham frowns. “By brigade then.”

  “Yes, by brigade.”

  When Private Joe Zein, Company A, 1st Louisiana Regular Infantry, feels the need to defecate, he defecates where he wants to, when he wants to, and in whatever company he wants to. Several nights in jail before the war and twice carrying a rail in this army have done nothing to alter his opinion of his rights.

  Nor does Zein compromise in the gratification of his other needs. He takes what he wants. Oh, they can stop him sometimes, gang up and keep him from taking. But not for long, not forever. And oddly, though his needs are insistent, he is a patient young man, can grin, shrug, and wait. One of these days he’ll catch that boy Dickie Krall off by himself. And Dickie’s gonna crawl all right, gonna beg to suck the big hammer. And the big hammer is gonna try Dickie’s little pink ass, too, make him squeal like the pig Zein stuck with a bayonet on the march up to Perryville. He laughs at the memory. God, what a look the boy had on his face that day! All the boys. Couldn’t goddamn believe what he’d done.

  Waiting for the brigade to go forward, Private Dickie Krall also remembers the pig. It had been a small pig, a shoat of the pink, nearly hairless variety. It must have been someone’s pet, for it had stood unafraid just inside the fence, nose stuck through the rails, as they’d marched past. A friendly, curious little pig. And Dickie would have eaten it. Sure. They all would have, for army rations are bad and frequently lacking. But marching into Kentucky, they’d been under strict orders not to forage. And they understood, for it would be hard to convince Kentuckians to join the banner after watching their cellars, smokehouses, gardens, coops, and pens emptied by Bragg’s army.

  But Joe Zein heeded no such niceties of diplomacy and discipline. He fixed the bayonet to the muzzle of his Enfield, stepped to the fence, and expertly skewered the pig over the top rail. The pig let our a squall of pain and disbelief. Zein laughed and, with a heave of his powerful arms, swung the shoat over the fence. He shook the Enfield, delighted with the squeals and convulsions this produced in the creature. “Got me a live one, boys! Makin’ a hell of a fight, but he’s comin’ along for supper.” He swung the musket across his chest in a parody of the manual of arms. “Bacon brigade. Port, arms! Left shoulder, arms! Forward, march!” He stepped out, swinging his free arm, the pig writhing and crying on the bayonet as Joe Zein broke into one of his obscene ditties:

  Oh, I wish I could screw, Dixie.

  Hooray! Hooray!

  In Dixie’s twat, I’d stick my cock.

  And make her yelp, by cracky.

  Hooray! Hooray!

  I wish I could screw, Dixie.

  It is a tenet of folklore, and an assurance given by every father attempting to teach a bruised and humiliated son self-defense, that bullies reveal themselves as physical cowards when sternly and expertly confronted. Mothers and children know that this is nearly always false. Private Joe Zein of the 1st Louisiana Regulars is a warrior as brave as a Viking berserker. Going into battle, he sings for the sheer joy of the slaughter to come. The tunes are familiar—Dixie, The Bonny Blue Flag, Rose of Alabamy, Yellow Rose of Texas—but each comes with Zein’s original lyrics: filthy, perverse, and bloody. Fate seems to protect him in battle, and he is never so much as scratched while all around him men die. This never surprises him, for his mother told him that he’d come home safe to the farm when the war is over. And she’s never wrong. She’s his ma, after all.

  While the rest of the 1st Louisiana stands waiting for the order to go forward against the Yankee line, Zein sits cross-legged in the center of the front rank, honing his bayonet on a brogan. The officers and sergeants ignore him, know that to get Zein to obey is more trouble than it’s worth. Not that Zein would attack one of them. No, to think of Zein as a powder keg is to misunderstand the man completely. Zein does not hate anyone. In truth, he’s a rather good-humored young man who simply enjoys food, drink, carnal pleasures, blood, and battle to extraordinary excess. Particularly battle, for which he has an inexhaustible appetite.

  “First Louisiana!” the colonel shouts. “Attention!”

  Zein climbs languidly to his feet, looks at Private Dickie Krall to his right. “Hey, Dickie-boy. You take care out there. After the fightin’, you and me gotta get more neighborly. You, me, and the Hammer.” He laughs.

  Krall ignores him, though his beardless cheeks pinken to the same color as the shoat on the march to Perryville.

  Despite Ben Cheatham’s determination to prove himself to Bragg before he personally and severely beats the man, there is still more confusion getting the advance underway. As written by Bragg, the order of battle calls for Major General Jones M. Withers’s division of four brigades to form the first line in the attack on the Federal right center, with Cheatham’s four brigades forming a second line following in support. This is not one of the better aspects of Bragg’s plan, since Withers and Cheatham will have to control lines nearly a mile long in an advance over broken terrain. To resolve the problem, Polk has split the line down the middle, giving Cheatham the left four brigades, Withers the right four.

  For the men of the 1st Louisiana Regulars and the five Alabama regiments of Second Brigade, Withers’s division, the result is more waiting. At the left end of the front line, the brigade is now part of Cheatham’s command. And since Cheatham knows the brigade’s temporary commander, Colonel J. Q. Loomis, only slightly, he decides to relay his instructions in person.

  The men of the 1st Louisiana stand easy as Cheatham and Loomis consult. Joe Zein wanders from the ranks, casting about for an agreeable place to defecate, finally squatting beside a smoldering fire where he will enjoy a bit of warmth on his bare backside. A few of the men are still amused enough by Zein’s outrageousness to hoot. Private Dickie Krall wonders if he could shoot Zein during the attack without getting caught.

  Shortly after 7:00 A.M., the brigade steps out at the regulation quick-time of Hardee’s Tactics, muskets at left-shoulder shift, bayonets glittering dully in the drizzle. The regiments have to cross three hundred yards of cornfield, the last hundred yards uphill, to reach the Yankee line. Whatever element of surprise might have been enjoyed half an hour ago has dissipated like the thinning mist in the cedars three hundred long yards away.

  Loomis’s attack will overlap the crease between Colonel William E. Wood-ruff’s Federal brigade (the last intact brigade of Davis’s division) and Brigadier General Joshua Sill’s brigade of Sheridan’s division. Promoted only the week before, Woodruff commands the smallest brigade in the Army of the Cumberland, but he has prepared his three regiments well, positioning his men behind a rail fence on the edge of thick cedars with the 8th Wisconsin Battery on his left. Shortly before the Rebels advance, he rides over to consult with Sill.

  Sill is glad to see him. He has felt melancholy since his midnight conversation with Sheridan. “I think you have done perfectly, Colonel,” he tells Woodruff. “We have an excellent field of fire and should, I think, inflict heavy casualties on the Rebels before they can fire effectively. We may drive them back with artillery alone.”

  Woodruff seems reassured, spends a minute finishing the cup of coffee provided by one of Sill’s aides. My God, he is a handsome man, Sill thinks. He imagines running his fingers through Woodruff’s thick brown hair. He shakes off the thoug
ht, smiles slightly.

  Woodruff tosses the cup to the aide. “Thanks, General. Good luck.”

  “And to you, Colonel.”

  Colonel Frederick Schaefer, commanding Sheridan’s reserve brigade to the rear of Sill, is by nature high-strung. It is not a temper he admires in others, and he has trained himself to maintain strict control over expression, gesture, and speech. Fortunately—and paradoxically—he finds that battle eases the task, makes him calmer, more precise. After his first battle in this country—a meaningless skirmish in Kentucky—he overheard one of his soldiers call him “stonecold.” Schaefer liked the phrase, has held on to it since.

  Sheridan is the opposite. Reticent, almost remote, at other times he is transformed by battle. Yet the fury that comes over Sheridan does not deflect his judgment, but rather confirms its unerring purpose. Schaefer has known certain genius only twice in his life: the first time in 1839 in Leipzig, when he’d heard Mendelssohn conduct Schubert’s Symphony in C Major; the second time in October 1862 in the chaos at Perryville, when he’d watched Phil Sheridan play his guns against Hardee’s flank, saving McCook’s corps and Buell’s army.

  Schaefer smokes his pipe, watches Sheridan pace in explosive bursts of his short legs, pausing frequently to listen to the firing on the right. Sheridan pauses in his pacing, glares at Schaefer. “Hear that firing, Schaefer? That’s Hardee’s boys going after Post’s brigade and Johnson’s reserve. Baldwin, I think. It’s just about our turn now. They should have hit us before, but something must have held them up. But they’ll come soon. Ten minutes at most.”

  Schaefer nods. “Yes, General. We are ready here.”

  Sheridan strides to where an orderly is holding his big brown gelding. “We’d damned well better be. From what Sill’s boys heard on the picket line, Ben Cheatham’s across from us. You can bet he remembers what our guns did to him at Perryville, and he’ll be looking to give us some back. Sure as hell.”

  Private Joe Zein breaks into one of his obscene ditties when the 1st Louisiana Regulars advance on the Federal line. The cornfield is soft, the mud clinging to the brogans, boots, rags, and bare feet of the soldiers. The Yankee cannons fire shell, the explosions throwing up geysers of mud and shrapnel. Zein whoops with laughter when a shell explodes fifty feet down the line, hurling men and body parts into the sky. “Good luck, boys! See you in hell!” he shouts. Another shell, this one apparently a dud, comes skidding across the field and through the line, tearing off the leg of a private named Meis. “No more dancin’ till dawn for you, Billy!” Zein shouts. He laughs, tears of mirth running down his cheeks. I am going to kill him, Dickie Krall thinks. I swear I will.

  At two hundred yards, the Union guns shift to canister and the Yankee infantry opens fire. The fire is stupendous. The butternut infantry leans into the storm, pushes grimly ahead. In theory, it should take them two minutes to cover one hundred yards at the quick time, half that at the double-quick, but under fire every foot takes an eternity. A private named Handrick, two men to the right of Krall, gives a wet cry, stumbles forward clutching desperately at his throat. “That one looks bad, Jim,” Zein shouts. “Better lie down. There you go.”

  Dickie Krall is crying, can’t help it. He won’t run, hasn’t before; but God, he is afraid of dying. Jesus, spare me. Oh, Mary, mother of God, spare me. Make them run. Make them—

  The head of the sergeant carrying the regimental flag explodes. Zein slaps Krall on the shoulder. “Why, I believe the boy lost his head. Now ain’t that a shame. And him so handsome and proud of waving that rag.”

  “Just shut up, Zein! For Christ’s sake, shut up,” Krall screams over the bedlam.

  Zein laughs, drops a thick arm over Krall’s shoulder, pulls the boy to him, and laps a thick red tongue over the boy’s cheek and across his eyes. He laughs again, gives Krall the buck-up, cheer-up hug an older brother might give a younger after a lost game of base-ball. A private named DeJarlis takes a bullet in the abdomen, sits down staring disbelievingly at the wound. Zein waves. “Bye bye, Dave.”

  Loomis’s brigade splits, three Alabama regiments on the left advancing against Woodruff’s brigade, the 1st Louisiana and two Alabama regiments on the right pushing toward Sill’s line. Woodruff’s infantry is firing furiously, but the Alabamans are coming hard now, firing a volley every twenty paces. The 25th Illinois and the 81st Indiana shudder and then break for the trees to the rear. Colonel Thomas Williams of the 25th grabs the regimental colors, rams the staff into the earth: “Rally, boys! We’ll plant it right here and rally the old 25th around it. Not another foot, boys, we’ll die right here if we have to!”

  No sooner have the stirring phrases left the colonel’s mouth when he is drilled through the heart by a minié ball. Unlike most credited with expiring between upright and prone, Williams is truly dead before he hits the ground. Loomis’s regiments storm over the position, whooping and yelling. Unable to get their guns away, the artillerymen of the 8th Wisconsin Battery fight with pistols, rammers, and fists until their captain is shot down and they are overwhelmed.

  The veteran 35th Illinois is positioned at a slight angle to the right of the sudden gap in the Federal line, its own right flank holding to the 38th Illinois and the 15th Wisconsin, the last regiments of Carlin’s battered brigade still holding against Cleburne’s assaults. Until now, the 35th has directed most of its attention to that fight, but now it shifts fronts coolly and fires a raking volley into Loomis’s flank. The execution done by five hundred rifle-muskets from an unexpected direction throws Loomis’s line into chaos. Moments later, the 25th Illinois and the 81st Indiana, rallied by their officers and embarrassed by their brief loss of nerve, come storming back through the woods. Assaulted from front and flank, the three Alabama regiments break and run, not pausing until they reach the trees on the far side of the cornfield.

  To the right of the seam between Woodruff’s and Sill’s brigades, the 1st Louisiana and the 19th and 22nd Alabama charge up the rise toward the Federal line. Private Dickie Krall feels his throat spasm with the Rebel yell. It is an unearthly sound, terrifying even to those who make it, for it bespeaks of something bestial and grisly in the soul. Krall can make the high ululating howl because the others in the ranks make it, can together with them put aside humanity in the terrified, ecstatic rush into combat. But loping along beside Krall, Private Joe Zein yells not in communal desperation but in simple wild joy. It seems that he could catch bullets in his teeth and spit them back, sweep an arm and level a score of Yankees. He is in this moment indistinguishable save for his clothing from some ancient, bronzehelmed warrior so dread that even Bishop Polk’s dybbuk wolf would give way growling amid the heaps of the soul-fluttering dead.

  The 1st Louisiana hits the 24th Wisconsin, a green regiment that disintegrates almost before it is touched. One youngster throws down his Springfield, tries to surrender, but Zein slams his bayonet into the center of the boy’s chest. He shakes the boy, perhaps hoping that he will squeal and convulse like the pig, but the boy is already dead, and Zein wrenches the bayonet free. He bounds on into the cedars after the retreating bluecoats. Led by Sergeant Simon Buck, the rest of the squad follows behind, most of the boys hoping, in the fragmentary way they can think of anything in these moments, that some Yankee will kill Zein.

  To the left of the gap abandoned by the 24th Wisconsin, the veteran 36th Illinois, with a record dating from the savage fighting at Pea Ridge in Arkansas, waits until the 19th and 22nd Alabama are nearly to the trees, then rises up and delivers a volley that stops the Rebels cold. But the Alabamans are veterans too, and the lines hold facing each other, blazing away at fifty paces. From the woods across the cornfield the Rebel cannons cannot fire for fear of hitting their own men, but the 4th Indiana battery on the left of the 36th Illinois has no such problem and rakes the Rebel line with load after load of canister.

  Meanwhile in the cedars, the 1st Louisiana hunts the boys of the 24th Wisconsin. Zein loves the game, stalks through the thickets like a tiger, leapi
ng into little knots of Yankees to kill at pointblank range. No one ever seems to think to fire at him. Dickie Krall sees Zein disappear into the shade of a thicket, realizes how easy it would be to shoot at the next glimpse of his broad back. A mistake, an accident of war. Others will share the relief, ask few questions.

  A thousand yards to the rear of Sill’s line, Captain Henry Hescock, commanding the 1st Missouri Battery and Sheridan’s artillery, studies the struggle between the 36th Illinois and the two Alabama regiments though his field glasses. Captain Charles Houghtaling of Battery C, 1st Illinois Artillery, stands at his side, doing the same. “There goes the reserve in,” Houghtaling comments.

  Hescock shifts his view, watches the 15th Missouri and the 44th Illinois of Schaefer’s Brigade, the slender erect German leading them, going into the woods to plug the gap left by the 24th Wisconsin. “It would be nice if we could give those boys on the line a little help until Herr Schaefer gets in position.”

  Houghtaling purses his lips. “Range is a bit tricky. Figure too short and we’ll hit our boys instead of the Rebs.”

  “Well, I think my Napoleons can drop a few rounds in all right.”

  “Oh, and my Parrotts, too. No doubt about it. I just thought I’d point out the dangers.”

  It is a routine for Hescock and Houghtaling to chaff each other. They are perhaps the two best artillerists in the army, and that alone would be enough to stimulate a rivalry. That their batteries are also equipped with cannons of rival qualities has produced a custom of rigorous scorekeeping and hot debate between the batteries. Hescock is suddenly serious. “No case shot, though. That really would be tricky.”

  Two minutes later Hescock’s battery opens fire, joined a minute later by Houghtaling’s. They range with shell, then shift to a mix of shell and solid shot. Under the fire of three batteries, the Alabama regiments begin to leak men to the rear. Colonel Loomis looks desperately behind him, hoping to see another brigade coming to his support. But Cheatham is still holding the other brigades back. Loomis pushes to the front of his line, where the 19th Alabama has just managed to reach the woods, tries to urge his men forward in a final, desperate push. But just then one of Houghtaling’s Parrotts sends a solid bolt slicing through the branches of an oak, severing a limb that strikes Loomis on the crown of the head. He drops as if poleaxed. Colonel J. G. Coltart takes command, orders the remaining regiments to fall back. In the cedars on the left, the 1st Louisiana is late getting the order. The men turn and run for the open, knowing that if they cannot catch up to the Alabamans, they will become the sole target of half a dozen Yankee regiments and batteries. Private Joe Zein has gone far ahead of the rest in pursuit of the Yankee boys of the 24th Wisconsin. No one wastes the time to go after him.