Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  Brigadier General Joshua Sill rides along his line smiling, giving commands in a cheerful voice. There are few to give really: his job is mainly to be seen. It is love that enables Sill to control his fear, love for the men whose fear he understands. He rides exposed to the Rebel fire to assure them that someone is taking greater risks, is surviving, is looking out for them.

  When Sill sees the Rebel line breaking, he touches spurs to his black mare, canters to where the 4th Indiana Battery is blazing away with double canister at the Rebel flank. Sill knows the tendency of gunners to ease up when they see the enemy flee, knows their fear of running short of ammunition and their even greater fear of continuing to ram powder charges down barrels so hot that they can hardly be touched. But they cannot give in to fear now, must keep double-shotting their guns, must keep firing until the Rebs are swept from the field. He swings into the rear of the battery, spotting the battery commander amid his gunners. “Captain Bush,” he shouts. “A word.”

  Private Joe Zein comes running from the woods and, for reasons fathomable only to himself, goes bounding across the cornfield at an angle to the Yankee line. Dozens of minié balls fly about him, but he is invulnerable. They cannot hurt him; his ma told him so and it is so, will always be so. He sees the handsome, bearded officer on the black horse leaning down to speak to a captain of artillery. A colonel at least, maybe a general. Zein drops to a knee, cocks the hammer of his Enfield, and squints along the barrel. The officer looks up, and across the distance of a hundred yards, their eyes meet. The puff of smoke from the muzzle of Zein’s Enfield interrupts and then he is up, bounding joyously across the field.

  The minié ball enters Sill’s head through the upper lip, carrying away his front teeth, passing through the oral cavity, severing the brain stem, and exiting the back of his skull. He has no time to react, has only the briefest picture of a boy kneeling in a harvested field—a handsome boy with shaggy black hair and laughing blue eyes sighting along a rifle barrel. The blue of those eyes is the last light to fade, contracting until the eyes are only pinpoints of pure blue far off in the darkness.

  Captain Bush catches Sill, eases him to the ground. After a moment, he stands, looks after Zein’s bounding form. “Well, you son of a bitch,” he mutters. “You just killed the best man I ever hope to know.”

  Told of Sill’s death, Sheridan reacts with a grimace and a nod. He rides forward to speak to Colonel Nicholas Greusel of the 36th Illinois, the senior regimental colonel.

  Sheridan finds Greusel afoot, straightening the line of First Brigade. The carnage all about is tremendous, the blue dead lying in the shadow of the cedars, the gray dead scattered across the field to the front, the positions taken for volley firing marked by irregular rows of fallen men. The lucky dying are unconscious, while the severely wounded and likely to die clutch themselves, cry and rock, as if seeking the comfort of the cradle or the long sea-roll of a primordial memory. Sheridan ignores it all, tells Greusel to take command of the brigade. They cover the critical questions quickly: ammunition, casualties, what the Rebs are likely to do next.

  “Who will command your regiment, Colonel?” Sheridan asks.

  “Major Miller. He’s a good officer.”

  “I know him. We’re rounding up the Wisconsin boys who didn’t hold. We’ll put them in reserve behind him.”

  Sheridan is about to wheel his horse when Greusel speaks. “They’re green, but it’s odd just the same; Wisconsin troops usually hold better than that.”

  Sheridan frowns, for the comment seems out of place. Conversational. “Yes, well—”

  “I sent General Sill’s body back to the hospital near the pike. I think they’re calling it the Gresham house.”

  “I know of it.”

  “Do you know what he said to me once, when I said that it was unfair how he’d been replaced by an officer as weak as Bandbox Johnson? He said that I should be charitable, that General Johnson had four years of seniority and much more field service than he did. Then he apologized for taking my place in command of the brigade, said he never would have requested assignment to this division had he known that that would be the result.”

  Greusel’s voice has become thick and he avoids Sheridan’s eyes. Sheridan sits his horse for a long moment then climbs down. This is delicate and Sheridan is rarely a man of delicacy. He steps to Greusel, places both hands on the taller man’s shoulders. “General Sill was my roommate at West Point. I never would have graduated without his help. But I can’t think of him now. And you can’t either, Colonel. We can’t think of anything except holding this position and killing as many Rebs as we can.”

  “Yes, General. I’m sorry. I—”

  “Never mind, Colonel. Don’t mind anything except the work.”

  Sheridan mounts, looks out over the field. Wounded Rebels are tottering back toward the cedars. A few of the closest stumble into the Union lines, collapse beside grievously wounded Yankees. Before long we won’t fight this way, Sheridan thinks. We won’t let their wounded walk away; we’ll shoot them down. “They’ll be coming soon, Colonel,” he calls to Greusel. “I’ll give you what help I can.”

  The 1st Louisiana and the five Alabama regiments of Loomis’s brigade lie exhausted under the trees on the south side of the field. Colonel Alfred J. Vaughan’s brigade of five Tennessee regiments and the 9th Texas comes forward in line of battle to the edge of the cornfield. There is a good deal of jeering and chaffing of Loomis’s brigade by Vaughan’s men, the Texans in particular. “So you yellowhammers couldn’t get ’er done, huh?” one of the Texans shouts at a dozen of the Louisiana soldiers, Privates Dickie Krall and Joe Zein among them.

  Sergeant Simon Buck levels a bloodshot gaze at the Texan. “We ain’t no yellowhammers. We’re Louisiana tigers, the 1st Regulars. And let me tell you something, son. Over there you’ll find about the hottest place you ever struck. We left a lot of good boys dead over there, and it ain’t fittin’ that you treat them with anything but respect.”

  The Texan bites his lip. “Sorry, coz. Didn’t mean no harm. Just funnin’.”

  “Well, you go have your fun over there and good luck to you.”

  Joe Zein nudges Dickie Krall. “I got me a tiger hammer. Wanta see?”

  Krall gets up, walks a dozen paces, and slumps down next to Sergeant Buck. Zein chuckles.

  Shortly before 8:00 A.M., Ben Cheatham sends forward Vaughan’s brigade and the Alabama and South Carolina brigade of Colonel Arthur M. Manigault. Together, the brigades have the power to break through Woodruff and Greusel’s line, but the confusion occasioned by Polk’s revised order of battle delays the delivery of the message to Manigault by five minutes and the brigades go forward too far apart to support each other. Vaughan’s five Tennessee regiments strike the 25th Illinois and 81st Indiana of Woodruff’s brigade, driving them back from the same fence they’d abandoned in the fight with Loomis’s brigade. But again the Yankee regiments rally and charge back into the fight. Unsupported by Manigault and taking fire from front and both flanks, Vaughan’s Tennesseans retreat.

  The 9th Texas, the adopted “foreign regiment” of Vaughan’s brigade, does not get the order to retire. Advancing to the left of the Tennessee regiments, the Texans have the odd experience of finding no one to fight. They push into the cedars, making jokes about how the Yankees have run at the first sight of a Texan. Colonel William H. Young, only twenty-four and as filled with braggadocio as his men, is determined to find an opponent. He obliques the regiment to the right and stumbles into the right flank of the 35th Illinois. Enthusiastically and without orders, the Texans open fire at two hundred yards, doing little but pelt the trees about the surprised Illini. Young shouts at them to cease fire and leads them forward another hundred yards. But again the Texans can do little damage while Illinois bullets snick through the trees, dropping Texans in steadily increasing numbers.

  Raging, Young leads a charge over a rail fence to within fifty yards of the 35th’s line. Now, goddamn it, they should be abl
e to hit something! But before the Texans can improve the score, the 38th Illinois of Carlin’s brigade, withdrawing under the continual pounding of Wood’s brigade of Cleburne’s division, chances by the rear of the 9th Texas. The 38th, which along with Hans Heg’s 15th Wisconsin has been holding the stub of the Yankee line for the better part of an hour, is in a thoroughly awful mood and takes great pleasure in laying several volleys into the backsides of Young’s Texans.

  For five minutes the Texans are caught in a ferocious crossfire. Young dashes about, trying to shout orders over the din, until his horse is shot from under him. He scrambles up, runs from company to company ordering a charge, then grabs the regimental colors and leads his men forward against the 35th Illinois.

  After all the frustration and wasted Longhorn blood, Young’s timing is perfect. Vaughan’s Tennessee regiments come rolling across the field to strike Woodruff’s line a second time. Battered and short of ammunition, Woodruff’s three regiments fall back through the cedars to a new position near the Harding house, seven hundred yards south of the Wilkinson Pike. Vaughan’s regiments pause for breath and to assess the cost of breaking the Yankee line. It is staggering, the 12th Tennessee alone losing more than half its men dead or wounded.

  By 8:30 A.M., it would seem that no place along the entire length of Woodruff and Greusel’s line could have escaped some form of human trespass by boot, wagon wheel, or shell blast. But until Vaughan’s 154th Tennessee charges the 81st Indiana, nothing has penetrated one particular thicket that is home to a spectacularly fecund colony of rabbits. Suddenly, rabbits are everywhere, “hopping across the field like so many toads.” It is then that a curious thing happens. As if by a common consent that would do lemmings proud, the rabbits take cover with the men of Greusel’s line, snuggling against them, crawling into pockets and haversacks, taking shelter under arms and legs.

  A few of the men are amused, attempt to pet the rabbits. More are disconcerted, swat at them, fearing that they carry disease or perhaps belong to some venomous southern species of lagomorphs. Colonel Francis T. Sherman of the 88th Illinois, a practical man who manufactured brick in Chicago before the war, is among the amused. “And what dastardly tactic do you suppose the Rebs will try next?” he asks his adjutant.

  His adjutant, a bespectacled, bookish young man, frowns. “I have no idea, Colonel. Do you suppose that they were domesticated once?”

  “The Rebs? I doubt it.”

  “No, I meant the rabbits.”

  “Hell of a lot of them for that.”

  The adjutant, who has read Darwin, persists. “But suppose a pair of them had been family pets and escaped. Then—”

  Sherman, who is gazing into the smoke that now eddies across the cornfield, feels a sudden sting on his cheek. He raises a hand, feels a shard of glass protruding from the skin. What in hell? He turns to the adjutant for an explanation, sees the boy lying on his back, a red hole where his right eye should be, shattered spectacles askew on his nose. “Here they come, boys!” Sherman shouts.

  Sheridan has told Captain Hescock, his artillery chief, to damn the ammunition supply and to hurl as much iron as he can into the advancing Rebs. The batteries of Hescock, Houghtaling, and Bush blaze away. On the line, Bush can fire canister, but Hescock and Houghtaling are too far away. Hescock takes a chance, loads his Napoleons with grape—the awkward stands of small roundshot that have fallen out of favor in preference to canister since old General Taylor made Braxton Bragg a hero at Buena Vista with his famous request. Twice the size of canister balls, Hescock calculates that the grapeshot will clear the Federal line. He is right, and the grape hits Manigault’s brigade with frightful effect.

  Under the fire of the Yankee batteries, Manigault’s regiments advance coughing, eyes streaming, through the breeze-blown smoke from Vaughan and Woodruff’s fight. Manigault, a sharp-featured thirty-nine-year-old Charleston businessman, rails at the negligible support from the Southern batteries. If private business ran like the goddamn army, every business would fail, there would be no jobs, and the country would go belly-up!

  When the Rebel line is fifty yards short of the 88th Illinois, Colonel Sherman gives the order and the Illini stand, scattering rabbits, and slam a volley into the face of Manigault’s two South Carolina regiments. Rocked back, the “sand lappers” try to steady, only to be hit by a second devastating volley. They retreat, soon joined by Manigault’s Alabama regiments, which have likewise run up hard against Sheridan’s line.

  It is time to pull back. Phil Sheridan knows it, though his inclination is, as always, to stand and slug it out. But the eternally rational part of his mind, the part that refuses to rage even in battle, speaks now in a voice very like Sill’s: “Your choice may determine whether you become a great general or die a foolish one.”

  Sheridan orders Greusel to fall back on Schaefer’s reserve while Roberts’s brigade—as yet nearly unengaged—draws in from the left. Sheridan gallops back to the Harding house, finds Woodruff’s brigade and Carlin’s two regiments refilling their cartridge boxes. To Carlin’s right are a ragtag collection of companies, squads, and barely organized soldiers too stubborn to abandon the battlefield. “Who are those men beyond Carlin, Colonel?” Sheridan asks Woodruff.

  Woodruff, who is concentrating on loading his Navy Colt, glances where Sheridan is pointing. “What’s left of Post’s brigade and a few men from Baldwin’s brigade, I think. Davis is over there somewhere.”

  Sheridan would like to talk to General Jefferson C. Davis, whom he dislikes as a man but respects as a fighter. But time is too short. He turns to his adjutant. “Find General Davis. Tell him I will conform to his left.”

  The 36th Illinois, Colonel Greusel’s regiment until he succeeded Sill, loses its second commander of the day when Major Miller is severely wounded. Captain Porter C. Olson takes command, requesting permission for the regiment to leave the line to refill cartridge boxes. As the rest of Greusel’s brigade falls back on the Harding house, the 36th Illinois reaches the Wilkinson Pike. They find half a dozen ammunition wagons of Thomas’s corps and beg for cartridges. The ordnance sergeant glances at the regiment’s Model 1842 rifle-muskets. “I don’t think I can help you boys.”

  Captain Olson, red-haired and quick-tempered, takes this to mean a refusal based on corps membership. “The hell you can’t,” he growls, starting to unholster his Colt.

  The ordnance sergeant throws up his hands. “Hold on, Captain. I would if I could, but you need sixty-nine caliber and all I got is fifty-eight. You’re welcome to see for yourself.”

  A dozen soldiers of the 36th take the invitation, dig frantically through the wagons. Incredibly, there isn’t a .69-caliber cartridge anywhere. Cursing, Captain Olson turns, nearly colliding with a tall horse that seems to have appeared from nowhere. Olson looks up at the rider: a pasty-faced youngish man, clean-shaven except for a heavy mustache that doesn’t quite mask a large mole on the upper lip. For a moment Olson hardly recognizes Major General Alexander McDowell McCook, who has about him the look of a revenant—some formerly prominent personage lost at sea or kidnapped or fugitive for debt, who has reappeared at this moment to upset the family that no longer misses him, has nearly forgotten that he ever existed.

  Olson salutes. “General! I’m sorry, I—”

  “Do you command here?”

  “Yes, sir. Our colonel had to—”

  “Pull your regiment back to the Nashville Pike. We will try to hold there.”

  Olson would protest, nearly does. But they have no .69-caliber cartridges here and he must go looking for some anyway. “Yes, sir.”

  McCook rides on. He has received orders from Rosecrans to reorganize his wing north of the Nashville Pike. But Sheridan’s division still fights, and he should see to it. Brooding on choices, McCook rides slowly along the Wilkinson Pike.

  Braxton Bragg has often heard of generals with a feel for battle, generals who know intuitively how to maneuver, when to attack, where to send reinforcements. Bragg has no such t
alent, must labor to fit every report, every fact seen or heard, into an overall picture of the battle. He is horseback now, a fine if rather stiff equestrian, riding from one elevation to another, trying to get a better sense of the battle. He does not approach the line and the actual fighting, for that would risk losing his grasp on the whole. He communicates with his generals by courier, feels no need to show his physical presence to the soldiers doing the fighting.

  Bragg and his field staff pause atop a slight rise to the rear of Hardee’s headquarters. Colonel Brent interrupts Bragg’s inspection of the smoke drifting from the most recent clash between Cheatham and Sheridan. “General, there’s another message from Hardee requesting reinforcements. He says that two or three fresh brigades can make the difference now.”

  “Tell him that Wheeler is due on the field shortly. I will send him against the Yankee flank. Beyond Wheeler, I can provide nothing at present.”

  Sending the message eases Bragg’s mind. He will not upset his plan. There is far more risk in making an impetuous change than in sticking with a plan made in the cool, unemotional rationality before battle. Let Hardee push on with what he has while Polk smashes in the Union center. Breckinridge is best used where he is. The plan is working; just give it time.