Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  Major Joseph O. Thompson, acting commanding officer of the 44th Mississippi, Chalmers’s Brigade, could weep while inspecting his men. They are good men, fine men, veterans. Then why in hell are they being expected to fight with flintlock muskets little better than clubs? It is insulting, humiliating, mad. He clenches his jaw, stalks down the line.

  Three weeks ago, when Colonel Blythe was carried deathly ill to the hospital, the division chief surgeon put the regiment under quarantine. The men accepted their lot, busied themselves with the innumerable small tasks that keep soldiers from lassitude or outright insanity in the endless tedium of camp life. They played cards, read, sewed buttons, stitched seams, wrote home, threw dice, told the same old stories again, and cleaned their new Enfield rifle-muskets, of which they were inordinately proud. So it was an extraordinary agony when the brigade ordnance officer arrived to gather up the Enfields for distribution elsewhere. The men cast hard looks Thompson’s way, grumbled that Colonel Blythe would never have let this happen to his boys.

  The regiment was released from quarantine the day after Christmas. Thompson sent a detail to the ordnance officer for weapons and waited in his tent with an anticipation he hadn’t felt since Christmases as a child. But when the detail returned, the men were stricken, stunned with humiliation. Wordlessly, the sergeant threw back the canvas atop one of the wagons to reveal a jumble of rusted, dented, and bent muskets, some of them awkward percussion-cap conversions, many still with their original flint locks. Thompson picked up an 1816 Harpers Ferry musket with a cracked stock, a missing hammer, and no ramrod.

  “The ramrods are in the other wagon,” the sergeant said. “They just gave us a bunch and told us to match them up the best we could. Half of ’em are bent.”

  “How about bayonets?”

  “They spared us one for the entire regiment, Major. Ain’t much of one neither.”

  Thompson started to drop the musket on the pile, thought better of it. “I must go see the general. In the meantime, do your best to salvage something from this … this refuse.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant said.

  But there were no better weapons. General Chalmers would like to say otherwise, but he cannot: 44th Mississippi must do the best it can to requisition arms on the field of battle. Thompson tried to argue, held up the battered, hammerless Model 1816, but Chalmers cut him short: “Major, we are a small nation fighting a large nation that is far superior in manufacturing capacity, including the means to produce firearms. Therefore, we must take from their soldiers what we need to maintain our independence. That should not be too difficult as long as we remember that Southern manhood excels theirs by a far larger margin than their manufacturing capacity exceeds ours.”

  Thompson, who until a few months ago had taught French, classics, and introductory logic in a boys’ school in Biloxi, blinked several times. “But if we are to win our independence—”

  “We do not need to win it, sir! It is ours by natural right. We have declared it, now we must defend it.”

  “But, General, my men—”

  “Tell your men to be manful! Tell them to go forward with a bold front and whatever weapons come to hand. Defeating the Yankees will provide them with more than enough to choose from in the way of arms.”

  The men of the 44th Mississippi stand downcast, only loosely at attention, as Thompson inspects the line a final time before the attack. Many have refused to carry the rusted flintlocks at all, have chosen hefty clubs or staffs instead. A few have spades with sharpened edges. Still others have axes and old swords. My God, Thompson thinks, give us a few pitchforks and scythes and we shall look like the Paris mob storming the Bastille.

  He returns to the center of the line, sets himself as if he actually had the confidence he means to assume. “All right, boys. We’ve got more to fight for than just victory. Today I’d see us become a legend: the regiment that thrashed the Yankees with clubs and fouled flintlocks. After this fight, we shall be the best-equipped regiment in the army. And no one—mark you, no one—will ever take our rifles again.”

  For a long moment, there is silence, then someone starts to cheer and then the entire regiment is whooping its agreement. Thompson is startled, has to blink back tears. Please, God, he prays, let it come true. Don’t let these boys down.

  Bierce stands a few yards from Hazen, watching the quiet woods beyond the Cowan house. Except to give his report, he has not spoken to his colonel since returning. Hazen pauses in his pacing, stares at Bierce with his usual mix of irritation and irony. “You are quiet, Lieutenant. No philosophical observations?”

  “No, Colonel.”

  “Did you see something out there that shocked even you?”

  Bierce hesitates. “No, Colonel. I’m afraid I saw nothing that didn’t confirm my opinions.”

  “And the confirmation?”

  “Just two wounded men caught between the lines, Colonel. Nothing exceptional.”

  Shortly after 9:00 A.M., with the bizarrely armed 44th Mississippi on the right flank, Chalmers’s brigade steps out to the rap of drums and the playing of The Bonny Blue Flag. The latter is a rather dismal effort, the band having difficulty concentrating on the music in the cold, the damp, and the slippery footing. The distance to the Yankee line is wide, eight hundred yards, and all of it under a rain of case, shell, and solid shot.

  Halfway across the open, when the advance should be gaining momentum for a charge, the line becomes entangled in the sheds and fences of the Cowan farm. It emerges into the cottonfield in two parts. Led by Chalmers himself, the 7th, 10th, and 41st Mississippi sweep ahead against Cruft’s line, while the 9th and 44th Mississippi angle to the right to strike Hazen’s position in the Round Forest.

  The 31st Indiana and the Union 2nd Kentucky of Cruft’s brigade wait behind fences, boulders, and hastily erected breastworks until the Rebels are within easy range, then lay down sheet after sheet of volley fire until the field to their front is hidden in acrid smoke. Chalmers’s line stumbles back, regains its footing, and plunges forward with a yell. But Cruft’s men are veterans, too, answer the high-pitched yelling with a growling cheer of their own, and stand to the work. Fifty yards short of the Yankee line, Chalmers can take his men no farther. They hold there, blazing into the smoking woods while the Yankees blaze back. It is hellish, indescribable, the smoke so thick that no one on either side can make out a clear target to the front or a friend a half dozen paces to left or right. Many of Chalmers’s men strip bolls of cotton from the plants to shove in their ears against the din. Yankee gunners ram double canister, cut fuses short so that shells explode only feet above the Rebel line. It is dangerous, but the Yankee gunners are surpassingly confident while, as usual, the Rebels are given nothing in the way of support from their own batteries.

  Chalmers, riding his third horse of the morning, gallops behind the line, shouting for a bayonet charge. A shell fragment that has already decapitated one private and torn the arm off another expends most of its remaining velocity ricocheting off Chalmers’s skull. He drops senseless into the cotton. The line gives way, the staff officers too confused and deafened to assume direction of the line. Command should devolve on Colonel T. W. White of the 9th Mississippi, but no one knows where to find him.

  Colonel White is leading the 9th and the ill-armed 44th Mississippi against the Round Forest. At first the advance seems strangely easy despite the artillery fire, but then the 41st Ohio rises up from cover to open a tremendous fire on the Mississippians. The Rebel line goes to ground to return fire. Among the men of the 44th, soldiers struggle with their ancient weapons, trying to prime locks and coax sparks from wet flints. Men armed only with clubs, staffs, spades, axes, and broken muskets can do nothing except scrabble in the earth for rocks to hurl at the Yankee line. Several of the flintlocks explode, iron fragments injuring a dozen men. Private Absalom McMurra’s musket lets off a sputter of escaping gas, more a fart than an explosion. He lowers it in disgust only to have it kick violently in his hands.
To his horror, he sees the slouch hat of the private lying in front of him go cartwheeling across the field. The private feels about his scalp for blood or perhaps flame, finds none, and goes back to wrestling with his own flintlock. McMurra is shaking too hard to risk reloading, lies down to survive or not survive as God wills.

  Amazingly, the Rebel line holds for an hour under the Yankee fire until the 41st Ohio, its ammunition exhausted, gives way to the 9th Indiana. The disciplined fire of the Hoosiers is too much. The Mississippi line falls back. Most of the 9th Mississippi streams back to the abandoned rifle pits. The majority of the 44th Mississippi takes cover in a hollow behind the Cowan house, where the men will become spectators to the carnage for the rest of the day. To augment their flintlocks and improvised weapons, the regiment has gathered a total of eight abandoned rifle-muskets, none of them Federal.

  In the shelter of the hollow, Private McMurra hands his hat to the private whose head he nearly shot off. The man nods, inspects the inside for lice, then pulls it down over his forehead, nearly to his eyes, folds his arms, and falls asleep.

  Watching from the low ridge southeast of the Cowan farm, it seems to Major General Jones Withers that Chalmers’s brigade is pushing the Yankees slowly but steadily into the cedars. He trots forward to the rifle pits, where Brigadier General Daniel Smith Donelson has mustered his big Tennessee brigade.

  “General,” Withers calls. “You can make ready to go forward momentarily.”

  Donelson turns, a ferocious old man with rumpled hair, the burning eyes of a zealot, and a mouth set hard by unabashed certainty. “About damned time! We should have gone in half an hour ago.”

  Withers ignores this, begins delivering careful instructions. Old Dan nods impatiently, mutters: “Yes, yes, of course.”

  A sudden ripple of consternation runs down the ranks. Withers looks up, is stunned to see Chalmers’s brigade streaming across the field through the raining fire of the Yankee guns. “Goddamn it!” old Dan snarls. He kicks his horse forward, bringing his sword up to order the charge.

  “General!” Withers shouts.

  Donelson wheels his horse. “What, goddamn it?”

  “You can’t go forward and maintain your ranks. Not against that flood.”

  “We’ll push them aside with bayonets or drive them before us!”

  Withers stares steadily at the old man until Donelson lets his sword arm drop limp to his side. “I am disappointed, too, General,” Withers says. “I may have erred in not sending you forward sooner. But now we will have to wait another chance. Open your ranks, let Chalmers’s men through, and then join me. We’ll plan what to do next.”

  Shortly after 10:00 A.M., the firing all along the line eases for perhaps twenty minutes. Sheridan holds on, amid the cedars and limestone outcroppings north of the Wilkinson Pike. Davis has given way under Cleburne’s pounding, but Rousseau has managed to bring the brigades of Beatty, Shepherd, and Grose in to cover Sheridan’s right.

  Shortly after halting Donelson, Withers receives Brigadier General Alexander Stewart’s cool note announcing his intention of leading his brigade against Sheridan’s stronghold. Withers supposes it is inevitable: Cheatham has squandered his brigades and Patton Anderson’s brigade, too, and now Withers and Stewart must throw weight in his direction rather than minding their own responsibilities. Well, Stewart will get the job done. If there is a man in this army serving far below his capacities, it is Stewart. If asked, Withers would cede command to him in a moment and go home to raise troops. Or, better still, let Stewart take Polk’s place. Send the Bishop off to raise money and recruits; Withers would happily take orders from Stewart.

  He takes a dispatch book, writes: General, I trust completely in your success. I will order Donelson forward when I hear your attack.

  While Stewart sites his batteries and briefs his colonels, Donelson’s Tennessee brigade waits behind the flimsy breastworks constructed by Chalmers’s men in their two-day wait in the rain. The 8th Tennessee doesn’t enjoy even that much protection, must wait behind the slender cover of a rail fence. The range from the Yankee line is eight hundred yards, but a Springfield or an Enfield can kill at a thousand yards and more. Minié balls sing across the field, slapping into the fence, the ground, and occasionally a man. By the end of fifteen minutes, the 8th has suffered twenty dead and wounded. But though this sacrifice is hard, harder than any made when the feet are moving forward, the 8th stands firm with the rest of the brigade. All Donelson’s Tennesseans have something to prove: a question of manhood to the general they hate to a man, General Braxton Horse’s-Ass Bragg, who despises Tennesseans almost as much as he hates (with solid reason, the Tennesseans believe) the Kentucks.

  Considering the amount of their blood Bragg had squandered at Shiloh and Perryville, the Tennesseans have long guessed his animosity. But in the last month they’ve had documentary evidence: a letter written by none other than the general’s whore-witch wife, Elise. How exactly a copy of the letter came to be passed around the brigade staff and eventually—in a dozen copies—through the ranks, no one knows or is willing to admit. But few doubt its authenticity: Dear husband, please do not trust the Tennessee troops. Put the Tennesseans where your batteries can fire upon them if they attempt to run. Lead them into action yourself and shame them into fighting.

  All right, we’re waiting, General. Lead us yourself. And when we’re done whupping those Yankee boys, we’ll invite you to count our wounds, invite you to count how many prisoners and guns we’ve taken, invite you to count all the dead and wounded—theirs and ours—we’ve strewn across the landscape; and then you can tell us why you and your whore don’t trust Tennesseans.

  Oddly, the one man in the entire brigade who may not have seen the letter is Brigadier General Dan Smith Donelson. Not that it matters greatly; he already despises Bragg with every fiber of his sixty-two-year-old body. Others may call him “Old Dan,” but Dan Donelson doesn’t feel old. Age has only burned away the foolishness of youth, the glut—the veritable hyperemia—of desire for food, drink, and women. He feels purged, supple, immeasurably alive. He has no more desires, save to show them all how sixty-two is not old, but rather transcendent with power. He could be a shaman, already looks the part, can feel the power roaring into him from the ground, the trees, the very air. Give him the order, goddamn it, it is time for Dan Donelson to kill Yankees.

  Shortly before 10:30 A.M., as Alex Stewart’s batteries open a devastating fire on Roberts’s portion of Sheridan’s line, Withers orders Donelson’s brigade forward. Watching from behind Cruft’s batteries, Brigadier General John Palmer is deeply moved, will later write his wife: They came toward our position in solid lines and moving in admirable order. It was not easy to witness that magnificent array of Americans without emotion.

  But the Cowan farm still stands in the way. Like Chalmers’s brigade before them, Donelson’s regiments lose their careful order in the warren of sheds and fences. The brigade straggles into the cottonfield as the Yankee guns open from the cedars ahead and the Round Forest on the right. Grimly, Donelson prods the line into order. A battery of Federal Napoleons deploys in front of the Round Forest, trying to enfilade Donelson’s line at an angle that will make every solid shot a dozen times lethal. Donelson splits off the 16th and half of the 51st Tennessee to drive the guns back under the cover of the trees while he pushes ahead against Cruft’s smoking line.

  Captain Drury Spurlock, whose parents came to Murfreesboro the day before to tell him of his brother’s death, leads Company C, 16th Tennessee, along the railroad embankment toward the Round Forest. His brother died of a wound gotten fighting for the Confederacy’s hold on Kentucky, a state too gutless to fight for its own rights. What does Spurlock fight for? He had answers once, could add revenge for his brother’s death, but he can’t imagine any reasons now. He is terrified. God, they are all terrified, go forward because others go forward, drive ahead shooting, screaming, sobbing. The first bullet strikes him to the left of the navel, puncturing his
spleen, the second tears through his left lung, the third enters just below the left nostril, passing through the oral cavity to lodge in the hard muscle right of the spinal cord. The succession of impacts is so rapid that he cannot for a moment absorb the reality that he has been hit at all. He stumbles, curious why his legs have suddenly gone wooden, then pitches onto the hardpacked cinders. He lies there, feet passing over him, other men falling nearby, wonders at the oddity of the cinders, their burned-out desolation. I’ll roll onto my back, he thinks, let my eyes clear, then pick one up and look at it carefully. He has the sudden realization that he is wounded, is probably dying. Poor mother, he wants to think. Poor father. But he cannot keep his mind from wandering. I’ll roll over in a moment. That will make everything clearer. But the moment stretches out, becomes immaterial.

  Colonel John H. Savage, commanding the 16th Tennessee, sees Spurlock go down. A moment later, Savage’s brother and second in command, Lieutenant Colonel L. N. Savage, pitches from his horse. Major James Womack swings a leg over his saddle to go to the lieutenant colonel’s aid, but a Yankee minié ball tears through his shoulder before he can dismount. The major yells, tries to regain his seat, but loses it. He lands next to the lieutenant colonel, lies writhing in pain.

  Colonel Savage curses, kicks his horse off the embankment in a shower of black cinders. Donelson is a hundred yards away, pushing his line toward Cruft. “Donelson, you goddamned fool!” Savage screams. “You’re going to get us all killed!”

  Donelson turns in his saddle, eyes glittering like an ancient cockatrice that might at any moment rise winged from the slough of the man. “Return to your men, Colonel, or I shall shoot you myself!”

  “Murderer!” Savage snarls.

  In the middle of Donelson’s line, Colonel William L. Moore feels his horse shudder beneath him. A half dozen years ago, Moore might have been agile enough to jump free; but his second wife has proven a far better cook than the first, and Moore’s girth has expanded by a belt notch with each passing year. The mare goes down on her knees, as if giving him another moment to get free, but he is too slow, and she rolls onto her side, pinning Moore’s leg beneath her. The line pushes forward without them, losing definition in the battle smoke and the fountains of earth, cotton, and flesh thrown up by the exploding shells of the Yankee cannons. Moore curses his slowness of body, his even more unforgivable slowness of mind. He grabs his knee with both hands, tries to wrench his ankle free. Come on, girl, rise up a little.