Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  Sullivan finds the boy’s tobacco, settles back to fill his pipe. “That boy’s not minding, Lieutenant. He’s at peace sure enough.”

  Winston shakes his head in disgust.

  Sullivan lets his brogue thicken. “Now, now, Lieutenant, darlin’. ’Tis truth he don’t mind. Besides, from the look of things, a good many of us will be joining him presently.”

  Winston turns to follow Sullivan’s gaze. Shepherd is issuing orders as Thomas’s staff trots after their boss. “They’re sending us in again,” Winston says.

  Sullivan draws deeply on his pipe, savoring. The lieutenant is all right, is learning quickly. In a moment, First Sergeant Sullivan will rise, get the boys ready for the lieutenant to lead forward. A hard fight, but a squarer one this time. Maybe they’ll live through it, maybe not. There’s no telling, and no point wasting this little time with good tobacco worrying about it.

  Stewart knows history too well to let his ranks become disorganized during a pursuit, and his regiments are still moving in good order when the regulars hit them straight on.

  The regulars come into the woods in tight formation, the entire brigade line extending only a quarter mile. They will be flanked, that is a certainty, but there is no other way to stop a foe advancing with the speed and confidence of Stewart’s brigade. So the regulars go forward shoulder to shoulder. They might be a Macedonian phalanx or one of Caesar’s legions or a line of Wellington’s Miserables, for they are truly at home only in ranks, only in moments like this, when all the feuds, all the bitching, all the drudgery of soldiering is forgotten, and they share the gut certainty in each other. In the end, there is no other reason for doing what they do, but it is enough and more.

  The two lines bore in on each other until they are no more than seventy yards apart, blasting each other with torrents of musketry. The Rebels fight as individuals, loading and shooting as fast as their skills and temperament dictate. Some abandon aiming altogether in the thick smoke, simply point their Enfields toward the enemy and let fly, then reload as quickly as hands can manage.

  The regulars fire by volleys, the men loading, capping, presenting, and firing according to the metronomic repetition of commands by officers and sergeants. But as casualties mount, they too are overwhelmed by the desire to fire absolutely as fast as possible. When the volley fire starts becoming uneven, the order is passed to fire at will. The regulars cheer, pour it into the Rebels.

  Lieutenant Winston walks coolly behind Company B’s line. Sullivan glances at him with pride. Yes, the lad’s come a long way, hasn’t even drawn his revolver yet. At seventy yards, an Army Colt is a decidedly ineffective weapon. Experienced officers carry theirs mostly as symbols of authority, drawing them only when the work is very close, the addition of a few rapid shots of some possible value. Otherwise, best to leave a Colt holstered and rely on the men to do the shooting.

  The Rebel line is pressing in from the left, Patton Anderson’s brigade catching up with Stewart’s and joining the fight. Shepherd has anticipated this, swings back Major Stephen Carpenter’s battalion to meet the assault. Maney’s brigade is coming in on Stewart’s left, and Shepherd prepares to swing back King’s battalion, now commanded by Captain Jesse Fulmer. But there is a cheer from that direction and a crash of musketry. Two of Stanley’s re-formed regiments, the 18th Ohio and the 11th Michigan, come charging through the woods, led personally by General Lovell Rousseau, who looks as fearsome as one of Napoleon’s guard officers, though his mustache is a bit too ragged and his form a little too heavy. Shepherd, who takes a pride in Rousseau something similar to that felt by Sullivan for Winston, nods in approval: Rousseau is coming along.

  Lieutenant Winston’s Company B holds the hinge of the regulars’ line at the point where the left flank has been refused to meet Anderson’s envelopment. The work is grim now, dozens of men down, the survivors rifling the cartridge boxes and pockets of the dead and wounded for more bullets. Sullivan shakes blood off his nose, guesses that he must have a splinter lodged at the hairline. Ahead in the smoke, the Rebel line is closer, edging forward as numbers begin to tell. In the midst of reloading, Sullivan shouts to Winston, “You might want to get that Colt out now, Lieutenant. Looks to be some close work ahead.”

  Winston looks at his right hand, seems surprised to find it empty. “I’d forgotten about it. Thank you, First Sergeant.”

  For all his vaunted stubbornness, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver Shepherd has no intention of letting his brigade die in the cedars. If he has lost hundreds, he must have inflicted even greater losses on the Rebels. They won’t pursue, will need time to recover before going forward again. “Send word to Major Carpenter to start pulling back on the left,” he tells his adjutant. “Go yourself to tell those formations on our right that we’re going to fall back. General Rousseau if he’s there, whoever’s in charge if he’s not.”

  In the smoke and confusion of the withdrawal, Company B becomes separated from the rest of the battalion. Winston takes it back, counting out twenty-four paces, ordering the men to turn and fire, and then counting out twenty-four more. Sullivan shouts to him, “Lieutenant, darlin’, could you make those paces a mite longer?”

  Winston is about to reply when a minié ball smashes into the bridge of his nose, shattering the center of his face and killing him instantly. Sullivan staggers, chokes back the animal howl that rises in his throat. “All right, lads,” he shouts. “By the numbers, twenty-four paces, turn and fire.” Only when Company B reaches the edge of the cedars, sees the rest of the battalion double-timing for the pike, does Sullivan release the boys from the cadence.

  At the pike, Shepherd has the roll taken. Four hundred men lost in a bare twenty minutes in the cedars, including Major Carpenter, shot six times withdrawing his battalion. So far this morning, three of four majors lost, half the captains and lieutenants, and seven hundred of sixteen hundred men. Shepherd could work out the percentages, but the day isn’t over. For a moment an image of his three young sons flashes in his mind. I will kill anyone, he thinks, who tries to make one of my boys a soldier.

  For more than an hour, Stewart’s brigade has led the Rebel charge. Now it sags like a pummeled fighter between the brigades of Anderson and Maney. Stewart reorders his line and takes it forward through the cedars to the edge of the fields fronting the Nashville Pike. For the first time, he has a clear view of the compressed Union line. For two miles west from the line’s apex in the Round Forest, Yankee batteries are firing over the fields into the woods. Masses of blue troops, some of them disorganized but rallying, others marching under streaming battle flags, cover the ground from the near side of the pike to the far side of the railroad.

  Stewart dismounts, slumps on a log. His adjutant is alarmed. “General?”

  Stewart waves a hand at the Yankee line. “We’re finished. All we’ve done is force the Yankees to concentrate. We can’t cross that field; they’ll butcher us.”

  General Dan Smith Donelson isn’t finished. Not by a long goddamn shot. He swings his brigade around the right of Anderson and Stewart, leaves the brawl with the Yankee regulars to them. He is going to plow over that damned little grove of trees and take the pike and the railroad. Then let Bragg call Tennesseans cowards.

  Donelson’s line emerges from the cedars three hundred yards southwest of the pike and the Round Forest. A thin butternut line wavers at the southeastern edge of the trees. Donelson laughs aloud. Savage and the 16th Tennessee. Why, the craven bastard hasn’t taken his boys back after all! “Come on, men,” he shouts. “Just that far to Glory.”

  Men look curiously at him, shake their heads in failed understanding, for Dan Smith Donelson has lost his upper plate and no longer makes the least sense. They lean into the Yankee fire, plunge ahead across the field.

  If he had a respite as short as a minute, Colonel John Savage might consider surrendering. He has brought his men to within fifty yards of the Round Forest. It is impossible to go farther, equally suicidal to fall back. The 16th Tennessee and
the three companies from the 51st Tennessee can only slug it out with the Yankees until they are ground up.

  “Colonel! Colonel!” one of the men shouts. Savage looks to the left where the man is pointing, sees the 8th, 38th, 84th, and the rest of the 51st Tennessee whooping out of the woods, with Donelson, sword flailing at air or perhaps at giants and windmills, driving them toward the Round Forest. The line is thinner than when Savage saw it last, yet still hugely impressive in its bulk. My God, Savage thinks, the crazy old fool is going to do it.

  The screaming of the blinded cannoneer reminds Bierce of the wailing of an old woman he’d seen dragged behind a horsecar on a Cincinnati street in the winter the war began. The similarity lies not so much in volume or tone as in the sudden ending. A fragment of case shot slices through the cannoneer’s windpipe, ending his screaming with the same abruptness as the old woman’s had when her skidding body struck the curb, her head cracking with the clear audibility of a breaking bowl.

  Hazen steps his horse around the man’s body and continues walking it behind the battery of Napoleons answering the Rebel cannons on Wayne’s Hill. Bierce follows. In the racket of musketry and cannon, it is odd how some sounds penetrate. I must ask the colonel’s opinion of the phenomenon, he thinks. Hazen is an engineer, must have some understanding of the science involved. On the other hand, perhaps we perceive more with our imagination than we actually hear with our ears. We see the rain evaporating off the cannon barrel, see the steam when a gunner swabs the bore, and imagine we hear hissing, like water squeezed from a sodden dish cloth onto a hot stove. But we don’t actually hear it.

  The thuck of the bullet penetrating the forehead of Hazen’s horse requires no imagination to apprehend. The creature shudders, collapses on its right side. Hazen drops nimbly to the left, steps clear of the kicking legs. “Your horse, Lieutenant.” Bierce is already dismounting. Hazen takes the reins, swings up. “Take an orderly’s. I want you on horseback.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Before Bierce can look around for another horse, there is a shout from the line facing southwest. Hazen rises in his stirrups. “There’s the rest of them! I knew this bunch wasn’t all of them.” He wheels the horse, gallops to the colonel of the 110th Illinois, as Donelson’s line charges across the field.

  Donelson’s line officers are screaming: “Charge bayonet!” But it is a hopeless command. For all the times the command is given in this war, few charges succeed in locking men in hand-to-hand combat. The accuracy and stopping power of the rifled musket are simply too great, the volume of fire of a line of infantry too intense for any body of troops of similar size to endure in the last few score yards. Despite their general’s raving to press ahead, Donelson’s Tennesseans stumble to a halt eighty yards short of Hazen’s line.

  Bierce fires his Colt over the heads of the infantry. Amid the stink of powder smoke he detects another smell, wonders at it for a moment before putting a name to it: cedar. Little wonder since the air rains with green twigs clipped by Rebel minié balls. A Christmas smell, a smell of being home, of not dying in the rain and the mud. He breaks down the Colt, drops out the spent cylinder, snaps another in its place. He’d brought three loaded cylinders, has only this one left. He should hold off until the Rebels make a rush.

  Nearby a young officer lies moaning, head against a tree, a bubbling wound in his chest. Bierce steps to him, picks up the revolver beside the boy. He takes deliberate aim at the Rebel line, correcting as well as he can for the Colt’s poor ballistics that will make the ball drop precipitously beyond fifty yards.

  Bierce is a rational young man, alert to the possibilities of accident, and deliberate in their avoidance. When he loads a cylinder, he greases the balls to seal the chambers and prevent a spark from one igniting the charge in another. Not so the young lieutenant dying against the tree. The flash of the first shot from the Colt ignites all the charges, blowing apart the revolver and spraying the nearby infantry with its parts. Bierce stares at the pistol handle, lets it fall beside the dying lieutenant. He cannot feel his hand, rubs at it. Amazingly, none of the infantrymen seem to have been wounded. Or at least not so far as he can tell in the torrent of fire engulfing the lines. He turns away, goes to find a horse and Hazen.

  Along the Federal line, generals wade into the fight like junior officers. Brigadier General Tom Wood, already lamed by stepping on the nail the night before, is re-forming a regiment of Illinois troops when a shell explodes a dozen yards away, chopping two privates into barely recognizable pieces and spraying Wood’s legs with splinters. He is momentarily stunned by the explosion, thinks he has been hit in the chest, but realizes that he has only had the wind knocked out of him by the clap of the concussion. He manages an agonized breath, then another. His pants are shredded and he is bleeding from a score of lacerations, but his testicles and his femoral artery seem intact. He tries to rise, but blood squirts from his legs and the pain is like fire. He slumps back, slams a fist into the earth. His chief of staff is leaning over him, a gash in his cheek but otherwise uninjured. “Tell General Hascall that he has command of the division,” Wood grates. “I’ll send word when I am able to resume. Tell him to support Hazen at all hazards.”

  Since capturing the turnpike bridge over Stewart’s Creek, Brigadier General Milo Hascall has felt a peculiar possessiveness about the battle his small victory made possible. Hazen’s position in the Round Forest has become the crucial point in the Federal line, and Hascall is determined to see it held even if it costs every man he has or can find. He puts his own brigade into line to Hazen’s right, leaving its immediate management to the senior colonel. He rides back into the center of the salient to help structure a defense in depth. To his surprise, he finds that no one has taken charge of this task. Confused colonels welcome the sight of Hascall’s star, present themselves for his orders. He pushes more regiments into line to the right of Hazen, then forms a reserve to counterattack any Rebel breakthrough.

  The reserve is hardly safer than the front line. The Rebel artillery, managing one of its rare instances of common purpose, pours fire from three sides into the salient. Firing from the elevation of Wayne’s Hill, two of the Rebel batteries consistently overshoot Hazen’s position, their shellfire seeming to wall off the Round Forest from the rest of Hascall’s line. Brigadier General John Palmer plunges through the wall of fire and iron to reach Hazen. He is appalled by what he finds. The grove is a shambles of shattered trees and shot-plowed earth. The ground itself jumps with the explosion of shells and the answering crash of cannons. Case shot bursts in the treetops, sending balls and splinters screaming among the men. Not a single horse, artillery or staff, is upright, although Palmer spots two apparently unwounded horses being kept down by orderlies. Another orderly dashes to Palmer’s side. “Get down, General!” he shouts. “I’ll see to your horse.”

  “Where’s Colonel Hazen?”

  “Over there, sir. Him and his aide. He’s told everybody else to stay down.”

  It’s true. No officers are standing behind their men, making a show of courage and coolness. Instead they are kneeling behind the ranks, revolvers in hand. Palmer cannot at first make out Hazen, sees him then, striding through the smoke, a single aide following. Palmer recognizes the brigade topographical officer. Pierce. Bierce. Something of the sort.

  All around men are shouting for cartridges. “Fix bayonets,” Hazen shouts.

  “We have none, sir,” a plaintive voice calls from the smoke.

  “Then club your rifles!”

  A minié ball clips Palmer’s hat brim. Another jerks at his coattail so that he momentarily turns, expecting to find a recumbent figure—or perhaps a child—trying to attract his attention. He hurries to Hazen. “Bill, you’re going to have to fall back!”

  Hazen glares at him, eyes blazing. For a moment he doesn’t seem to recognize Palmer. “I’d like to know where the hell I’m supposed to fall back to, General!”

  Palmer clamps his jaw, stares at the man. “Can you hol
d?”

  “We are holding.”

  “How long?”

  “Till they kill us, General. And I’ll take the gravedigger with me to hell!”

  “Very well, then. I’ll get you cartridges if I have to bring them myself.”

  Rosecrans gallops into the reserve behind the Round Forest, spots Milo Hascall. “Give me a report, General!”

  Hascall summarizes what he’s done.

  “Excellent, General. This line must hold. Everything else depends on it.”

  “Yes, sir. I know.”

  Rosecrans leans across his saddle, grips Hascall by the shoulder. “This battle must be won, Hascall! And we are going to win it.” He turns to Garesché. “Colonel, get in there and talk to your friend Hazen. Tell him we’re bringing everything we can to his aid.”

  “I should be with you, General.”

  “I’ll be back presently. Go.”

  Battery F, 1st Ohio Artillery, Captain Daniel T. Cockerill commanding, holds the center of Hazen’s line, blazing away with canister at Colonel John Savage’s 16th Tennessee a bare 150 feet down the railroad. A shell from Cobb’s battery on Wayne’s hill explodes beside the right-hand Napoleon of the battery, killing half a dozen gunners. Hazen points to it. “Get that gun in action!”

  Bierce springs forward, helps wrestle bodies away from the cannon. An infantryman grabs up the rammer, pauses to inspect it as he might a new and unfamiliar farm implement, and then steps to the muzzle. “Come on, boys. Let’s shoot this thing. Lieutenant, do you know how to aim it?”

  Before Bierce can reply in the negative, an artillery sergeant comes running up. “I’ve got it, sir.”

  Bierce steps back, watches the gun go into action. He turns to see Garesché on a bloody-nosed gelding. For a moment he almost doesn’t recognize the man, for Garesché is transformed, seems harder of feature somehow, the gentleness burned away.

  Hazen looks around. “Julius! For the love of God, what are you doing here?”