Bright Starry Banner

by Alden R. Carter

  “Fighting Rebs, Bill, same as you.”

  “This is no place for you. The general needs—”

  “The general wants you to know that we’re sending all the help we can. Just hold this position, and we’ll beat them back along the rest of the line.”

  “We’ll hold, Julius. Bierce, get the chief of staff out of here!”

  Garesché laughs, begins turning his horse, but then pauses to look down at Bierce. My God, Bierce thinks. He’s more than transformed, he’s gone mad. Garesché sweeps an arm toward the enemy line. “Do you see, Lieutenant? The hope of the ungodly is like dust that is blown away with the wind!” He leans down, grins. “It’s The Wisdom of Solomon. Do you believe, or are you still the skeptic?”

  Bierce would speak, cannot. Can only shake his head.

  Garesché rears up in his saddle. “Like dust, Bierce! Believe!”

  Savage’s 16th Tennessee clings to the railroad embankment, trying to hold through the blasts of Cockerill’s battery until Donelson can force the Yankee line from the left. Privates Junior and Hugh Ottlein, a pair of raw-boned farm boys, lie near Savage, firing their Enfields carefully.

  “I got one of them gunners, I think,” Junior says.

  Hugh snorts. “If yer talkin’ ’bout that boy with the ram stick at that gun on the left, I got him two, three minutes ago. Just took him a while to fall down.”

  Junior is about to reply to this barb when a solid shot fired from somewhere to the left carries away both his legs below the knee. He looks down at the stumps and then turns to say something to his brother. But Hugh has slumped forward onto his musket, the top of his head exploded by a canister ball. Junior stares, then reaches beneath him to extract a pistol from his belt, puts the barrel to his temple, and pulls the trigger. All this before the horrified Savage can scream.

  Brigadier General Phil Sheridan has just found water and cartridges for Schaefer’s brigade when Rosecrans comes hurtling down on him. “Sheridan, take your men in there and support Hazen!”

  Sheridan, who has never avoided a fight in his life, stares openmouthed at Rosecrans. His three brigades have been wrecked in four hours of intense combat. And now Rosecrans wants him to take perhaps the most battered of the three back into battle? He clamps his mouth shut, turns, starts shouting orders. In ten minutes, the men are jogging—many of them stumbling— down the pike toward the Round Forest.

  Whatever hesitancy Sheridan feels disappears on entering the Federal salient. He knows Hascall from Academy days, counts him a friend if not an intimate. “Milo! How shall I deploy?” he shouts.

  Hascall shouts back over the tumult, still managing to sound calm, cultured. “How many regiments do you have?”

  “Four.”

  “Leave two with me in reserve. Put the other two in between my boys and Hazen.” He points to the southeast corner of the salient.

  Bierce supposes it is his way of not going mad, but part of his mind seems to hover entirely outside himself, observing the slaughter. The two lines have achieved a frightful equilibrium in the trading of death—an exchange that, if left undisturbed, might eventually lead to the last two men in the world killing each other.

  Sheridan upsets the balance, pushing the 2nd and 15th Missouri in between Hascall’s and Hazen’s brigade. It is bloody ground, the forest floor strewn with the bodies of dead Ohio and Illinois boys. The Missourians clear space by rolling the bodies from the firing line. Riding with Hazen to find Sheridan, Bierce sees a macabre breastwork of tangled bodies four deep filling the gap between two limestone boulders. Perhaps it is only the earth trembling with the discharge of Cockerill’s battery, but the breastwork seems to heave as if transformed into a living creature. An arm extends, lifts a hand. “Colonel,” he shouts. “Those bodies—” At that moment, he sees with horrifying clarity a round of spherical case, fired with an inadequate or damp charge, bouncing across the field. It bursts twenty yards short of the Federal line, its load of iron balls ripping into the breastwork of bodies. The pile seems to rise a foot, a sad creature of many arms, heads, and legs making a final effort to crawl off to some more private place to die. It collapses, and through the din, Bierce hears a long sigh, perhaps of the bodies settling against each other as gases escape punctured stomachs and intestines—perhaps of something even he dare not imagine.

  He looks to Hazen, sees the man’s face unmoved. The part of Bierce’s mind that hovers detached begins muttering ancient words, as if trying to decide among them—rakshasa, shedu, barghest, fiend.

  The added fire of the 2nd Missouri crumples Donelson’s line. As it gives way, Sheridan sends the 15th Missouri forward in a heavy skirmish line to push Savage’s line off the railroad. Savage gives way, his men rolling down the side of the embankment to take what cover they can among the cornstalks in the field north of the tracks.

  Among the guns of Battery F, 1st Ohio Artillery, a minié ball creases the leather pouch of one of the gunners, igniting the friction primers inside. The primers explode like a string of fire crackers, the cannoneer leaping and capering as hundreds of copper shards flay his legs and crotch. Thinking the jig is a victory dance, one of Donelson’s retreating men turns in a rage, sights carefully along the barrel of his Enfield, and shoots the gunner down. It is perhaps just as well.

  Donelson rides back to the woods in a fury. He is as unharmed as if he had ridden to Sunday service, though his horse bleeds from half a dozen wounds that will, by evening, kill it. A little decent artillery support, another regiment, a rush by Stewart or Maney at the right moment, and Donelson would have smashed through the Yankee line. But others have done nothing, and Dan Smith Donelson will suffer the blame.

  The brigade has suffered staggering losses. Of the 440 men of the 8th Tennessee, 41 are dead, including Colonel Moore, and 260 wounded. When Colonel Savage at last manages to lead the 16th Tennessee to safety, it will muster only 150 of its original 377 men.

  Passing a fresh column marching to renew the attack on the Round Forest, one of Donelson’s men calls, “What regiment?”

  “Fourth Florida,” comes the reply.

  The soldier lifts the bloody stump of an arm. “Do it up right, Gators. Pay them back for my arm.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Wednesday, Noon–3:00 P.M.

  December 31, 1862

  The Federal Right on the Nashville Turnpike

  Hazen’s defense of the Round Forest has temporarily stymied the Confederate assault on the Federal center. Behind the Round Forest and northwest along the Nashville Pike, Rosecrans has cobbled together a strong line of infantry and artillery. Meanwhile, Hardee prepares to renew his attack on the Federal right.

  ABOUT NOON A silence falls on the field. The hush cannot be absolute, of course—not with some eighty thousand men fighting inside a square not a mile and a half on a side—but after a tumult Colonel John Beatty likens to the beating of a thousand anvils, the diminished volume is as profound as utter stillness.

  On the Nashville Pike, Lieutenant Alfred Pirtle, Rousseau’s ordnance officer, watches the woods from the vantage of Van Pelt’s battery. Between the pike and the cedars lies a long, irregular field, some of it in cotton, some in corn, some in pasture. The ground has been trampled by the retreat of Rousseau’s division to the pike. Shepherd’s remaining regulars have been detached to back up Hazen and Hascall’s position in the Round Forest. John Beatty’s and Scribner’s brigades have joined the Pioneer Brigade and the brigades of Sam Beatty, Fyffe, and Harker in support of the batteries emplaced along the pike. Without clear targets, the guns have ceased firing. Now and then a gun will drop a round of shell into the quiet woods, but mainly they are waiting, saving their ammunition.

  Pirtle massages his midriff. A dread like nothing he has ever felt seems centered just to the right and slightly above his stomach. He presses the spot with fingertips, detects a hard lump, wonders if it is an organ undiscovered in all the centuries of human dissection. Perhaps it is microscopic except in battle, when it expands to the
size of a pomegranate, ventricose with a thousand fears that may any moment burst the exocarp, blowing apart his abdominal cavity like a load of canister fired from within.

  A Rebel officer leaps from the woods with a shout, brandishing his sword toward the pike, and a Rebel brigade seethes out of the trees. The regimental color guards race each other across the cottonfield, the ranks surging after. Pirtle turns, searching desperately for Rousseau or someone else of sufficient authority to give the command to fire. He can spot no one, screams: “Fire!”

  Eighteen Union guns and their four supporting regiments open fire with a roar that cracks windows in Murfreesboro three and a half miles to the southeast. Brigadier General James E. Rains, leading the Rebel brigade, is killed in the first volley by a bullet through the heart, nearly his entire staff swept away with him. For ten minutes, the Rebel line tries to push forward against the barrage of shells, canister, and minié balls, but it is impossible. The lines dissolve, flow back into the woods.

  Rains’s charge is a blunder: ill-prepared, ill-timed, and unsupported. Coming to the edge of the trees in advance of Lucius Polk’s brigade, Major General Pat Cleburne shakes his head at the litter of butternut dead in the cottonfield. How impossibly foolish. Where was McCown when Rains—a good man but an amateur—conceived the charge? Where is McCown now?

  A quarter mile separates Hardee’s corps from the Nashville Pike and victory. But it is an unspannable crevasse. Cleburne holds Bill Hardee in an esteem bordering on adoration, but no matter what Hardee thinks, the path to glory does not lie in charging down the throats of the Union cannon. If they are to win at all, they must get around the Yankee flank. He halts his line and rides back to find Hardee.

  Cleburne has the brigades of Bushrod Johnson, A. J. Vaughan, and Lucius Polk in line left to right, but St. John Liddell’s brigade has slipped from his hand. Liddell is a troublesome man, forever going off on his own hook, and Cleburne guesses that he may already be maneuvering to get behind the Yankee flank. Well, in this case he may have stumbled on exactly the right tactic.

  Cleburne finds Hardee with Harper’s brigade, until recently under McNair. Hardee is expansive. “So, Patrick, are you ready to deliver the coup de maître to the Yankees?”

  “Not just yet, General.”

  Hardee frowns slightly at Cleburne’s tone, rides off with him a few paces so they can talk privately. “What’s the matter, Pat?”

  “Rains took a drubbing, General. He attacked without support and suffered the consequences of inexperience. I’m told that he paid for it with his life.”

  “I’m sorry, I had not heard.”

  Cleburne hesitates, knowing that he presumes much on Hardee’s friendship in gainsaying his plans. “The Yankees have set up several batteries on the pike, all of them well supported with infantry. You know that I am not opposed to frontal assaults when they have a good chance of success. You have even accused me of something less than subtlety on a few occasions. But I don’t think we can gain much this time without suffering great loss.”

  Hardee, who though courtly is never stiff, wishes Cleburne could relax the formality of their relationship. He listens, absently massaging his left hand, which, after all the years he’s spent holding reins, has begun to cramp with arthritis. “What do you suggest?”

  “Let me try to get my division around the Yankees’ flank nearer the creek. At the least, I can distract their attention long enough for General McCown to launch an attack with better hope of success.”

  “How long will it take you to get in position?”

  “An hour, perhaps a little more.”

  “And all that time Rosy Rosecrans will be reinforcing his line against us.”

  Cleburne feels himself slipping away. It is a sensation familiar since childhood. He has given his best opinion, must submit now to those of greater authority. He will carry through Hardee’s order as he had his stepmother’s at home or his sergeant’s in the 41st Regiment of Foot. The slipping away is the relinquishing of self to duty, a subsuming of will in the will of others. Necessary for a soldier, perhaps, and easy enough to accept once the habit is formed, but enervating to the soul.

  Hardee gazes morosely at his gloved hand, works the fingers individually. “If we just had a fresh division, even a brigade or two, we could carry the pike now. But Bragg ignores my pleas.”

  “Perhaps you should go see him.”

  “No, I won’t leave here. McCown needs my guidance… . All right, Patrick, move your division to the left. But hurry. The rest of this day will go quickly.”

  Private Wayne Hodges, the orderly sent by Garesché to summon General Stanley and his cavalry from Stewart’s Creek, has always been a thief. Even his name is a theft, taken from a farm boy decapitated trying to hop a freight when they were traveling together to Cincinnati to enlist. Hodges, who was then the thief Eli Smith, searched the dead boy’s pockets. He’d only known the boy a day, but he’d seemed an innocent rube, unlikely to have done anything to attract the notice of the law. So Eli Smith, who has felt the eyes of the law upon him most of his life, slipped the boy’s birth certificate into his pocket and walked away a different if not a new man.

  Though Garesché still senses the vulpine in Hodges, a good deal of the furtiveness has disappeared from his face in the months since he joined the army, the reflection of an odd reality: Hodges no longer steals. The change comes from no moral awakening, nor from any absence of need, since he is, like all soldiers in the Army of the Cumberland, frequently hungry and bereft of comforts. Hodges himself has no clear idea why he no longer steals. The approximate answer is that he, unlike many soldiers, is a true believer. He cannot discuss Constitution or Union, but he senses with absolute certainty that in their failure will fail all hope for him and all like him, that kings and priests and rich men will then tyrannize them always, will grind them down, hang them and torture them and shit on them forever.

  Within a half hour of leaving Rosecrans’s headquarters, Hodges is captured by a patrol of Wharton’s cavalry. It is not a great concern to him. He has already discarded his dispatch pouch, carbine, and hat, muddied his face and uniform, and assumed the desperate look of thousands of other stragglers from the Union right. Relieved of his horse, he stands for a while in a crowd of prisoners and then approaches a guard. “I gotta go visit the bushes, Sarge.”

  “You don’t need no bushes.”

  “Sarge, I ain’t gonna run. It’s safer here than anywhere. I’m gonna stick here till I get my parole and then go home. Never should’ve come in the first place.”

  “Well, at least you’ve got that figured out. Go on. I don’t want to see your skinny ass anyway.”

  Hodges saunters into the brush and keeps going. He doesn’t hurry, doesn’t even have to tell himself to be casual, for seeming innocence is for him a craft of long practice. He is captured again near Overall Creek and again wanders away. But escape takes time, and it is noon before he is across the creek and well up the Wilkinson Pike in the direction he was told he would find Stanley. Like Garesché and the commanding general himself, Hodges cannot understand why Stanley has not come galloping down the road to join the fray. Even at this distance, the sound of battle can’t be mistaken. Yet Stanley has not come. So Private Wayne Hodges must go fetch him.

  General Braxton Bragg is sitting hatless in the rain, his tall black gelding pawing nervously under him. Brigadier General Joe Wheeler is shocked by the old man’s visage. It might be a death’s-head, the sunken cheeks rivuleted with rain, drops hanging from the eyebrows, the eyes themselves hollow save for a deep flicker. “You are tardy, General,” Bragg rasps.

  Wheeler salutes. “We made the best time we could, General.”

  “You told me that you could deploy by late morning. It is afternoon.”

  The rain, the mud, the broken-down mounts, the men fainting with exhaustion… . How can he explain it all? “I’m sorry, General. We’ll be ready to move in an hour.”

  “You must move now. The battle is
reaching a crisis; no one has the luxury of ease.”

  “But I must have remounts for at least half my men. And the men themselves must have a little time to rest. We have been—”

  “And I have been fighting a battle in anticipation that you would be here to help me win it! Deploy what men you can immediately. Let the others catch up or fight on foot.”

  “Yes, sir. Where shall I take them?”

  Bragg waves vaguely to the northwest. “Support Hardee. He’s been crying for reinforcements all morning, but I’ve had nothing to give him. And, as usual, Professor Hardee has no conception of what may be required of this army beyond his own quarter, while I must contend with that!” He points angrily at a low forested elevation crowned with smoke. Stretching out to either side in an acute angle, Wheeler can make out the battle lines.

  “Rosecrans and Thomas have piled infantry into that angle,” Bragg continues, “and backed it heavily with artillery. Rosecrans may know nothing beyond what he learned at the Academy about artillery, but Thomas is a master. You can be assured that those guns are well placed.”

  Then why are you attempting the assault? Wheeler wonders. He glances sidelong at Bragg, considers if he dare speak. No, it is not his place. “I should be about supporting Hardee, General.”

  “Yes, go. Send me a report of his dispositions.”

  Wheeler salutes, rides back to the staff huddled beneath a low awning on the reverse of the hill. He sees Brent, beckons him over. “Colonel, why is the general set on assaulting the strongest point of the Yankee defenses?”

  The chief of staff shrugs helplessly. “It’s the plan. We must drive the Yankees from that point to complete the wheel and pin their army against the river. Hardee has had great success on his part of the field, but General Bragg says the main effort must be made against the apex of the angle. Only if we carry it will we carry the day.”

  My God, Wheeler thinks, even Brent sees the error, and Brent is nothing more than an accomplished clerk without a speck of military training. He looks back over his shoulder at Bragg sitting his horse in the rain. Even at this short distance, man and horse seem molded of one piece: a cenotaph of bronze against a gray sky.