On the extreme right of the Yankee line, Lieutenant Colonel Richard W. McClain of the 51st Ohio walks calmly along his line. “Don’t stand until you see their hats come over the hill, boys. Then rise and give them hell.” Sure every man has the word, he kneels near the center of the line, pistol in his right hand, sword in his left. The men wait, listening to the crackle of dry corn, the tramp of boots. The crown of a slouch hat bobs into view, then the forehead and hazel eyes of an extraordinarily tall Reb. His eyes widen at the sight of the long line of prone Yankees. “There they are, boys!” the Reb screams.
At the same moment Colonel McClain shouts, “Rise up, Fifty-first!”
At twenty yards the front lines fire simultaneously. Forty-two Yankees and nearly sixty Rebels are killed or mortally wounded in an instant. The Rebel line shivers like a stricken animal, regains its footing, charges. Johnny Green leaps over the body of the man who’d taken his place in the first rank, rushes forward, bayonet leveled. He cocks the hammer of his Enfield, fires on the run. The shot hits a thick-chested Yankee private in the side. The man throws up his hands, as if suddenly taken by the Spirit and intent on crying hallelujah. Green drives his bayonet at a young lieutenant who flinches aside so that Green misses the chest, hitting the man in the trapezius muscle between shoulder and neck. The officer chops at Green with the sword in his left hand. Green dodges, holding the man off on his bayonet. Jesus Christ, nobody is killed in this war with a sword! Green has never even heard of a sword wound! “Give it up, Lieutenant. Drop the… . Goddamn it.” He dodges another slash. “Just drop the goddamn—”
Running full tilt, Private Harry Graebel hits the officer square in the middle of the chest with his bayonet, driving him off Green’s and laying him down amid the bluecoat dead and dying. The Yanks retreat across the top of the hill. Green and Graebel ram cartridges, push new percussion caps on the cones of their Enfields. “Thanks, Harry,” Green manages.
“Sure ’nough. For a second, I thought he was gonna get you with that toadstabber.”
The Yanks are coming back. The Rebel line steadies, makes them pay with a volley, and then charges. The lines collide in a melee of bayonets, clubbed muskets, pistol shots, and swinging fists. Green thrusts at a rangy Yank, misses, clouts the man with the barrel of his Enfield. The man goes down at his feet, dead or unconscious. The Yankees fall back again, keep going this time. Green kneels, steadies rifle on elbow and knee, fires, reloads, fires again. The pole-axed Yank raises dazed eyes, blinks at Green, looks around, makes a face, and puts his head back down, lying very still. No fool, that boy, Green thinks. When the company is called to re-form, Green gives the man a neighborly clap on the shoulder before running to fall into line.
Private Sam Mullet of the 51st Ohio has taken a minié ball through the lower right leg. He drags himself to a tree where his friend Nathan Shannon lies wounded, shirtfront soaked with blood. Mullet cradles Shannon’s head in his lap, waits. He can hear the second Rebel line coming up the slope at the double-quick. He pokes gingerly at his leg, trying to detect damage to the bone. Apparently, he has been lucky. In a minute, he will put a tourniquet above the wound. Perhaps one of the Rebs will pause long enough to help.
The second Rebel line crests the ridge. To Mullet’s horror, the first man to see him throws up his gun and fires. The range is no more than a dozen feet and Mullet feels the muzzle blast, sees the flame of exploding powder. The slug strikes the bark an inch from his ear. “Christ!” he screams. “Do you want to shoot a dead man?”
The Reb looks horrified, hurries on. Before Mullet can ponder the meaning of his odd protest, half a dozen men in butternut gather around, grinning, asking questions, offering their canteens. Where’s he from? What’s his unit? Has he got any kin fighting for the South? One of the men kneels by Shannon. “Might as well lay this boy down, coz. He’s about done for.”
Another man binds a rag above Mullet’s wound. “Keep that tight and you should be all right. Don’t look like it broke no bone, so don’t let ’em take yer leg off.”
A sergeant is yelling for the men to hurry. The man who tied the tourniquet scrambles up. “What regiment did you say?”
“Fifty-first Ohio.”
“Well, bully for the Buckeyes! Looks like you put up a hell of a fight.” They jog away, leaving Mullet amazed. A second later, a dog—some sort of beagle mix—leaps his legs, makes a skidding turn, and rushes back, tail wagging, to nose his face.
“Come on, Frank!” one of the Rebs yells. The dog dashes away, hurdling the bodies of the dead and wounded. A rabbit breaks from a thicket, streaking across the brown grass. Frank cuts in a tight turn, yelping with joy. The Rebels hoot. “Run, cottontail, run!” one of them shouts. “If I didn’t have no reputation to sustain, I’d run too.”
With the 51st Ohio and the Union 8th Kentucky gone from its right, the 35th Indiana occupies a nearly untenable position. Colonel Bernard Mullen orders his men to fall back, but the Buckeye blood is up, the roar of the battle drowning commands. Mullen drags the men back by company, but much of his regiment is overwhelmed, shot down or captured.
The retreat of Price’s first line becomes a rout. The 99th Ohio and the Union 21st Kentucky try to hold, but their field of fire is obstructed by fleeing survivors, and Hanson’s Kentuckians are coming hard. The second line breaks, streams back with the first. Hanson’s men pause to fire volley after volley, littering the reverse slope of the ridge with hundreds of Federal bodies.
Kentucky Brigade has taken the elevation that Hanson and Breckinridge thought unassailable. But not all is going well. Farther to the right, where the ridge descends to almost level ground, the 18th Tennessee of Pillow’s brigade hits two fresh Indiana regiments, the 79th and the 44th. The 79th is a new three-year regiment, blooded for the first time only two days before but already infused with the calm of its commander, Colonel Frederick Knefler, a former Hungarian officer and another of the 1848 revolutionaries in this army. Knefler sits his horse in front of the Hoosier ranks, watching the Rebels come yipping and howling across the open ground. When he judges the range close enough, he turns, rides back through the ranks. There is altogether too much noise for speeches, but he smiles at his boys, nods his head. On command of the company officers, the Hoosiers raise their Springfields, take careful aim at the pumping legs of the onrushing Rebs, as Knefler has taught them, and fire.
The volley rips through the 18th Tennessee with horrifying effect. The natural inclination of every rifleman, no matter how expert, is to jerk the muzzle of his rifle up when pulling the trigger. So a shot aimed at the torso will too often fly high while a shot aimed at the legs strikes groin, belly, or chest. War is brutal business, cannot be made otherwise. Like the wolf, the professional goes for the belly, knowing that the most painful wound is the best, that a shrieking, pitching victim disconcerts its herdmates, panics them. And though Knefler is a kind man who bears no man ill will, he is a professional.
The 79th Indiana fires a second volley, and a third. The 44th Indiana joins in, pouring fire into the right flank of the 18th Tennessee, before shifting smoothly to meet the charge of the 20th Tennessee with an equally withering fire. The confusion in the Rebel line becomes general. Pressing forward, Preston’s line stumbles into Pillow’s. Nearly hysterical with excitement and apparently unable to recognize the difference between a line’s front and back, Colonel William Bowen of the 4th Florida orders a volley that rips through the 20th Tennessee from the rear. Screaming curses and imprecations, the men of the 20th throw themselves to the ground.
The 13th Ohio jogs forward to join the Federal front line to the left of the 79th and 44th Indiana. For a few minutes it appears that the Federal line may hold. But as Pillow and Preston start blaming each other for the failure of the attack, Captain E. E. Wright’s Tennessee Battery trundles up on the right of the 20th Tennessee, opens fire with shell and canister on the 13th Ohio. The 20th charges again, manages to reach a rail fence, starts doing terrible execution in the 44th Indiana at a ran
ge of forty yards.
Colonel Fyffe, the Union brigade commander, tries to bring the 59th and 86th Ohio forward to outflank Wright’s battery. But his horse spooks amid the exploding shells. Fyffe lands on a sharp rock, breaking his hip and cracking his pelvis, and is carried screaming from the field. The 13th Ohio falls back, tries to stand, and then gives up, streaming with the 59th and the 86th Ohio toward Grose’s line behind McFadden’s Lane. Seeing the Buckeyes giving way, the 20th Tennessee leaps to its feet, crashes through the rail fence in a body, and drives the 44th Indiana toward the lane.
In the midst of the chaos, the 79th Indiana stands firm. Colonel Knefler rides along behind the line smiling, winking, occasionally shaking a finger at a weakening man. When he sees the 44th Indiana break on his left, he knows his regiment can do no more. But good boys these, will make soldiers in time. He spreads his arms wide, draws his hands together, turns to point with both index fingers toward the rear. The company officers understand, start withdrawing their men exactly as taught. The flanks fall back, the center withdrawing slowly, until in a column—albeit a rather rough one— the 79th Indiana falls back to Grose’s line.
In the space of less than fifteen minutes, the 20th Tennessee has lost every member of its color guard except for Private Frank Battle, a slender fifteen-year-old whose father was the regiment’s first colonel. Yankee bullets have twice broken the flag’s staff, and Battle is not strong enough to carry the colors by the stub remaining. So he drapes the flag over his shoulders, wrapping it around his narrow chest, and marches out in front of the line so that all can see and follow.
The compression of the Confederate line by the inward wheel of the right and the outward swing of the river has forced several companies of the 6th and 2nd Kentucky out of line on the left. Intent on getting into the fight somehow, the men splash across Stones River. In the trees on the far side, they encounter a thin line of Yankee pickets, many of whom are ignoring their principal duty of defending the riverbank to take potshots at the flank of the Rebel line storming the hill. Private Gervis Grainger of the 6th Kentucky sees a flimsy cabin bristling at door and window with musket barrels, all blazing at the boys across the river. Grainger lies down behind a sycamore tree, positions cartridge box in easy reach, lays his ramrod next to it, and opens fire, sending five bullets into the cabin as fast as he can reload. He hears a scream, shouts of consternation. He rolls behind the tree, reloads again.
In the rain, sleet, and failing light, General Sam Beatty cannot at first find Colonel Benjamin Grider, commanding the three-regiment reserve brigade between the ridge and the ford. When he picks Grider’s squat figure out of a knot of mounted officers, he shouts, “Grider! Take your brigade forward and retake that hill! Help’s coming!”
Beatty is surprised how easily the lie comes to his lips. He has no word from the far side of the ford, has no idea if the brigade will be reinforced or sacrificed. I suppose this means I have truly become a general, he thinks.
Grider takes his regiments forward. The 19th Ohio, closest to the river, makes contact first, smashing into the Confederate 4th Kentucky and parts of three other Rebel regiments. For the second time in twenty minutes in a war that rarely sees hand-to-hand combat, Corporal Johnny Green finds himself trying to skewer another human being with a bayonet. The Yank, a big, unshaven sergeant, knocks aside his bayonet, swings at Green’s head with a clubbed Springfield, but is shot through the left eye before he can bring the rifle butt through to its target. Green loses his Enfield in the melee. He grabs up the sergeant’s Springfield, clubs it, and lurches ahead. He swings at a private who is simultaneously swinging at him. The rifle butts meet with a crack, splinter. Both men go down, grabbing hands and forearms that must, it seems, be likewise shattered. Green stumbles up, afraid of being trampled, manages to fall back a dozen paces. “No retreat, there!” a lieutenant yells. “Get back in line, Corporal.” Green ignores him, bends over, hands between his knees. Christ, it’s like someone had simultaneously lalloped both his funny bones.
Grider brings forward the Union 9th and 11th Kentucky. The compact blue lines clear their fronts with heavy volleys at less than fifty paces. The Rebels fall back across the top of the hill. Grider dispatches a message to Beatty: We have them checked! Give us artillery and we’ll whip them.
But it is already too late. An officer of the 19th Ohio shouts to its commander, Major Charles Manderson, points to the trees across the river. Manderson squints through his fogged spectacles. “How many do you make them to be?”
“I don’t know, sir. A lot of ’em. And they’re Rebs sure.”
Manderson, a courageous but pessimistic man, concludes that he is flanked when in actuality the Rebels number fewer than a hundred men of the Confederate 2nd and 6th Kentucky, intent only on finding a better position in their fight with the Yankee pickets on the west bank of the river. Manderson refuses his right and sends word to Grider that a Rebel formation has gotten on the brigade’s flank. With no artillery and heavily outnumbered, Grider orders his three regiments back to the ford. The withdrawal is barely underway when the Rebs come storming back. They seem in the dusk twice as tall as when they retreated. They yell, yip, howl, bay, seem transfigured, spectral, their long beards and tattered uniforms cloaking not flesh and blood but only bone: a thousand reincarnations of the Reaper. The assault is too much for Grider’s men. They break, run headlong for the ford, each man seeking the center of the crowd, hoping to put as many living, racing bodies as he can between himself and death.
The sun is well down, the sky lowering so that the ground between the ridge and the ford lies in shadow. The fleeing soldiers lose individuality, become an undulant blue mass. The soldiers of Kentucky Brigade fire volley on volley into the mob, their vision dazzled by the flash of their own muskets. My God, if they just had some artillery, they could slaughter them all. But there is no time to worry about guns; it is late and they must hurry. They reload, check cartridge and cap boxes, re-form their line. They have taken the ridge as ordered, but every man can see the wink of Federal cannon fire from higher ground beyond the ford. It is not only artillerymen who covet high ground, and though a few of the officers hesitate to go on without orders, the men know they must. Their certainty is voiced in the urgency they dress the line, their expectation a powerful thing, rendering officers all but irrelevant except to give the single command to go forward.
Breckinridge is desperately trying to get Robertson to bring his guns forward. He writes a third message, hands it to a staff officer. “Tell him the order is peremptory.”
“Yes, sir.”
Breckinridge turns to Major Pickett. “It has cost Hanson’s life and the lives of too many of our boys, but if we can get guns on that ridge, we may have accomplished the impossible.”
“Yes, General. I would not have believed it. General Bragg was right to trust in the gallantry of your men.”
Breckinridge snorts. “I doubt if it was that, Major. I doubt if it was that.”
In the near dark and without orders from Breckinridge, the Confederate line goes forward again, still wheeling to the left, approaching McFadden’s Lane on a front six hundred yards wide. Beyond the lane, a low bluff rises just high enough to cloak the slightly higher bluff on the west bank of the river. There are two or three batteries of Yankee guns on that coveted ground, but they are poorly handled, firing at irregular intervals and almost always too high. A few of the Southern officers wonder if the division may not be on the point of outflanking the entire Federal line. A pity there is not more daylight.
The enlisted men don’t worry about grand tactics, go forward at the double-quick, covetous only of the high ground.
Sergeant Sam Welch of the 51st Ohio runs for McFadden’s Ford with scores of other men from Price’s brigade. They are not quite panicked, still have their rifle-muskets, but, oh, they are beaten as surely as the Army of the Cumberland is passing out of existence on this winter eve, collapsing upon itself, streaming in a great, dark torrent of men an
d beasts up the roads toward Nashville. Welch and the others tumble down the bank to the ford, splash across—the river a mere two feet deep and twenty yards wide—claw their way up the far bank either side of the lane already jammed with horses and ambulances, break through the scrub into an open field, and halt amazed.
Negley’s division lies in the field, four thousand prone men, their ranks rising and dipping with the roll of the land. Left and right and along the lane where it runs north toward the high ground in the crook of the river, columns hurry at the double-quick. On the high ground itself, guns. God, how many? A tremendous line of guns, only a few firing, their muzzle flashes illuminating their silent brothers and the crews at attention, waiting.
Officers and troopers appear in the gloom, shepherd the men onto the lane. “Up this way, up this way. Follow that man on the brown horse. Re-form to the right of the guns.”
A big man in a cloak on a tall, rangy horse, rides beside them, his voice raspy from overuse, but gentle, friendly, consoling. “Well done, boys. Well done. Chins up now. Re-form over right of the guns. We’re about to give the Johnnies a hell of a greeting.”
A youngster pleads, his voice tearful. “General, I’m sorry, but I ain’t got my gun. I dropped it back over there. Didn’t think there was no more army left.”
“That’s all right, son. Never mind. You can pick up another in a little while.”
Rosecrans cuts away from the lane, canters along the slope of the bluff below the guns to guide a regiment into position by the river. Above him, a cannon fires, looping a shell over the facing bluff toward the unseen line of Secesh infantry coming to take the ford and the high ground. Seeing Rosecrans’s face silhouetted by the flash, one of his staff officers fancies that he rides in the presence of a great captain, a hero as implacable as Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, or the great Khan.
For the past hour Rosecrans has been pushing infantry into place in support of Mendenhall’s line of guns. Negley brings Stanley and Miller’s brigades into position in front of the gun line, orders the men to lie down. Rosecrans himself posts the Pioneer Brigade and Cruft’s brigade of Palmer’s division behind the guns. He finds Carlin’s brigade of Davis’s division a quarter mile back. He speaks loud enough for the men to hear. “Colonel Carlin, I beg you for the sake of the country and for my own sake to go at them with all your might. Get in position quietly and at the command, go at them with a whoop and a yell!”
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