Fort Pillow

by Harry Turtledove

  Ben Robinson did. He had a rifle musket of his own now, and swung it at the Reb's piece. The blow caught the weapon squarely and knocked it out of the enemy soldier's hands. Forrest's trooper let out a startled yelp. Aaron Fentis hit the Reb in the head with the butt of his Springfield at the same time as Robinson slammed his rifle-musket butt into the pit of the man's stomach. Down went the Confederate. Somebody stepped on him, shoving his face into the mud. He wouldn't get up soon, if he got up at all.

  “We can lick' em!” Sandy Cole shouted.

  The small band of Negroes had licked all the Rebs who came at them. If the other men who garrisoned Fort Pillow could have done the same, the Secesh soldiers would be running away with their tails between their legs. And if pigs had wings…

  Too many Rebs. That was what it came down to. Now that they were in the fort, the men in blue couldn't drive them out. Robinson knew one reason his little band of soldiers hadn't been badly tested was that they looked and acted tough. Forrest's men were no more eager to risk getting hurt than anybody else with an ounce of brains in his head. They went after people who were hurt or acted afraid. Once all the easy marks were down, they'd deal with the tougher ones.

  Somebody close by was screaming for his mother. Ben Robinson couldn't tell if the cry came from a white throat or a black one, from a U.S. soldier or a Confederate. Badly hurt men all sounded pretty much the same. Maybe people should have drawn a lesson from that.

  In fact, he was sure they should have. He was also sure they didn't. If they did, mad scenes like this wouldn't happen.

  “Kill the niggers!” bawled somebody else much too close. Unlike the other, that cry would only come from a Confederate.

  “Kill the traitors!” That might have been somebody from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry, but was much more likely also to come from a Reb. Forrest's troopers hated the men who fought under Major Bradford at least as much as they hated blacks. When Ben Robinson came to Fort Pillow, he wouldn't have believed that was possible. After listening to Bradford's troopers talk for a while, he did.

  And, after listening to them, he also believed the Confederates had some pretty good reasons to hate them. Some of the things the troopers bragged about doing… Of course, they had their reasons for doing those things-they were avenging themselves for other things Forrest's men had done to them and their kind and their friends. How long would that cycle of vengeance go on? How long could it go on, before everybody killed off everybody else?

  Without Ben's even noticing, Charlie Key managed to reload his Springfield. When he fired, the muzzle of the piece couldn't have been more than six inches from Robinson's left ear. “Do Jesus!” Robinson yipped, and jumped in the air. “What you shooting at?”

  “Damn Secesh bastard.” Mournfully, the other colored soldier added, “I done missed the son of a bitch.”

  “Almos' didn't miss me.” Robinson's head still rang. Even after he'd fired the twelve-pounder more times than he could count, that rifle musket made an appalling noise, all the worse because it was so unexpected.

  “Shit,” Sandy Cole said. “They's in behind us.”

  Ben Robinson swore, too. The line of soldiers in blue wasn't a line any more. It had broken down into little knots of struggling men, like the one of which he was a part. Each knot fought for itself. Not enough U.S. officers remained on their feet to make the Federals fight as a group any more. And they were going to get defeated in… What was the word? In detail, that was it. Robinson felt absurdly pleased with himself for remembering.

  But how much good would remembering do him? How much good would anything do him, with the Rebs howling like wolves and his own side falling one man after another? He tried to knock the rifle musket out of another Confederate's hands. He failed-the Reb held on to it. But the man didn't seem quite so eager to gut him like a butchered hog. The way things were going, that was a triumph of sorts.

  Major Bradford couldn't even mourn the loss of his brother, not unless he wanted people to be mourning him, too, and in short order. He ran now here, now there, trying to rally the Federal soldiers wherever he could. For a little while, he hoped they could hold Forrest's men out and drive them back.

  For a little while, yes-but not for long.

  No matter what he'd thought, Bedford Forrest was in deadly earnest when he said his troopers could take Fort Pillow. Between the sharpshooters on the high ground looking down into the fort and the swarm of Rebs coming over the earthen rampart, the garrison had no chance to hold back the tide, any more than King Canute could in days gone by.

  When Bradford fired at an oncoming Confederate, he found he'd emptied Theodorick's Colt as well as his own. “Son of a bitch!” he shouted, and then, because that wasn't nearly strong enough, “Shit!”

  He threw the revolver in the enemy soldier's face. Whatever the Reb was expecting, that wasn't it. The pistol caught him right in the nose. He shouted, “Shit!” too, much louder than Bradford had. Clutching both hands to the wounded member, he slowly crumpled.

  Instead of reclaiming the pistol, Bradford snatched up the Springfield the Confederate had dropped. The Colt was just a lump of iron now. He'd never have the chance to load in bullets and measure out charges of black powder and affix a percussion cap for each cylinder he wanted to fire. With a bayoneted rifle, he carried a spear longer than a man was tall. That was something, anyhow.

  Something, yes, but how much? The Federals' defense of Fort Pillow was coming to pieces before his eyes. Things were falling apart. The center could not hold, and the Confederates poured in on both flanks as well. The flag had fallen. In a few minutes, Forrest's men looked likely to kill or capture every Union soldier in the fort.

  Biting his lip, Bradford shouted the order he'd hoped he wouldn't have to give: “Down to the river, men! Down to the Mississippi! If the Rebs come after us, the New Era will give them canister!”

  The gunboat had kept firing all through the fight, even if her shells didn't do so much as Bradford wanted. She hadn't tried lobbing rounds up onto the flat ground atop the bluff, but Bradford could scarcely blame her for that. The shells could, and surely would, fall among his command as well as among the Rebs.

  Even breaking contact with Forrest's troopers was hard. The howling men in gray and butternut were mixed in with their foes in blue. Soldiers thrust at one another and swung their Springfields like base ball bats. Whenever somebody managed to load a musket, he fired at the closest soldier in the uniform of the other color. Here and there, men rolled on the ground, kicking and kneeing and choking each other in a struggle old as time.

  Little by little, whites and Negroes in blue made for the steep side of the bluff and started scrambling and tumbling down toward the Mississippi far below. If some of the Negroes ran-well, some of the white troopers from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry ran, too. Who wouldn't, with sure death behind and possible salvation ahead?

  Bradford wished he could do something about Theo's body. His brother lay where he had fallen. Dead men and writhing wounded lay everywhere inside the earthwork, testimony to how fierce the fighting was. If the Federals still held the fort when the battle was over, Bradford would have to bury poor Theodorick. If they didn't…

  He shrugged. If we don't, chances are somebody will have to bury me. A heartbeat later, he shrugged again. Even if the Federals held Fort

  Pillow, he might stop a minnie or get in the way of a Reb's bayonet. He'd worked hard to preserve the Union in western Tennessee and Kentucky. A lot of Forrest's troopers wanted to kill him not just because he was a Yankee officer. A lot of them carried personal grudges. Both as a lawyer and as an officer, he'd harried Rebs and their families as hard as he could. They had it coming, by God! But he couldn't expect Confederate soldiers to love him afterwards. He couldn't, and he didn't.

  He carried the Springfield at high port: held diagonally in front of his chest, ready for a lunge or a parry. He wished he'd done more bayonet drill. Because they were cavalrymen, the troopers from the Thirteenth
Tennessee had scanted that tiresome exercise, and the officers even more than the men.

  The colored artillerymen seemed better at it than their white counterparts. He watched a colored sergeant keep a Reb off him with a few smooth-looking jabs and butt strokes. The coons had rhythm, no doubt about it. Who would have imagined they could go toe-to-toe with men who might have owned some of them-who might, as a matter of law, still own some of them?

  Bradford shook his head. That wasn't so: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation superseded what had been the law. When it was first issued, Bradford had no use for the Emancipation Proclamation. It seemed like a sop to Northern abolitionists and nothing more, because it freed slaves only in regions beyond the reach of Union forces. What did that do, except win the President political capital?

  But the answer soon became clear. Federal troops might not be able to free Negroes through most of the Confederacy, but a great many slaves were able to free themselves by running off to the closest U.S. garrison. They voted with their feet against the South's peculiar institution.

  Southerners still insisted Negroes were slaves by nature, and never could match up against whites on even terms. Maybe they were right. Though a strong Union man, Bill Bradford had always believed that himself. But what the Negroes here at Fort Pillow were doing was making him change his mind.

  No, they and their white comrades couldn't keep Bedford Forrest's men out of the fort. But how many more men did Forrest have? And weren't those big black bucks fighting as well as the whites beside whom they stood? Bradford couldn't see that they weren't.

  He also couldn't see that he could stay up here on top of the bluff much longer, not if he wanted to go on breathing. Keeping that Springfield between himself and the enemy, he fell back toward the slope that led down to the Mississippi.

  Moving a gun was work for a team of mules or horses, not for men. Like the rest of the yelling, cheering Confederates with him, Matt Ward didn't give a damn. They swarmed over the twelve-pounder, literally manhandling it toward the edge of the bluff.

  “We hit that son of a bitch of a gunboat a couple times, we'll kill it deader'n a cow that gets in front of a locomotive,” somebody said.

  More cheers rang out. Not one of the troopers shoving the cannon into place was an artilleryman; Forrest hadn't brought his batteries west against Fort Pillow. Considering the state of the roads the cavalry traveled, that had to be wise. But, like any soldiers, the troopers were convinced they could do anything. They had the gun. They had cannonballs. They had bags of powder. And they had a target. What more did they need?

  “Look!” Ward's voice broke with excitement. “There's that stinking scow, just sitting in the water waiting for it. Let's give it to the damnyankees! “

  “How?” somebody said. “Damn gun won't point so low.”

  “We lift the trail up, that'll bring the barrel down,” Ward said.

  Half a dozen Confederates suited action to work, grabbing the trail and, grunting with effort, lifting it into the air. Then a sergeant said, “That won't work, boys.”

  “Why not, goddammit?” one of them demanded irately.

  “On account of you can't fire steady that way, and on account of the recoil'll run the gun carriage right on over you and squash you like a bunch of bugs,” the sergeant answered. “Jesus God, you got to be dumber'n a nigger if you can't see stuff like that.”

  The trooper remained irate, but he couldn't very well argue because the sergeant was obviously right. “What'll we do, then?” he asked.

  “Put stuff under the trail till it stays up and the barrel goes down,” Ward said. He wouldn't have insulted the other Confederate the way the sergeant did, but the fellow wasn't what you'd call smart.

  Enough “stuff” lay scattered across the grounds of Fort Pillow: boards, barrels, sandbags, what have you. Ward would have used bluebellies' bodies to prop up the trail, but nobody else seemed to want to do that. Even without bodies, they found plenty to depress the gun barrel.

  They loaded a sack of powder into the muzzle of the gun. They didn't bother sponging it out first; if any bits of wadding, were still smoldering, they might have been very sorry, but luck stayed with them. Somebody shoved a twelve-pound iron ball into the muzzle and rammed it down toward the end of the bore. And someone else, ignorant of friction primers, stuck a burning splinter in the touch-hole… Matt Ward wasn't the only one who jammed his fingers in his ears. But nothing happened.

  “Hang on,” the sergeant said. “You got to prick the bag so the powder's loose and the flame can get at it.”

  Artillerymen, no doubt, had a special iron tool to do just that. Forrest's troopers had to improvise-and they did. Several of them carried horseshoe nails and hoof picks in their pockets. One of those proved long enough and straight enough to do the job. Then Matt Ward put a percussion cap over the vent. “Somebody whack it with a rock!” he said. “If that won't set the blamed thing off, I'm a nigger.”

  “I'll do it,” the sergeant said. “We aimed at that son of a bitch?” He looked down the barrel of the gun, then nodded. “Oh, yeah.” He smacked the cap not with a rock but with a hammer he'd picked up God knew where.

  Boom! The twelve-pounder's roar was a truly impressive noise. Flame and a great, choking cloud of smoke belched from the muzzle of the gun. Cannon, carriage, and all jerked backward, knocking down the ramshackle support the troopers built under the trail. The sergeant had to spring to one side to keep from getting run over, just as he'd warned the men who wanted to hold the trail up by hand.

  They missed the Yankee gunboat. The cannonball kicked up a truly impressive splash about fifty feet behind it and well to its left. There were probably fancy nautical terms to describe that better, but Ward neither knew them nor cared about them. All he knew was, the miserable gunboat still floated.

  Several troopers cussed. “We shot the stinking gun once,” Ward said. “We can damn well do it again, right?”

  “That's the spirit!” the sergeant said. “And even if we did miss, we let those damnyankee bastards down there know this here fort's got it some new owners, right?”

  “Right!” the troopers shouted. Maybe they really were heartened. Maybe they just knew better than to argue with anybody who wore three stripes on his sleeve. Under his profane direction, they shoved the twelve-pounder back to the very edge of the bluff. Getting it ready to fire again didn't take so long. Now they had some idea of what they were doing.

  They thought so, anyhow. The colored artillerymen whose captured gun they served would have laughed themselves silly. Those colored artillerymen never once entered Ward's mind. Like the rest of the cavalry troopers at the gun, he was intent on the gunboat down in the river.

  The sergeant walloped another percussion cap. Again, the cannon bellowed. A gust blew some of the smoke into Ward's face. He coughed and wiped his streaming eyes on his sleeve. More curses erupted from his comrades. This cannonball went into the Mississippi about as far ahead of its intended target as the other one was behind it. “Well, we scared 'em, by God,” Ward said.

  “We can still hit that damn thing.” The sergeant had no quit in him. “All we've got to do is split the difference between those two. We do that, we put a cannonball right through the blamed boat's brisket. “

  He seemed to think his makeshift gun crew had the skill to split the difference. Real artillerymen would have, no doubt about it. The Negroes who'd been driven from the gun would have. This swarm of Forrest's troopers? They had enthusiasm and very little else.

  They did load the twelve-pounder again. Jostling one another to peer down the barrel, they tried their best to aim the field piece at the gunboat-and to hold it on target with that flimsy pile of stuff raising the trail and depressing the muzzle.

  “Here we go! This time for sure!” the sergeant shouted, and brought the hammer down on a third percussion cap.

  Fire. Smoke. Thunder. The iron shot splashed into the Mississippi at least as far from its target as either of the earlier two. �
��Hell's bells!” somebody said in disgust. “We can see the son of a bitch down there. Why in blazes can't we hit it?”

  “She,” said somebody who fancied himself an expert on things that had to do with ships. “Boats are always she. “

  “She's a god damn bitch, is what she is. She don't hold still for no body,” another trooper said.

  “Sounds like a woman, all right,” Ward said. His own experience in such things was limited-he'd been kissed twice, not counting cousins-but he got a laugh.

  “Let's try again, boys.” Yes, the sergeant who'd taken charge of the twelve-pounder was as stubborn as they came.

  No matter how stubborn he was, three misses made his crew start melting away. “Hell with it,” a trooper said as he stooped to pick up his carbine. “I'm gonna go shoot me some niggers and Tennessee Tories. I can damn well hit them bastards.”

  “That's right.” Ward grabbed his Enfield, too. “I know how to aim this critter.”

  The sergeant squawked, but they all went farther along the edge of the cliff till they looked down on the soldiers in blue scrambling down toward the riverbank. Ward raised the rifle musket and aimed at a white man descending feet first. The homemade Yankee saw him and waved desperately. “Don't shoot!” he cried. “I ain't done nothin' to you!”

  Killing a man in the heat of battle was one thing. Killing a man in cold blood, killing a man begging for his life, killing a defenseless man-for the trooper in blue had dropped his piece-proved something else again. With a swallowed obscenity, Matt swung the Enfield away from the other man.

  Not all the bluebellies going down the slope and already at the bottom had given up. A soldier down there fired at Ward. He didn't know how to gauge such a steep uphill shot, and the minnie slapped into the mud about ten feet below the Confederate.

  If I don't kill' em, they'll kill me, Ward thought. He aimed at a Negro. This time, nothing stayed his trigger finger. The ball caught the black in the short ribs. Although the runaway slave-for what else could he be? — was halfway down toward the Mississippi, the howl he let out reached Ward up on the bluff. The black rolled and tumbled all the way down to the riverbank.