Soldier's Heart (5 page)

“Lord …”

There was no sound except for the clink of metal against metal on their shoulder straps, and Charley heard Nelson's voice whispering next to him.

“Lord, there they are, right there. See them?”

Charley said nothing but Nelson was right. He too could see the Rebel soldiers. This time they were not behind earthworks but were forming in ranks in front of the trees, just as the Union soldiers had done.

“They're going to come at us,” Nelson said. “They're forming to attack us.”

And even as he said it the Rebel soldiers began to scream and run forward at them. There was still no firing—the distance was too great—but the scream could easily be heard. It was the first time Charley was to hear the Rebel yell and for a moment it frightened him, but everything had to be compared and he thought of the fright of the first day, first battle, and the yell was nothing.

This was not a line of earthworks, with shells coming from cannons. This was not a hidden line of fire and death.

These were men, only men, no matter the yelling, and as the Rebels came running toward them the Union officers stopped the marching soldiers.

“Present arms!”

Charley raised his rifle.

“Ready—aim low, aim at their legs—
fire!
”

The men fired as one and the front rank of advancing Rebels went down.

“Reload and fire at will!”

Charley bit a cartridge without taking his eyes off the Rebels. They were still coming, but slower, the charge broken by the first volley, and he reloaded and fired four times, each time aiming low, and was reloading the fifth time when an officer to his front raised his saber.

“At them, men!” he screamed. “Give them steel!”

He started running at the confused Confederate line, and the Union soldiers followed, bayonets extended to the front.

Where's your yell now? Charley thought, and then realized that he was screaming it. “Where's your damn yell now?”

The Confederates started to hold, tried to stand. They fired once at the charging Union soldiers and out of the corner of his eye Charley
saw men fall. But five smashing volleys of accurate fire had demoralized the Rebels, cut their numbers at least in half, and when they saw the blue line coming at them through the powder smoke, saw the glint of the bayonets, it was more than they could stand and they turned and ran.

“Look—they're showing tail,” a man next to Charley yelled as they ran, and Charley glanced at him, surprised. Nelson had been there. Cocky Nelson. He was nowhere to be seen and Charley hadn't seen him get hit, hadn't seen him fall. Charley ran on.

Some men slowed, satisfied that they'd won the fight, but Charley couldn't stop running and soon found himself in front of the line. He would have been shocked to see himself. His lips were drawn back showing his teeth, and his face was contorted by a savage rage.

He wanted to kill them. He wanted to catch them and run his bayonet through them and
kill them. All of them. Stick and jab and shoot them and murder them and kill them all, each and every Rebel's son of them. Not one would be able to get up. Not one. Kill them all.

Before they could kill
him
.

He was out of himself, beside himself, an animal, and it is difficult to say how far he would have gone; certainly he would have caught up with them and since he was nearly alone, and would have been alone when he did so, he would have been killed. But one of the sergeants stuck the butt of his rifle between Charley's ankles and brought him down.

“Better hold up there, gamecock—you can't take the whole Rebel army. Besides, they don't want any more of you. Let them go.”

Charley sat on the ground, still snarling, watching the retreating Rebels. “We have to kill them.…”

“You'll get another chance,” the sergeant
said, smiling. “Now re-form and let's get a line fixed again.” He turned away and yelled at the other men. “On me—line-of-battle! Form line-of-battle!”

Charley got up and reloaded his rifle. The Rebels had gotten back into the trees and were firing, sniping at the Union lines, but the bullets all went high.

“Withdraw!” the sergeant yelled. “In formation, in good order, withdraw!”

They moved back across the field and had gone perhaps forty paces when Charley saw Nelson.

He was sitting on the ground, one hand holding his stomach. Charley broke rank and went to kneel beside him.

“Where are you hit?” He already knew the answer. Blood and other matter slid through Nelson's fingers onto the ground.

“Belly,” Nelson said. “I got me a belly wound. Wouldn't you know it? First fight and I
get me a belly wound.” He gasped the words. The pain was already making it hard for him to breathe and Charley knew the real pain hadn't truly started yet.

“You'll be fine,” Charley said. “The ambulance will come here and get you and you'll be back in Minnesota in no time—”

“Don't,” Nelson said through his teeth. “Don't lie. They don't pick up men with belly wounds and you know it. They'll give me some water and leave me to die.”

Charley didn't say anything but knew it was true. Stomach wounds were fatal. The surgeons could do nothing. The ambulance drivers would go through the wounded—when and if they got to the field—and jerk shirts up checking for stomach wounds. Those soldiers would be left. The surgeons were too busy with amputations and treatable injuries to spend time on those with stomach wounds.

It was an agonizingly slow death—it might
take two days—and the pain left men screaming until they were too hoarse to make another sound.

“I don't want to die like this,” Nelson said. “Just laying here waiting for it …”

Charley didn't say anything because there was nothing to say.

“Load my rifle, will you, Charley? I fired it just as I was hit. Load it for me just in case the Rebs come back, will you?”

Charley hesitated, then nodded and picked up Nelson's rifle, tore a cartridge off with his teeth, poured the powder down the bore and settled the bullet on the powder.

“Don't forget the cap, Charley. Seat the cap good.”

Charley pinched a cap and set it on the nipple, pushing it down tightly with his thumb. He put the hammer on half cock.

“Just put the rifle next to me, with the butt down by my foot. Yes, like that. Now cock the
hammer, will you? Thank you. That's right kind of you, Charley. Just one more thing. I can't reach down to my foot and there's a powerful itch on my right foot. Would you take my shoe off before you go so I can scratch it?”

Charley unlaced the shoe and pulled it off. The foot was white, so white it looked like marble, as if it wasn't alive. Well, he thought, soon enough.

“I got me a letter back in my haversack where we put them down before we formed up,” Nelson said. “Would you see that it gets mailed back to my folks in Deerwood? And tell them, if you see them, that I died with my face to the enemy, will you?”

Charley nodded and was surprised to find that he was crying. He did not think he could cry any longer but the tears were sliding down his cheeks. “Do you have water?”

Nelson nodded.

“Just take small sips,” Charley said. “They say to just take small sips.”

“Thank you for this—after I snotted back at you that way.”

“That was nothing.”

“Thank you anyway.”

“It's nothing.” Charley took a breath. The sergeant was coming back across the meadow toward him. One of the rules, he knew, was that you didn't stop for the wounded. When a man went down he was alone, even if he was your brother. “You want me to stay with you?”

Nelson shook his head. “They might be ready for another attack.”

Charley stood and waved the sergeant back. “Well, then …”

“Yes—you'd better go.”

Charley nodded but his feet didn't want to move. He had to force them, think about them moving, and with that he walked slowly. It was strange, he thought, the crying. I don't even
rightly know him—still don't know his first name—and here I am crying. With all the men I've seen drop and I don't even know him and—

The sound of the shot stopped him. He stood for a moment, the tears working down his face, stood for a long moment and then started walking again. He did not look back.

Second battle.

TOWN LIFE

T
hey went into camp again and this time they sat for three months. They were there so long they thought of the camp as a town and gave the paths between the tents street names based on Minnesota towns. Soon signs were stuck on poles: Winona Avenue, Taylor Falls Street …

It went from summer into fall and they cut trees and made log shanties and drilled in the rain and then snow, but spent most of their time in the log huts plugging leaks, keeping out
cold wind and trying to get their clothes dry. They were rarely successful.

Disease spread through the camp like fire as the weather worsened, and with the disease came the rumors.

It was said that McClellan was afraid to fight. Almost all the men—including Charley—loved the new commander and felt that he was only trying to be easy on the men by avoiding a winter campaign. But the rumors said that Lincoln—most of the men also loved the president and called him Old Rail Splitter—was very dissatisfied with McClellan's “lack of bite” and wanted some attack made on the Rebels, somewhere, at some time soon.

This did not translate into action and the men sat another month, getting sicker and sicker, both physically and in their spirits.

Rumor said that a whole regiment from New York had deserted and gone home. It turned out not to be true—four men had deserted
from a New York regiment and had been caught and tried and shot by firing squads—but it showed the lack of morale.

Another rumor said that a young general named Grant out west in Tennessee had fetched the Rebels such a hit that he'd whipped their western army and that Grant was a drunk and that Lincoln had said, “Find out what kind of whiskey he's drinking and send a case to
all
the generals.” This proved to be the truth, but none of it really mattered to Charley.

Like most of the men, he worked at taking care of himself. It kept him busy. The camp was worse than a pigsty. Men from the country—most of the Minnesota volunteers—knew of country living. They dug holes for latrines, kept their areas cleaner than others and worked at getting good shelter. Men from cities—New Yorkers were the worst—had little concept of living with the land and no idea how
to take care of themselves. They left sewage in the open, didn't drain the slops from their shelters and consequently were virtually destroyed by disease. Some New York companies lost more than half their men to dysentery, typhus, measles and diarrhea, which soon spread to other units.

It seemed somebody was always either getting sick, was sick, or was getting over something.

Charley and the rest were kept moving just working at repairing the shelter, keeping it clean and cooking. The food was simple and for the most part bad: beans, always beans, salt pork and coffee. Soon a bakery with wood-fired ovens was going and bread was doled out to the men. The plan was to give each man a pound of bread a day but it rarely worked out that well. The sutlers kept plying their trade and brought cakes and pies and cookies to the men, but the prices went up—fifty cents for a
cake that tasted as if it was made of wood—and most of the men only bought from the sutlers in dire emergency. Charley once relented and bought an apple pie but when he sat down to eat it there were only three small slices of apple in it and nearly no sugar.

If they had the ingredients housewives on nearby farms cooked and sold meals to the men, but getting food this way was chancy, to say the least. There were over ninety thousand men in the camp and perhaps twenty farms where food might be available. To feed all the men three meals a day, the farm wives would have had to make thirteen to fifteen thousand meals a day each. Besides, the officers seemed to get most of this good food.

Officers were initially the only ones allowed whiskey as well. Charley didn't drink but like everybody else thought it unfair in the extreme that only officers were considered able to handle it. There was a small mutiny among some
of the units and soon whiskey was made available to all troops, although the enlisted men were to be issued it by the sutlers—a shot a day “to ward off the ague, chill and fever of winter camp”—and were supposed to drink it right where it was issued.

There was very little that was fair about the whole situation, at least from Charley's viewpoint, and it quickly became obvious to him that it was every man for himself.

He became adept at camp survival. He pulled his own weight, took his turn gathering food and wood, and cleaning, and cooking, but he made a private world for himself where he kept his thoughts and knowledge. He worked constantly on his equipment, shining the leather, changing his cartridges if they became damp or seemed even a bit moist, and most of all tending to his feet and his rifle.