The Better Angels of Our Nature (19 page)

“How is your hand, sir?” Jesse asked, after he had formed the new line on the right of Owl Creek Bridge, when they were briefly alone between messengers coming and going.

“My hand?” He brought it from his frock coat and frowned at it wrapped in the blood-soaked handkerchief, as though it and the appendage belonged to someone else. “I’d forgotten. Now I come to think of it—it throbs.” He grimaced around his cigar stub, though it might have been a smile.

“I was negligent, sir, afraid and excited, there was so much going on—I lost concentration—just for a moment—”

He was barely listening to her; he was watching a spirited cavalry charge by the enemy, characterizing it as a “
handsome repulse
” when the men of the Twenty-ninth Illinois did their work with a will. He searched in his pockets for a fresh cigar, but he had none. Falling back, they had left everything in their old camps, including his cigars!

“Sir, will you take some whiskey for the shock?” Jesse rummaged inside her haversack.

“Stop fussing, boy.” He pushed her aside and shoved the hand back inside his coat as a captain from the Fortieth Illinois rode up at a lick, excitedly calling for ammunition.

“General Grant sent up boxes of ammunition hours ago, Captain,” Sherman told him with the confidence of one who completely trusts his commander in chief.

“It’s true, sir, but out of the five different cartridges that were sent up none were of the caliber needed in the Fortieth.”

This was a different story. Sherman looked around him. Van Allen, Jackson, Sanger, McCoy, Taylor, all had been sent off with messages to various parts of the field, and poor Holliday, dead at the very start of the battle. Slowly his intense gaze moved down to Jesse. There was no one else to send.

“Tell me, boy, do you think you can take a message to General Grant, last seen at the wharf?” Without awaiting an answer, he was already giving her a leg up into the battered saddle atop her battered horse.

This was her moment to prove her mettle. It was her chance to prove that she was capable of more than merely copying orders. She was trembling, not with apprehension, but with excitement as she looked down at the Ohioan’s strained features. Gunpowder had turned his short-cropped beard almost black now, and his face was red where it was not black and rivulets of sweat ran down his neck into his upturned shirt collar. He blazed with a fierce unquenchable energy, intoxicated and intoxicating, exhilarated and exhilarating. He had never looked nor felt more alive as he grabbed her leg.

“Tell General Grant that the Fortieth Illinois is holding its ground under heavy fire, though their cartridge boxes are empty.” Sherman looked to the artillery captain, who quickly told Jesse the caliber required, twice, as though he didn’t trust this tiny soldier to carry out this life-or-death task. Then Sherman said, “Ride, Corporal, don’t let down our brave boys!” He struck the animal’s hindquarters and it shot away across the field with an energy and purpose that for a moment shocked even the girl fighting to stay upright in the saddle. Was it possible that this curmudgeonly steed knew that the lives of the men of the Fortieth Illinois rested on his tired old haunches?

“Think he’ll make it, sir?” asked the artillery captain, wishing he had written down the caliber instead of trusting to a young, excitable boy’s memory.

“Yes,” Sherman replied staunchly, grabbing the captain’s shoulder and squeezing tightly. “He’ll make it—I know that boy, know him well, future West Point cadet.”

From out of the corner of her eye, as she and Ironsides, for that was her horse’s name, galloped across Jones Field to the relative safety of the tangled undergrowth to her left, in the direction of the Landing, Jesse saw a line of men rise up from the cover of the long grass, their uniforms indistinguishable under blood, gunpowder, and dust. For a second she knew such intense fear that her chest seemed to squeeze the heart that lay inside and a roaring started up in her ears. Then a blaze of color. Stars and Stripes on a staff held aloft, flapping defiantly in a sudden gust of wind. Yankees. In a few seconds the steady blue line moving resolutely, inexorably forward had been raked with a furious fire of canister and grape, which exploded from the densely wooded area in their front, severing limbs from bodies, cutting branches from trees, sending fence rails and pieces of tree bark and strips of blood-soaked cloth flying into the air.

“Lay down!” she screamed. “Take cover!” Or thought she did.

Oh, dear God, they could have lain down. Why did they come on as if they were immortal? They could have hidden in the tall grass, or broke and run, those left standing after the first assault, but they just kept on coming, grabbing up the colors, as one after another fell, crossing that open field.

Suddenly there was a gigantic explosion, like a thunderclap, a man-made tornado that gathered up the groaning, mangled blue line in a smoke-filled, flaming din of splintered trees, whirling metal, pieces of canteen, musket, shoe and hat, flying clods of earth, uprooted brush and bloody body parts flinging all into the smoke-filled air.

When the sheet of flame that had burned and engulfed them had at last died away, a hundred years or perhaps a hundred seconds later, leaving only the swirling black acrid-smelling smoke of gunpowder, Jesse saw not men, but a horrifying twisted tangle of wreckage that had once been men.

Across a field thickly carpeted with dead and wounded they staggered, those still miraculously able to walk or drag themselves forward, coming on, coming toward her, closer and closer. Arms outstretched, arms without hands, shoulders without arms, men without legs, men on bloodied stumps, hair and beards clotted with blood, men with faces shot away, gray matter exposed, jaws gone, temples torn away, men with their insides hanging out. Those who could not walk or drag their shattered remains crawled, until it seemed to her horrified gaze as if the very field itself was alive with crawling flesh.

Then one of these shocking visions spoke to her, or it seemed that he had spoken; the sighing sound of a ghost carried to her ears, though nothing but whimpering noises issued from what remained of his shattered face, as he lifted the stump of his arm. Eyes protruding with a glassy stare, he was asking for something.
Water? Mercy? Death? Something.
Was this war? Was this the glory and the honor?

Jesse sat motionless in the still air, listening to the buzzing of maddened flies and the rumbling of the cannon, like a distant thunderstorm. The flag was limp now. Lifeless. Time had stood still. Reality had ceased to exist. This place was not a cornfield in the middle of a warm spring afternoon, and these hideous, grisly images searing themselves onto her eyeballs were not men. The world she had inhabited that morning, last evening, last week, last century, had fallen away.
She
had fallen away, into hell. She had told Dr. Cartwright, I have seen hell many times before, but every time it had been a recognizable, unmistakable, demoniacal pit, wherein was raging a death struggle, a wrestle between good and evil. This was different. This was a new kind of hell. In this place, even the devil quailed.

As the sighing of these ghostly shapes accosted her ears, she seemed to become aware of the weight of her haversack slung across her narrow chest. The haversack that was as much a part of her now as her arms and legs. The haversack filled with lint, bandages, morphine, whiskey, and chloroform, for momentary oblivion. God forgive her, she could not stop to help these men that were already dead. If she did, men who were still alive would die. She had already wasted too much time. She was breathless as she turned Ironsides’s head and kicked him into a trot. He seemed to hesitate, his haunches quivering between her thighs. She kicked again, hard as she had ever kicked and the animal went forward, though reluctantly.

Her chest was tightening again, her eyes had started to burn and smart and fill up with water. She would not have been able to say if it was the smoke or tears and if it were tears, she could not have said if it were tears of sorrow or tears of anger and if it were anger, she could not have said if she was angry with herself or with humankind.

In less than twenty minutes, the artillery captain reported in person to General Sherman that boxes of cartridges of the correct caliber had started to arrive from the rear.

“Splendid, Captain, splendid—you sound surprised, sir, did I not tell you the boy would complete his mission?”

“Yes sir, you told me.”

By four o’clock McClernand and Sherman, still awaiting Lew Wallace’s seven thousand men and Buell’s Army of the Ohio, decided to pull back yet again.

Indeed, the Rebels had pushed the Yankees to within a quarter of a mile of the Landing.

Could it possibly be true, was the Rebel army well on its way to winning a decisive victory along the banks of the Tennessee River?

9

“What a piece of work is man?”

It was along the banks of the Tennessee River, at the Landing, that Jesse had earlier found Sam Grant. The short crumpled man had given his full, undivided attention to her request, had her wait while he gave the order, and then moved off to greet a tall, heavyset, balding man with a trimmed gray beard, whose prominent light-colored eyes betrayed an anxious expression as he approached. Grant’s greeting had conveyed more emotion than usual. The emotion he had conveyed at that moment was relief.

“General Buell.”

So the commander of the Army of the Ohio was here at last, if not the army itself. The two men had spoken briefly. Grant asked Buell to bring his forces to the Landing as soon as possible and Buell asked Grant what preparations he was making for retreat. Grant had repeated the word as though its meaning was totally foreign to him, then he had replied, “None. We are going to win.” As always, he spoke with a quiet simplicity that could have been mistaken for lack of imagination in a plain man, or tenacity of character in a wise one. History had yet to decide in which category the tanner’s son belonged.

Could Don Carlos Buell be blamed for lacking Grant’s focused optimism? Whether grounded in reality or not, for at the staging area in sight of the wooden Federal gunboats
Tyler
and
Lexington,
anchored in the Tennessee River, boys and men, soldiers in name if not deed, were hiding under the bluffs, cowering in fear—hundreds, if not thousands and more. The dead were piling up like cordwood.

No one could possibly have said how many soldiers had run away from the fighting. Grant himself tried to persuade these panicked soldiers to return to the battle and support their comrades. When his heartfelt entreaties fell on deaf ears he did what any self-respecting army commander would do, he unleashed a squad of cavalry into their midst, driving many of the skulkers to the water’s edge, where some jumped and drowned and others were crushed by the transports.

Jesse clutched Ironsides’s lead rein tightly in her hand, watching more in sorrow than in shame as men, out of control, near hysterical with fear, stampeded through the ranks of Buell’s fresh troops, at last arriving at the Landing. They threw their muskets upon the ground, crying, “We’re whipped, whipped all to hell—retreat—turn back while you still can—run for your lives! It’s Bull Run—I tell you—Bull Run—our regiments are all cut to pieces. We’re the only survivors.”

“Stand and fight or die by the hand of your own countrymen,” a captain of artillery bellowed as he waved his pistol in the air, searching in vain for men to fill the places of those who had perished beside their guns.

“It’s no use,” cried a soldier trying to rid himself of his equipment, strewing the ground with canteen, kepi, knapsack, rubber blanket, and finally his musket. “We’ll be pushed into the Tennessee, go back, go back while you still can.”

“Why you lousy stinking coward!” shouted a second officer and struck the man full in the mouth with the barrel of his pistol, sending him reeling to the ground, blood spurting from his mouth. No sooner had he fallen than he was up again, fear of the enemy greater than his fear of the officer. A few seconds later Jesse saw him jump into the river.

She was knocked sideways by a member of Grant’s staff as he caught hold of a youth who was trying to make good his escape to a transport. He shook the boy roughly, and screamed into his ashen face, “You cowardly son of a bitch!” but the boy was quivering from head to toe, muttering to himself like someone gone stark raving mad. Just one of thousands, running in every direction. The officer, suddenly seeing the hopelessness of his cause, released him, and he ran on.

Lying on their bellies under the bluffs were farm boys no older than Jesse, trembling and incoherent with fear, unable to fight, unable even to move or respond to the entreaties and threats of the officers who ran around waving their sabers in the air and shouting. Side by side with the cowards, and those genuinely paralyzed with fear, were the wounded, the dead, and the dying. Those who had been carried off the field and abandoned along the riverbanks, to lie there like dirty bundles of clothing until they could be transferred to the steamers or moved to the dressing stations and operating areas that had been set up all over the yellow clay bluff.

Wide-eyed, sweating, her heart thumping in her narrow chest, Jesse stared at this vision. They were everywhere; they covered the ground like a human carpet, making it impossible in some places to walk without stepping on a broken arm, a mangled leg, a cracked skull. In some instances, they had been deposited so close together they lay two deep, as if rehearsing for the burial trench and yet more were arriving by the second. On litters, blankets, fence rails, doors torn from their hinges, left without shade, without water, without hope. She wanted to shout, to scream into their faces. There was no more room, no solitary spot for a man to make peace with his God. A girl alone with a single canteen and a small haversack filled with bandages could do very little. She must do
something.
If they would not stand shoulder to shoulder with these brave men, would they not comfort them in their final moments?

Desperately she rallied some of the walking wounded, those who had been patched up and were able to move; they must help those who could not help themselves. She shouted at the skulkers to carry the seriously wounded to shelter, to the shade of a tree. A few emerged from their hiding places and passed among the groaning blood-soaked men with their canteens, as Jesse bode them. Once her back was turned they disappeared again.

To those who remained Jesse demonstrated how to use a blanket to carry a wounded man. Four men could tie a corner of a blanket to a musket and steady the muskets on their shoulders, forming a carrying cot. She showed them how to wind a bandage around a bleeding stump and press a hand to the wound so that the pressure stopped the bleeding. How to cool a fevered brow or steady a trembling hand.

As she knelt beside a soldier with her canteen, Grant passed, alongside him rode James McPherson.

“Di’we win, Gen’al,” asked the soldier, heaving himself up with a gargantuan effort. One of his legs was gone, gone from the knee down; in its place was a mess of dirty, bloodied rags. Around his empty left eye socket, Jesse had wrapped a strip she had torn from the bottom of her corporal’s blouse. She was all out of bandages.

“Tomorrow, for certain.” The words barely made it out of the trapdoor mouth before it closed and the commander passed on, averting his gaze. McPherson, recognizing her, pursed his mouth in a sorrowful little smile and handed down his full canteen, his compassionate gaze on her face. He looked just a little the worse for wear, but still very much the booted and gauntleted soldier, though his gauntlets were now grubby and his boots caked in mud. Earlier he had halted his mount to watch her giving a dozen young farm boys instruction on how to load and fire a musket. Going through each stage slowly and patiently as Sherman had done for her that first night in his bivouac near Shiloh Church, in what now seemed an age ago. Halfway through this impromptu class most of the students had crawled back into their hiding places, leaving their firearms on the ground, as if divesting themselves of these symbols of the war, ridding themselves of all responsibility to fight. The three who remained had wiped their runny noses on the backs of their hands, steadied their trembling lower lips, and marched off to the sound of the guns, one of them still sobbing, but from fear or shame, no one could say.

“You are an example to us all, Corporal,” he said from atop his large chestnut mare and saluted, his eyes filling with tears before he spurred away.

Half-covered by a blanket Jesse found a child in the elaborate uniform of a musician, with soft brown hair and pale skin. The front of his shirt was rags and what must have been a fragment of shell casing had ripped a huge jagged gash right across his small chest. His breastbone was split in two and unidentifiable bony fragments protruded from the mangled flesh. She could see one of the lungs feebly attempting to expand with each labored respiration. A young cavalry officer, a bloodied bandage around his head and an arrogant expression on his face, passed at a slow walk on his tired-looking mount. Failing to look away fast enough to avoid seeing the blood-soaked child with the insides of his chest exposed he sat forward suddenly and vomited from his saddle. Jesse poured the last few drops of water from McPherson’s canteen onto a piece of rag and passed it up wordlessly to the officer.

He snatched it from her hand and held it to his mouth. When his retching had ceased he tossed the rag into her face, saying angrily, “Damn
you
—it was something I ate—something I ate—” He jerked his horse’s head around, trotting off, almost running into a riderless mount that had careened into the side of a wagon before being subdued by the teamsters.

A dismounted officer slowly approached this excited, sweating animal, stared at him hard for a moment and spoke to Grant, who was standing nearby. “Sir,” his voice shaking as he spoke, rivulets of grimy sweat running down his brow, “I’d know this fine animal anywhere, it’s Prince, my brother’s horse. Will Wallace, commander of the Second Division.”

She remounted Ironsides, lately munching grass under a tree with all the nonchalance of a horse unhitched from a barouche at a church social, and started back to join her general by way of Jones Field.

The closer she got the more deafening became the clamor of battle. The artillery and billows of dirty-white smoke that rose chokingly above the green-leafed trees had set the woodland afire. Here in the once peaceful fields were the real soldiers; here the fighting was in deadly earnest. She had left the panicked mob in the rear where they belonged, where their stories of defeat could not infect those striving to do their duty. It was impossible to judge if the Federals were retreating and the Rebels advancing, or if it was the other way around. Masses of men seemed to roll back and forth, yelling and screaming and dropping to their knees to load and fire, many crumbling, never to fire again, while the crash of field artillery rumbled on in the background.

At the south end of Jones Field she halted Ironsides, touched a soothing hand to his panting flanks. Never give a sweating horse cold water, Private Holliday had told her.

As she stopped to slake her own thirst, she saw a ragged, terrified rush of men in blue come howling from the underbrush, arms raised, muskets held aloft, as they gave themselves up to headlong flight, some crying at the top of their lungs,

“The Rebels are coming! The Rebels are upon us! Retreat! Retreat! Save yourselves!”

Jesse stared beyond the blue-clad fugitives, to the officer pursuing them at full gallop, leaping fallen timber, splashing through creeks and streams, hatless, a saber raised above his dark blond hair, and blood from a head wound running down his distorted features. Jesse blinked and blinked again, a look of rampant excitement and chilled horror filling her eyes. It was
Lieutenant Colonel Ransom.
Yet it wasn’t him. The Vermonter’s compassionate, handsome face was converted into something supernatural, so completely different from the man who had spoken to her almost as an equal.

“Retreat, will you? Run in the face of the enemy?” he screamed. “I’ll give you retreat! I’ll teach you to desert your comrades—you spineless cowards! I’ll give you reason to run! Stand and fight, you cowards! You filthy cowardly traitors! Come back and fight like men! Stand to it, I say!”

But they would not come back or stand to it, or fight. They were completely out of control. Running headlong across the field, tossing away equipment and muskets, trampling over fallen comrades, disappearing into the woods, throwing themselves behind large oaks, clambering through the cornfields, stumbling over tangled timber, clearing fallen logs, knocking each other aside in their panic to fall back from the enemy and this officer, in their rear.

Moments later Jesse’s blood had turned to ice.

An infantryman, his uniform disheveled, coat trailing, hat gone, shirt flung open as if he had tried to tear it from his body, went splashing through the shallow creek in a desperate attempt to escape the horse and rider that was bearing down on him. He scrambled up the steep incline and with crazed red eyes starting from his head, spun suddenly around. In a frenzy of violence, screaming so loudly his eyes bulged from their sockets, he brought up his musket and plunged his bayonet into Old Bob’s exposed flank. A roar like thunder broke from the Vermonter’s throat. He rose up in his saddle, blood streaming from the wound in his scalp, and slashed out at the soldier with his saber, slicing the side of his head clean away. The man staggered forward, clawed at thin air and fell face down into the creek. Ransom wheeled his injured horse around, slender threads of blood and sweat flying in every direction from a face made inhumanly ugly by rage, and seemed to notice Jesse for the first time. He stared at her without the slightest sign of recognition, and for a heart-stopping moment it seemed she would suffer the same fate as the infantryman.