The Better Angels of Our Nature (25 page)

Out the window. Next. Out the window. Next. Out the window. Next.

Jesse took the amputated limb to the window and dropped it out, hardly glancing at the pile that now reached to the frame itself.

“Think you can do an amputation now?” the surgeon asked her as she put adhesive straps on the skin between the sutures, again as she had been taught. She looked at him. “Just joking,” he said and while she was still applying the dressing, he called loudly, “Next!”

In the dim candlelight now supplanting the lantern, orderlies were placing an elderly soldier on the table, as quiet and calm as the captain was loud and hysterical. Another amputation, this time of the right leg.

“It comin’ off, Doc?” he asked philosophically. He wore the uniform of an artilleryman and he was already short three fingers on his right hand.

“Yes.” Cartwright didn’t even look at the soldier’s face. “I’ll cut below the knee. Less pain for a false limb.”

“That’s a hell of a damn consolation, Doc, if yer don’t mind ma sayin’ so.”

“I
do
mind you saying so, as it happens. If you’re not happy with the service around here, you’re free to go someplace else.”

“Didn’t mean no harm, Doc,” said the man, looking at Jesse sorrowfully and back at the doctor. “Hell, Doc, I didn’t mean no harm.”

“Damn light—” Cartwright took off his spectacles and wiped them on his apron. “Can’t see a damn thing in this damn light. Have you noticed how there’s always enough light for the battle and never enough to operate.” Then he had grabbed up his Catling and was cutting.

And next.

And next. And next. And next. And next. And…

Cartwright wiped his stiff hands on his apron and went toward the open door. Jesse saw him draw in a deep breath. It was all he wanted, just a deep breath, a glimpse of sky, confirmation that death hadn’t completely overwhelmed the universe. Yes, there was a tree, a blade of grass, a star still twinkling, rain falling. Not all was darkness, not yet. He held his face up to the rain then took the canteen of water she gave him. When he returned to the table, she wiped his brow for him with a piece of toweling and he laughed.

“Where’s your precious colonel?” he wanted to know.

“Resting,” she said, stifling a yawn.

“It’s the chloroform fumes,” he said. It wasn’t exhaustion. “Get some fresh air, and while you’re out there, empty the buckets.” He kicked at the bucket for emphasis.

It was while Jesse was on one of these bucket-emptying runs that General Grant hobbled to the doorway of the log house, which had been his headquarters earlier in the day. She saw him move awkwardly aside to allow wounded men to be carried through in a never-ending stream, some lying ominously still as they were jostled on makeshift stretchers.

As Jesse went by, he stopped her, looked at her face spotted with dried blood and streaked with grimy sweat. Large patches of sweat showed under her arms and the cuffs of her too-long pants hung heavy with blood. He dropped his gaze to stare into the bucket she was carrying. It contained three severed hands and one foot. Then he gazed into the interior, dimly lit by flickering candles, and one single lantern that swung hypnotically from a roof beam on a length of string in the center of the room. He listened a moment to the screams of men whose courage had held steadfast in the wheat fields and Peach Orchard, but which now deserted them at the sight of the surgeon’s knife.

“Sir, are you quite well?” Jesse asked, as the army commander seemed to ruminate on some mystery, and then perhaps decide against overtaxing his limited intelligence, which would be in demand for matters of a more military and less philosophical nature in the morning. On the other hand, maybe he wasn’t ruminating at all and the inhuman clamor and foul smell had merely caught him unawares.

His croaky monotone barely audible, he said, “Do you need anything, Corporal?”

“Yes sir, lamp oil,” she said. If daylight didn’t come soon they would be working blind. “And tents, we need more tents.”

“I’ll have some of both sent up.”

If Grant remembered to send the lamp oil, it never arrived, but the tents came.

“If there was a damn
God
he’d give us daylight—strong…steady daylight,” Cartwright muttered as he paused in his task to pull the lamp that the orderly was holding aloft closer to the patient’s groin, ripped open by shell fragments still lodged in the torn flesh.

“I’ll pray for daylight,” said the boy fifer. He went down on his knees by the door and put his hands together, a child before his bed. As Jesse passed, she placed a hand briefly on the top of his head. No more than a minute passed before the orderly with the lamp gazed up and out at the soft blue, almost iridescent light that was spreading through the night sky.

“Well, I’ll be—and it ain’t even dawn yet,” he said in surprise.

A couple of the walking wounded trying to shelter from the rain came to the doorway and gazed up into the sky to the east.

“It’s lightnin’,” said one. “Some poor bastards are in for a soakin’.”

In a few moments, the cabin itself seemed to be flooded with light.

“Don’t worry about what it is,” called out Cartwright, ever the realist, “just use it!”

At 7:00
A.M.
of Monday, April 7, the bombardment by Federal gunboats ceased. Grant’s orders were simple, to advance, to counterattack, and to recapture their original camps. They must be determined to redeem today the losses of yesterday.

There was to be nothing complicated and grand about the assault. The combined armies of Buell and Grant would simply drive forward and overpower the Rebels by sheer weight of numbers. The addition of Lew Wallace’s and Buell’s forces gave the Union army another twenty-seven thousand men, surely more than enough to gain the second day. Now it was the Rebels turn to fall back.
Today
the tide would turn.

At the appointed time, what remained of Sherman’s Fifth Division, along with the Thirteenth Missouri, moved forward and reoccupied the right of McClernand’s camp. Here, while the Rebel artillery bombarded them with a vengeance, for even if the Yankees knew the Rebs were on their last legs, the Rebs themselves did not know it, or did not care to know it, General Sherman waited patiently for four hours before the sounds of Buell’s advance could be heard on the Corinth Road. Either Buell needed to change his timepiece or, like the guest of honor, he liked to arrive late, even for a war.

It was only fitting that Sherman personally direct the howitzers that silenced the enemy’s guns at the Shiloh Meeting House. By 3:00
P.M.,
the enemy was giving way at every point, and an hour later, the Ohioan had regained the ground of his original front and immediately directed his brigades to resume their old camps.

By twilight the Rebel army of Beauregard, Bragg, Hardee, and Polk had retreated in disarray and the Battle of Shiloh was over.

11

Dreadful days

Sherman sat restlessly on a campstool staring through the open flaps at the Federal soldiers detailed to remove the corpses, their own and the enemy, from what remained of the tents and camps while Jesse put a fresh dressing on his hand. The wound was inflamed, but it was no worse than expected considering the Ohioan had been in the saddle since daybreak. His own tent was so full of holes it was no more than canvas strips fluttering in the breeze. Sherman had fared no better. His rough-hewn Yankee features were smeared with grime and sweat, his red beard darkened with gunpowder, his shoulder strap still ripped asunder, and his hat brim torn from the crown, hanging down the back of his neck. The Rebels had stolen his cot, ransacked his trunk, bayoneted some of his books, made off with much of his new underwear and his spare uniform, none of which appeared to bother him unduly as he demanded of Captain Jackson, “Did you hear them, Andy? My Muldraugh’s Hill men—remember how they used to call me ‘Old Pills’?” Andy remembered, “Old Pills” because he was hard to swallow—“Now they cheer me as I ride down the line—you heard them—they would have marched on Richmond.” His staccato voice, normally hoarse, but now almost a croak from shouting orders at his men as he rode the line, shot out the words like bullets, without breath or punctuation. “Yes, one word from their old commander and they would have marched on Richmond!”

Horatio had disappeared. Last seen he had been running toward the undergrowth behind the church on Sunday morning. Now the general declared himself suddenly hungry, a condition shared by most of his staff. Orderlies were dispatched to search for edibles among the debris.

Jesse made straight for the surgeon’s tent. To be sure, he had nothing of value to steal, unless the Rebels coveted his dirty laundry and empty whiskey bottles. His home-sweet-home-from-home looked as it always did. Undoubtedly, any thieving Rebel stumbling on this mess would have thought it already plundered.

His loose papers were scattered and some pages of his notebooks ripped in half, but if all the pages were present, there was no reason why they could not be patiently pieced together again; after all, he pieced together the bodies of broken men. Jesse put them carefully in her haversack with his spare eyeglasses, which she’d found wrapped inside a rancid-smelling sock under his upturned cot. She gathered some of his soiled laundry into a small canvas sack and went off to continue her foraging.

Before heading back to headquarters, she visited the old hospital area of the Seventieth Ohio. Orderlies were already in the process of trying to salvage something of the ripped tents, overturned cots, sabered sheets, and torn blankets. Even the medicine chests had been vandalized, their precious contents poured away and the vials and bottles smashed. The utter stupidity of such a waste by an army that was reportedly low on medicines was unimaginable. Inside what remained of the hospital were the dead, patients unable to protect themselves from the Rebel advance, cut down from behind by a saber slash or a minié ball, trying to escape from their sickbeds. Jesse helped herself to some bandages, lint, sticking plaster, and rags, stuffing all into her haversack, with the doctor’s papers.

Back at division she laid out her contribution to the booty, a potato with more eyes than a sutler has in the back of his head, two pieces of hardtack, a tin of beans, a chunk of moldy cheese, three handfuls of rice, and two cans of condensed milk. She kept back one can of condensed milk, an apple, two pieces of hard candy, and a quart bottle containing about three mouthfuls of whiskey. Since the surgeon would not touch the alcohol in medical supplies this was a particularly choice find, taken from the frozen hand of a dead Federal captain, who was certainly dead drunk before he was dead.

The scene of carnage and slaughter near Shiloh Church was unbelievable. Bringing order to this chaos would take weeks.

First, they would have to bury the dead.

As the ambulance moved heavily in the fading light, rolling from side to side over muddy roads and rutted, uneven tracks, Jesse stared out into the night. By the light of the lantern swinging drunkenly above her head, she could just make out the overturned artillery caissons and upended limber boxes. Here lay a stricken axle, there a twisted wheel, there splinters and wreckage where solid shot had met solid iron and wood, along with the grotesque contortions of dead or dying horses, still in harness, their guts spilling out, smeared across the ground.

For most of that day, the Army of the Tennessee had advanced over ground soaked by the night-long rain, littered with the dead and wounded from the previous day, and now frozen into shocking, macabre poses. Twenty-four-pounder howitzers had rolled over this earth, breaking the bones of the dead and wounded beneath the wheels, crushing arms and legs, grinding pieces of bloody flesh to pulp. Muskets, their barrels bent and twisted, the stocks splintered, knapsacks bulging open, their contents disgorged and trodden heedlessly into the mud, lay everywhere. Letters and photographs, precious personal items left on the field by soldiers who would never now return to claim them, had been scattered to the four winds. Black smoke filled the air, a choking black smoke that obliterated the setting sun, made eyes burn, and caused tears to roll down grimy cheeks, and everywhere the smell of burning flesh, man and the beasts that had served him so faithfully.

Some of these dead horses remained in the most bizarre attitudes of death, down on fetlocks, on their backs, their legs stiffly in the air, indecipherable shapes against the darkening sky. Shockingly, even now, others were still dashing around, riderless, horribly injured and unable in their pain and madness to simply lie down and die. By morning these pain-crazed creatures would have been caught and burned, for highlighted against the skyline were funeral pyres upon which the carcasses of dead animals were being heaped.

The Peach Orchard, Rhea Field, Jones Field, the Sunken Road, the Hornet’s Nest, all had been battered by shells, trees blasted by canister and grape, branches rent asunder, hanging from the heart of the oak, like mere straws, as though struck by lightning. The foe had withdrawn. The battlefield was now alive with another kind of horror, men half-alive, their upturned faces and open eyes imploring mutely for help. The night was alive with their screams. They lay about in ditches, and creeks, strewn across brush, and wooded areas and buried by fallen timber. Lantern lights danced in the darkness, held aloft by soldiers moving across the fields, like Jesse and Jacob, searching for the wounded.

“There’s an awful bad smell, ain’t there, Jess?” said Olly, the boy fifer, starting to cough.

Jesse untied the neckerchief from around her throat and showed the boy how to fasten it around his mouth and nose, to block out the smell and the bad air. Others stuffed leaves up their nostrils.

“How ’bout you?” he asked, his voice muffled and only his big eyes visible between the peak of his low-slung forage cap and the spotted bandanna.

“I’m accustomed to it now,” she said. Jacob’s prediction had come to pass.

In a few moments, the Dutchman had joined them, together with a teamster and his partner, who, after settling his mules, stood in stunned silence staring at the sight that met their gaze.

In the lush green grass beneath the tall stately white oaks, as insects buzzed about them in the warm damp air, were three rows of Rebel dead, twenty to a row, dirty gray bundles that had once been men, and one row of Yankees, dirty blue bundles, laid out, all awaiting interment. Even the weary animals hung their sad heads over their harnesses and wept for man’s folly.

“A’mighty God—” said the teamster, dragging off his slouch hat and spitting tobacco juice away from the sight. “—Lord knows, I ain’t never seen nuthin’ ter compare, not so neat an tidy like. Now who’d yer suppose laid them out thataways, so neat and everythin’?” He looked at Jacob, who he assumed, as the medical steward, would be the one to take charge, the one to have all the answers. But there were no answers.

“Let us get started,” the Dutchman said.

The stench of rotting, bloated, blackened bodies under the midday sun was overpowering; some boys gagged, others simply ran away. But most stuck it out, their eyes streaming, their noses running, their jaws set grimly, determined to “plant the Rebs” with no less dignity than they planted their own. They used bayonets bent into hooks or blankets to drag these dirty blue and gray bundles to the chosen burial site where men, strong not only in body but also in stomach, had dug long, shallow trenches. “Wagons hauling in dead men and dumping them on the ground as cordwood, for burial in long trenches, like sardines in a box.” Sherman’s words came back to Jesse. The bodies were then placed in these mass graves, two or more deep, and covered with a layer of earth, sometimes gentle, other times thrown down with less than reverential haste because there were more that needed burying and the smell was like nothing anyone had ever experienced. A piece of splintered wood or the side of a cracker box was used as a marker, then someone with a pocketknife or a stub of pencil would scratch, “30 Rebel Dead” or “28 Union Dead” and the date: “April 1862.”

On one part of the field, Jesse helped bury forty-seven Rebel soldiers, among them a major and three captains, one of them with fine gray mustaches like the Hoosier aide. That happened a lot lately; Jesse saw the faces of those she loved in the faces of those who had perished. This fine, big, manly-looking individual with dirt in his mouth and blood in his nostrils and a bullet hole in the center of his brow reminded her of Captain Jackson. The expression of the eyes only imagined, since death had closed the lids forever.

“Don’t make too much fuss a the Rebs” was the casually given advice of a well-groomed lieutenant who appeared out of nowhere and spent his time leaning on his dress sword and smoking a cigar. “It ain’t even like yer buryin’ yer favorite hound dog, now is it?”

“They look so darn peaceful—some ’er ’em,” said one boy.

“They look damn angry, most of ’em,” said his partner, “and they smell awful bad.”

“Reckon them Rebs is short a footwear, some a ’em ain’t got no shoes.”

“Some ain’t got no feet.”

Some had no faces. The first boy backed away from the pile of rotting copses before he heaved up his breakfast and then, looking at his companions with undisguised horror, started to run for the trees. The lieutenant, who up until then had expended little energy above lighting a fresh cigar, brought his pistol from his holster and sighted.

Before he could get off a shot, a sergeant who had buried soldiers before at Donelson, among them two brothers and a son, had clamped a hand over the weapon and said, “Now there ain’t no call fer that, Lieutenant. Ain’t we had ’nough killing,
sir
?”

Five minutes later, after watching how the men disentangled that faceless corpse from the rest of the decomposing pile with a meat hook, the lieutenant was sick into the silk handkerchief he was holding to his mouth. However, no one laughed, no one thought it funny.

“Yer dig a hole in the ground, lay ’em side by side without any coffin, and then cover their bodies with earth,
Tennessee
earth,” said the sergeant who had buried three men of his family at Donelson. Unfortunately, there never was enough time for the traditional military salute. Nor even a short prayer. The sight of a chaplain at the burial trench was also rare. It fell to the soldiers who had fought with and fought against these men to offer up a word of spiritual comfort.

Some, more familiar with the lyrics of a melancholy song than the scriptures, would speak or sing, bringing a genuine sorrow to the occasion. Appreciated by the mourners as well as the mourned, this was infinitely more relevant than the pious sanctity of a chaplain, eager to be back in his tent with his communion wine. Across the way, Jesse watched one such dedication, led by an infantry major, a handsome, heavily bearded man near as big as Jacob, whose baritone voice rose reverentially, stirringly, to the treetops.

“Just before the battle, Mother

I am thinking most of you

While upon the field, we’re watching

With the enemy in view

Comrades brave are round me lying

Filled with thoughts of Home and God

For well they know that, on the morrow

Some will sleep beneath the sod

Farewell, Mother, you may never

You may never, Mother

Press me to your breast again

But O, you’ll not forget me

Mother, you will not forget me

If I’m numbered with the slain.”