The Storm Before Atlanta (14 page)

There had been no comrades gathered around crying, no time for a prayer or for the soldier to say how he loved his country as his God—whichever country it was. Not like the Drummer Boy of Shiloh at all.

Around him branches and trees splintered amid the crash of cannons and rifle fire. Jeremy no longer had any idea which direction he’d come from. He unslung his drum, set it on the ground between his knees, and beat out the Dead March, to make up to the dead man for the lack of weeping comrades.

Then he got shakily to his feet. This was no way to behave. He was a soldier, and his company was in battle, and he was supposed to be in battle with them. If he wasn’t, he might as well be a deserter, and deserters sometimes got shot. Of course, probably not as often as
non
-deserters got shot, he realized. He closed his eyes and tried to sort out the sounds around him, tried to figure out which way the battle was. No good. The battle was all over the place. The best thing was to try to retrace his steps.

This was hard to do. Not only did the woods and the ravines all look the same, but they looked a sight more shot up than they had an hour ago. Nothing looked familiar. At last Jeremy saw a man in a Union uniform.

“Yank or Reb?” Jeremy asked, out of breath.

“Provost marshal,” said the man.

Jeremy gulped. A provost marshal’s job was to drive fleeing men back into battle, to arrest anyone who was trying to escape the battle behind the lines. “I got lost.”

“I’ll say you did,” said the provost marshal. “You don’t belong in this at all. Get to the rear.”

“I’m a soldier,” Jeremy protested.

“Then you won’t disobey a direct order. Get to the rear.”

Jeremy nodded. He didn’t know where the rear was. The provost marshal pointed, and Jeremy stumbled that way. But as soon as the provost marshal was out of sight, he turned around. He knew the battle must be in the opposite direction from where the provost marshal had pointed
him, and so he went toward the battle. He crashed and fought his way through clinging branches and brush. Sometimes his feet weren’t even touching the ground as he punched and kicked and forced the forest to let him through. At last the trees grew thinner and he burst out into the actual battle.

In the valley below was a railroad track, and on the near side of it the Union Army was arrayed in battle. Artillery boomed from the hills. Rank upon rank of soldiers fired into the forest on the opposite side of the tracks, where the enemy was hidden. Jeremy tried to find his own regiment, but it was impossible to pick out the blue flag of the 107th New York in the chaos below. As Jeremy watched, a volley of shells came from the Confederate side and an entire Union regiment lay down on the ground and didn’t get up again. At first Jeremy thought they were dead, but then he saw some of them moving. And there wasn’t much blood, either. They were lying down because they were afraid to get up. Jeremy was indignant. At least he knew
that
wasn’t the 107th New York.

Then the Rebs moved out of the forest, advancing in ranks toward the Union lines. The Union soldiers fired on them like so many targets set up for practice. Jeremy watched in horror as the soldiers fell. But they were enemies, he reminded himself. It was good for them to die. He wished they would stop marching forward. Still they kept marching, and they kept dying.

Finally, to Jeremy’s intense relief, the remaining Rebs turned and ran back into the woods. But then more Rebs came out, fresh ranks from the woods, marching and dying. Closer and closer they came to the Union lines, but that just made them easier to shoot. This was
insane
. On a bright, sunny May afternoon, in a country that had trains and telegraphs and newspapers and every other kind of modern invention, people were lining up and shooting each other to death. Someone should stop them!

Jeremy hastily banished this unpatriotic thought from his mind. At last the Rebs retreated into the woods, except for a group who came forward under a white flag to surrender.

That night there was no calling back and forth across the lines. The Confederates weren’t that close. They must have all retreated into the town of Resaca, Jeremy’s messmates supposed.

“Not everyone can face a real battle,” said Lars, looking at Jeremy as he said it.

“I got lost!” said Jeremy, indignant.

“Sure. I’ve known plenty of soldiers who get ‘lost’ when their regiments go into battle,” said Lars.

“Leave him alone, Lars!” said No-Joke. “He’s just a child.”

“I’m a soldier!”

“Reckon this battle’s over,” said Dave, changing the subject. “Reckon the Rebs have absquatulated.”

“Wish the whole blamed war was over,” said Nicholas.

“The war must not be over until slavery has ended!” said No-Joke.

“Well, you’ve got your Emancipation Proclamation, ain’t that good enough for you?”

“Only if we win,” said No-Joke.

“How can we lose?” said Jeremy. He thought of what he had seen that day, of the Rebs coming out of the forest and then running back into the forest. He erased from the picture the sight of them being mowed down like hay under a scythe in summertime, because that wasn’t so pleasant to think about. “The 107th is invincible!”

“You got that right, Little Drummer Boy,” said Lars.

THIRTEEN

A
FTER THE FIRST DAY
, D
ULCIE HARDLY NOTICED
the sound of muskets and grapeshot anymore. She was too busy dealing with the results.

The cannons she still noticed, because each time they boomed she could feel the ground tremble under her bare feet. But she didn’t have time to think about it.

The first man she saw coming out of the battle wounded was not walking, he was crawling. Dulcie ran toward him. He wasn’t headed toward the field dressing station; he couldn’t see. Blood ran down his face into his eyes. The smell of the blood took Dulcie back to the farmyard, to Anne being whipped two hundred times … being bitten by dogs.… She willed the memory away. She had a job to do.

She approached the man and gingerly laid a hand on his shoulder. “This way, sir. The dressing station is over here.”

He made no response, but kept crawling in the wrong direction.

Dulcie risked a look down. He had been shot in the leg. It was horrible. She looked away hastily. She wanted to run back to the tent and get someone else to handle this. One of the orderlies, or Dr. Flood.

No, they were busy. She had to handle this herself.

She gripped the man’s collar and pulled him gently toward the tent. To her relief, he yielded to the pressure and started crawling in the right direction. She kept pulling, he kept moving. It was like how you had to drag Redtop, the old dog back on the farm, when he needed a bath. Dogs. Don’t think of dogs. Anyway, Redtop wasn’t that kind of dog.

One of the orderlies, Jake, was running out of the tent toward them, holding a length of cloth and a stick in his hand. Pushing Dulcie aside, he rolled the wounded soldier over onto his back, wrapped the bandage tight around the man’s leg just above the knee, and put the stick through the bandage. He wound the stick around and around, until the tourniquet cut deep into the man’s leg. The bleeding slowed to an ooze. Dulcie forced herself to watch. This was important.

“Tourniquet,” Jake said to Dulcie. “Go get Tim and tell him to bring a stretcher. And then grab a tourniquet yourself. They’re by the door.”

Dulcie did as she was told. She saw that she would be
expected to apply the next tourniquet herself. She hoped she wouldn’t mess it up.

When she came out of the tent again, they were everywhere … men stumbling, men crawling. One man was walking, but he suddenly keeled over frontward. Dulcie ran toward him, her tourniquet in her hand.

There was nowhere to put the tourniquet that she could see. A pool of blood seeped from beneath the soldier. Dulcie knelt beside him, wondering what to do.

“Leave him!” A man’s hand gripped her shoulder—one of the orderlies. Bill. He hauled her to her feet. “Go help those who can be helped!”

Dulcie looked up at him, horrified. This soldier beside them was still alive. Bill scowled back at her. “This is war, girl.”

Dulcie ran off to help another man who was stumbling blindly. She draped his unresponding arm over her shoulder and guided him to the tent, where Jake took him off her hands. She wanted to ask how the first soldier she’d found was, but there wasn’t time. She had to run out and get more wounded soldiers.

It’s us against the battle
, she realized.
And we have to save as many as we can
.

There must be others who weren’t able to stumble out of the battle, who are lying wounded under the gunfire
. She forced herself not to think about them right now.

“You’re not wounded!” Dulcie heard Bill yell.

She turned. He was screaming in the face of a dazed-looking soldier.

The soldier stared vaguely back at him.

“Get back to the battle or you’ll be shot for desertion!” Bill turned the unresisting soldier around, back toward the explosion of guns and cannons, and gave him a little shove. The soldier fell over flat on the ground and, as far as Dulcie could see, did not move.

There was no time to think about this. She ran to the next soldier. His arm was bleeding copiously. Tourniquet. Dulcie fumbled with it. Quick. She wrapped the bandage around the man’s arm. The more she tried to hurry, the more she grappled with the bandage. She dropped the stick. The wounded man watched her curiously all the while, as if she and his wound were in a painting hanging on a wall somewhere, nothing to do with him.

When it came time to turn the stick, though, he helped her. Together they turned it round and round, the soldier wincing in pain, and he held it while she clumsily bound it in place with the bandage.

Not all the soldiers were quiet and calm. The groans and howls of the wounded were all around her, filling her ears more insistently than the boom of the artillery and the crack and whistle of rifles. She tried not to feel anything. Feeling got in the way of action. She needed to be everywhere at once. There was never a moment to slow down and take a breath. She hated Bill’s instruction to help only those who could be saved—especially because she had no
idea which ones those were. She kept gathering fresh tourniquets and heading out to guide in the walking and crawling wounded. She tried not to look at the others. If they were stretcher cases the stretcher bearers would deal with them. Let them make the decisions about who could be saved.

She also tried not to look at a space under a wide-spreading chinquapin tree where some of the wounded soldiers had been gently laid down in the shade. She thought they were not dead—yet. She tried not to think about it.

Darkness fell. The shooting was less now, but it was still going on.

“Light some more lanterns, Dulcie.”

It was Dr. Flood who spoke. He was damp with exhaustion, the silver hair hanging down in strings over his forehead. His arms were spattered in blood, and he held a bloody knife in his hand.

Dulcie found the lanterns, lined up—candles in perforated tin boxes. She struck steel and flint together and lit them, one by one. Dr. Flood, she saw, already had several candles around him as he worked on a patient on a rubber blanket laid out on the ground. Beside him sat Seth, with his good leg tucked under him and the stump sticking out in front. Silently Seth passed the doctor bandages and bloodstained instruments. A bucket of water stood at his side, and sometimes he took a rag from the bucket and wiped blood off the instruments with it.

Dulcie took the lanterns to the orderlies. She kept one for herself and headed out, again. Now she had to locate the wounded by their groans, and she could no longer look away from the worst cases, because she didn’t know who they were until she was up close, shining the lantern’s yellow dots of light down on them.

A soldier was crawling toward her. Dulcie could see no wounds on his arms and legs, or head.

“Where are you wounded, sir?” she asked.

The man looked up at her, his teeth clenched in pain. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old. “Gut,” he said tightly.