Shiloh, 1862 (39 page)

A
T LONG LAST, MUSICIAN FOURTH CLASS
J
OHN
Cockerill reached Pittsburg Landing, “almost too scared to be put on any sort of duty.” From the crest of the bluff he looked down upon a hive of breathtaking commotion, which he compared to a disturbed bed of ants. “Below lay thirty transports, at least,” he remembered, “all being loaded with the wounded, and all around me were baggage wagons, mule teams, disabled artillery teams and thousands of panic-stricken men. Some of the stragglers were being forced to carry sandbags up to fortify batteries of heavy siege guns.”

The cabin on the bluff that had once been used as Grant’s headquarters was “turned into a temporary field hospital,” Cockerill said, grisly as a charnel house, “where hundreds of wounded men, brought down in wagons and ambulances, were being unloaded, and where their arms and legs were cut off and thrown out to form gory, ghastly heaps.”

It seemed to Cockerill that everyone was yelling at once, and the air continued to fume with curses and threats by officers who were variously ordering or pleading with the thousands of fugitives to return for the one final stand against the Rebel onslaught. Even Grant joined in this effort, Cockerill said, yelling at the men that “Buell’s army would soon be on the field, and he did not want to see his men disgraced.”

Cockerill said that Grant told them if they did not return to the fight, “he would send his cavalry down to the river to drive them out,” and indeed did just that, for “a squadron of cavalry soon appeared, divided at either end of the landing, and riding toward each other with sabers drawn. The majority of the skulkers climbed up the bank,” Cockerill said, “hanging by the roots of the trees, and after the cavalry had passed they were back in their old places again.”

About that same time, said Cockerill, a most welcome sight appeared on the opposite side of the river, “where I saw a body of horsemen emerging from the low canebrakes back of the river. In a moment I saw a man waving a white flag with a red square in the center. I knew that he was signaling, and a few minutes later, I saw the head of a column of blue emerge from the woods beyond.” It was Buell, and they were saved, or so Cockerill believed.

Twenty-nine-year-old Ann Wallace had remained aboard the
Minnehaha
all through that Dantesque day, while teamsters loaded wounded men aboard the steamboats that were, in fact, about the
only structures at Shiloh remaining in Union hands.
¹
Buell’s men on the far side of the river had to make a road down to the water, but soon all the steamers at the landing, including the
Minnehaha
, were going “over and back, over and back,” Ann Wallace recorded, ferrying fresh troops to the battlefield. Overtaxed surgeons on the upper, or hurricane, decks were tending to the wounded, while Buell’s soldiers were loaded below.

Half of Ann Wallace’s family was on that fatal battlefield, or so it seemed, and she was nearly beside herself because of it. In addition to her husband, the general, her father, a colonel, and both of her brothers as officers, two of her husband’s brothers, as well as a number of more distant relatives, were in the fight. The noise of the battle had been drawing ominously nearer throughout the day and was now practically on top of her.

“As I sat there I saw these shells strike the sides of other steamers and cut off limbs of trees near where the road was made, and pass buzzing across our deck,” she wrote in a letter shortly after the battle. Adding to the beastliness of the scene were the shrieks and moans of wounded who faced the surgeon’s saw, or the frightened, searching eyes of silent sufferers. “I felt dazed and horrified, yet enthused by some means,” said Ann Wallace, “so I was not afraid … I knew the danger, but felt lifted above fear of it.

“The panic-stricken raw troops seemed perfectly insane,” she remembered. “The steamer would have to keep a slight distance from the shore, or it would have been swamped by the rush of officers and
men.” At one point a Union officer, half crazed with fear, somehow got aboard and came into the pilothouse where Ann Wallace was sitting. He produced a revolver and threatened to kill the pilot if he did not take his men aboard. The pilot stalled, pretending to obey, “giving the frenzied man time to come to his senses” and put his pistol down. “I felt it would be safer below,” she said, “but the feeling that exhibition of fear on my part would make it a little harder for that pilot to stand at his post kept me from going down.”

As the battle seemed to be nearing a wild, frantic peak, Ann Wallace turned to see the Rev. Charles Button, whom she knew from Springfield and as chaplain and elder of her husband’s former regiment, “with a worn and depressed look,” coming up the gangway, partially disabled by a spent bullet while he had been tending to the wounded.

“This is an awful battle,” he said to her. She replied, “Yes, but these fresh troops will yet win the day.” He hesitated. “You have a great many relations on this field, you cannot hope to see them all come in safe.” Ann somehow deflected the statement, but he had come up behind her, where she was sitting, and once more said, “It is an awful battle.”

It was his tone of voice. “The dread truth fell on my heart like a thunderbolt, like the cold hand of steel,” she cried. “Words needed not to tell it. I was stunned, chilled, almost paralyzed! Suffering came hours afterwards.” Soon Lieutenant Dickey, her brother, arrived and was “spared the task of telling me my life had darkened,” she said. Dickey provided some details of Wallace’s last moments and the attempt to return the body, but to Ann Wallace it was nearly beside the point. “My husband was dead, and the enemy had possession of the ground where he lay. ’Twas all they could tell me, and it was enough.”

Ann Wallace spent the miserable remainder of that night, she wrote later, “bathing the fevered brows and limbs of the sufferers around me. Action was a relief, and it was a slight help to aid men who were suffering in the cause for which Will had given his life.” These were the words of a general’s wife.

Buell’s army arrived on the opposite shore with understandable trepidation. Since late morning they had marched the ten miles from Savannah through the most obnoxious jungles and swamps alongside the Tennessee River, down an old wagon road, in places barely a rut, “dank and unwholesome,” led by a native guide, and impeded by fallen trees, shallow, scummy ponds, and “slippery mire shoe-top deep.” It seemed with each passing minute the noise of the battle was sharpened, said a private from Ohio, naturally reinforcing everyone’s realization that “it was no child’s game going on ahead of us.”

It was about 4:30 p.m. when Buell’s leading regiments emerged from the swamp into a large cornfield and meadow opposite Pittsburg Landing, from which the view across the Tennessee River was appalling.

Ambrose Bierce, destined to become one of America’s best-known literary figures, was a first lieutenant with the Ninth Indiana in Col. William B. Hazen’s brigade of Nelson’s division. As they slogged through the greasy swamps, in his mind the battle became a “dull, distant sound like the heavy breathing of some great animal below the horizon”; then, as they surfaced into the cornfield, “the air was full of thunder and the earth was trembling beneath [our] feet. Below us ran the river, vexed with plunging shells and obscured in spots by blue sheets of low-lying smoke.”

Across the river, the smoke mostly blanked out the landing itself
but, on the bluff above, Bierce saw “the battle burning brightly enough; a thousand lights kindled and expired every second. Through the smoke, the branches of the trees showed black; sudden flames burst out, here and there, singly and in dozens, fleeting streaks of fire [that] crossed over to us, followed by the musical humming of the fragments as they struck the ground on every side, making us wince, but doing little harm.”

“The air was full of noises,” Bierce continued, “distant musketry rattled smartly and petulantly, or sighed and growled when closer. There were deep shaking explosions and smart shocks. The death-line was an arc of which the river was the chord, filled with the whisper of stray bullets and the hurtle of conical shells; the rush of round shot. There were faint, desultory cheers. Occasionally, against the glare behind the trees, could be seen moving black figures, distinct, but no larger than a thumb; they seemed to be like the figures of demons in old allegorical prints of hell.”

Such was Bierce’s first impression of the unearthly spectacle unfolding before Buell’s army as it reached its place opposite the landing—a vivid, articulate account of what it must have been like to see the very gates of hell across the river Styx. One of Buell’s signalmen set up a wigwag
²
station, which is what 16-year-old John Cockerill saw from his perch atop the opposing bluff where the battle raged in earnest. Soon a transport, and then another, emerged from the blanket of sulfurous, flame-stabbed smoke around Pittsburg Landing and steamed toward them.

As more Federal regiments began to arrive at the cornfield they found themselves sharing space with a sizable gathering of local “country folks,” who exhibited “an intense anxiety to see every movement visible on the farther side of the river.

“One of these worthies,” wrote a private in the Sixth Ohio, “was hailed by our company,” whose members apparently held the locals in fairly low esteem. “Say, old feller!” he was asked. “How’s the fight going on over there?”

The man, the soldier said, was “an old and somewhat diminutive specimen, grizzle-haired, stoop shouldered, and withered from the effects of the sun and tobacco.” After hesitating for a moment he turned and, “with a side-long glance of his eyes, answered slowly: ‘Well, it are’nt hardly decided yet, I reckon; but they’re driving your folks—some.’ ”

This perfectly diplomatic and truthful answer was greeted with howls of derision from the Sixth Ohio men, who called him a “damned old sesesh”
³
and sent him on his way with kicks and jeers and other, harsher expressions inappropriate for this story.

Pandemonium reigned on the riverbank as Buell’s men and horses were herded onto the boats. Owing to the poor road through the swamp, all of the division’s artillery had to be left behind at Savannah and brought up later in transport ships, but that didn’t matter. What was needed now was men, or rather cannon-fodder, but—with any luck—fodder that would fight.

At the head of his division was 300-pound Bull Nelson, in fine spirits astride Ned, his magnificent black stallion, “the very picture of satisfaction and good humor,” calling out to the men,
“Now, gentlemen, keep the columns well closed up!” This statement so stunned the private Ebenezer Hannaford of the Sixth Ohio (unaccustomed, as he was, to being referred to as a “gentleman,” and certainly not by a major general) that he concluded it must have to do with the way the prospect of impending battle worked on the psyche of his rotund division commander. Hannaford decided that Nelson was a war lover and psychologized afterward that “Some natures seem to find in antagonism and conflict their native element—almost as much a necessity to them as the air they breathe.”

For his part, Lieutenant Bierce acknowledged “there was no elephant on the boat that took us across that evening,” adding that, instead “we had a woman. She was a fine creature, this woman; somebody’s wife. Her mission, as she understood it, was to inspire the failing heart with courage, She stood on the upper deck, with the red blaze of battle bathing her beautiful face, the twinkle of a thousand rifles mirrored in her eyes; and displaying an ivory-handled pistol, she told me in a sentence punctuated by the thunder of great guns that if it came to the worst she would do her duty like a man!” Whether Bierce and his company were aboard the
Minnehaha
with Ann Wallace as it transferred troops from bank to bank is unknown. Mrs. Wallace is silent on this, and so is history, but it’s certainly an interesting possibility to contemplate.

Bierce’s writing here turns as purple as the darkening skies when the sun dipped below the horizon of the battlefield. But outside there was still light and time for one more charge by the ragged and exhausted Rebel army. It would be the one out of many they would talk about, and write about, and argue about, for decades to come, the charge that became known as “the Lost Opportunity.”