Shiloh, 1862 (42 page)

He formed his command into a column of fours in support of a regiment of Alabama infantry that was trying to drive a body of Federals from a fencerow and charged toward the Sunken Road. Blasted by massed artillery and infantry fire—both of which are anathema to cavalry—Forrest’s bold riders lurched into the knotty thickets of the Hornet’s Nest and immediately found themselves and their mounts hopelessly entangled in the branches of the thick scrub oak. They—most of them, anyway—somehow managed to extricate themselves from the jungled thicket, but it was obvious now, if it wasn’t before, that mounted cavalry has little business in the middle of a serious infantry fight.

After that, Forrest led his regiment to the far Confederate right and hovered behind a series of Indian mounds along the Tennessee River, watching for trouble, of which Buell’s army was the paramount example. In the distance Forrest’s scouts could see some kind of activity on the far shore of the river, and the moving of steamboats, but when they attempted to get closer one of the Federal gunboats opened up and drove them back into the woods.

Night found Forrest suspended between curiosity and suspicion, and he ordered a squadron to strip a dozen dead Federals of their uniforms and sent a reconnaissance team under a Lieutenant Sheridan, dressed in Yankee blue, to get a better look at Pittsburg Landing. Soon they returned during a tremendous rain and electrical storm with news that was at once ominous and promising. Buell’s army had indeed arrived and was crossing the river, Sheridan said, but in his opinion there was such disorder at the landing that a surprise night attack might end the affair on the spot.

Forrest immediately set out in search of a superior officer, the closest being Brigadier General Chalmers, who was asleep. After being awakened he replied that Forrest needed to find a corps commander, if not Beauregard himself, for such a portentous operation. Continuing on, Forrest came upon corps commander Hardee and told him that if the Rebel army did not immediately launch a night attack, “[We] will be whipped like hell before ten o’clock tomorrow.” Hardee replied that Beauregard was the man to see, but somehow, in the rainstorm and the dark, Forrest was unable to locate Beauregard’s headquarters at the Shiloh church. About 2 a.m. he returned to Hardee but was told only to “maintain his pickets.” If there was in fact a “lost opportunity” for the Confederacy at Shiloh that was probably it.

For most of the men, that night must have been at the least an absorbing experience. The storm drenched everyone to the bone—even the Confederates who were now occupying the Yankees’ Sibley tents were soaked, for the canvas had been riddled with holes during the day’s fighting. All had been up since daybreak and were completely exhausted, and now even sleep was denied them. From the woods and the fields there came a kind of low, constant, monosyllabic sighing from the wounded, interspersed with the screams of those in acute agony. All day hundreds of wagons had been carting the wounded off toward Corinth, but it had not been enough. In places where the fighting had been heaviest, the wounded and the dead lay thick like a carpet, their countenances made more ghastly by the lightning flashes. As the storms broke up, a pale moon shone between the racing clouds, basking the horrid tableaux in an unearthly shade of yellowish blue.

Even more nauseating was the appearance of feral hogs, which began eating the dead and the wounded alike. Augustus Mecklin,
who had survived the charge of Statham’s brigade at the Peach Orchard, heard them, “unmistakable, quarreling over their carnival feast.” Bierce, too, later told of recoiling in horror at the droves of man-eating hogs on the battlefield.

All of this was punctuated throughout the night by terrific explosions from the big 8-inch cannons of the gunboats, which had been firing at 10- or 15-minute intervals since sundown to harass the Rebel army. Confederates hid in hastily scraped-out pits or beneath houses and corncribs; one even told of crawling into a hollow tree trunk. Since it was unaimed fire, most of the shells fell harmlessly in the woods, but some did not. Four Rebel soldiers were found next day, stone dead but completely intact and without apparent wounds, seated around an oilcloth they had spread on the ground in a Sibley tent to play cards. A burned-out candle sat atop a bayonet stuck in the ground. “Each had three cards in his hand,” said one of the soldiers who found them, “and four cards lay in the middle of the blanket.” The mere proximity to such huge explosions was enough to fatally stop the human heart.

Don Carlos Buell was a stern old martinet with a superiority complex who from the beginning did not like Grant or anything else about the Battle of Shiloh. He was most especially disturbed by the horde of stragglers at Pittsburg Landing and hinted—or so Sherman claimed—that he was considering not bringing his army across at all rather than have it mingle with such cowardly riffraff. To Sherman it suggested that the ever cautious Buell didn’t want to risk the possibility of his army getting whipped by the Confederates, just like Grant’s had been. But Buell rebutted this years later by
pointing out that he began bringing his army across to the landing as soon as it arrived on the opposite bank of the river. Brig. Gen. Thomas Crittenden, however, one of Buell’s division commanders, worried that the cowardice in Grant’s army would be contagious and found himself “so disgusted” by the mob at the landing that “I asked General Buell to let me land a regiment and drive them away. I did not wish my troops to come in contact with them.”

Grant seemed unperturbed by any of this. When the rainstorm began he sought shelter in the cabin atop the bluff, which had once been his headquarters, but found that it had been turned into a surgery that was still operating at full capacity. Repelled by the gory work, he returned to the tempest and took refuge beneath a large oak tree, which is where Sherman found him in the pouring rain stretched out in his overcoat, his slouch hat pulled down, and smoking his eternal cigar.

“Well Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Sherman remarked.

“Yes,” replied Grant. “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

There were many in the army, if not most, who would have declared that Grant was living in a fool’s paradise—but not all. Colonel Camm at least was confident that they were safe from the Rebel onslaught.

“For the first time we had a continuous line,” he wrote in his diary. “There was no chance to flank us, and of the men who bore the brunt that day there was none left in the ranks that would not have died on the line.”

For the Yankee army, April 7, 1862, began before sunrise, which was slightly after 5 a.m. What Grant had in store for the Confederates
was almost the exact opposite of what they had planned to do to him the day before. Starting from Pittsburg Landing, the Union line would attack in a giant wheeling motion, pivoting on Sherman and Lew Wallace, who held down the far western end of the line, sweeping across the battlefield until they drove the Rebel army against the boggy wilds of Owl Creek, where it would have to surrender. As with everything else at Shiloh, this was easier said than done. Unlike yesterday’s fighting, though, at least it was a plan.

Buell’s divisions, which were nearest the landing, moved out first, crossing Dill Branch, now deserted except for the dead. Musician fourth class John Cockerill, who had been told that his father, the colonel of his regiment, was shot and killed on Sunday, had a miserable night at the landing. He had been near enough to witness the grisly beheading of Captain Carson by the cannonball and had curled up in the rain beside a hay bale but was unable to sleep because of the constant firing of the gunboats.

“There was never a night so long, so hideous, or so utterly uncomfortable,” he wrote later. At dawn, however, young Cockerill was awakened by, of all things, strains of the overture from
Il Trovatore
,
²
“magnificent[ly]” rendered by the 15th Infantry Regiment band, serenading from the top deck of the steamboat
War Eagle
.

“How inspiring that music was!” wrote Cockerill. “Even the poor wounded men lying on the shore seemed to be lifted up, and every soldier received an impetus”—including Cockerill himself, who grabbed a rifle and, after a jolt from a swig of “Cincinnati whisky,” joined up with the 15th Infantry Regiment and marched
on the enemy. As they crossed Dill Branch, it didn’t look like the same ground anymore—and it wasn’t.

Cockerill noted that “the underbrush had been literally mowed off by the bullets, and great trees had been shattered by artillery fire.” Moving on, he found “In places the bodies of the slain lay upon the ground so thick that I could step from one to the other … I remember a poor Confederate lying on his back, while by his side was a heap of ginger cakes and bologna sausage. [He] had evidently filled his pockets the day before with edibles from a sutler’s tent, and had been killed before he had the opportunity to enjoy [them].”

Farther on, Cockerill “passed the corpse of a beautiful boy in gray, who lay with his blond curls scattered about his face, and his hands folded peacefully about his chest. He was clad in a bright, neat uniform, well garnished with gold, which seemed to tell the story of a loving mother and sisters who had sent their household pet to the field of war. He was about my age,” Cockerill said wistfully, and later, when reminded of it, he broke into tears.

All across the line of march it was the same. “The blue and the gray were mingled together, side by side. Beneath a great oak tree I counted the corpses of fifteen men, lying as though during the night, suffering from wounds, they had crawled together for mutual assistance, and there all had died.”

As they neared the Peach Orchard, Cockerill remembered, they came upon “an entire battery of Federal artillery which had been dismantled in Sunday’s fight, every horse of which had been killed in his harness, every gun of which had been dismantled, and in this awful heap of death lay the bodies of dozens of cannoneers.”

Among the most piteous sights, everywhere on the field “were the poor wounded horses, their heads drooping, their eyes glassy
and gummy, waiting for the slow coming of death. No painter ever did justice to a battlefield such as this, I am sure,” said the musician John Cockerill.

Soon enough they encountered the Confederate army. Lieutenant Bierce had found himself experiencing an odd sort of disappointment that morning when Hazen’s brigade moved out “straight as a string” but through woods that seemed strangely unmarked by yesterday’s battle. But shortly, “we passed out of this oasis that had singularly escaped the desolation of battle, and the evidence of the struggle was soon in great profusion.” Bierce marveled that every single tree that remained standing was covered in bullet holes “from the root to a height of ten to twenty feet,” [and] “one could not have laid a hand [anywhere on the trunk] without covering several punctures.” Soon they began to come upon the dead, and a few of the living wounded, including a Federal sergeant whose brains were oozing out through a hole in his skull. So brutalized had things become that one of Bierce’s men asked if he should put the victim out of his misery with his bayonet, but Bierce said no. “It was [an] unusual [request], and too many others were looking,” he said.

The brigade kept moving through open fields and past the Bloody Pond and the Peach Orchard. Ahead they caught glimpses of Rebel cavalry, but no infantry, and Bierce had convinced himself that the Confederates, “disheartened” by the arrival of fresh Union troops, had retreated to Corinth. Onward they marched unmolested, until they came to “a gentle acclivity, covered with an undergrowth of young oaks.” He could not have known it then, but Bierce was looking at the rear of the Sunken Road.

The brigade pushed into the open field and halted; then there were orders to press forward. When they reached the edge of the
oaks, Bierce said, “I can’t describe it—the forest seemed all at once to flame up and disappear with a crash like that of a great wave upon the beach.” There was “the sickening ‘spat’ of lead against flesh, and a dozen of my brave fellows tumbled over like ten pins. Some struggled to their feet, only to go down again. Those who stood fired into the smoking brush and retired. We had expected, at most, a line of skirmishers”; instead, he recalled bitterly, “what we found was a line of battle, holding its fire till it could count our teeth.”