13 The Unbidden Guest

It seemed to my dazzled eyes that I was to be overwhelmed in the next breath, that I alone was the aim of the entire Southern army, hurled at me thus like a single huge cannon ball. I stood for a moment without motion. The “rebel yell,” poured from so many throats, was still ringing in my ears and filling all the forest with its menace. As far as I could see reached the flash of steel, and a moving line of rifle muzzles and bayonet points as thick as a hedge confronted me. Behind these appeared the faces of the men in row on row, seeming to rise above each other like a terrace, as the attacking army rushed on. The crackle of rifles swelled to the left and right, and the dawn sputtered with flame. The battle had begun.

I fired my own weapon at the wall of faces that was rushing down upon me, and sprang back, shouting the alarm. I looked for Shaftoe with that instinctive feeling of reliance which caused me to turn to him in such emergencies, and the regular was there.

“Back upon the camp, Henry!” he shouted. “They’ve caught our army over the coffee cups, and we must give to the first rush.”

It was obvious, even to the untried, that nothing else could be done if we would save ourselves from being swept out of existence, and backward we sped like corks before a wave. I was still in a sort of daze. This apparition of a great and hostile army rising up, as if from the earth itself, struck me with such surprise that I could not recover at once, especially with imminent danger pressing so hard upon me, and the thunder of so many feet in my ears. It was a time to try the boldest.

A terrible tumult rose in the camp of our army, to which the dawn of a Sunday had brought such a sudden and unbidden guest; the officers shouted commands, the men rushed to arms, and some began to fire scattering shots into the advancing waves of the assailing force. It was a turmoil, a medley of fire, and steel, and shouting men, and unheard orders, and rattling rifles, and always sweeping down upon us the Southerners; a wave crested with bayonets. We stopped for a moment in a little clump of bushes, while past us, driven on from behind, surged the remnants of five companies, sent out to reconnoitre at daybreak, and first to feel the shock of the Southern charge. They had been driven backward at once, and when they would give warning of the danger, that danger came with them.

The Southern line began to fire, rank after rank, the rattle of the rifles rose to a fierce and unbroken crash, and a leaden sleet beat upon the confused camp, decimating the men who were trying to form for battle, strewing the ground with dead and wounded, sweeping down the tents, and adding to the confusion which attends a surprise—and most of all, a surprise at daybreak, when the men are just rising from sleep and the senses are dull. The yell of the Southerners swelled and fell once and again, but over it now rose the crash of the rifle fire and the wheet-wheet! of the bullets. Nothing was more vivid in my ear than the noise made by the passage of these bullets, which rushed by in such a stream that the air seemed to be filled with them. Then a deeper thunder joined, as the field artillery—the twelve-pound Napoleons—began to fire, and the sweep of their balls formed the bass chorus for the shriller note of the bullets.

“Oh, for earthworks, intrenchments, and we’d hold ’em off yet!” groaned the regular.

“I don’t mind a battle, but I don’t like being rushed into it before it’s due,” I gasped.

Shaftoe laughed.

“That reminds me that it’s no time for either of us to complain,” he said.

Clouds of smoke rolling up in languid waves rose over the forest, and gathered in a thick veil between the earth and the skies beyond it, which were now suffused with the morning sun. But beneath it there was an ominous brightness; a brightness, too, made ruddy by the incessant blaze of the rifles and heavy guns. The stricken army struggled and writhed in its pain, and bleeding already from many wounds, sought to gather itself together and hit back at its enemy. It seemed to us that the whole world was pouring upon us in one avalanche seeking to blot us from the face of the earth. We beheld our dead scattered through all the woods before us. The sight afflicted us; many of our men cursed their officers for allowing us to be surprised. Some, untried, raw, were overcome by panic, and joined the stream of wounded that poured back toward the shelter of the river bank, telling strange tales of what they had seen and suffered. But the vast majority, even in those moments of terror when Nature said “run,” remembered their duty and strove to do it in the face of death and defeat. Companies formed, and as soon as they formed were swept down by the flood of the Southern army and the battle knew them no more. Officers dragged their men into line until they themselves were slain by rifle and cannon balls; but whatever officers and men did, however bravely they fought, the great wave of fire and smoke bearing down upon us and pouring out death rolled on. It burst upon the camp, overthrowing men and tents, sweeping everything before it in a wild rout, a line of lead and steel that nothing could withstand. Some of the fallen tents caught fire, and the boughs of the trees, despite their spring freshness and the dampness of previous rains, sparkled into flames, lighting up the dawn with a new and redder light. Horses broke loose from their pickets and galloped up and down in terror, some wounded, all neighing a wild, shrill neigh that had more of pain in it than the cry of man. The thunder of the battle deepened, and with it the confusion.

After the first shock of surprise, the resistance in our army began to grow. The earliest groups of men that formed were scattered, and the Southern troops passed over the places where they had stood; but the later bodies showed more cohesion, and, though swept back, did not break; they began to unite with each other by and by, and to form companies and regiments and long battle lines, and to oppose with an angry front the powerful army that had been launched at us like a catapult. They seized every hillock as a post, and defended the crossing of every gully, clinging to a second position when they lost the first.

The Southern army rushed, a victor, through our camp, and, knowing already what it was to go unfed, was amazed at the plenty it saw there. Soldiers who were half starved, and thinking the victory sure, suddenly remembered their stomachs, and began to eat the breakfast cooked by the Northern army, served now to the unbidden guest, our foe. Boys, like our own, they began to rejoice hugely in their triumph and their captured food. Meanwhile the battle rolled on toward the Tennessee. The main part of both armies was still fighting, and the loss of the stragglers did not diminish the torrents of metal which swept the field.

I began to recover my clearness of mind, and grasped the facts that I saw, meanwhile keeping close to Shaftoe, who, though a private, loomed suddenly in my opinion one of the most important men in the field, certainly one of the wisest, and a figure to whom it would be well to cling.

“What shall we do?” I asked, shouting to make my voice heard above the roar. We had lost our own regiment.

“We’ll join Sherman, who is standing firm across yonder, and after that we’ll do whatever the rebels will let us do,” replied Shaftoe, in the same tone.

Sherman and his command, who still held the ground upon which they stood, were some distance behind the little church of Shiloh, and we ran toward his solid body of troops, wishing to join that portion of the army which was the firmest. But we were compelled to make our way through the line of fire, and my wonder that I had not been hit was great, since the shower of bullets seemed to me to increase in thickness, and their whistling rose to a sound that resembled the scream of a hurricane. The air was full of falling twigs and boughs clipped from the trees by this hail of lead and steel, and once a tree, cut through at the trunk by cannon balls, fell with a great crash across our path. But we leaped over and ran on, coming to the crossing of a gully which was defended by a squad of men in blue. An officer was swearing at them with energy and profusion; a cannon ball stopped his oaths and his life at the same moment. The men hesitated, but when the tallest among them said something which I failed to hear, they settled back in their places and turned their faces to the enemy.

“Don’t you know those men?” shouted Shaftoe to me. “That’s the drunken squad, the lot of Kentuckians whom you saw put into the guardhouse the other morning for diminishing the visible supply of whisky. The tall one who was talking is Sibley, and I should be surprised if they were not at least half drunk now. It’s a pity, too; there’s some first-class raw material there. The cloth is good, but it was spoiled in the making. Down for your life! There comes a volley.”

He pulled me to my knees behind some rocks just in time. I heard the bullets over our heads, and we lay there awhile not daring to face the shower. We were at the edge of a gully, and only a few feet below us stood the drunken squad. We could hear every word that was said.

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