APRIL 7, 1862
SHILOH
This is Hell.
Less than a year ago I was sixteen years old and my worst fear was my father’s hand, a leather belt wrapped twice around the knuckles. Now I stare at a landscape blown apart by hate and mortar, drenched in blood and the flesh of countless men.
Ellie, please help me.
Our line advances, disheveled uniforms soaked through. The march from Corinth was two days of heavy rain. My socks—what remains of them—were hung from a branch overnight while we prepared for the latest attack on Grant’s men, but the wool holds moisture and my feet burn and itch as I move forward with my line. Colonel Forrest screams from his horse, his voice lost amid a barrage of cannon from the Federal gunboats lining the Tennessee River. I’ve been separated from my assigned brigade under Brigadier General Ruggles, whose battery had been heroes only a day prior, capturing over a thousand Yankee soldiers. Now, under Forrest, who seems mad and vicious and—quite frankly—careless, we march with a speed and negligence that leaves us open to all forms of counterattack.
All around me, men fall.
Standing as a clean target atop a rise near a burnt-out peach farm, I pause to scan the breadth of the battlefield. The ground ripples like water as thousands of men march toward Union lines, the clouds of rifle smoke conjoining with the ever-present mist hanging over the land; the staggered batteries and their incessant cannon fire are a froth atop a breaking wave. The unceasing artillery blows apart great patches of earth. Screams of triumph and pain rise in chorus, deafening as the weaponry.
My brothers and I constitute three men of the Army of Mississippi. Three of thirty thousand sent to break Grant’s forces at Pittsburgh Landing. I’ve never seen so many people in one place, nor so much death. When I scan the vista, I feel as if every man of the South has come to Shiloh to fight this battle, so unreal to me are the sheer numbers. For two days, victory seemed assured. The men sang, spoke excitedly of pushing the Federal Army into the Tennessee River. But then Johnston was shot, blood filled his boot, and by the time they laid him beneath a tree he was gone. Beauregard was given command just as reinforcements arrived to stiffen the Union defense.
Now, after two days of horror, the men no longer sing. They say that all is lost. That we’ve pushed too far for a possible retreat.
That we’ve been thrown into a hornet’s nest. That Beauregard’s cries of a counterattack are a death knell. Meanwhile, the naval boats don’t stop firing. They don’t ever stop, and men are blasted—again and again—into great blossoms of torn flesh everywhere I look. Hundreds. Thousands. On both sides.
I say this is Hell because it’s the truth of what I see. Blood pools in fields like ponds, overflowing with limbs. The unceasing artillery is deafening thunder and the very air reeks of brimstone. Great swaths of earth have caught fire and are ablaze. Trees burn like angelic sentinels passing judgment.
Marching over the ridge I draw to a halt, raise my rifle, and fire at the distant line of blue. I reload. Across misshapen terrain I meet eyes with an enemy soldier, his own eyes wide above a wooly beard. I wonder what he thinks of my clean face, my thin frame awash in frayed grays, as I make to murder him and those he loves. He likely thinks me a child who has lost his way but needs to die all the same. I don’t disagree; I’m convinced my short life has been chosen as a sacrifice for this war.
I fire my weapon and he disappears behind the cloud of my rifle shot. I reload, search for another target, but in the surrounding chaos my mind loses clarity—my feet walk, my rifle aims—but my thoughts are sluggish. There are but two things I know clearly.
I will soon be dead.
I must find my brothers.
The earth beneath me erupts.
A blinding white light lifts me off the ground and sends me flying backward. Hot blood hits my face, and a fist of meat that was once the man walking ten paces ahead slaps against my cheek and slides past my ear to the ground. My breath is snatched away by the impact and when I try, heaving, to suck in a breath I inhale nothing but hot smoke that burns my throat like fire. My ears ring so loudly that—for the first time in two days—I can’t hear cannon fire. My vision warps, tunnels, but remains good enough to see a detached arm resting to my left, the dirty hand clutched to a broken rifle.
It’s my bad luck to have stepped into target range of the naval ships, which now seem to have coordinated on my exact position. Worse luck for the man whose back I followed toward the Union line, a stranger with whom I now share an intimate connection, his blood sprayed over my uniform, my face, bits of his flesh greasing my long hair as I gain my feet. I force myself to gather my bearings as piles of earth blast upward in great, sky-darkening sprays everywhere I look and showers of dirt and stone rain down on my head and shoulders. The detonations leave holes deep enough for graves.
The desperation to live—to see my brothers one last time and escape this nightmare, to perhaps make my way home and see my sister and feel her warm embrace—motivates me to push through the veils of horror, the rollicking tumult of the battle, and find shelter. I turn my back on the Union soldiers firing their rifles and face the hundreds of Confederate men in a line running toward them on either side of me. I spot the mad Colonel Forrest, red-faced and bellowing orders. Suddenly, all the things related to duty and honor that have grown inside of me dry up and crumble to dust, blow away like the shifting gray smoke clouding the battlefield.
And I run.
I’m not three steps when another blast hits me, punching me with a wall of hot air and I’m knocked clean off my feet. I waste no time searching myself for injury and, finding none, begin to crawl like an animal, scrambling on hands and knees away from the massive concussions of enemy fire. The smoke has gotten so thick I can see only shadows of soldiers sprinting past, toward the war, more ghosts than men. I get to my feet and run up a small hillock ending at the lip of a natural gulley. Without thought I throw myself over the edge, let my body go loose as I hit bottom, wincing as I collide with dirt and stubborn rocks. I roll toward a thin stream stained red with blood then push away from the water, curl myself into a fetal position beneath a stone overhang that I pray hides me from eyes as well as bullets.
I begin sobbing because I don’t have enough sense left in myself not to.
I don’t care if they think me a coward. I’m seventeen years old and I don’t want to die.
Ellie, I love you and I miss you. Please save me.
I flatten myself against the earth, will my body to be swallowed by the dirt as the non-stop barrage of artillery from the Union batteries and metal-clad gunboats continues, shuddering the ground beneath me, pummeling the land hard enough to shake Heaven itself, cause the angels in the clouds above to cry out in despair and make God bleed from his eyes and ears.
I lie for what seems an eternity beneath that ridge as rifles and small arms fire at will, cannons roar, and the earth is beaten, as if mountain-sized giants had left the pages of fairy tales and were pounding their fists against the Tennessee soil in some mad rage against this evil world.
I shut my eyes tight and cover my head with my
arms, the blood-soaked Confederate cloth sticky against my flesh, and wait for the end.
“Ethan! Ethan, God damn you!”
I open my eyes. Two men stare at me, wide-eyed; scraggly beards thick as moss cover their cheeks, mouths, chins. They lie prone in the dirt beside me, rifles laid flat.
My brothers.
“Christ, boy, we thought you were dead,” Archie says, bent teeth flashing amidst his filthy red facial hair. He punches me in the shoulder—too hard—and I wince.
Mason stares at me with those intense, pale blue eyes, scrutinizing my head and body. Looking for injuries. “Can you walk?”
“I’m fine,” I say, and feel a swell of joy in my chest at the sight of them. Both of them. Both alive. “Scared,” I add, feeling no shame at the confession.
Mason nods. “Beauregard is either stupid or crazy. Perhaps both. Grant’s got the whole damn Ohio army landing in support, and more coming. We’re badly outnumbered. This battle is over.”
Part of me knows this. I’d heard enough from the other soldiers who’d whispered similar things, but I don’t have a mind for strategies of war. Back home I’m not even trusted to run Father’s tobacco shop. Out here I’m asked to murder, day and night, and know I’ll never forget my first kill in the heat of battle.
When we made our initial thrust into Grant’s camps, catching the bastards by surprise, I’d been running and screaming like a demon—we all were, thousands of us—and I gloried seeing those bluecoats panic amidst all the chaos and death, retreating as fast as their legs could carry them, leaving spoils and prisoners behind like offerings. Somehow I found myself alone amidst a group
of tents when a Union soldier burst from the mouth of one of those tents, holding his rifle like a spear, bayonet pointed at my gut. By instinct alone I swung my weapon and knocked the deadly point away, but the bluecoat threw his weight into me and we both went hard to the ground. I looked into his eyes for a brief moment and saw terror. He was only a few years older than myself, screaming in my face, primed to kill.
But I had an advantage.
In addition to the bayonet attached to my rifle, I keep a second tucked into my right boot (the boots being the only nice things I own, stripped off a dead Yankee colonel that Mason had found floating down the Cumberland River after the devastating loss of Fort Donelson. Luckily for me they’d been too small for my oldest brother, who is taller and broader than me by three inches and fifty pounds, and too small for Archie, who—although skinny as barbed wire—has feet so big he was wearing father’s hand-me-down shoes at the age of twelve). It was into this dead colonel’s boot I reached, sliding the bayonet free while the Yankee slid strong hands over my throat.
I punched it once into his side, saw his eyes widen in shock. His hands loosened, trembling, from my neck, and I cursed into his dying face as I plunged the steel into him again, this time into his guts. I twisted, pulled free, and thrust it into him again, and again. I pushed him off me, knelt beside his pale, shaking body—those murderous hands now grappling at the blood spilling from his stomach—and drove the bayonet into his heart, then his neck. I thanked God for preserving me even as I felt awash with the evil of my deed. Hands shaking, I wiped my weapon clean on his blue pants and returned it to my boot. From that moment on, I thought of that bayonet as a good luck charm and go nowhere without it stuck firm to my calf.
“What do we do?” I ask, looking into Mason’s pale eyes, cold as a frozen windowpane, for guidance.
He spits and scowls, turns to Archie, who simply grins like the fool he often is. A mad, dangerous fool. When Mason looks back at me, his face is determined, his mind set. His eyes, however, are full of apology.
As the afternoon wears on, it becomes apparent that the battle is lost and that Beauregard is set for another counterattack—despite immeasurable deaths and casualties—against an ever-increasing Yankee army building along the river.
The three of us head southwest, aiming for the hospital at Fallen Timbers. There’s so much chaos no one spares us a glance. Entire brigades are already signaling retreat. Even so, we walk steadily, careful not to draw undue attention from a colonel or any of the regiments pushing toward Pittsburgh Landing and certain death. We stay to the trees as best able, and the further we walk the easier that becomes, since fewer of them are burning as we move beyond the range of Union artillery.
“We’ll take the Corinth Road,” Mason says, eyes studying the face of every soldier we pass, as if daring them to question our direction. “Anyone asks, we’ve been ordered to fortify the hospital. That the Yanks are surging and some of us are falling back to protect the wounded.”
It’s not an unfair assumption, and both Archie and I nod our assent. While the stacked regiments continue pushing east, there are several wounded being carried—by arm or by stretcher—back toward the hospital. It’s only a few miles to Fallen Timbers, and we can regroup there, decide next steps.
“I don’t feel bad about it,” Archie says, and spits in the dirt. “We had the sons of bitches good as dead when Johnston got it. We never shoulda let up.”
Archie’s voice is deep and gravelly, and has always been hard to understand. I don’t recall the event, since I’m nearly eight years his junior, but as a boy he’d been cursed with a disease called diphtheria that nearly killed him. Mason told me about it once when I asked why Archie talked the way he did; told me our brother was near strangled to death. Said it was some kind of poison in the blood, that he was lucky to have survived.
What was unknown, however, was whether Archie’s grinding voice was the result of the disease itself or our father’s frantic attempts at clearing his airways, which he did by repeatedly driving the shaft of a silver serving spoon down the boy’s throat.
Whatever the case, his words always sound as if they’ve been scraped from his tongue with a rusty hatchet. Most people can’t understand him the first time they hear him speak—if ever—but Mason, Ellie, and I have grown familiar with it and have little trouble in the deciphering.
“No reason to feel anything,” Mason says, walking faster now than he’d done since we all joined the army six months ago.
The idea to join the 20th Regiment had been Mason’s. Ellie had protested me going with them, having just turned seventeen, and young for a soldier. But Father served in the Mexican-American War and would hear none of her compassion on my behalf. He was proud of his boys going to fight for the great state of Mississippi, to “protect the morals of the South” against Lincoln’s hordes. At first, we were excited. We marched to Virginia well-stocked and champing at the bit for some action. Men spoke of seeing the elephant, a real battle, speaking in rushed, excited tones, as if it would all be some sort of adventure.
Most of those happy-go-lucky men were killed or captured shortly thereafter, at the battle of Fort Donelson. My brothers and I were lucky as rabbits in a clover patch to sneak out of that one, and me with new boots. After regrouping, a bunch of us were sent to join Bragg’s ten thousand in Corinth. A few weeks later we were at Shiloh, sprinting out of the trees like men possessed, howling like demons toward Union camps, thinking we’d win the damn war with one charge.
And now, after getting us into this, it’s our eldest brother making the decisions once more. Only this time it’s to get out of the war. To stay alive. I don’t know what he’ll tell Jeremiah—if we ever make it home, that is—but it’ll be his mess to explain. He’s the only one of us Father has any respect for. Not just because he’s the oldest—having lived an entire decade before I’d even taken a
breath—but because he’s the only one of us as mean, if not meaner, than the old man himself.
Sure, Archie has his moments. But Archie ain’t so much mean as he is cruel. If there was a disagreement, Mason (who is big as an ox and twice as strong) would invite a man to a fight before beating him to Hell and back. Archie’s the type to say nothing to an insult, but a week later you’d feel steel sliding into your back on a dark night, and it’d be my brother grinning down at you as you bled out, his crooked teeth and grating, sandpaper laughter the last thing you’d see and hear on this earth.
I’m nothing like my brothers. I’m tall, but weak. Skinny as a pole, as Mason likes to say, teasing me about it all my years. I think my lack of temper has a lot to do with my twin sister, Ellie. Growing up, she wouldn’t let me get mean, or cruel. Kept me on a moral path, I suppose. She’s a good person with a big heart, and my love for her is boundless. Our whole lives we’ve been inseparable, and even now, with hundreds of miles between us, it’s as if I can feel her heart beating next to mine, her hand squeezing my fingers tight, tugging at them—at me—to come home.
Lord knows I’m trying.
“We’ll leave the road before Fallen Timbers,” Mason says. “Don’t need any questions from the officers at the hospital. We’ll cut southwest, pick up the Natchez Trace from a distance, then make our way toward the big river. See if we can steal a boat or, hell, a canoe if we have to. Make our way back to Natchez on the Mississippi. We’ll need to stay clear of roads, of stands and towns. Men like us, they’ll wonder why we ain’t fighting.”
“What’ll they do?” I know the answer but need to hear my brother say it, need to know it’s certain and not just my being afraid.
“Shoot us, of course,” Archie says, then chuckles. “We’re deserters now, boy.”
“Yeah,” Mason mutters. “We’re under Bragg. He’s merciless with deserters. If we’re caught we’ll be dragged back, made an example of.”
He looks at me with a frown. I notice how dirty he is. His overgrown black beard is matted with mud, or blood, I don’t know which; the hair under his tilted cap is caked to his sweaty neck like a shadow. The
The whites of his eyes are bloodshot, red as lit furnaces, his lips chapped and bleeding. “I’m sorry, little brother,” he says, then looks to Archie, who gives a nod, then looks to the dirt.
“Won’t let nothing happen, Ethan,” Archie grumbles. “We’ll keep you safe.”
“I know,” I say, and adjust the rifle slung over my shoulder, and am reassured by the pressure of my lucky bayonet hiding in a dead man’s boot as we tromp forward—criminals, cowards, deserters—toward home.
It’s about six miles to the field hospital. As we walk, we come across fewer and fewer soldiers. There’s a ridge ahead and if memory serves the hospital is just over the other side. Perhaps a half mile. I’m beginning to wonder when it would be wise to change course into the fields, and away from the road, when a lone figure appears on the ridge, close enough to be hit with a well-thrown stone.
“That’s a lieutenant,” Archie mumbles, face tilted down but his gaze ahead, watchful.
“Damn,” Mason replies. “Keep your eyes forward, nod and show your palms but don’t make a show of it.”
I tense as the man comes closer. I try to appear relaxed, as if what we’re doing and where we’re going are perfectly legitimate. Following orders. But the lieutenant is scrutinizing the three of us—a deep frown creases his face above a trimmed beard; his hands balled like fists where they extend from a clean frock. He looks brand new, as if he’d been dropped down into this place from Heaven above, eager and fresh and unblemished.
Before we can decide whether to salute his moderate rank or continue on our way, he comes to an abrupt halt, eyes wide and glaring beneath his forage cap. I note that one of his hands is settled on the hilt of his saber.
“Stop!” he snaps, and we do.
I swallow hard, do my best not to look nervous. I glance toward my brothers. Mason looks bored. Archie smiles broadly, scratches at his rust-red beard. Both looks are unsettling, because I know what danger simmers beneath those masks.
The lieutenant stomps within a couple feet, glares at each of us individually; anger flares his nostrils, wide brown eyes bulging. “Where you headed?”
“We’re to support the hospital,” Mason drawls, that bored expression never leaving his face. ...
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