he realized the troopers posted on the knolls-he'd been up on one of them himself for a little while, before hurrying forward-were taking a steady toll on the U.S. soldiers at the top of the bluff.
He also realized something else: a galvanized Yankee or even a Negro shrieking for his mother or simply howling out his pain to the uncaring world sounded just the same as a luckless Confederate doing the same thing. Were he a different person, that might have persuaded him of the essential brotherhood of man. Instead, it made him want to hear the foe making those noises instead of his own comrades.
At the top of the bluff, just outside their earthen parapet, the Federals had dug a ditch ten or twelve feet wide and even deeper than that. They likely hadn't dreamt any attackers could come so far, but, like any military engineers who knew their trade, they interposed a final barrier between themselves and the enemy. Or they thought they did.
Some of the Confederates reaching the top of the bluff tried to leap the ditch and scramble up onto the earthwork beyond. Matt Ward didn't see anyone who succeeded; that would have been a formidable jump even for a man not burdened with a rifle musket and enough cartridges to do a deal of fighting.
Most troopers showed better sense than to try to imitate a mountain goat bounding from crag to crag. Instead of jumping over the ditch, they dropped down into it. Ward was one of those. The bottom of the ditch was all mud and puddles; the ooze tried to suck the shoes right off his feet. But he was here, at the top of the bluff. Panting, he paused a moment to catch his breath and try to figure out what to do next.
Were the earthwork that protected the Union troops thinner, they could easily have shot down into the ditch and slaughtered the attackers. Instead, they had to crawl out on top of the bank of dirt to fire into the ditch. When they did, they exposed all of themselves to the distant sharpshooters' deadly fire.
“Now that we're here, that damn earthwork does as much for us as it does for the Federals,” said a man near Ward. “We can't get at them, and they can't get at us, neither.”
“But we don't need to be here, “ Ward said. The wet squelching as he shifted his feet underlined the point. “We need to be there.” He pointed to the far side of the parapet. “Long as the bluebellies hold us out, they win.”
“Well, it don't look like them sons of bitches is gonna be able to do it much longer,” the other trooper said. “Look there.”
In the age of chivalry, when knighthood was in flower, besieging an enemy castle was an everyday part of war. Soldiers no more thought of going into battle without scaling ladders than without their pants. Bedford Forrest's troopers knew little of days gone by. They had to improvise if they wanted to get out of the ditch. They had to-and they did.
It all started without orders, which made it seem more marvelous to Ward. Here and there, at the bottom of the muddy ditch, men went down on their hands and knees. Others swarmed up onto them, using them as human scaling ladders to get up to where they could reach the rampart and break into Fort Pillow.
For the first little while, things didn't go smoothly. The would-be ladders didn't perform well. Time after time, they toppled before they got very tall. Then a couple of sergeants who had some idea of what needed doing started yelling their heads off. Most of the time, Matt Ward had no use for sergeants. Just because they had stripes on their sleeves, they thought they were entitled to throw their weight around. Here, though, they turned out to be worth something after all.
With loud, profane encouragement, they got big men on the bottom of what turned out to be human pyramids instead of human scaling ladders. They put smaller men in the next layer up, and smaller men still above them. They still had a couple of collapses…
“God damn you, Riley, you stupid, clumsy son of a bitch, why the hell did you have to go and wiggle then?”
“I'm sorry, Sarge. Stinking bug landed right on my eyelid, so help me Jesus. What the devil was I supposed to do?”
“Likely tell,” the sergeant said. But he didn't waste any more time scorching the luckless Riley, so if he didn't exactly believe, he didn't exactly disbelieve, either. It wasn't as if he didn't have plenty of other troopers to scream at.
The first Confederate who made it up so he could rush the rampart got shot in the face the instant he showed himself. He tumbled back into the ditch, dead before he splatted into the mud.
“Move!” the closest sergeant bellowed to the men in his pyramid. “That Yankee bastard's gotta reload. If you can get up there before he does — ”
More and more men went up. A few of them were hit, and fell in the ditch again. Most, though, gained the narrow strip of ground between the ditch and the earthwork. They crouched there, ducking down behind the piled dirt, waiting for their orders. Matt Ward scrambled up himself. He saw Colonel McCulloch no more than ten feet away, waiting like everybody else.
“Be ready, boys!” McCulloch called. “We're almost there!”
On the other side of the rampart, the Federals had mostly stopped shooting, too. They waited tensely for whatever happened next.
“At my order!” someone shouted-a Confederate, Ward thought, though accent was no help in telling the sides apart with so many Tennesseans on both. The C.S. trooper clutched his rifle musket and braced himself, not that that would do any good if a minnie hit him.
“Is that General Chalmers?” whispered the soldier next to him. “Beats me,” Ward whispered back.
“Now!” shouted the officer, whoever he was.
Mack Leaming's saber blade glittered in the sun. He'd never dreamt he might have to fight with his officer's sword. The saber in the scabbard was a mark of his rank, nothing more, and an occasional nuisance that thumped against his leg. But at close quarters a slashing saber was a weapon not to be despised. He wished he had a better notion of how to fight with it, for the coming fight would be at quarters as close as a man could imagine in his direst nightmares.
“Are your pieces loaded?” a Federal officer called to the colored soldiers under his command.
“Yes, suh,” they said, and, “Sure is, suh,” and, “We ain't afraid of no Rebs.”
Leaming wondered why they weren't. He was desperately afraid himself, and trying hard not to show it. Not knowing fear seemed impossible. Carrying on in spite of it… A mere mortal might aspire to that.
Somewhere not nearly far enough away, a wounded U.S. soldier howled. While Bedford Forrest's troopers just outside of Fort Pillow mostly held their fire, the sharpshooters on the rises that looked down into the Federal position kept popping away at the soldiers in blue. Every so often, a round struck home.
“This is our big chance, men!” Major Bradford shouted. “If we hold them out now, they're whipped!” Bradford pointed up to the big U.S. flag floating above the fort. Several minnies had punched holes through the Stars and Stripes, but they still proudly waved. “That flag will never come down! Never, do you hear me?”
Together, white cavalry troopers and colored artillerymen raised a cheer. Bradford seemed over the worst of the jitters that afflicted him earlier in the day. Leaming hoped it wasn't too late. He shrugged. Jitters or not, Bradford had done about as well as any man could after Major Booth fell. His adjutant didn't see what he could have done differently if he didn't intend to surrender.
Oh, things might have gone better. If they had, the Federals would have been able to fire all the barracks buildings, not just those in the first row. Then Forrest's men would have had fewer places from which to shoot at the fort from close range. And, more important still, the Olive Branch and the other steamboats might have been able to land their soldiers. The Confederates were out there in large numbers. Leaming didn't know whether Booth's 1,500 or Bradford's 7,000 was a better guess, but the garrison was badly outnumbered either way. Reinforcements would have helped the U.S. cause.
If Forrest hadn't sent men to the mouths of the ravines below the fort to scare off the steamships… Leaming still thought he shouldn't have got away with doing that under flag of truce, even if it was a truce about which the soldiers aboard the Olive Branch knew nothing. No matter what Leaming thought, it was over and done with now.
“Be ready, boys! We're almost there!” a Confederate bawled.
“At my order!” another Rebel shouted. Both voices carried an officer's authority. Perhaps two heartbeats later, the second one cried, “Now!”
All along the earthen rampart, Bedford Forrest's troopers popped up, rifle muskets and pistols at the ready. Every Federal soldier with a loaded weapon fired at the same time, at point-blank range. Dead and wounded Rebs
