coons-what kind of fight could people like that put up? He figured they would throw up their hands and surrender as soon as that first terrific volley tore into them. Of course, from what he heard, Bedford Forrest had thought they would surrender when he sent in the flag of truce.
Forrest proved wrong, and so did Ward. The soldiers in blue fought with as much courage as anyone could want to see. Maybe that was the desperation of cornered rats. Whatever it was, they showed no signs of yielding even if they were badly outnumbered, even if that blast of gunfire killed or wounded quite a few of the men at the rampart.
If they wouldn't give up, they had to go down. A big colored man in a blue uniform swung his clubbed Springfield at Matt Ward's head. Ward ducked just in time. The rifle-musket butt knocked the slouch hat off his head, but didn't knock out his brains. He swore all the same; he liked that hat.
He stabbed at the Negro with his own bayonet. The black man sprang away. But then he swung again, trying to knock the Enfield out of Ward's hands. Ward wasn't an experienced bayonet fighter. He didn't think any soldiers except former U.S. Army Regulars were expert with the bayonet. But he held on to his weapon, and the black man's swipe left him hideously exposed and unable to get away. Only a sandbag on a practice field could make a more inviting target.
Like anybody who grew up on a farm, Matt Ward had slaughtered and butchered his share of livestock. He knew the soft resistance flesh gave to a knife, knew the feel of a blade grating off a rib and then sliding deeper. But there was all the difference in the world between sticking a hog and sticking a man.
The Negro's eyes opened enormously wide. “Do Jesus!” he screamed. Then he let out a bubbling, wordless shriek of pure agony. He jerked away from the blade and from Ward. An experienced bayonet fighter would have held the lunge and gone on stabbing, twisting the blade to make sure he had a killing stroke. Ward thought the black man would fall over dead. The blood pouring from his side made that seem likely.
Likely or not, it wasn't so. Once free of the bayonet, the Negro went right on fighting-not against Ward, but against a nearby Confederate trooper. That wound had to kill him sooner or later-Ward drove more than a foot of steel into his chest-but it wasn't finishing him fast. As Ward had by the barracks below the bluff, he found out how hard human beings were to kill.
Not far from him, a black soldier threw down his Springfield and fell to his knees in front of a couple of Bedford Forrest's troopers. “Don' shoot me!” he shouted. “Please don' shoot me! I surrender! Ain't gonna fight no mo'!”
“You a runaway, boy?” one of the Confederates asked. Most of the Negroes who fought for the U.S.A. were. By the way this bluebelly talked, he sure didn't come from Massachusetts or New York.
He hesitated a split second, but had to realize lying would do him no good. “Yes, suh,” he admitted. “You kin send me back to my massa. I don' care, so he'p me Jesus.”
Most of the time, the Yankees complained because the Confederates treated captured colored troops as reclaimed property, not prisoners of war. Forrest had offered to treat the blacks in Fort Pillow as prisoners like any others-he'd offered, and the U.S. commander turned him down. Now the bill for such folly came due.
“I'll send you to your master, all right,” the Confederate said. “I'll send you straight to the Devil, because you belong in hell!” He shot the black man in the head from no more than a yard away. Blood and brains and bits of the Negro's skull blew out. The black toppled and lay twitching in the dirt.
“That's telling him, Hank!” said the other C.S. trooper in butternut. “I should've bayoneted him in the guts, let him die slow,” Hank said. “Shooting's too good for a mad dog like that.”
“If you can kill 'em fast, you better do it,” Ward broke in. “I stuck one, stuck him good, and he's still on his feet, the son of a bitch.”
“Niggers is like rattlesnakes-they don't die till sundown.” Hank stirred the man he'd just shot with his foot. “Well, this here one's a goner. Bastard's dead as a stump. But Lord only knows when I'll get a chance to reload.”
If you didn't carry a repeater or a revolver, that was the rub, especially in a close-quarters fight like this. If you fired too soon, you might come to a point where you desperately needed a bullet but didn't have one. If you waited too long, somebody on the other side was liable to shoot you before you pulled the trigger.
Without a minnie in his own rifle musket, the question was as academic for Ward as it was for Hank. When the Federals mounted a counterattack, he defended himself with bayonet and butt because they were all he had. He might have been one of Julius Caesar's legionaries, except their spears were lighter and longer and less clumsy than his.
But some of his comrades still had loaded weapons. They shot a couple of white officers, after which the Union charge faltered. “Come on!” Ward said. “There ain't enough of 'em to hold us out, no matter how hard they try!”
He waded into the fight. A white Tennessean in a blue uniform tried to bayonet him. He tried to bayonet the homemade Yankee at the same time. His bayonet punched into the enemy trooper's thigh. The Federal's thrust missed him. The Tennessean who fought for the U.S.A. yowled and sat down hard, trying to hold the wound closed with his fingers. Ward never found out what happened to him, whether he bled to death, whether some other Confederate killed him, or whether he ended up getting taken prisoner.
Ward also stopped worrying about what happened to the Tennessee Tory the instant after he bayoneted him. A great cheer rose from the Confederates, a hardly smaller moan of dismay from the Union troops.
The large U.S. flag that had floated over Fort Pillow since dawn's early light was down. If that didn't mean the fort was falling, nothing ever would.
Sergeant Ben Robinson groaned when the Stars and Stripes came down. That was his flag, not any of the ones the Confederates used: not the Stars and Bars, not the Stainless Banner that replaced it because from a distance it looked too much like the flag it sought to supplant, and not the Confederate battle flag with its blue X on red. If he belonged to the United States, he had a chance to be a man, an American, a person in his own right. If he belonged to the Confederate States, what was he but a slave, a piece of property, a thing? Nothing, nothing at all.
If he wasn't very lucky, he feared he would be a dead man soon. A glance at the sky told him the sun had hardly moved since the Secesh soldiers swarmed over the rampart. He wasn't Joshua, to hold it back in its course. The hand-to-hand fighting inside the earthwork hadn't lasted long-no more than fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside. It only seemed to go on forever.
Well, no matter how it seemed, it wouldn't last much longer. The colored artillerymen and Tennessee troopers inside the fort had done everything flesh and blood could do to hold out Forrest's men, and everything flesh and blood could do wasn't enough. Some people were saying thousands and thousands of Rebs had got into Fort Pillow. Robinson wasn't so sure about that. But he was sure there were more men in butternut and gray than in blue wherever he looked.
“What is we gonna do, Sergeant?” Sandy Cole shouted. He and Robinson and a few other Company D men, Nate Hunter and Charlie Key and Aaron Fentis, formed a little knot of stubborn resistance against the oncoming Confederate tide. Key had served the twelve-pounder; the other two Negroes hadn't. They were riflemen who'd fired over the earthwork at the Confederates. With the gun useless and the earthwork lost, they were all in the same boat. Yes, they were all in that boat, all right, and it was sinking.
“We got to fight,” Robinson answered, bending to pick up a fist-sized rock and throw it at the nearest Rebel. “We don't fight, they kill us fo' sure.”
None of the other colored soldiers could argue with that. Cries of “No quarter!” and “Black flag!” still rang out. Forrest's troopers were murdering Negroes who tried to lay down their arms and surrender. They were also murdering men from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry who did the same thing. Their blood was up, and they cared about nothing but slaughter.
“Watch yourself, Aaron!” Charlie Key yelled. Aaron Fentis started to turn. He was a squat, broad-shouldered man, strong as an ox but not very fast. He didn't have a chance of knocking away the Confederate bayonet pointed straight at his midriff.
Ben Robinson did. He had a rifle musket of his own now, and swung it at the Reb's piece. The blow caught the weapon squarely and knocked it out of the enemy soldier's hands. Forrest's trooper let out a startled yelp. Aaron Fentis hit the Reb in the head with the butt of his Springfield at the same time as Robinson slammed his rifle-musket butt into the pit of the man's stomach. Down went the Confederate. Somebody stepped on him, shoving his face into the mud. He wouldn't get up soon, if he got up at all.
