“We can lick' em!” Sandy Cole shouted.
The small band of Negroes had licked all the Rebs who came at them. If the other men who garrisoned Fort Pillow could have done the same, the Secesh soldiers would be running away with their tails between their legs. And if pigs had wings…
Too many Rebs. That was what it came down to. Now that they were in the fort, the men in blue couldn't drive them out. Robinson knew one reason his little band of soldiers hadn't been badly tested was that they looked and acted tough. Forrest's men were no more eager to risk getting hurt than anybody else with an ounce of brains in his head. They went after people who were hurt or acted afraid. Once all the easy marks were down, they'd deal with the tougher ones.
Somebody close by was screaming for his mother. Ben Robinson couldn't tell if the cry came from a white throat or a black one, from a U.S. soldier or a Confederate. Badly hurt men all sounded pretty much the same. Maybe people should have drawn a lesson from that.
In fact, he was sure they should have. He was also sure they didn't. If they did, mad scenes like this wouldn't happen.
“Kill the niggers!” bawled somebody else much too close. Unlike the other, that cry would only come from a Confederate.
“Kill the traitors!” That might have been somebody from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry, but was much more likely also to come from a Reb. Forrest's troopers hated the men who fought under Major Bradford at least as much as they hated blacks. When Ben Robinson came to Fort Pillow, he wouldn't have believed that was possible. After listening to Bradford's troopers talk for a while, he did.
And, after listening to them, he also believed the Confederates had some pretty good reasons to hate them. Some of the things the troopers bragged about doing… Of course, they had their reasons for doing those things-they were avenging themselves for other things Forrest's men had done to them and their kind and their friends. How long would that cycle of vengeance go on? How long could it go on, before everybody killed off everybody else?
Without Ben's even noticing, Charlie Key managed to reload his Springfield. When he fired, the muzzle of the piece couldn't have been more than six inches from Robinson's left ear. “Do Jesus!” Robinson yipped, and jumped in the air. “What you shooting at?”
“Damn Secesh bastard.” Mournfully, the other colored soldier added, “I done missed the son of a bitch.”
“Almos' didn't miss me.” Robinson's head still rang. Even after he'd fired the twelve-pounder more times than he could count, that rifle musket made an appalling noise, all the worse because it was so unexpected.
“Shit,” Sandy Cole said. “They's in behind us.”
Ben Robinson swore, too. The line of soldiers in blue wasn't a line any more. It had broken down into little knots of struggling men, like the one of which he was a part. Each knot fought for itself. Not enough U.S. officers remained on their feet to make the Federals fight as a group any more. And they were going to get defeated in… What was the word? In detail, that was it. Robinson felt absurdly pleased with himself for remembering.
But how much good would remembering do him? How much good would anything do him, with the Rebs howling like wolves and his own side falling one man after another? He tried to knock the rifle musket out of another Confederate's hands. He failed-the Reb held on to it. But the man didn't seem quite so eager to gut him like a butchered hog. The way things were going, that was a triumph of sorts.
Major Bradford couldn't even mourn the loss of his brother, not unless he wanted people to be mourning him, too, and in short order. He ran now here, now there, trying to rally the Federal soldiers wherever he could. For a little while, he hoped they could hold Forrest's men out and drive them back.
For a little while, yes-but not for long.
No matter what he'd thought, Bedford Forrest was in deadly earnest when he said his troopers could take Fort Pillow. Between the sharpshooters on the high ground looking down into the fort and the swarm of Rebs coming over the earthen rampart, the garrison had no chance to hold back the tide, any more than King Canute could in days gone by.
When Bradford fired at an oncoming Confederate, he found he'd emptied Theodorick's Colt as well as his own. “Son of a bitch!” he shouted, and then, because that wasn't nearly strong enough, “Shit!”
He threw the revolver in the enemy soldier's face. Whatever the Reb was expecting, that wasn't it. The pistol caught him right in the nose. He shouted, “Shit!” too, much louder than Bradford had. Clutching both hands to the wounded member, he slowly crumpled.
Instead of reclaiming the pistol, Bradford snatched up the Springfield the Confederate had dropped. The Colt was just a lump of iron now. He'd never have the chance to load in bullets and measure out charges of black powder and affix a percussion cap for each cylinder he wanted to fire. With a bayoneted rifle, he carried a spear longer than a man was tall. That was something, anyhow.
Something, yes, but how much? The Federals' defense of Fort Pillow was coming to pieces before his eyes. Things were falling apart. The center could not hold, and the Confederates poured in on both flanks as well. The flag had fallen. In a few minutes, Forrest's men looked likely to kill or capture every Union soldier in the fort.
Biting his lip, Bradford shouted the order he'd hoped he wouldn't have to give: “Down to the river, men! Down to the Mississippi! If the Rebs come after us, the New Era will give them canister!”
The gunboat had kept firing all through the fight, even if her shells didn't do so much as Bradford wanted. She hadn't tried lobbing rounds up onto the flat ground atop the bluff, but Bradford could scarcely blame her for that. The shells could, and surely would, fall among his command as well as among the Rebs.
Even breaking contact with Forrest's troopers was hard. The howling men in gray and butternut were mixed in with their foes in blue. Soldiers thrust at one another and swung their Springfields like base ball bats. Whenever somebody managed to load a musket, he fired at the closest soldier in the uniform of the other color. Here and there, men rolled on the ground, kicking and kneeing and choking each other in a struggle old as time.
Little by little, whites and Negroes in blue made for the steep side of the bluff and started scrambling and tumbling down toward the Mississippi far below. If some of the Negroes ran-well, some of the white troopers from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry ran, too. Who wouldn't, with sure death behind and possible salvation ahead?
Bradford wished he could do something about Theo's body. His brother lay where he had fallen. Dead men and writhing wounded lay everywhere inside the earthwork, testimony to how fierce the fighting was. If the Federals still held the fort when the battle was over, Bradford would have to bury poor Theodorick. If they didn't…
He shrugged. If we don't, chances are somebody will have to bury me. A heartbeat later, he shrugged again. Even if the Federals held Fort
Pillow, he might stop a minnie or get in the way of a Reb's bayonet. He'd worked hard to preserve the Union in western Tennessee and Kentucky. A lot of Forrest's troopers wanted to kill him not just because he was a Yankee officer. A lot of them carried personal grudges. Both as a lawyer and as an officer, he'd harried Rebs and their families as hard as he could. They had it coming, by God! But he couldn't expect Confederate soldiers to love him afterwards. He couldn't, and he didn't.
He carried the Springfield at high port: held diagonally in front of his chest, ready for a lunge or a parry. He wished he'd done more bayonet drill. Because they were cavalrymen, the troopers from the Thirteenth Tennessee had scanted that tiresome exercise, and the officers even more than the men.
The colored artillerymen seemed better at it than their white counterparts. He watched a colored sergeant keep a Reb off him with a few smooth-looking jabs and butt strokes. The coons had rhythm, no doubt about it. Who would have imagined they could go toe-to-toe with men who might have owned some of them-who might, as a matter of law, still own some of them?
Bradford shook his head. That wasn't so: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation superseded what had been the law. When it was first issued, Bradford had no use for the Emancipation Proclamation. It seemed like a sop to Northern abolitionists and nothing more, because it freed slaves only in regions beyond the reach of Union forces. What did that do, except win the President political capital?
But the answer soon became clear. Federal troops might not be able to free Negroes through most of the Confederacy, but a great many slaves were able to free themselves by running off to the closest U.S. garrison. They voted with their feet against the South's peculiar institution.
Southerners still insisted Negroes were slaves by nature, and never could match up against whites on even terms. Maybe they were right. Though a strong Union man, Bill Bradford had always believed that himself. But what
