Oh Lord, oh Lord… Ellet had played this scene out a hundred times in his head, a thousand, but here were difficulties he had not imagined, such as what he would do if the Rebel would not turn away from his bow-on attack.
And there was more to think of. If the Queen of the West hit the closest Rebel, then the Rebel right behind would have a clear shot at hitting the Queen, broadside. And there was a third secesh ram, just downriver. He could not hit one without being hit by the other. He could not hit bow to bow.
“Sir,” Davis began, tentative but urgent. The Rebel fired her bow gun and the water just forward of the Queen was torn up by grape and cannister.
In the instant the Rebel’s bow gun went off, she began to turn, backing down and then sheering off, exposing a swath of larboard side, right under Ellet’s bow and seventy yards off. The Confederates were unwilling to risk a head-on collision, but they had decided that too late. Incredible, it was a gift from heaven.
“There, there!” Ellet pointed toward the Rebel’s side. The pilots were nearly dancing with excitement. Davis took the wheel from the helmsman, gave a quarter turn to larboard, following the turning Rebel boat around as the space between the ships dropped away.
The Rebel’s stern wheel was really digging in. Ellet could picture the skipper laying on the bell, shouting for steam to get him the hell out from under the Yankee ram.
Too late, too late… Davis brought the bow around so the Queen was pointing first at her foredeck and then her deckhouse as the Rebel tried to steam away.
The Queen of the West struck just forward of the Rebel’s wheelhouse. She did not even slow as she plowed on through. The side of the Confederate boat caved in like an eggshell. The chimneys leaned over, threatening to fall on the Queen’s foredeck. The whole vessel seemed to bend in the middle under the ram’s crushing impact.
Then the Queen was brought up short, brought to a jarring halt by the mass of the ship impaled on her bow. Ellet was flung forward, hit the low wall and window of the wheelhouse hard, as tables, charts, instruments, crockery, and the pilots all flew across the space in a shower of debris.
The Queen twisted around, her paddle wheels still driving her into the rebel ship, which was filling fast and hanging on their bow. Ellet bounced off the wheelhouse’s forward bulkhead and staggered back, but managed to keep his feet.
“Full astern!” Ellet roared, but he was the only one still standing. He crossed the wheelhouse, gave a jingle, three bells, full astern.
For a second the Queen was still, the terrible vibration in her deck gone, as the paddle wheels stopped. Then they began to turn again, churning in reverse. The ship shuddered as the paddle wheels struggled to pull the ram from the dying Confederate. Ellet could hear screeching and snapping sounds as the massive paddles drove the ship astern and drew the bow from the Rebel’s side.
He turned to see what execution Monarch was doing, but he saw instead another Rebel rushing at them, black smoke churning from her chimneys, a mad bull charging a red cape. It was exactly as he had feared. Hung up on one ship, he was easy pickings for another.
He grabbed the bell and gave another jingle and three bells because he could think of nothing else to do. There was nothing else to do but brace for the impact.
The pilot, Davis, pulled himself to his feet, looked out the window at the Rebel ram, now looming over them. “Oh, hell!” he shouted and then the Rebel struck them, right in the larboard paddle wheel. Painted boards and buckets and metal arms, bits of rail and parts of the Queen’s gig flew into the air and became so much debris as the Rebel drove the attack into the army ram’s side.
The Queen heeled hard to starboard with the impact, and the paddle wheel made a terrible groaning noise as it was sheered clean off.
“Damn it! We’re done for!” Ellet shouted. So soon? Was that all the battle for him? He did not think it was above ten minutes since he had cast off from the bank at the sound of the guns, and now the Queen was disabled and he would be lucky if she did not sink under him.
“Damn!” he shouted again and raced out of the wheelhouse to better see the damage. The sound of the battle was much louder on the hurricane deck, the low thunder of the ironclad gunboats as they poured their fire into the Rebels, the sharp crack of the Rebels’ smaller guns, the shouting of men on the sinking Rebel ship and his own men on the main deck below.
It was bad. The larboard wheel was gone, there was nothing there. The water was littered with floating debris. It looked as if an entire ship had been blown to bits, right on that spot. Ellet turned to the deckhand beside him. “Billy, run below and see if we’re taking on water!”
There was a thumping sound now that he could not identify. He looked around. Another Rebel was moving past, slowly, as if she were disabled. Small arms! They were firing on the Queen with small arms. Bullets were thudding into the deck.
Get the men behind cover, Ellet thought and then suddenly his leg was gone from under him, as if someone had hit him in the back of the knee with a club and sent him galley-west. He hit the warm deck planks with a grunt, hands down to break his fall, still not certain what had happened.
He rolled on his back and felt the pain shoot up his leg. He stifled a shout, gritted his teeth, looked down. Blood was spurting from his knee, and his leg from the knee down seemed to jut off at an unnatural angle.
“Sir! Sir!” Ford and the pilot Davis were kneeling beside him.
“Sir, you’re hit!” “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Ellet said, his teeth still clenched.
He relaxed his jaw. Had to give orders.
“Queen’s out of the fight, larboard wheel’s gone, I reckon we’re going down,” Ellet managed, then a wave of pain hit him and he stopped for a moment, caught his breath, then went on. “I think we can get to shore with the remaining wheel. Quick, quick, run her ashore while you can!”
“Yes, sir!” Ford said, leaped up, and rushed back to the wheelhouse. Ellet closed his eyes. Both he and the Queen of the West, disabled, knocked out. But not dead. It was as if their fates were intertwined, bound together, like vines twisting around one another. Hurt one you hurt them both. It was not the first time he had thought as much.
Bowater was seething and Mississippi Mike was cursing out loud. The river man cursed with a vehemence that did not seem possible for a man with a gut wound, as if the whole thing had been in his head, and now in the excitement of the moment was forgotten. They had barely rung up two bells when the first Union ram hit the Lovell broadside with a crash that they could hear plain as could be, even over the gunfire, even a quarter mile away. The Lovell seemed to fold right around the Yankee’s bow, like a dishrag draped over a clothesline. She rolled hard and began to settle even as the Yankee was still driving into her. “Oh, son of a bitch! They done for her! Son of a whore!” Sullivan ranted. He stood up from the stool, not quite straight, hand on the butt of one of his pistols.
Bowater ignored him. “Baxter, come left. We’ll make for the second ram. Tarbox, see that the gun crew in the bow fires into that ram, there, the one to the west. Keep them at it, fast as they can.”
It was like chess, a furious, waterborne game of chess, with the pieces all moving at once, the situation changing by the second.
“There goes Sumter! Damn me, there goes Sumter!” Sullivan gasped, pointing. Sumter was racing for the first Yankee ram, which was still trying to dislodge itself from the Colonel Lovell. Bowater watched, transfixed. The actual impact was hidden from him by the wreck of the Lovell, but he could see the Yankee roll under the impact, see the debris lifted in the air.
He imagined he would have heard the sound of the impact if the gunfire had not been so intense.
Then the Colonel Lovell sank, went right down as if it had never been meant to float. She settled on the bottom with only the upper deck still visible, an island in midriver on which the survivors of her crew huddled.
The smoke from the Union ironclads was spreading down-river, and the River Defense Fleet was adding its own, and visibility was getting worse, with patches of smoke like cotton batting hanging over the water. The second ram was lost from sight, but just for an instant, and then it burst out of the cloud that enveloped it, bearing down hard on the General Bragg.
