Hindman, still in his saddle, was smacked into the air. At the height of his flight, he twisted like a rag doll before falling limp onto the blasted carnage of his mangled horse.
Butler didn’t remember dismounting, only that in the next instant he was crouched beside the unconscious Hindman. The smell from the horse, gutted stem to stern by artillery round shot, was overpowering.
“Help me!” Butler cried, wondering if Hindman were alive or dead. Bullets were zipping past his head, the sound mixing with the shouts of panicked men and the screams of the wounded and dying.
And then Hindman blinked, sucked in a frantic breath, and moaned.
The air beside Butler’s shoulder was torn away as a round shot ripped past. Standing, powered by panic, Butler jerked Hindman up and tossed him over his shoulder. Turning, he ran like he’d never run in all his life. At the rear of the receding gray wave, he pounded over the torn grass. His boots slipped in the blood, clawed for purchase as he leaped over the sprawled dead, and darted to one side or the other of the crawling wounded.
Dear God, save me. Please, just let me live!
The memory faded into a confused swirling of images. He was back among the shot-chewed trees. Weaving through disorganized formations of weary and dispirited Arkansas volunteers.
Then he was placing a groggy Tom Hindman on the ground, leaning him against a tree. Around them, the shattered formations were fleeing Duncan field. Butler stayed at his general’s side until a stretcher could be brought from the medical service, and two privates loaded the dazed Hindman onto the stretcher.
As the stretcher bearers bore him to the rear, Hindman called, “Butler?”
“Yes, Tom?”
“Stay with the brigade! You are my eyes and ears!”
“But Tom, you’ve just—”
“Damn it, man! Stay with the brigade!”
Butler stopped short, a feeling of disbelief eating a hole in his chest.
As the general vanished behind the wall of trees, Butler looked around at the stunned and horrified men who had dropped to the ground beneath the trees.
Hindman’s final order.
Stay with the brigade? And do what?
Overhead a shell burst, shrapnel cutting the air with a fluttering sound followed by twigs, branches, and spring-green leaves as they rained down from above.
22
2:30 P.M., April 6, 1862
Tom Hindman’s horse had exploded in the morning. Since then, Butler had ridden Red back and forth through the chaos as the remains of the division fell back and replenished their ammunition. With Hindman and his replacement, General Wood, disabled, Alexander Stewart of the First Corps had taken command of the disorganized Arkansas brigades.
Butler had been told that Hindman had been evacuated, and even then was on his way back to Corinth.
It was two-thirty. The weary survivors of the re-formed Arkansas regiments again charged the Union position. Word was they were calling it the Hornet’s Nest—for every time a Confederate formation attacked it, the result was the same: a buzzing, painful, and devastating response.
Instead of crossing the open Duncan field, now the Arkansans approached up the thickly wooded slope. Slipping among the trees, the gray-clad men wound past fallen heaps of dead and dying men. Gibson’s Louisiana volunteers. They had tried and failed to break the Yankee line but an hour past.
As he rode in the rear, Butler’s throat had gone dry. To either side, hidden behind the trees, the crackling hell of battle could be heard. And here, moving up among the boles, he was aware of the irregular tight whirring of bullets as they cut the air and smacked into wood and leaves.
Somewhere the woods were on fire, a fact known only by the sweeter smell of wood smoke and presence of ash that whipped and whirled through the relentless Confederate advance.
Butler clamped his eyes shut, hard and tight, left hand tightening on Red’s reins as if to squeeze them like soft mud between his fingers. Beneath him, his horse trembled. Danced sideways around a bled-out corpse that lay facedown in last year’s moldy leaves. And stilled at Butler’s insistent tug.
He opened his eyes, and the vision remained the same: men dressed in gray and brown, staggering forward through the rough-barked trees and hanging vines. Ghosts, they intertwined and separated from the smoke and noise and stench of battle. Like hunters they proceeded in a half crouch, their rifles held low until, at an instant, they would straighten, shoulder, and fire. Each shot but a single snap in the popping, crashing cacophony of banshee sound and banging explosions. With each discharge came another puff of the vile and sulfurous blue-gray smoke that blew around like corrupt and hellish mist.
Afterward, the men slowed, ripped a cartridge from their box, bit off the paper tail. The sides of their mouths bore a darker streak left from the powder. Eyes half panicked and wide, they poured the charge into their still smoking rifles and shotguns. The clatter of the ramrods was drowned in the deafening roar as they seated the ball or shot. Fumbling a cap onto the nipple, or priming a pan, the man would start forward again in his half crouch, his eyes fixed on the drifting smoke ahead. He advanced with his face slightly averted, shoulder up, as though edging into a frightful storm.
As they went, they stepped around or over gray-and-butternut-clad bodies: the wreckage of Gibson’s previous assault. Some dead, lying in puddles of darkening blood, others crawling in the grass, leaves, and twigs, heads up, mouths open in screams that were devoured by the clatter of musketry, the shouts of officers, and the calls of terrified men.
A Federal soldier stumbled out of the smoke-wreathed hell of splintered trees. Bareheaded, blood streaming from a long cut that had laid the right side of his head open above the ear. With both hands he struggled to hold his intestines inside his
