Colonel Shaver’s First Brigade paid him no heed, as if he were nothing more than a vaporous apparition. A spectral phantom conjured of a nightmare.
As though stunned by that very realization, the Federal dropped to his knees in the trampled leaves. The impact defeated his groping hands. An instant later he toppled onto his face, only to vanish into the swirling smoke as the snorting and trembling sorrel carried Butler beyond sight of the wretch.
A shell burst above Butler’s head, the shrapnel almost musical as it tore and twisted through the air and pattered like absurd hail onto the ground around him. Two men fell, hit by the hissing fragments. Branches clattered down where they’d been severed from their anchoring trunks.
A shriek ripped the air away beside Butler’s left ear. The passing shot batted at his head, blowing his hair, mustache, and goatee sideways. His hearing popped painfully on that side.
Cannon.
Solid shot.
A finger’s width from his ear.
Damn, that was close!
The image of Hindman’s horse exploding replayed in his tortured brain. He should have been terrified.
Instead he was numb. His thoughts ex-corporeal.
Just ahead, calling encouragement, Lieutenant Colonel Dean of the Seventh Arkansas followed behind his line of men. The ground rose before dropping into a sunken track at the crest. There, behind a mat of brush, a large force of Federals had fortified themselves: Prentiss. He had stubbornly been holding up the entire Confederate advance on Pittsburg Landing.
Is this where it ends?
So far, word was that the morning had gone well. The wretched two-day march up clogged roads—though tedious, and infuriating with its delays, bogged wagons, and mismanaged movement—had been a success.
That morning Hardee’s Third Corps had taken Prentiss’s Sunday morning encampment by surprise. Hindman’s brigades had routed Peabody’s panicked troops and driven them in a desperate flight that had reminded Butler of flushing quail.
Then had come the disastrous assault at Duncan Field.
They’d restocked their ammunition from the plundered Union camp, and been ordered here, to these woods, to dislodge some general named Wallace and his stubborn Iowans.
“Stay with the brigade! You are my eyes and ears!”
Butler watched the approaching tree line across the sunken road; the smoke was brushed back as though by the breath of a providential God.
The first elements of his massed brigade, maintaining a solid line, were no more than fifty yards from the trees. The demarcation was clearly seen by the piles of dead left after Gibson’s previous assault.
Oddly, the rattle of guns slowed, the battle gone quiet to the point that Butler heard the Yankee commander’s order: a plaintive voice from the other side of the brush that cried, “Have at ’em, boys! Fire!”
Magically, a rank of dirty blue-clad forms—faces powder-blackened, their hair unkempt—popped up like manikins on strings. Their rifles clattered against each other, so closely were they packed. The silver of fixed bayonets gleamed in the afternoon light.
Then the entire line vanished in a wall of flickering orange fire and spewing smoke. The sound of it, like hell’s own hail, hit with the impact of a hammer. And in it, the tortured air screamed with the whiz of the bullets. Red bunched, spooked, and seemed to hunker beneath a great dark weight.
Butler heard the volley as it tore through the Arkansas infantry, popping into flesh, pocking through rifle stocks and skulls, clacking as hot lead struck metal.
A great moan went up from the troops ahead of him, and the ranks literally wavered and melted as men dropped, curled, pitched sideways, or threw up their arms, weapons flying.
“Onward! Forward, Arkansas!” Dean’s bellowed order was picked up and relayed by the captains and lieutenants. “Onward, Arkansas!” the shout rose.
Guns popped, the ranks stepping over or around the piles of fallen, as though the formation were a great and ponderous snail-like creature. They were close now, the smoke rising enough that Butler could discern the Iowans, ramrods clattering as they reloaded. Capped their guns, and leveled them.
“Forward!” Dean screamed again, his sword held high as he followed his men. “Onward, Ark…”
The great wall of curling orange fire, sparks, and rolling smoke was accompanied by the crackling hammer of sound.
As another pattering impact tore the Arkansas regiments apart, Colonel Dean spun, his sword cutting a corkscrew pattern out of the smoky air. For the briefest instant, Dean’s eyes met Butler’s, and then he was down, sprawled on the trampled grass.
Red stopped short, trembling as if about to burst.
Butler glanced up from the colonel’s limp body. Fixed on the falling soldiers—at the gaping holes in the ranks. He could see the indecision as men slowed, firing, glancing this way and that.
Filling his lungs, he was about to shout encouragement, take up Dean’s cry.
Impossibly, the Iowans dropped, falling flat into their sunken road. It was so surreal that Butler hesitated, another of the lulls having gone quiet enough that his order would carry down the entire line.
The woods behind the Federal line erupted in cannonfire. The air screamed as canister and grape tore into the massed Arkansans. Concentrations of men burst into red haze. Entire ranks vanished into a flying melee of arms, heads, hands, broken rifles, flying cloth, and wide-splayed ribs. One severed leg flipped on high, twisted toward the afternoon sky; a shoe flew off the foot before the limb thudded down onto cowering soldiers.
The line stopped, stunned at the impossibility of what it had just endured.
Butler could feel it, as if the massed ranks of men were an organism—some primordial beast with a horrified conscience of its own.
Before the beast could react, the Iowans rose from the dirt and gore. Their guns swung level, heads bending to the stocks, squinting eyes on the sights. A wall of sound, fury, and flame again blasted into the Rebel line. The slapping of the bullets as they blew through cloth, skin, muscle, and bone was dazing in its effect.
Butler watched his soldiers falling out of ranks the way corn might be cut when a hundred workers
