“Fire!” one of the Seventh Arkansas sergeants bellowed, and from the decimated lines, a ragged and irregular staccato of musketry hammered at the Iowans. The men in blue knew their jobs. They’d dropped flat, the majority of the Confederate balls smacking harmlessly into the wall of ruined timber behind them.
“Forward!” Major Martin cried.
Butler saw him, perhaps thirty yards to the west as he tried to exhort his men to the attack.
Too much time had been lost. The advance had stalled.
An Iowan screamed, “Down!”
The Federals dropped like rocks.
The Federal gunners hidden back in the trees had reloaded. Again the howitzers and rifled cannon blasted their wrath into the stumbling Confederate ranks. Men vanished in another red haze of flying body parts, bits of them spattering in all directions to bounce off the leaf mat, to rain down on their cowering fellows, or to catch in gruesome patterns to hang from the splintered branches in shot-broken trees.
Butler gaped at one such display: a man’s entrails strung like Christmas bunting in the jagged branches of a hickory.
As quickly the Iowans leaped up from behind the brush, their rifles leveled. Another popping and crackling wall of flame shot from their muskets, the balls ripping through the broken and dazed formations.
What remained of the Seventh Arkansas, groups and individuals, turned and ran. Some managed to hang on to their guns, others just threw them down, arms pumping as they fled the insane wreckage of human flesh that had been piled in mangled heaps. Hundreds of voices rose in screams, pitiful wailing, and pleas for help, as wounded soldiers crawled among the broken, bleeding pieces of dead human beings, and reached out to the backs of their fleeing comrades.
Behind them, a shout of victory rose from the Yankee lines, as men waved their hats, shook fists, and held up rifles.
Butler froze, disbelieving eyes on the bleeding piles of meat and splintered bone strewn over and around the dead and dying that still had human form.
Is this real? Or am I living a deluded nightmare?
The impossibility of the scene before him defied … defied comprehension. Let alone belief.
Someone pulled at his stirrup, breaking the trance. Butler glanced down, saw a panic-crazed man, saw him drag at Butler’s pant leg. The man’s mouth was working as though he were shouting, but nothing permeated the ringing scream in Butler’s ears.
The man jerked again at his leg, as if trying to pull him from the saddle. The action spurred Red, who turned away. As she did, something slashed through the air where Butler’s body had been but an instant before.
The spell, the horror, whatever it was, broke, and Butler heard the Federal balls ripping through the air around him.
The man now clasped his leg, screaming, his eyes crazy, and refused to let go. Then a minié ball blew the back of his head off; the man dropped as if his strings had been cut.
Butler jammed his spurs into Red’s side, and let her carry him down the slope. He was faintly aware that at least two men were knocked flat in the horse’s terrified flight. And then, ducking and weaving, he and Red were through the trees.
Butler heard whimpering, as if from a distance. The sobs were soft, like those of a child whose beloved dog had just died. The forest through which he rode shimmered, going silver in his vision.
23
April 8, 1862
Doc Hancock blinked the fatigue from his eyes. He steadied the capital saw in his grip, nodded at John Mays, and began his first cut.
At the feel of the saw on bone, the young man on the table cried out, “Oh God!”
Doc ignored it.
“No! Not my leg!” The young man’s face, gleaming with sweat, had a look of absolute horror. He swallowed hard, the Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. The wide brown eyes had an almost angelic softness. He broke into whimpers, his other limbs bucking against the straps Augustus Clyde had adapted out of harness.
The saw ate its way through the lower femur, and the youth’s shattered knee rolled loose under Doc’s left hand.
Augustus flung the useless and bloody lower leg into the pile in the corner where it added its leaking gore to the pool in which the other amputated limbs lay. With the rongeur Doc dressed the rough edges of bone, pausing only to wipe the sweat from his brow.
Augustus had already wrapped the surgical suture silk around the hook-shaped tenaculum, and Doc used it to pull the arteries free of the severed muscle. Dropping the ligating loop around the arterial end, Doc tied it off.
The boy on the table was quivering like a desperate rabbit as Doc worked his fingers to relieve the stiffness. His hands ached, his fingers cramped from fatigue. Outside the rattle of wagons and the shouts of men announced the arrival of another load of wounded.
Hurry. Got more to do.
How many more? Where was the end of it? He’d been working straight through since Sunday morning when the fighting started.
It dawned on him that the crackling and banging of battle had grown louder. That things were not going well for the Army of the Mississippi.
General Albert Sidney Johnston was dead. The story from Dr. Yandell—after he had finally been led to Johnston’s body—was that the commanding general had bled to death. The irony was that all the while the general had had a field tourniquet in his pocket.
The boy on the table—for he was little more than that—had ceased crying, his expression pale with shock. Doc battled against the trembling in his fingers as he stitched the flap closed as best he could. The caked blood, thick on his fingers, made matters worse. He didn’t have the “feel” he needed for elegant stitches.
Damn it, these things needed time to do right. Sloppy. So damned sloppy. But the suture held after Doc nodded, and John Mays carefully released the tourniquet.
“Next,” Doc called, wondering when his voice had gone hoarse. Wasn’t there anything to
