37
September 19, 1863
Bully for General Bragg. He’s hell unleashed when it comes to a retreat. That was the joke in the Army of Tennessee.
And right now, we could use a little retreat, Butler thought.
The day’s fighting had been a bloody seesawing through the thick Georgia forest southwest of Chattanooga. Men shot, ducked behind trees to reload, and popped out to shoot again. A mayhem of bullets hissed through wreaths of smoke, the smacking of lead into hardwood. Falling branches and leaves—ripped from on high by shot and shell—came raining down from the thick canopy above. Masses of men had struggled to maintain their formations as they clambered over fallen logs, around tree trunks, through brush, and a nightmare of vines. It had been primitive and bloody.
Butler’s decimated Company A tried to sleep where they’d stopped at nightfall. Whipped, demoralized, and shamed, they now suffered as the temperature dropped to freezing.
No fires allowed.
Just wolf down cold rations—assuming you had any. The smart ones had grabbed Yankee haversacks and packs from the dead as they passed. Confederate commissary sure as spit and fire couldn’t be trusted for a meal.
To Butler’s relief, Kershaw had seen to the posting of pickets. They hid out there in the darkness, not more than fifty yards from where Butler stood looking out at the cold forest.
He could hear the pleas of the desperately wounded men lying just out there beyond the pickets. They all could. Between the lines. Gut shot, legs broken or shot off, hit in the head or spine shot, they called piteously for water, rescue, or their mothers or wives. The only answer to their pleas had been the Yankee axes as the Federals a couple of hundred yards farther to the west built breastworks.
Butler lifted shaking hands to his head, trying to block the sound. Like ice picks, they seemed to pierce his skin, muscle, and bones.
“Stop it,” he whispered. “In the name of God, please make them quiet.”
Tears streaked down his face, his stomach tickling with the urge to throw up.
“Played hell today, didn’t we, Cap’n?” Kershaw asked as he stepped up beside Butler.
“It’s so different,” Butler whispered hoarsely as he struggled to hide his trembling in the Cajun’s presence. “I’m used to being on the staff, to knowing what’s happening around the battle. Here, I just have such a small piece of it. Orders coming down, just my little piece, the men around me.”
Dear God, he felt lost.
Just hold it together.
That’s all he had to do. Cobble his courage into some semblance of a backbone.
The men are depending on you.
“Reckon, Cap’n, we done had us better days. Had ’em right smart this maw’nin when we started driving the Yankees north past Brotherton Road and Winfrey field.”
Butler closed his eyes, the cries of his dying and wounded from that morning mixed with those out in the darkness. “It all came apart this afternoon, though, didn’t it?”
Govan’s Arkansans had been routed by an enfilading vise of blue-coated troops. They’d fled through the forest in a disorganized frenzy.
“Got the boys back together,” Kershaw told him, his dark form shivering in the frosty night. “Reckon they’ll be more’n ready to make up for it tomorrow.”
Butler thought back to that precipitous retreat. When had he ever felt as desperate? Had it not been for Red following the retreat, he’d have died there on the field, tears streaking down his face. It was as if he’d lost himself. His brain and body had shut off. He couldn’t shake the image of his men falling, shot down, as they ran from the hideous blue line.
“This is Shiloh all over again.” Both of Butler’s hands were shaking. He thought he saw lights glimmering out in the forest. But when he blinked, they were gone. “We pushed them back all morning long, chasing them through the forest. Only to have them throw us back in the afternoon.”
“Tomorrow, we whip ’em,” Kershaw told him firmly. “The difference dis time? We got Longstreet’s Corps. À vue de nez. It gonna do foah us what Buell did foah Grant at Shiloh. You see.”
Butler looked out into the forest darkness, smelling smoke and blood on the night breeze. “Bloody as today was, tomorrow’s going to be worse, Sergeant.”
There, again, he saw the lights. “Do you see them, Sergeant? Right out there in the night?”
“See what, Cap’n?” Kershaw was squinting, following Butler’s pointing finger.
“Like little twinkles. Sort of like stars. They’re just…” He blinked again, and felt foolish. “Now they’re just … gone.”
“Didn’t see nothing out der, Cap’n.”
“Maybe it was just the souls of the dead,” Butler whispered under his breath.
“You all right, Cap’n? Maybe you’all otta get some shut-eye. Been a long hard day, suh.”
“Maybe I should.”
Butler hunkered down, back to a tree, his gaze on the dark battlefield with its cold smell of blood, smoke, and death. Tomorrow they would once again march into the enemy’s guns.
How many of his men would die?
And you can’t save them, the voice seemed to hiss from the darkness around his head.
“You don’t hear that, do you?” Butler asked.
“Hear what, Cap’n?”
“Echoes of hell in the darkness.”
“Speaking of hell, Cap’n, what happened to that preacher? Dat one who give dat blood-and-guts sermon on de march up here? I hear’d most of it. Damning Yankee Puritans fo’ witch-burning bastards, and how God gonna chase der souls through fire and brimstone? Last I hear, he say if’n he but have a gun, he ride into the fight with us, non? Dat we be de chosen of God. Dat any man who fall, he gonna be eating supper in heaven at de Lord’s right hand.”
Butler’s trembling lips bent in a smile. “Yep. I heard all that, Sergeant. The ol’ reverend was with us right up to the moment a Federal shell exploded in the tree above him. As the fragments whistled past his ear, he turned
