Kershaw chuckled, then sobered, listening to the ominous sounds coming from the darkness.
God, I wish I could excuse myself, too.
All Butler had to do was bind himself together. Just one more day. He could do that, couldn’t he?
38
September 20, 1863
Butler leaned, panting, against the rough bark of a hickory tree, thankful for the thick copse of woods that hid him and what was left of his tattered and exhausted Arkansas volunteers.
He rubbed the sleeve of his dirty uniform across his mouth and wished for a drink of water. Any water. Even the bloody, fouled, and muddy stuff rolling down Chickamauga Creek. It lay just a half mile over east, screened by woods, and behind the sounds of battle.
Terrified, he stared up at the thick and sinuous branches overheard. The fall-dark leaves stirred in the breeze—the sound of their rustling drowned by the hammering crackle of musketry, the banging of artillery, and sharp cracks of exploding shells.
The sound was more of a tearing thunder, a ripping staccato, as if the world’s very fabric were being sundered. Rising and falling, the demonic crackle was accented by irregular bangs, many of them deafening.
Even here, so far into the timber, gray wisps of smoke, like phantom wraiths, brought the acrid smell of burned powder to his nostrils.
Butler’s reeling brain kept replaying the things he’d witnessed: men’s bodies jerked comically as they exploded. Gore-spattered and maimed limbs were sent wheeling through the air as if ripped and flung from torsos. Decapitated heads just seemed to pop up as the bodies disintegrated beneath them. Entrails burst from ruptured flesh and clothing, or were strewn in the grass where cruel shells had tossed limp and broken fragments of men.
He couldn’t stop his hands from trembling.
Butler blinked hard, as if by clearing his sight, he could also clear the horrors playing so vividly in his mind. Chickamauga’s scenes mixed. Flowed together. And parted. Haunting memories.
Or were they from Shiloh?
Or perhaps from frozen Prairie Grove?
Impossible to tell after the eternity of the last two days.
Among the haunting visions, Private Newsome—so young and vivacious—with midnight hair, soft brown eyes, and a round, freckled face—kept grinning widely as he looked over his shoulder at Butler. Captured in the instant that a minié ball hit him in the back of the head. The soft lead had mushroomed and blown Newsome’s brains out through the center of his face.
Or it might be Harper Angrue, the fast-talking wheelwright’s son from Chicot County, Arkansas, who was thin faced with slick brown hair. Yankee canister had torn the lad’s belly open, slinging ropes of his intestines this way and that like macabre, whipping strings of sausage to slap onto the cringing men closest to him.
My men. My soldiers.
Who said that?
Where did the words come from?
He kept hearing obscene voices as they formed out of the nearby racket of battle. Like devil’s talk, they hissed through the trees, riding upon the acrid smoke. Could be heard as syllables in the rising and falling chatter of musketry. If he concentrated, picked out the cadence, the voices had an almost female tone.
Had to be the names of the dead.
Mocking him. Mocking his incompetence at command.
Chickamauga.
Even the sound of it boded of no good.
“What do we do, Cap’n?” Sergeant Amos Kershaw asked, his dark Cajun face blocky and grim under his sweat-stained kepi. Starbursts in the powder grime around his eyes betrayed how he’d been squinting.
Butler raised his hands from the bark, pressing hard against his ears, trying to shut out the guns, the screams of the wounded and dying out there just beyond the trees. Shut out the voices that hung just below his hearing.
Think! If I could just think?
His men were cowering among the trees. Panting and scared. Looking to him for salvation after the mauling they’d taken as they charged around the Federal right in a supposed flanking movement—and marched right into massed Federal guns.
We fell apart, fled the only direction we could: west, into the trees behind the Yankee lines.
In the melee, Butler’s company—his lieutenants shot dead—lost track of the rest as they skedaddled through the smoky maze of dense hardwoods, clambering through thickets, dodging among dangling vines. They’d crawled over tangles of deadfall, clawed through brush, and plunged through low-hanging smoke and mist to this small clearing. If it could be called such.
South! the voices seemed to say despite his plugged ears.
“South?” he questioned, wondering if the words in his teetering and exhausted mind had been whispered past the devil’s lips.
“Why south, suh?” Kershaw asked. “We’s a’hind the Yankee lines.” His crowsfeet deepened as he considered, and nodded his head as if in understanding. “I see, suh. C’est bon.”
See what? Butler was still struggling, too many voices whispering in his head, the words confusing to him, woven as they were into the cackle of gunfire.
Kershaw was putting it together. “Most of the battle is just over east. The rest off to the west a mile or so. Reckon y’all thinks there be a hole a’tween, right, suh?”
Was that what he thought? He nodded faintly, cocking his head in an attempt to hear the voices as they called to him from the hot air with its reek of sulfurous smoke.
“Got to be careful, though,” Kershaw said, nodding. “On yor feet, boys. The cap’n done figgered us a way out. Corporal Pettigrew, you follow on along behind. Make sure nobody lags.”
“Yes, sir,” Willy Pettigrew told him, cradling the Yankee Springfield he’d carried since picking it up on the battlefield at Shiloh. “C’mon, y’all.” He waved the tired men to their feet.
Butler took a quick count. Twenty-seven. He had only twenty-seven left. He’d seen nearly a hundred die in the last day and
