Michener, James A. (120 page)

That last night, as the two armies slept fitfully, General Grant's order of battle was awesome, studded as it was with distinguished names: the 118th Illinois Infantry; the 29th Wisconsin Infantry; the 25th Iowa; the 4th West Virginia; the 5th Minnesota; and then two names that symbolized the fraternal agony of this war: the 7th Missouri, the 22nd Kentucky. Their brothers would be fighting the next day as Confederates: the 1st Missouri, the 8th Kentucky.

To reach the Confederate lines, the Union soldiers had to sweep down into a pronounced valley, then climb a steep hill and charge into the teeth of cleverly disposed fortifications. These were of three types: the redoubt, a large square earthwork easy to hold if there were enough men; the redan, a triangular projection out from the line to permit concentration of fire upon an attacker; and the smallest of the three, the lunette, a crescent-shaped earthwork, compact, with steeply sloping sides and not easy to capture.

Tough Louisiana swamp fighters occupied the major redan. Detachments from various parts of the South held the Railroad Redoubt, and the 2nd Texas Sharpshooters, a name recently bestowed because of their great accuracy with rifles, held the key spot in the line, a lunette guarding the main road back to town. Here Major Cobb's replacement detachment finally joined up with their fellow Texans.

During the furious cannonading on the morning of 22 May, Cobb's men took what shelter they could, doing their best to survive until the attack began. 'Why can't our side fire back?' a

frightened boy of seventeen asked, and Cobb said bluntly: 'Because they have the cannon and we don't.'

At ten minutes to ten, all the Yankee batteries fired as rapidly as they could, in order to provide their troops with as much last-minute cover as possible. At ten o'clock the fiery monsters fell silent, and in that first awful hush bugles began to sound, first one and then another, echoing back and forth until the valleys facing the redoubts, the redans and the lunettes reverberated with their clear and stirring sounds.

Then came the infantry attack, down slight inclines at first, then across level ground, then straight up the steep flanks protecting the Confederate line. It required about eighteen minutes for the thousand or more blue-clad troops assigned to take the Texas lunette to advance across the open land, and to some who watched the solemn approach from inside the fortification, it seemed as if the Northerners would never reach their goal, as if they would march forever like dream figures across a timeless landscape. But quickly enough for both attacker and defender, the ominous blue line reached the steep flanks, scrambled up, and broke into the lunette, where a wild, confused struggle took place. With rifles, pistols, revolvers, even with bayonets and clubs, the Texas defenders threw back the Union attackers, South and North falling upon each other in bloody fury.

The struggle went on for an incredible number of hours, with the dogged Texans repelling first one assault, then another, then countless others. Each time the Yankees surged forward, up those steep final flanks, they did reach the top, and they did kill defenders, and always they seemed to have victory just within their grasp. 'Follow me!' shouted a lieutenant, waving his blue cap until a Texas rifle ended his charge and his cry and his life.

Otto Macnab kept his men from panic by constantly moving among them with gestures of encouragement—he used few words —and by leaping into the breach whenever a perilous weakness showed. Indeed, he stifled so many nearly fatal assaults that his survival was a miracle.

Well into the afternoon the Yankee assault on the lunette halted, to enable the batteries encased in the hills behind to throw down a savage curtain of fire, hoping thus to dislodge the weakened Texans, but when the cannonade stopped and the men in blue resumed their charge, the indomitable 2nd Texas repelled them yet again.

The slaughter now became obscene, a grotesque expenditure of life, Grey and Blue, on the sloping edges of a lunette which could never quite be taken. Loss came closest at about two-thirty, when

a determined captain from Illinois led a charge with such bravery that he carried right into the lunette, with some nine or ten Yankees following, and had even a dozen more succeeded in joining him—and they tried, desperately—the Texans would have been subdued and Grant would have had the one foothold he needed to break the line.

But at this moment, while Macnab was engaged with a mighty assault on his little sector and Reuben Cobb was involved on his, Captain Somerset Cobb, with a courage he had not known he possessed, leaped directly at the Illinois leader and drove a sword clear through his body. The man staggered forward, thinking victory still within his grasp, clutched at the air and fell back, and the crucial charge faded.

But now a young boy, not over fifteen, ran screaming into the lunette from the southern stretch of the trench line: 'Railroad Redoubt's fallin',' and when the Texans looked across the short distance to the big fort on their right, they saw that the messenger was correct. This redoubt, big and loosely constructed, was protected by a much less severe slope than the Texas lunette, and against it the Yankees were having real success. Some were already in the fort and others seemed about to break through. If Northern guns occupied the redoubt, the Texas lunette was doomed.

It took Major Cobb and Captain Macnab about five seconds to see and to appreciate the peril in which the Confederate line stood, and without consultation these two plus some fifty of their men ran like dodging, frightened, low-clinging deer across the open space between the two projections. They arrived just in time to meet the day's most furious battle, Blue and Grey in one tremendous tangle, with the former on the knife edge of victory.

'Stop them!' Major Cobb shouted to the men following him. 'In there!' Macnab never uttered cries in battle; he was always too busy managing his deadly guns, but this time the peril was so great that even he shouted: 'Here!'

He and some fifteen others leaped directly into the foremost Yankee guns, and although several of his men went down in the dreadful fusillade, their sheer weight carried them forward. But as soon as this breach was stabilized, Otto saw that Federal troops were streaming in through a larger break farther on.

'Cobb!' he shouted, and the red-haired major, his cap lost in the battle, swung about to face some new enemy when a musket discharge caught him full in the face, blowing his head apart.

'Men!' Macnab cried, and his high voice was so compelling, so unique among the battle sounds, that his men formed behind him,

and in a surge of slashing and firing, repelled the attackers from the wavering line.

Grant had been denied his victory. The Confederate lines had held firm, all the way from the Railroad Redoubt at the south, which Major Cobb and Captain Macnab had saved at the last moment, to the bloodied Stockade Redan at the north. Now the long, cruel siege would begin.

The terror of Vicksburg lay not in those wild charges of that first day, for then men from both sides fought in white heat, and death came so explosively, so suddenly that there was no awareness that it had struck until a companion fell silent amid the roar. The real terror began on that night of 22 May, because in the open space between the two battle lines lay several thousand Union wounded, and for reasons which have never been explained, General Grant decided to leave them there rather than allow the customary' battle truce for the removal of the dead and the rescue of the wounded. Perhaps he thought that on the next day the Confederates would be so exhausted that his men could gain an easy triumph, and he did not want to give the enemy any respite. At any rate, he left his dying exposed to the cold night air; but what was worse, he left them there all during the next day, that fiercely hot May morning, that blazing May afternoon.

Now some of the men dying on the dusty field were so close to the lunette that the Texans could hear them pleading for water, and others were so near the Federal lines that Union men could hear their companions' pleas, but all across the vast battlefield the order stood: 'No truce.'

Night brought no release, for now the battle wounds, some of them forty hours old, had grown gangrenous from the day's prolonged heat, and both the pain and the smell were unbearable. It was unspeakable, the agony that came as a result of this hideous decision not to clear the battlefield, if I ever see Grant,' a Texan shouted into the night, hoping that some Northern soldier would hear, Til shoot his bloody eyes out.'

At about two in the morning Otto Macnab, who had seen a great deal of war and who knew how men should die, could stand no more. Leaving the lunette, he went out among the dying, and when he found a Northern soldier in the last shrieking pain of gangrenous agony, he shot him, and in doing this he attracted the attention of a Missouri man who was doing the same from his lines. Meeting in the dark shadows, neither soldier entertained even the most fleeting idea of shooting the other.

'That you, Reb?'

'Yank. What unit?'

'Texas. You?'

'Missouri.'

'We have Missouri men on our side. Good fighters.'

'You know a sergeant named O'Callahan?'

'I don't know many.'

'Should you come upon him . . . ' The man was a schoolteacher.

'I'll tell him.'

'My brother. Good kid.'

When Otto crept back to the lines he went to all parts of the lunette and even back to the Railroad Redoubt, shaking men awake and asking if they'd seen a Missouri man named O'Callahan.

On the morning of 24 May, in response to a plea from the Confederates, General Grant relaxed his inhumane order, a truce was agreed upon, and men from each side moved out upon the battlefield to look at the bodies of those who might have been saved had it come earlier. When the truce ended, the soldiers returned to their respective lines, the war resumed, with General Grant bitterly acknowledging that he was not going to capture Vicksburg by frontal assault. He would have to do so by siege, which he promptly initiated. Not a man, not a scrap of food, not a horse would move in or out, and the last bastion on the Mississippi would fall.

But during the truce soldiers from each side had met with their opponents, and a respect had developed, so that invariably in the quiet evenings the men began to fraternize and sing. The Northern troops refrained from insulting their friends with the 'Battle Hymn' while the Southerners rarely sang 'Dixie.' Always, in the course of the night, some group of Southerners would begin the song they loved so deeply, and Northerners would fall silent as the winsome harmony began:

'We loved each other then, Lorena, More than we ever dared to tell; And what we might have been, Lorena, Had but our lovings prospered well.'

The song had a wonderfully rich sentiment which sounded elegant in the stillness, and some from the North almost chuckled at it, but toward the end, even the most indifferent hushed when a strong high tenor sang solo of death and life hereafter:

'There is a future, O thank God,

Of life this is so small a part, Tis dust to dust beneath the sod,

But there, up there, 'tis heart to heart.'

Otto did not care for such songs, too much about death, but he did stop his battlefield wandering when Northern troops sang one song he had not known before. 'Aura Lee' spoke of love as he recalled it, and sometimes when the singing ended he found himself humming the tune to himself or mumbling the words:

'Aura Lee, Aura Lee, Maid with golden hair, Sunshine came along with thee And swallows in the air.'

He thought of Franziska in those terms. He could see her bringing sunshine, and it was not preposterous to think of her as attended by swallows.

In the following weeks, when starvation clamped its iron claws about the innards of the Texans, both Somerset Cobb and Otto Macnab took short, dreamlike excursions: Cobb, into Vicksburg to meet with the Peel sisters he had stayed with while on his way to Texas in 1850; Macnab, out into the battlefield at night to compare situations with O'Callahan of Missouri.

The Peel sisters still had their house at the north end of Cherry Street, but since it was exposed to artillery fire from Federal warships in the Mississippi below, they lived, like so many others, in hillside caves. Lucky for them the caves were available, for their house had already taken two hits, and had they been sleeping upstairs, they would probably have been killed.

Like all the citizens of Vicksburg, the Peels had started out confident that Grant would be forced to withdraw, but as the foodless weeks passed they began to see the inevitability of defeat. However, they would not speak of it.

'You mean that fine young man who traveled with you from Carolina . . . ?'

'From Georgia, ma'am. My cousin.'

'And he was killed on the first day?'

'Most gallantly.'

T remember his reading to us from Ivanhoe.'

'He loved Scott. We named our Texas plantation Lammermoor.'

'That's nice. That's very nice.'

'Miss Emma, I wish to God we had food in the lines to share with you.'

'No, Major. We wish we had food for you.'

Miss Etta Mae said: 'Is my sister right? You're a major now?'

Before he could answer, the cave in which they were meeting was shaken by a violent attack of shellfire from the warships, and as soon as it stopped, a cluster of explosions from the batteries inland rocked the area. 'They hold us in a crossfire,' Miss Emma said. 'It's murderous. Three slaves on this street killed this week.'

The Peel sisters did not leave their cave except for sunlight on quiet days, and even then they never knew when a stray shell from the river or from the battle line might kill them and everyone else in sight. They were wraithlike, each weighing less than a hundred pounds, but they maintained high spirits in order to encourage the soldiers who stopped by to see them.

On the evening of July first, Otto Macnab, suffering from the acute hunger which had attacked him viciously that day, wandered through the battlefield during the customary informal truce, and when he saw how close to the Texan lunette the Yankee sappers had brought their trenches, he gasped. Starting to pace off the tiny distance that would separate the two lines when battle resumed next day, he was interrupted by a voice he was delighted to hear. It was O'Callahan.