Terrible Swift Sword (35 page)

On the Confederate side there was equal
confusion. Bragg's second line advanced through Hardee's first line so that the
elements of the two commands were completely intermingled, with the men of Polk
and Breckinridge coming up to infiltrate the disordered lines. Command
arrangements dissolved entirely, and at last the corps commanders made
spur-of-the-moment plans: Bragg would take the right, Polk the center, and
Hardee the left, with Breckinridge operating wherever he seemed to be needed.
Troop movements were utterly disordered. One soldier wrote after the battle
that "we fooled around for 5 or 6 hours before we got to see a Yankee, although
the battle was raging not more than half a mile from us." He added that
when his regiment at last did get into action "I tell you they made us
fight a while before they let us quit."
⁸

This was happening,
remember, to men who (save for the Donelson veterans in Grant's army, and a
scattering of Polk's men who had been at Belmont) had never fought before and
who were most inadequately trained for fighting, and whose company and
regimental officers were in no better case than themselves. Many of them,
naturally, cut and ran for it without delay. Part of Sherman's division simply
disappeared, and by noon there were thousands of Union fugitives glued to the
ground on the river bank at Pittsburg Landing, men so overwhelmed by terror
that no conceivable effort could get them back into action: Grant estimated
later that at no time during the day were more than 25,000 Federals actually
fighting. Many Confederates were beguiled by the fact that the camps they
captured had abundant food lying ready to hand, the breakfasts which the
Yankees had not had time to eat; hungry soldiers paused to fill their bellies
and drifted out of any man's control. A nephew of Varina Davis, an officer in a
Mississippi regiment, told about finding a crowd of 300 men or more lounging
about in the rear. These men explained that "we are all smashed,"
although they had lost no more than three or four killed and two dozen wounded,
and he wrote angrily: "These are the kind of troops of which you read
gallant deeds and reckless conduct, they lose half a dozen, retire in time to
save their haversacks and are puffed accordingly."
⁹

Yet the stragglers and the incontinent
foragers and the faint-hearts were, incredibly enough, in the minority. Sherman's
division broke, retreated, arid reformed its fragments with McClernand's men,
but the records showed that it had 1900 casualties, which proves that it did a
good deal of fighting. If many Confederates left the ranks to sack the Yankee
camps, more of them stopped only long enough to pick up modern muskets to
replace their own antiquated weapons; the rear was disorder raised to the nth
power, but on the firing line everything was strictly business, and men who
were frightened almost out of their wits managed to keep on fighting. Wholly
characteristic was the breathless comment in one Confederate's letter: "It
was an awful thing to hear no intermission in firing and hear the clatter of
small arms and the whizing minny balls and rifle shot and the sing of grape
shot the hum of canon balls and the roaring of the bomb shell and explosion of
the same seaming to be a thousand every minute . . . O God forever keep me out
of such another fight. I was not scared I was just in danger."
¹⁰

All
morning the Federals were pushed back. Johnston's plan was working . . . except
that there was one hard core of Federal resistance, Prentiss's men and some of
W. H. L. Wallace's, who took their stand at last in an old country lane that
ran along the crest of an almost imperceptible little rise in the ground, with
briar patches and underbrush all along the front: the famous "sunken road"
of postwar memories, although in actual fact it was not sunken at all and was
held, apparently, just because it was a handy place to form a line and because
the men who formed the line did not want to go back any farther. Grant rode up
once and told Prentiss to hold the line at all hazards, and, after Grant left,
the lawyer-soldier and his men obeyed orders literally. This place and the
ground in front became known as the hornets' nest; the men beat off repeated
Confederate assaults, and hugged the earth grimly when Rebel artillerists put
many guns in line and pounded the lane and the trees around it and everything
to the sides and in the rear . . . and the Federals stayed and shot the next
Confederate attack to bits, and noon passed and the afternoon grew long and the
sun dipped down toward the smoky skyline, and but for the stand that was made
here General Johnston might have driven Grant's army into the river or into Owl
Creek swamp or straight into perdition itself and the victory he wanted so
desperately would have been won.

Johnston
himself had been up in front all day, riding from this place to that, keeping
the attack moving; and at last he came up near a peach orchard, a little to the
east of the hornets' nest, and tried to get a new assault organized. The air
was full of bullets, and one bullet ripped away the sole of one of his boots:
he waggled his foot, laughed, told an aide that this had come pretty close but
that he was unhurt; then a bullet struck him in the leg, cutting an artery, and
he reeled in the saddle, growing faint from loss of blood before he knew that
he had been hit. He was laid on the ground, somebody went to find a surgeon,
nobody thought of applying a tourniquet . . . and then, apparently in no pain,
speaking no word, he looked up at the sky and died.
¹¹

Hope of victory died with him: or, to be
more exact, died a little before he died. The stand at the hornets' nest had
gained Grant just the respite he had to have. From the beginning, Johnston's
only hope had been that he could overwhelm the Federal Army in one shattering
assault, and he had not quite made it. Grant's army had been mangled, it had
been driven back almost to the edge of the Tennessee, much of it had been put
entirely out of action . . . but the hornets' nest had held firm, hour after
hour, and as the afternoon passed the Confederacy's dazzling opportunity grew
narrower and narrower and at last vanished altogether. Far to the rear, on high
ground commanding the steamboat landing, Grant put together an immense rank of
artillery, with a reorganized infantry line behind it and on the flank.
Farther back, Lew Wallace at last overcame the confusion that had grown out of
garbled orders and unfamiliar roads and got his division of 8000 men on the
road to the Federal right; they would be on hand shortly after dark, and when
they arrived Grant would have the advantage in numbers. Most important of all,
Nelson's division of Buell's army had arrived—at last—and the steamboats were
bringing his advance guard across the Tennessee, the men kicking the skulking
fugitives at the landing as they tramped up to take their place in the new
battle line. When Johnston died the Confederacy assuredly lost a soldier it
desperately needed, but it had already lost its chance to win the battle of
Shiloh.

. . . except, perhaps, for the
intangible that cannot be accurately appraised. Just possibly, this man's
capacity for firing the spirits of tired soldiers might have been enough to
send one final, triumphant assault through the shouting twilight, capturing
guns, breaking the last infantry line, destroying the heads of the reinforcing
columns and achieving the impossible in the smoky darkness above the deep
river. Probably it would not have happened so, but the one man who might
conceivably have made it happen was dead.
¹²

The
hornets' nest was taken at last. All the rest of the Federals had retreated,
and the men who had saved Grant's army were cut off, surrounded and made
helpless. By five o'clock or thereabouts General Prentiss surrendered, giving
the Confederates 2200 prisoners and an empty country lane.

It took time to get his men off to the
rear and to reorganize the Southern battle line, and when these things had been
done it was too late to fight any more that day. Grant's guns were in action,
the new line had been formed, and in the river Federal gunboats were throwing
huge shells into the ravines and gullies where the exhausted Confederates were
sorting themselves out. Sensibly enough, Beauregard (who had succeeded to the
command when Johnston died) pulled his leading units back a few rods and
ordered the troops to make the best bivouac they could for the night.

It was a dreadful night. Toward midnight
there was a hard thunderstorm, with a downpour to soak the soldiers who slept
among so many dead and wounded. Sudden flashes of lightning illuminated hideous
scenes—dead men everywhere, pools and creeks given a ghastly tint by the blood
of wounded men who had crawled down to drink and had died with their faces in
the water, brambly fields carpeted with torn bodies, helpless wounded men lying
in the downpour chanting weak calls for help: the memory of it leading one
Confederate to write: "O it was too shocking too horrible. God Grant that
I may never be the partaker in such scenes again . . . when released from this
I shall ever be an advocate of peace."
¹⁸

But things are seldom all of one
pattern. There were men who ate well and slept well that night. After all, the
Federal camps were there to be looted, and many of the tired Confederates
feasted and told one another that there would be nothing to do tomorrow but
bury the dead and finish raking in the Yankee supplies; no doubt the enemy had
all gone across the river. A Tennessee soldier recalled that "our mess had
that night all the tea, coffee, sugar, cheese, hardtack and bacon they could
want," and remembered that wine and liquor were found among the surgeons'
stores; in the morning one stout foot soldier tried to go into battle with a
huge cheese impaled on his bayonet. Some men became so interested in the spoils
that they forgot about the unfinished battle, and one Confederate officer wrote
bitterly that if the high command had had the sense to burn all of the
captured stores that night the army might have won the fight next day. All
through the Federal camps, he said, Confederate soldiers were picking up
valuables, and by midnight "half of our army was straggling back to
Corinth loaded down with belts, sashes, swords, officers' uniforms, Yankee
letters, daguerreotypes of Yankee sweethearts, likenesses of Grant, Buell,
Smith, Prentiss, McClellan, Lincoln, etc., some on Yankee mules and horses,
some on foot, some on the ground prostrate with Cincinnati whiskey."
General Bragg told his wife that Shiloh was lost because of lack of discipline
and lack of good officers, concluding savagely: "Universal suffrage,
furloughs & whiskey have ruined us."
¹⁴

That looting,
straggling, and lack of discipline harmed the army is beyond question, but the
plain fact is that regardless of these things the army had had it. That it had
done as much as it had done was one of the marvels of the war; to do anything
more was wholly out of the question. Grant's army had been shaken to its
shoetops but it had never quite been broken; Grant himself had never had any
notion of retreating, even when things were at their worst; Lew Wallace's
division reached him not long after dark, and during the night 20,000 of
Buell's soldiers came across the river—and when the morning of April 7 came
there was nothing Beauregard could do but get his men back to Corinth as best
he could.

He
did not do this at once. The fighting began all over again soon after sunrise,
and for most of the morning it was a hard, stubborn battle, the Federals
attacking now, the Confederates disputing every inch of the ground. Not until
after noon did Beauregard accept the inevitable and order a retreat, and when
his army withdrew the Federals made no more than a gesture of pursuit. Grant's
army had been fought out. Buell's troops were fresh enough, but Buell was only
partly under Grant's orders, the relationship between the two generals was
exceedingly delicate, and each man apparently felt that it would be just as
well to let the soldiers catch their breath and think about going after this Confederate
Army at some later date.

It is clear enough now that a hard,
vigorous pursuit might have destroyed Beauregard's army. But the controlling
fact undoubtedly was that this battle had brought utter exhaustion to the
victor as well as to the defeated. The Unionists had lost upwards of 13,000
men, the Confederates more than 10,000, and the figures call for a little
reflection. The armies that met on April 6 were larger than the armies that met
at Bull Run, but—it can stand one more repetition—they were hardly in the
slightest degree better trained or organized. They had fought three times as
long as the Bull Run armies had fought, and had suffered approximately five
times the losses, and although there had been heavy straggling on both sides
there had been no actual rout.
¹⁵
If in the end they drifted apart,
it is no wonder. In all American history, no more amazing battle was ever
fought than this one.

Nor have many battles
been more decisive, in their effect on the course of a war. Shiloh represented
a supreme effort on the part of the Confederacy to turn the tables, to recoup
what had been lost along the Tennessee-Kentucky line, to win a new chance to
wage war west of the Appalachians on an equal footing. It failed. After this,
the Southern nation could do no more than fight an uphill fight to save part of
the Mississippi Valley—the great valley of American empire without which the
war could not be won.