The Storm Before Atlanta (21 page)

“What do we need thousands of colored doctors for?” said Lars, who looked both relieved and disappointed that the subject had moved off of his sweetheart.

“Colored doctors, colored lawyers, colored teachers!” No-Joke’s eyes shone. “And congressmen, and senators …”

“Whoa! Colored congressmen?”

“A whole great colored nation! Can’t you see it?” No-Joke turned to them excitedly. “Can’t you see it all around us?”

Jeremy wondered, not for the first time, if No-Joke might be a little touched in the head.

Lars grinned, and Dave and Nicholas were smiling, and Jeremy could tell that things were about to go badly for No-Joke. He was relieved not to be Lars’s target for the moment.

“A colored nation, huh? Why not a colored president while you’re at it? No-Joke, you must be …”

“Halt!” The order came down the line. Why were they stopping? They’d already taken their nooning.

“About-face, march! Double time!”

Jeremy drummed out the commands. With the swift ease of endless practice the men of the 107th New York turned around and marched back the way they had come.

“Why do you reckon we’re going back?”

“That other road back there, maybe we took the wrong way.”

“The whole division?”

“Why not?”

“So what’s the hurry, then? Why double time?”

The long columns of men ahead double-timed down the road, and the 107th New York followed, in ranks of four.

“I don’t like this,” said Nicholas suddenly. “Every time we’ve had to reverse and march back double-time, it’s been bad luck for the 107th.”

“Did we do that at Antietam?”

“We did that at Gettysburg, I’m pretty sure.”

It wasn’t like Nicholas to be a pessimist, and now he was getting everyone else down. “I bet we just took the wrong road,” said Jeremy. “And if the Rebs need to be taught another lesson before Atlanta, the 107th New York can do it!”

Jeremy remembered how they’d sent the Rebs running at Resaca. The 107th New York was invincible.

But No-Joke muttered, “I don’t like this either.”

The day felt hotter now that they were marching so fast. No-Joke had said it was going to storm, but Jeremy couldn’t see so much as a cloud anywhere. He almost wished it
would
rain, to cool things off. At least he wished he still had his canteen.

They had marched back a mile or so when the column
turned off the road and began marching across a field. They crossed a small creek and then climbed a steep hill—still in step! Jeremy was proud to be a member of the 107th. They stayed in formation even as they reached the edge of a small ravine, and broke step only as long as it took to scramble down into it and up the other side. Climbing up, Jeremy grabbed something prickly, but he was a soldier, and tough. He ignored the sharp little thorns in his hands, because he had to keep drumming.

At the top of the hill, in the woods, they saw Union soldiers partly dug in behind hastily erected barricades of fallen logs. The artillery had unhitched the horses and were wrestling the cannons into position.

Meanwhile, the 107th was being ordered into line of battle, at the crest of the wooded hillside, part of a long blue line made up of the three brigades of the First Division, distinguished by the red, white, or blue stars on their hats.
Hooker’s Ironsides
, Jeremy reminded himself.
And it’s the Secesh who call us that!
Jeremy took his place in the line, his drumsticks clutched tightly in his hands. He no longer noticed the prickles in his hands. As far as he could see in either direction, Union soldiers were lined up, facing the woods. In the woods he could see nothing but trees.

“There’s nobody there,” he said under his breath.

“Oh, I reckon there’s somebody there,” said Lars. “But we’ll soon have them wishing they weren’t.”

Behind them the cannons fired, making Jeremy jump. The shells screamed overhead and exploded red and orange
in the forest beyond. Again the cannons fired. But they were all Union cannons. There was no answer from the forest.

Again Jeremy wondered if there was really anybody there.

“Attention!” Captain John F. Knox stood before them, his sword gleaming in his hand.

“This afternoon Generals Hooker and Geary with Geary’s division encountered the enemy unexpectedly on Pumpkin Vine Creek, and they have driven them to ground here in this woods. It now remains for us to kill or capture the remainder of their force.”

“They took a wrong turn,” muttered No-Joke, next to Jeremy.

“What do you mean?” said Jeremy. “Who did?”

“Those generals. Geary and Hooker. We were on the road to Dallas. This road”—he nodded to a road that Jeremy could just make out going through the woods to their right—“is a different road.”

“They took a wrong turn and stirred up a pile of rattlesnakes!” said Dave indignantly.

Nicholas shrugged. “What’s the difference? We have to fight ’em somewhere.”

Now came the part of warfare that Jeremy was becoming most familiar with. They waited. They stood in line, the men with their rifles on their shoulders, Jeremy with the drum strap digging into the back of his neck. The artillery went on shelling the woods ahead of them. The
sound shook the earth under Jeremy’s feet, and he began to get a headache and wished once more that his canteen hadn’t been blown up.

The sun sank lower in the sky. It shouldn’t be this dark yet, though, Jeremy thought—and then he looked up and saw dark clouds gathering in a yellow sky. It looked like No-Joke was right. There was going to be a storm.

At last the skirmishers were ordered forward, men who moved out in front of the attack. They had a dangerous job. The rest of the soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, would follow after. Their job was nearly as dangerous, because moving forward in formation, they were very easy to shoot. Except Jeremy still doubted there were any Rebels in the woods. It must be hours now since the skirmish at Pumpkin Vine Creek. He bet the Rebels had all run away. Absquatulated. He savored the word in his head.

“Attention! Forward, double-quick!”

The bugles blew the command; the drummers drummed it. Jeremy beat his drum and marched forward with the company, all in line, all together, the men with their rifles on their shoulders, Jeremy with his drum before him.

“Center on the colors! Close in on the right!”

They were not formed in ranks, one behind the other, as they had been at Resaca. After the skirmishers, the soldiers were ranked in long, long lines of men stretching as far as Jeremy could see to his left and right. The 107th was toward the right end of the line, near the road, but not
close enough to the end that Jeremy could actually see it. The officers wanted the men close together. It seemed to Jeremy that if the Rebs fired a shot they couldn’t fail to hit somebody. But they had yet to fire a shot—if they were even really there.

Ahead of them the skirmishers were firing; the rifle shots echoed among the trees. The smell of powder from the cannon smoke and the rifles filled Jeremy’s nostrils—the smell of war. He moved forward eagerly. He could see the Union skirmishers. “Double-quick!”

But the line of men began to slow—barely perceptibly, and still perfectly in step. The Union skirmishers ahead were slowing down. The rattle of gunfire ahead grew louder—was it just Union skirmishers firing? Jeremy saw one of them suddenly lifted off his feet, his body arching as he flew backward and landed limp on the ground.

So the Rebs were there after all, and the 107th was closing in on them. They’d soon have those Rebs on the run.

Ahead, the Union skirmishers had stopped moving forward. Why were they stopping? Then they waved madly, gesturing to the men behind them to stop. Jeremy hesitated. Should they stop? But there had been no command to stop, and the men of the 107th and all the rest of the men in the long, long line pressed on. So Jeremy pressed on too, of course. Anything else would have been unthinkable. He kept beating his drum.

And yet he wondered why the skirmishers had wanted them to stop. If there were Secesh up ahead, well, that was
what the First Division was here for, wasn’t it? To send them packing. Why should they stop?

And then he saw.

In a moment they had caught up with their own skirmishers. Ahead Jeremy could see the red clay mass of fortifications. Fortifications everywhere, bristling with Confederate cannons, far closer than seemed possible. There was no way to retreat.… They could not outrun the guns. Their only hope was forward—to overtake those huge fortifications.

The Union soldiers brought down their rifles from their shoulders and fired. There had been no order to fire. There didn’t need to be. They grabbed cartridges out of their pockets, bit them open, loaded, and fired again. Grab, bite, load, fire. And then the return fire came. Bullets whizzed all around like angry metal bees. Jeremy heard a cry beside him and the thud of a body falling to the ground. Jeremy had nothing to fire, and he slid backward, letting the men get ahead of him.

A storm of shells, minié balls, grapeshot, and canister burst from the Rebel fortifications. In an instant a fourth of the men in front of Jeremy were lying on the ground—some still moving, some not. Jeremy blinked and coughed, his lungs full of gun smoke. He tried to beat his drum, but found he no longer had his drumsticks. He looked down for them and then dropped to his knees. He felt unable to get up again.

He hadn’t been hit. He hadn’t been injured. It was just
that when his brain tried to tell his legs to stand up, his legs wouldn’t obey. He hated himself! He was a coward, not a Drummer Boy of Shiloh! Every second there seemed to be more men lying on the ground before him, and the sound of bodies hitting the ground and the moans of the wounded weren’t quite drowned out by the explosions all around. The men in the line kept closing up ranks, covering the gaps left by each fresh barrage from the Rebel fortification.

“On, men! The 107th! York State and the Union!” Captain Knox still had his sword in his hand, and Jeremy looked up from his knees in time to see the brilliant white flash of an exploding shell in the space where the captain was standing. Jeremy felt himself thrown into the air and then hit the ground again, hard. He opened his eyes and decided he wasn’t dead, although he suddenly couldn’t hear anything. His drum was gone. He got to his hands and knees and looked around. He was staring at a bare foot, lying on the ground. It didn’t seem to be attached to anybody. Just beyond it was a bright blue flower, growing up near the toes. Captain Knox was no longer there.

“Out of cartridges!” someone yelled, and Jeremy realized his hearing had returned. “Get me more cartridges!”

That was one of a drummer boy’s duties. But where could he get them from? Jeremy looked at the bodies lying around him. He crawled up to one, found the metal ammunition box on its belt, felt in the pockets for more cartridges. He found them, stumbled toward the man who
had yelled, and dumped the cartridges into his hands. Then he went back to find more.

As he scrambled about, his courage returned. Not suddenly, the way it had left him, but quietly and matter-of-factly. There was a job to be done, and he was doing it. All around him men were dead and dying, and the threshold between life and death did not seem very great or very frightening, and so he turned his attention to finding dead men who still had cartridges and getting those cartridges to the men who were still standing.

The air was so full of exploded gunpowder that he could taste it in his mouth, and his eyes stung with it. He didn’t have time to think of this. He needed to get cartridges to his men. He had no thought now that Charlie might be on the other side, that the bullets he was finding might hit Charlie. The other side was the enemy, pure and simple.

Quickly he lost any feeling of distaste for what he was doing, and he stopped looking at the powder-blackened faces of the dead. When the men whose pockets he was rifling stirred, he ignored that, too. His job was to get ammunition to those still on their feet. The sky grew darker overhead, and he heard thunder under the cannon fire. Again a shell exploded near him. The one that hit him, he thought, he would probably never know about. He hoped not anyway. He knew now that there would be no gathered circle of kneeling comrades, pressing a Bible into his hands. That was a song, and made up, and a lie. He would
just keep going until the moment of nothingness came, as it had come for so many of the men lying around him.

There was no line of soldiers anymore. The survivors hid behind trees or clung to the ground, like Jeremy. Two things could happen now, Jeremy realized. Either more Union soldiers could arrive to relieve the First Division, or the Rebs could come swarming over those fortifications and finish off the surviving Union soldiers.

And then the gathering storm overhead burst. Hot flickers of lightning rippled over the battlefield, and thunder crashed. The trees bent over, their branches thrashing in sudden wild gusts of wind, the leaves turning over white against the steel-dark sky. Then rain poured down in torrents. The firing stuttered to a stop, and the Rebs behind the barricade cheered.

Jeremy crawled back the way they had marched—it wasn’t even dark yet; had it been only an hour before? He couldn’t see anything through the pouring rain anyway. He just kept crawling in the mud that soaked through the knees of his breeches. His clothes were wet and slowed his dragging pace. Finally he stood up. His legs were shaking. He heard marching and orders being given—had he crawled into Rebel territory? No, those were northern accents he heard. The Union Army had arrived to relieve them at last.

Jeremy stumbled on. Maybe the First Division was being ordered to fall back now that their relief had arrived. He had heard no command, and was not sure there was
anyone left to give one. There were no bugles and no drums—Jeremy had lost his. For all he knew he could be deserting.

Through a bright triple flash of lightning he saw other soldiers in blue moving in, marching in formation, not a step wrong, just as the First Division had marched a short time before. Jeremy found it hard to even care. He felt numb.

NINETEEN