Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [40]
“We got to jump’m afore day,” Forrest said when he heard the news. “Else they’ll do us like they done us at Donelson.” He thought for a moment. “Like we done ourselves.”
He left the camp alone and was gone for hours. The moon had traveled half the sky when Henri propped up on an elbow to hear Forrest muttering mostly to himself.
“Cain’t find nobody to listen to me.” Air puffed out of him as he settled on his back. “This battle’s our’n to piss away, and we done pissed it.”
· · ·
TWO RAIN-SOGGY DAYS LATER, General William Tecumseh Sherman and his infantry command set out in pursuit of Rebel soldiers retreating down the road from Shiloh toward Corinth—abandoning all of the ground they’d won in the first phase of the battle. The Federals were four miles out of their camp when they came upon a long wide hollow strewn with timber. The trees had been felled in this long swale the year before but never hauled off to the sawmill. Bark flaking from them, covered with a fresh growth of spring vine, the logs lay every which way, crisscrossed just as they’d first fallen.
On the ridge beyond appeared a couple of Rebel horsemen. Sherman raised his glass to his eye. The riders didn’t altogether look like white men, and that puzzled him for a moment, but they were Rebels sure enough. He had no way of telling how many cavalry lay on the far side of that ridge, but it hardly mattered. The swale of fallen timbers would make a charge impossible; his foot soldiers would certainly have the advantage there.
“Yankees,” Matthew called, trotting his horse down toward Forrest. “Lots of them.”
“How many?” Forrest reined his gray around, pulled down the brim.
“Fifteen hundred and maybe more,” Henri said. “I don’t know. They’re still coming out of the trees.”
Forrest coughed. “That’s five to one on us. I wonder where in Hell they keep coming from.” He had a hundred fifty of his own men on hand and two hundred other horsemen Breckenridge had assigned to him for the rearguard actions of the day. He began dismounting these men now and ordering to the cover of trees or boulders along the top of the ridge.
“Yankees can’t ride for … beans,” Matthew piped up. He was still astride his horse and exposed on the open backbone of the hill.
“Git down from thar, and mind out for sharpshooters,” Forrest snapped. Then he stopped to look down the hill. “No, wait a minute.”
The blue skirmishers below were losing all semblance of a line as they began picking their way across the mossy logs. And the Yankee horses balked at every timber, though they were only going at a walk.
“They cain’t ride worth a good goddamn, kin they?” Forrest whispered, grinning at Matthew and Henri. And then in a shout: “Mount up, boys—let’s go find’m.”
THAT BLASTED CATERWAULING—Sherman couldn’t get used to it; much of it as he’d already heard, it still raised the hair on the back of his neck. Or maybe it was the impossible disaster spread before him: two or three hundred Rebel horse flying down the ridge into the swale where his men blundered among the logs, flinging up great gobbets of mud from their hooves and leaping among the fallen timbers as nimbly as giant cats. His skirmish line had already been slashed to pieces; and now his regular infantry was on a stumbling run to the rear, with the Rebel riders hard after them. One of the Rebels, tall in the saddle, pistol in one hand and blade in the other, came riding far out ahead of the rest, guiding his speckled gray horse with his knees as the animal jumped one log after another, gaining speed as he reached open ground and bore down on the infantry battle line Sherman had hastily regrouped two hundred yards behind his skirmishers.
As the speckled gray’s pumping shoulders smacked into the troops, a segment of the blue line collapsed and began to boil. Forrest had knocked down four or five Yankees with rounds from his Navy six before it clicked empty. The saber in his left hand whirled around and around like