This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [71]
SHILOH CHURCH had been built for the Prince of Peace and it had been named for an Israelite town in Ephraim, where the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant had stood and where the boy Samuel had heard voices and seen a mighty vision. It was a bleak frame building on a hillside in a clearing, with the road from the steamboat landing going past on its way to Corinth, and like the peach trees whose pink blossoms caught the April sunlight, the little church had been put there as a hint that life was not all bleak and barren. But Shiloh would get a terrible name now, for armies with banners had gathered around it and in thousands of families it would become a name for horror and desolation.
They were not really armies, although that is what men called them. They were just collections of very young men, most of whom knew nothing at all about the grim profession they had engaged in, all of them calling themselves soldiers but ignorant of what the word really meant. Day after tomorrow they would be soldiers, but now they were civilians, gawky in their new uniforms, each one dreaming that battle would be splendid and exciting and that he himself would survive; and they came from North and South, from farm and cane-brake cabin and from small town and busy city, trudging the dusty roads and tensing themselves for the great test of manhood which seemed to lie just ahead.
General Johnston and General Beauregard had joined forces at Corinth, and they had brought forty-five thousand men up to smite the Yankees in the fields and woodlots above Pittsburg Landing and drive them into the river. Grant had about the same number of men, waiting in their camps for the word to move down to Corinth and win the last great battle in the West. With a few exceptions — each army had a sprinkling of men who could call themselves veterans, because they had been in one fight — these soldiers were completely green. A Confederate brigadier confessed later that until he got to Shiloh he had never seen a gun fired, nor had he heard a lecture or read a book on warfare; and there were Confederate batteries whose members had never even heard the sound of their own guns, ammunition having been too scarce to permit target practice. In the Union army conditions were little better. The colonel of an Ohio regiment remarked that before Shiloh his men had not put in as much as ten hours on battalion drill, and there were many regiments whose men had received their muskets while on the way to the field and who had never so much as loaded and fired them until the battle began. Not even at Bull Run had two more pathetically untrained bodies of men been thrown into combat.1
The Confederate commanders knew perfectly well that the Federals were going to come down to drive them out of Corinth just as soon as Buell’s army joined Grant’s, and Johnston made up his mind to beat the Yankees to the punch. On April 3 he put his army on the road for Pittsburg Landing. The march was slow, disorganized, and noisy, as might have been expected of untrained troops; not until the evening of April 5 did Johnston have his men in position before the Union lines, and the men had made such a racket — whooping, yelling, and firing their muskets just to see if the things would really go off — that Beauregard wanted to cancel the whole plan and go back to Corinth, on the sensible ground that even the most inattentive Yankees could not help knowing that they were about to be attacked.
Beauregard should have been right, but he was not. Amateurish as the Confederate advance was, it was no worse than the state of the Federal defenses. Officers and men in Grant’s army knew that quite a few armed rebels were in their front, but nobody in the green front-line regiments knew anything about outpost duty; reports that went back to the rear were garbled and incomplete, and the notion that the Confederates would obligingly wait to be attacked at Corinth was overriding. Grant had six divisions in his army, five of them sprawled out between Shiloh Church and Pittsburg Landing. The sixth, under