This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [72]
It rained on April 5, and when the sky cleared at sunset the air was cool, and in the woods and half-cleared fields near Shiloh Church the opening leaves gleamed wet and green. There was a peach orchard a mile east of the church, and a little way back of it there was a country road, worn down by erosion so that its bed was a couple of feet lower than the featureless landscape it crossed; and in the orchard and in front of the sunken road and around the unpainted church thousands of Union soldiers had pitched their tents, with other thousands not far in their rear. The ground was good and the air was clear, the great victory at Fort Donelson lay comfortingly at the back of everybody’s mind, the new leaves and the pink blossoms on the peach trees were good to look at, and an Illinois soldier in Sherman’s division wrote: "We were as happy as mortals could be." Early in the afternoon, with the day’s drill over, regiments broke rank and hundreds of boys scurried down to Owl Creek for a swim. They were wholly unworried. There had been intermittent sputterings of rifle fire out on the picket lines for two or three days, but the men had got used to it; the high command was not fretting about it, so why should they?3
In the Tennessee River the wooden gunboats Tyler and Lexington lay at anchor not far from the landing. Downstream at Savannah there was Grant, in the house where Old Smith was nursing his infected shin. Grant had just received a dispatch from Sherman saying, “I do not apprehend anything like an attack on our position”;4 he endorsed this, saying that he felt the same way, and passed the reassuring news on to Halleck. And over the wooded plateau and the peach orchard and the river there lay an immense quiet and peace, the last hope of a war that would soon be over because the other side had lost the will to fight.
Within a few miles of Shiloh Church, Albert Sidney Johnston had finally shaken off Beauregard’s insistence that he give up the offensive and go back to Corinth, declaring: “I would fight them if they were a million.” His battle orders were drawn and issued: the Confederate army would move forward at dawn.
Five in the morning of April 6; patrols from the Union advance elements had gone forward a mile or two to see whether anything solid lay back of the Rebel skirmish parties that had been so much in evidence lately. As they went, Johnston was giving his general officers final instructions, closing with the remark: “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River.” The Union patrols kept on going, and before long they collided with Rebel skirmishers. For a little while there was a spat-spat of casual rifle fire, doing no particular harm, alarming nobody; then, up behind the Confederate advance guard, there came the enormous solid mass of a Confederate battle line, banked up to the full depth of three army corps, extending off to right and left through the woods and the underbrush beyond vision. There came heavy rolling volleys and the sound of thousands of men yelling, with the crash of field artillery exploding sullenly underneath.
Back came the Union patrols, and in the camps men fell in line and made ready. The advancing Confederates could see white tents on the hillsides, with ordered ranks drawn up in front of them, guns on higher ground,