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By Root 1809 0

of six.” In a lull that descended on one part of the field an Illinois captain found himself commanding his regiment, all superior officers having been shot, and since both his division and brigade commanders had also been hit there did not seem to be anybody to tell him what to do. He heard very heavy firing in the woods somewhere off to the right, so he collected what was left of the command and moved over to get in on the fight. An Iowa colonel came to the field drunk, maneuvered his regiment with reckless inconsequence, and was removed by his brigadier from command and placed under arrest; sobering somewhat, he picked up a musket and fell in with another Iowa regiment. Someone recognized him and asked him what he thought he was doing. He replied simply: “I am under arrest and hunting a place to fight.” He stayed and fought, too, acting as private soldier for the rest of the day. An army surgeon who had once served in an artillery company found four guns standing idle on a hill, dead and wounded men lying all around, surviving gunners having fled. He rounded up men from a nearby infantry regiment and got the guns back into action; they fought for half an hour, until a caisson was exploded and two of the guns were disabled.13

The area in front of the sunken road saw especially bitter fighting. The Confederates assaulted this strong point so many times the defenders lost all count, and Southerners called the place “the hornets’ nest.” On the right and left, Federal troops gave ground, and victorious Confederates came in and got the road from three sides, but the division that was holding it stayed put. Its commander was an Illinois politician, Brigadier General Benjamin Prentiss, who had been a volunteer captain in the Mexican War, had had a tiff with Grant over rank in the old days at Cairo, and who was turning out today to be considerable of a soldier. He held his line, although the rest of the battle was obviously moving back to the rear, and his men fired so hard and so fast that an opposing Confederate felt that if he could just hold up a bushel basket it would be filled with bullets in no time, Also, these hornets’-nest people killed the Confederate commander, Albert Sidney Johnston.

In spite of this valiant stand Grant’s army was being pushed back to the river. Grant himself had got to the scene and was doing all that a commander could to hold the position, but the southern attack was being driven home with a grim determination not to be expected of men who were tired of the war and ready to quit. (The determination converted Grant completely; after Shiloh he expected a war to the finish, not to be ended until the Confederacy had simply been made incapable of fighting any longer.) He sent for Lew Wallace’s division to come up, drew up his siege guns and reserve artillery on high ground in front of the river landing, and he did his best to get the disorganized fugitives back into battle and bolster his sagging line.

There was not very much he could do. His army had simply been caught off balance, and the Confederates were pressing their advantage. Grant’s front line that dawn had not contained one regiment that had ever been under fire before; many of these regiments had evaporated completely, and short of the line of guns by the river landing there was no good place to make a stand. An energetic Confederate general rounded up sixty pieces of artillery and put them in line to hammer at the hornets’ nest at the murderous range of three hundred yards. Prentiss’s men held their ground, but the men on their flanks were driven off; the peach orchard, dead bodies and broken trees and bloody ground, pink blossom petals strewn over all, was gone now, and the division was nearly surrounded. Men who tried to get to the rear found that to retreat was worse than to stay in the sunken road; the sixty Confederate guns were firing just a little high, and charges of canister were ripping the saplings and brambles fifty yards back of the line, creating a deadly zone no one could cross. Late in the afternoon Prentiss saw that he