Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [30]
The closer Grant got, the more obvious it was to him how badly he had miscalculated. It was late in the morning when he finally arrived at Pittsburg Landing, and from the river, and even from the shore once he had landed, he could see nothing. In the age before smokeless gunpowder, the battlefield was obscured by clouds of dense, gritty smoke, and in any case Grant was looking up at a seemingly impenetrable thicket of scrub and second growth, from which thousands of panicked Union troops were emerging, with or without their weapons, to huddle beside the river.
Now that Grant realized he had allowed himself to be outwitted by Johnston, he was calm again. He would have agreed with Wellington’s appraisal of his situation before Waterloo, “By God, Bonaparte has humbugged me!” and, also like Wellington, who had to hold out all day until Blücher arrived with his Prussians, Grant would have to hang on by the skin of his teeth until Buell arrived to join him. Since his cavalry was useless in the rough, heavily wooded country, bisected by creeks and streams, Grant ordered them to round up the Union stragglers and drive them back to plug the gaps in the battle lines. Having done this, he sent messengers off to look for Buell, and went forward to have a closer look. Nothing he saw was encouraging—he would later remark that in places the dead lay so thick and close to each other it would have been possible to walk across a field without putting a foot on the ground—and from all accounts his left was being pushed back to the river, without any sign that the Confederate advance was slowing.
By noon, however, Sherman—ever the optimist—had reported more hopeful signs, and by one o’clock Buell himself finally appeared and met with Grant aboard his steamer. Grant urged Buell into action, and for once Buell moved quickly, and by late afternoon, the Confederate rush had been slowed by a series of fierce artillery clashes and vicious hand-to-hand fighting. Grant did not know it yet, but luck had touched him again. Confederate general A. S. Johnston had been hit in the thigh; thinking it was a minor wound, he ignored it, continuing to urge his troops forward. When his staff finally got him off his horse and pulled his boot off, it was full of blood. It was too late to save Johnston, who bled to death on the battlefield, and command passed to Beauregard, who had not shared Johnston’s optimism about the attack in the first place.
With Johnston’s death the steam went out of the Confederate attack. As the dreadful day ended in a torrential rainstorm, Grant took refuge in a battlefield hospital, but he could not stand the blood, the screams, and the cries of the wounded and the dying (shades of the tannery), and took shelter under a tree. Sherman found him there in the dark, whittling a stick with his pocketknife and smoking a cigar, his hat pulled low over his eyes. As the story goes, Sherman said, “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Grant went on whittling and, without looking up, said, “Yes, lick ’em tomorrow, though.”
And so it would prove. Grant attacked in the morning—now, he finally had all Buell’s twenty thousand men and Wallace’s five thousand, the author of Ben Hur having at last found his way to the battlefield—drove the Confederates back, and by nightfall they were back in Corinth again. Shiloh was, to that date, the biggest battle ever fought on American soil, and the casualties came to nearly thirty thousand killed, wounded, and missing. More Americans were killed at Shiloh than in all previous American wars combined—the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War—a grim statistic that was to shock both the North and the South alike.
Grant, though Shiloh was not his finest moment as a general, had at least not been paralyzed by Johnston’s surprise attack or by the sheer ferocity of