The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864

'YE KNOW NOT WHAT YE ASK.'

One morn in spring, when earth lay robedIn resurrection bloom,I turned away my tear-veiled eyes,Feeling the glow but gloom,And asked my God one boon I craved,Or earth were living tomb.One autumn morn, when all the worldIn ripened glory lay,I turned to God my shining eyes,And praised Him for that day,When asking curses with my lips,He turned His ear away.

COMING UP AT SHILOH

The rain, which had been falling steadily since shortly after midnight, ceased at daybreak. The morning dawned slowly and moodily, above the wooded hilltops that rose steeply from the farther bank of the creek close by, right over against the cornfield, in which, on the preceding evening, we had comfortably pitched our camp. The bugle wound an early reveille; then came the call to strike tents, though one half of the brigade was yet busy in hurried preparations for breakfast, and presently the assembly sounded. We were on the march again by the time the sun would have liked to greet us with his broad, level-thrown smile for 'good morning,' if the sky had been clear and open enough, instead of covered, as it was on this damp, chilly April morning, with dull, sullen masses of cloud that seemed still nursing their ill humor and bent on having another outbreak. The road was heavy; an old, worn stage-coach road, of a slippery, treacherous clay, which the trampings of our advanced regiments speedily kneaded into a tough, stiff dough, forming a track that was enough to try the wind and bottom of the best. For some miles, too, the route was otherwise a difficult one—hilly, and leading by two or three tedious crossings in single file over fords, where now were rushing turbid, swollen streams, gorging and overflowing their banks everywhere in the channels, which nine months out of the twelve give passage to innocent brooklets only, that the natives of these parts may cross barefoot without wetting an ankle. Spite of these drawbacks, the men were in fine spirits; for this was the end of our weary march from Nashville, and we were sure now of a few days' rest and quiet.

A few minutes after midday we reached Savannah, and were ordered at once into camp. By this time the sky had cleared, the sun was shining brightly, though, as it seemed, with an effort; the wind, which had been freshening ever since morning, was blowing strong and settled from out the blue west, and the earth was drying rapidly. The Sixth Ohio and a comrade regiment of the Tenth Brigade pitched their tents in an old and well-cleared camping ground, on a gently sloping rise looking toward the town from the southeastward; a little too far from the river to quite take in, in its prospect, the landing with its flotilla of transports and the gunboats which they told us were lying there, yet not so far but we could easily discern the smoke floating up black and dense from the boats' chimney stacks, and hear the long-drawn, labored puffs of the escape pipes, and the shrill signals of the steam whistles. Altogether our camping ground was eligible, dry, and pleasant.

It was on Saturday, the fifth day of April, 1862, that the Fourth division, being the advance corps of the Army of the Ohio, came thus to Savannah, and so was brought within actual supporting distance of the forces under General Grant at Pittsburg Landing, twelve miles up the farther bank of the Tennessee. General Crittenden's division encamped that evening three hours' march behind us. Still farther in the rear were coming in succession the divisions of McCook, Wood, and Thomas. It was well that such reënforcements were at hand; otherwise, unless we disregarded the best-established laws of probabilities in deciding the question, the Army of the Tennessee was even then a doomed one, and the story of Shiloh must have gone to the world a sad, tragic tale of the most crushing defeat which had ever fallen upon an army since the days of Waterloo. No mean service, then, was rendered the national cause, and all which that cause will stand out as the embodiment of, in all the ages to come, when Shiloh was saved, and Treason was forced to turn, faint, and stagger away from the field to which it had rushed with a fiend's exultant eagerness, having there met only its own discomture. The meed due for that service is a coronal of glory, that may never, probably, be claimed as the desert of any one individual exclusively; nor is it likely that the epitaph, enchiselled upon whose tombstone soever it might be, 'Here lies the saviour of Shiloh,' would pass one hour unchallenged. Yet impartial history can scarcely be at fault in recognizing as preëminent the part taken by one officer, in the events, whose results, at least, permit so much of eulogy to be written, with other significance than merely that of a wretched burlesque. That officer was General Nelson, the commander of our own division. Iron-nerved, indomitable, willfull, disdainful of pleasing with studied phrase of unmeant compliment, but with a great, manly heart beating strong in his bosom, and a nature grandly earnest, brave, and true—with the very foremost of Kentucky's loyal sons will ever stand the name of General William Nelson.

Our column had marched from Nashville out on the Franklin turnpike, nearly three weeks previous. General McCook, as the senior divisional commander, had claimed the advance, and had held it in our march through that beautiful, cultivated garden spot of Middle Tennessee, as far as Columbia, a distance of nearly fifty miles. Here the turnpike and the railroad bridges over Duck river had both been destroyed by the rebels in their forlorn retreat from the northward. To replace the former even with a tottering wooden structure, was a work of time and labor. Meanwhile the army waited wearily, General Nelson chafed at the delay, and the rebel leaders Beauregard and Sidney Johnston were concentrating their forces at Corinth with ominous celerity. It was their purpose to crush, at one blow, so suddenly and so surely dealt that succor should be impossible, the National army, which had established itself on the borders of one of the southernmost States of the Confederacy, and was menacing lines of communication of prime necessity to their maintenance of the defensive line within which those commanders had withdrawn their discomfited armies. At length, one evening, on dress parade, there were read 'General orders, headquarters Fourth division,' for a march at daylight the next morning. Some days would yet be required to complete the bridge, but permission had been wrung from the 'commanding general' to cross the river by fording, and comically minute the detailed instructions of that order were for accomplishing the feat.

So on Saturday, the twenty-ninth of March, we passed over Duck river. Other divisions immediately followed. By his importunity and characteristic energy, General Nelson had thus secured for us the advance for the seventy-five miles that remained of the march, and, incalculably more than this, had gained days of precious time for the entire army. How many hours later the Army of the Ohio might have appeared at Shiloh in season to stay the tide of disaster and rescue the field at last, let those tell who can recall the scenes of that awful Sabbath day there on the banks of the Tennessee.

General Grant had established his headquarters at Savannah, and there immediately upon our arrival our commander reported his division. Long before night, camp rumors had complacently decided our disposition for the present. Three days at Savannah to allow the other corps of our army to come up with us, and then, by one more easy stage, we could all move together up to Pittsburg Landing, and take position beside the Army of the Tennessee. It was a very comfortable programme, and not the least of its recommendations was the earnest of its faithful carrying out, which appeared in the unusual regard to mathematical precision that our officers had shown in 'laying off camp,' and the painstaking care they had required on our part in establishing it.

There was but an inconsiderable force here, composed for the most part of new troops from two or three States of the Northwest. I remember, especially, one regiment from Wisconsin, made up of great, brawny, awkward fellows—backwoodsmen and lumbermen chiefly—who followed us to Shiloh on the next evening, and through the whole of Monday fought and suffered like heroes, as they were. Our first inquiries, quite naturally, were concerning our comrade army, and the enemy confronting it at Corinth. Varied and incongruous enough was the information that we gleaned, and in some details requiring a simple credulity that nine months of active campaigning had quite jostled and worried out of us. It seemed settled, however, that our comrades up the river were a host formidable in numbers and of magnificent armament and material; altogether very well able to take care of themselves, at least until we could join them at our leisure.

There were some things which, if we had more carefully considered them, might, perhaps, have abated somewhat this pleasant conviction of security. The enemy had lately grown wonderfully bold and venturesome—skirmishing with picket outposts, bullying reconnoitring parties, and picking quarrels upon unconscionably slight provocation almost daily. He had even challenged our gunboats, disputing the passage up the river in an artillery duello at the Bluffs, not far above the Landing, whose hoarse, sullen rumbling had reached us where we were resting on that Thursday afternoon, at the distance of thirty miles back toward Nashville. But, then, on how few fields had Southern chivalry ever yet ventured to attack; how seldom, but when fairly cornered, had its champions deemed discretion not the better part of valor! What other possibility was there which was not more likely to become an actuality than that the enemy would here dare to assume the aggressive? Who that had the least regard for the dramatic proprieties, could ever assign to him any other part in the tragedy than one whose featliest display of skill and dexterity should be exhibited in executing the movements of guard and parry, and whose noblest performance should be to stand at bay, resolutely contending upon a hopeless field to meet a Spartan death? So we cast aside all serious thought of immediate danger at Pittsburg Landing, the sanguine temperaments pronouncing these demonstrations of a foe who had shown our army only his heels all the way from Bowling Green and Fort Donelson, really diverting from their very audacity.

At sunset, the Sixth held dress parade—the first since our march from Columbia; but I, on duty that day as one of the 'reserve guard,' was merely a looker-on. I was never prouder of the old regiment; it went through with the manual of arms so well—and then there were so many spectators present from other regiments. Orders were given to prepare for a thorough inspection of arms and equipments at ten o'clock on the next morning, then parade was dismissed, and so the day ended. The wind died away, and the night deepened, cool, tranquil, starlit, on a camp of weary soldiery, where contentment and good will ruled for the hour over all.

Beautifully clear and calm the Sabbath morning dawned, April 6th, 1862; rather chilly, indeed, for it was yet in the budding time of spring. But the sky was so blue and cloudless, the air so still, and all nature lay smiling so serene and fair in the glad sunshine—it was a day such as that whereon the Creator may have looked upon the new-born earth, and 'saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good;' a day as if chosen from all its fellows and consecrated to a hallowed quiet, the blessedness of prayer and thanksgiving, praise and worship.

Hardly a man in our division, I believe, but awoke that morning with a happy consciousness of long hours that this day were to be his own, and a clear idea of just how he should improve them. My programme was the general one, and simple enough it was. First, of course, to make ready for inspection, and, that ceremony well gotten through with, to enact the familiar performance of every man his own washerwoman and seamstress: the remainder of the day should be devoted to the soldier's sacred delight of correspondence—to completing a letter to Wynne, begun back at Columbia, and writing home. Out by the smouldering fire, where the cooks of our mess had prepared breakfast nearly two hours before, I was busily at work furbishing with the new dust-fine ashes the brasses of my accoutrements, when the boom of cannon burst on the air, rolling heavily from away to the southward up from what we knew must be the neighborhood of the camps at Pittsburg Landing. It was after seven o'clock. The sun was mounting over the scrubby oak copse behind our camp, and the day grew warm apace. Another and still another explosion followed in quick succession.

What could it mean? Only the gunboats, some suggested, shelling guerillas out of the woods somewhere along the river bank. Impossible; too near, too far to the right, for that. It could hardly be artillery practice merely; for to-day was the Sabbath. And the youngest soldier among us knew better than to give those rapid, furious volleys the interpretation of a formal military salute. Could it really be—battle?

Every man almost was out and listening intently. Louder and fiercer the reports came, though still irregular. Now and then, in the intervals, a low, quick crepitation reached us, an undertone that no soldier could fail to recognize as distant musketry. Ominous sounds they were, portending—what? What, indeed, if not actual battle? If a battle, then certainly an attack by the enemy. Were our comrades up at the Landing prepared for it?

The first cannon had been fired scarcely ten minutes, when General Nelson rode by toward headquarters, down in the busiest part of the town, aides and orderlies following upon the gallop. Presently came orders:

'Three days' rations in haversacks, strike tents, and pack up. Be ready to move at a moment's notice. They are fighting up at the Landing.'

There was no need for further urging. By ten o'clock every disposition for the march had been completed. Nearly three long hours more we waited with feverish anxiety for the final command to start, while the roar of that deathly strife fell distantly upon our ears almost without intermission, and a hundred wild rumors swept through the camp. General Grant had gone up the river on a gunboat soon after the cannonading began. It was not long after midday when we struck tents, were furnished with a new supply of cartridges and caps for our Enfields, and waited several minutes longer. At length, however, the column formed, and, though still without orders, except those which its immediate commander had assumed the responsibility to give, the Fourth division was on the march for Shiloh. The Tenth brigade had, as usual, the advance, and, in our regular turn, the Sixth came the third regiment in the column. We had just cleared the camping grounds, I well remember, when General Nelson rode leisurely down the line, his eye taking note with the quiet glance of the real soldier of every minutia of equipments and appearance generally. Some natures seem to find in antagonism and conflict their native element, their chief good—yet more, almost as much a necessity of their moral organism as to their animal being is the air they breathe. Such a nature was Nelson's. His face to-day wore that characteristic expression by which every man of his command learned to graduate his expectation of an action; it was the very picture of satisfaction and good humor. He wheeled his horse half around as the rear of our brigade passed him, and a blander tone of command I never heard than when, in his rapid, authoritative manner, he rang out:

'Now, gentlemen, keep the column well closed up!' and passed on toward the next brigade.

Gentlemen! how oddly the title comes to sound in the ears of a soldier!

From Savannah to the Tennessee, directly opposite Pittsburg Landing, is, by the course we took, perhaps ten miles. The route was only a narrow wagon-path through the woods and bottoms bordering the river, and the wisdom was soon apparent which had beforehand secured the services of a native as guide. Most of the latter half of the distance was through a low, slimy swamp land, giving rank growth to an almost continuous forest of sycamore, cottonwood, and other trees which love a damp, alluvial soil, whose massive trunks were yet foul and unsightly with filth and scum deposited by the receding waters at the subsidence of the river's great spring freshet a month before. Stagnant ponds and mimic lagoons lay all about us and in our very pathway, some of the deeper ones, however, rudely bridged. Very rapid progress was impossible. It had already been found necessary to send our artillery back to Savannah, whence it would have to be brought up on the transports. The afternoon wore on, warm and sultry, and the atmosphere in those dank woods felt close, aguish, and unwholesome. Not a breath of air stirred to refresh the heated forms winding in long, continuous line along the dark boles of the trees, through whose branches and leafless twigs the sunlight streamed in little broken gleams of yellow brightness, and made a curious checkerwork of sheen and shadow on all beneath. Burdened as we were with knapsacks and twenty extra rounds of ammunition, the march grew more and more laborious. But the noise of battle was sharpening more significantly every few minutes now, and the men pushed forward. It was no child's game going on ahead of us. We might be needed.

We were needed. A loud, tumultuous cheer from the Thirty-sixth Indiana came surging down through the ranks of the Twenty-fourth Ohio to our own regiment, and away back beyond to the Twenty-second and Nineteenth brigades in the rear. 'Forward!' and we were off on the double quick. General Nelson was at the head of the column; there a courier had met him—so at least runs the tradition—with urgent orders to hasten up the reënforcements: the enemy were pressing hard for the Landing. Unmindful of all impediments—trees and fallen logs, shallow ponds and slippery mire shoetop deep; now again moderating our pace to the route step to recover breath and strength; even halting impatiently for a few minutes now and then, while the advance cleared itself from some entanglement of the way—so the remainder of our march continued. It seemed a long way to the Landing, the battle dinning on our ears at every step. At length it sounded directly ahead of us, close at hand; and looking forward out through the treetops, a good eye could easily discover a dark cloud of smoke hanging low in mid air, as though it sought to hide from the light of heaven the deeds that were being done beneath it. Suddenly we debouched into a level cornfield, extending quite to the river's verge. The clearing was not a wide one, and the farther bank of the Tennessee was in plain sight—the landings, the bluff, and the woods above stretching away out and back beyond.

What a panorama! The river directly before us was hidden by a narrow belt of chaparral and the drift that had lodged along the banks, but the smoke stacks of three or four transports were visible above the weed stalks and bushes, and the course of one or two more could be traced by a distant, trailing line of smoke as they steamed down toward Savannah. The opposite bank rises from the river a steep acclivity, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet in perpendicular height, down whose sides of brownish yellow clay narrow roadways showed out to the landings below. Cresting the bluff, woods overlooked the whole, and shut in the scene far as the eye could follow the windings of the Tennessee. In their depths, the battle was raging with unabated fury. A short distance up the river, though completely hidden from view by an intervening bend, the gunboats were at work, and even our unpractised ears could easily distinguish the heavy boom of their great thirty-two pounders in the midst of all that blaze of battle and the storm of artillery explosions. Glorious old Tyler and Lexington! primitive, ungainly, weather-beaten, wooden craft, but the salvation, in this crisis hour of the fight, of our out-numbered and wellnigh borne-down left. A signal party, stationed a little above the upper landing and halfway up the bluff, was communicating in the mystic language of the code with another upon our side the river. What messages were those little party-colored flags exchanging, with their curious devices of stripes and squares and triangles, their combinations and figures in numberless variety, as they were waved up and down and to and fro in rapid, ever-shifting pantomime? The steep bank was covered with a swaying, restless mass of blue-uniformed men, too distant to be distinctly discriminated, yet certainly numbering thousands. 'Reserves!' a dozen voices cried at once, and the next moment came the wonder that our march had been so hurried, when whole brigades, as it seemed, could thus be held in idle waiting. We were soon undeceived.

Out into the cornfield filed the column, up the river, and nearly parallel to it, halting a little below the upper one of the two principal landings. Here there was a further delaying for ferriage.

'Stack arms; every man fill his canteen, then come right back to the ranks!'

Not to the Tennessee for water—there was no time to go so far—but close at hand, at a pond, or little bayou of the river; and, returning to the line of stacks, a few more long, unquiet minutes in waiting, speculation, and eager gazing toward the battle. And then we saw what was that dark, turbulent multitude over the river: oh, shame! a confused rabble, composed chiefly of men whose places were rightly on the field, but who had turned and fled away from the fight to seek safety under the coverture of that bluff.

Forward again, and the regiment moved, with frequent little aggravating halts, up to the point on the river where the Thirty-sixth Indiana had already embarked, and were now being ferried over. The Twenty-fourth Ohio crossed at the lower landing. There were a number of country folk here, clad in the coarse, rusty homespun common in the South, whose intense anxiety to see every movement visible on the farther side of the river kept them unquietly shifting their positions continually. One of these worthies was hailed from our company:

'Say, old fellow! how's the fight going on over there?'

He was an old and somewhat diminutive specimen, grizzle haired, and stoop shouldered, but yellow and withered from the effects of sun and tobacco rather than the burden of years. For a moment he hesitated, as though guarding his reply, and then, with a sidelong glance of the eyes, answered slowly:

'Well, it aren't hardly decided yet, I reckon; but they're a drivin' your folks—some.'

Evidently he believed that our army had been badly beaten. The emphatic rejoinder, 'D—d old secesh!' was the sole thanks his information brought him: the characterization, aside from the accented epithet, was doubtless a just one, but for all that his words were in no wise encouraging.

A minute later we passed a sergeant, whose uniform and bright-red chevrons showed that he was attached to some volunteer battery. He was mounted upon a large, powerful horse, and seemed a man of considerable ability.

'Do the rebels fight well over there?' demanded a voice from the column a half dozen files ahead of me.

'Guess they do! Anyway, fit well enough to take our battery from us—every gun, and some of the caissons.'

Another soldier met us, unencumbered with blouse or coat of any kind, his accoutrements well adjusted over his gray flannel shirt, and his rifle sloped carelessly back over his shoulder. His eyes were bloodshot, and his face, all begrimed with smoke and gunpowder, wore an expression haggard, gaunt, and very weary. He was a sharpshooter, he told us, belonging to some Missouri regiment, and had been out skirmishing almost ever since daylight, with not a mouthful to eat since the evening before. His cartridges—and he showed us his empty cartridge-box—had given out the second time, and he was 'used up.' In his hat and clothes were several bullet holes; but he had been hit but once, he said, and then by only a spent buckshot.

'Boys, I'm glad you're come,' he said. 'It's a fact, they have whipped us so far; but I guess we've got 'em all right now. How many of Buell's army can come up to-night?'

A hurried, many-voiced reply, and hastening on past a heterogeneous collection of soldiery—couriers, cavalry-men, malingerers, stragglers, a few of the slightly wounded, and camp followers of all sorts—we quickly reached the river's brink. The boat was lying close below. Twenty feet down the crumbling bank, slipping, or swinging down by the roots and twigs of friendly bushes, the regiment lost but little time in embarking. The horses of our field officers were somehow got on board, and, with crowded decks, the little steamer headed for the landing right over against us. Two or three boats were there hugging the shore, quiet and motionless, and there were still more at the lower landing. One or two of these the deck hands pointed out to us as magazine boats, freighted with precious stores of ammunition, and the remainder were now, of necessity, being used as hospital boats. The wounded had quite filled these latter, and several hundred more of the day's victims had already been sent down the river to Savannah. One of the gunboats, fresh from its glorious work up beyond the bend, shortly came in sight, moving slowly down stream, as though reconnoitring the bank for some inlet up which its crashing broadsides could be poured with deadliest effect, if the enemy should again appear in sight.