Ward and his companions nearby were already inside the first line of works around Fort Pillow, the line laid out by the general who'd named the place after himself. That was high ground. From where Ward crouched, he could see into the much smaller perimeter the galvanized Yankees and their colored stooges held. The range was long-it had to be more than a quarter of a mile-but his rifle would reach that far.
A minnie thudded into a stump not far away. “Thank you, Jesus!” yelled a trooper in back of the stump. The garrison inside Fort Pillow hadn't done much of a job of clearing the approaches to their position. The attackers could take cover behind lots of bushes and stumps and fallen trees.
Cautiously, Ward raised his head from behind the stump that sheltered him. He fired at a man in blue in one of the rifle pits. The Enfield carbine he carried bucked against his shoulder. The rifle musket spat fire and a puff of black-powder smoke.
The Yankee in that rifle pit kept moving around, so Ward supposed he'd missed him. “Shit,” the trooper from Missouri said, without much rancor. He ducked down and reloaded, biting the paper cartridge and pouring powder and a cloth patch into the Enfield's muzzle, sending the minnie after the powder and wadding and ramming it home, drawing back the hammer to half-cock so he could set a copper percussion cap in place, and then raising the carbine to his shoulder and firing.
This time, the soldier at whom he aimed flinched and crumpled. A Mini? ball weighed almost an ounce. When one hit, it hit hard. He bit open another cartridge. After a long fight, soldiers who'd done a lot of shooting had so much black powder on their faces, they looked like refugees from a minstrel show.
Ward wished he had a breech-loading repeating rifle like the ones some Federal cavalrymen were starting to carry. A regiment armed with rifles like that had the firepower of a brigade with ordinary weapons.
“Wish for the moon while you're at it,” Ward muttered, tasting sulfur from the powder. Those fancy repeaters needed equally fancy brass cartridges. Even if you captured one, you also had to capture the ammunition to go with it, and keep on capturing more and more. Otherwise the rifle would be useless, except as a club.
Ward wondered why the Confederacy couldn't make rifles like that and the ammunition to go with them. Probably for the same reason it had trouble keeping its men in uniforms and shoes. A lot of the troopers in McCulloch's brigade wore tunics and trousers and shoes damnyankees didn't need anymore. Some of the trousers were still blue. Forrest insisted that shirts, at least, go into the dye kettle right away. If they turned butternut, your buddies were less likely to try to plug you by mistake.
More than a few Confederates carried captured Yankee Springfields, too. Their.58-caliber minnies and the.577 Enfield bullets both worked in both weapons.
If it wasn't for everything the Federals make, we couldn't hardly fight 'em, Ward thought. That was funny if you looked at it the right way. It was worrisome if you looked at it wrong, so Ward did his best to laugh.
He slipped another percussion cap onto the nipple and looked for a new target. There was some damnfool nigger cutting capers on the main earthwork. The black man acted like a drunk. That not only made Ward angry at him, it made the Missourian jealous. He drew a careful bead and pulled the trigger.
He couldn't have missed by much. The Negro's comic tumble behind the breastwork would have brought down the house in a play. But this wasn't a play. It was real. Matt Ward wanted that man dead. Now the coon might pick up a rifle and hurt somebody with it.
Two or three minnies from the fort cracked past the stump behind which Ward hid. They knew he was here, which meant it was time to go somewhere else. He'd fired several shots, and the clouds of smoke belching from his carbine announced his whereabouts to the world.
He scrambled to find fresh cover a little closer to the fort and to the firing pits in front of it. Other troopers were doing the same thing, and cheering one another on as they moved. Only a couple of wounded men staggered back toward the rear. One had a hand that dripped blood. The other…
“Son of a bitch!” Ward said softly. He'd seen some nasty wounds, but this was one of the worst. A Mini? ball had caught the trooper in the lower jaw and carried away most of it. Blood splashed down the soldier's front. Shattered teeth gleamed inside his mouth. His tongue flopped loose and red, like butcher's meat.
Could you live after a mutilation like that? If you could, would you want to? You'd never be able to show your face-or what was left of it-in broad daylight again. If you had a wife, would she stay with you? If you didn't, how could you hope to get one? Wouldn't you just want to pick up an Enfield or a shotgun and finish what the Yankee bullet had started?
Those were all good questions. Matt Ward did his best not to think about any of them. He tried to move up on the enemy soldiers in the rifle pits.
Major William Bradford had been in some skirmishes before this fight, but never a real battle. This was a different business from everything he'd known up till now. He didn't care for any of the differences.
The Confederates here weren't going to ride off after exchanging a few shots with his men. They meant it. He didn't need to be U.S. Grant to figure that out. They had numbers on their side, too. The volume of gunfire told him that. So did the way they pressed the attack along the whole perimeter, from the Mississippi all the way over to Coal Creek.
Not far from him, a colored soldier from one of the newly arrived artillery units fired his Springfield, calmly reloaded as fast as a white man could have, and fired again. The Negro nodded to him. “Them Secesh keeps comin', suh, we shoots all of 'em,” he said.
“Uh, right.” Bradford made himself nod. He knew Bedford Forrest's men hated the idea of Negro soldiers. They denied that Negroes could be soldiers. If Negroes could fight as well as whites, that knocked the Confederacy's whole raison d’?tre over the head. The Rebs could see as much perfectly well.
But Bill Bradford, though no Confederate, was a Tennessean, and a Tennessean from a county with more slaves than white men. He didn't believe-well, he hadn't believed-Negroes could fight, either. If they made him see they could, he would have to do some fresh thinking, and few men are ever comfortable doing that.
Worst of all, though, was what the battle was showing him about himself. With a major's oak leaves on his shoulder straps, he had rank enough to imagine himself a bold commander like General Sherman-or even like General Forrest, for whom every V.S. officer had a thorough and wary respect.
Now reality was rudely testing his imagination. What happened when the bullets started flying? He got flustered and fearful, and he knew it. He'd been the next thing to paralyzed till Major Booth told him to send out a couple of companies of skirmishers. Would he have thought of it for himself if Booth hadn't? He hoped so, but he wasn't sure. Dammit, he wasn't sure.
When a minnie struck home, it made a wet, slapping sound that chilled the blood. A white man-a trooper from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry-groaned and clutched at his shoulder. Welling blood made his dark blue tunic even darker. He stumbled away toward the surgeons' tender mercies.
That could have been me) Bradford thought with a shudder. Once lodged in his brain, the idea wouldn't go away. Know thyself, some ancient had said. This was knowledge Bill Bradford would rather not have had.
One of the cannon that had come north with the colored artillerymen bellowed. The crew reloaded the gun with the same matter-of-fact competence the Negro fighting as a rifleman displayed. They had a white sergeant and a white captain, but they didn't need anyone to tell them what to do. They knew, and they did it.