Major Bradford couldn't even mourn the loss of his brother, not unless he wanted people to be mourning him, too, and in short order. He ran now here, now there, trying to rally the Federal soldiers wherever he could. For a little while, he hoped they could hold Forrest's men out and drive them back.
For a little while, yes-but not for long.
No matter what he'd thought, Bedford Forrest was in deadly earnest when he said his troopers could take Fort Pillow. Between the sharpshooters on the high ground looking down into the fort and the swarm of Rebs coming over the earthen rampart, the garrison had no chance to hold back the tide, any more than King Canute could in days gone by.
When Bradford fired at an oncoming Confederate, he found he'd emptied Theodorick's Colt as well as his own. “Son of a bitch!” he shouted, and then, because that wasn't nearly strong enough, “Shit!”
He threw the revolver in the enemy soldier's face. Whatever the Reb was expecting, that wasn't it. The pistol caught him right in the nose. He shouted, “Shit!” too, much louder than Bradford had. Clutching both hands to the wounded member, he slowly crumpled.
Instead of reclaiming the pistol, Bradford snatched up the Springfield the Confederate had dropped. The Colt was just a lump of iron now. He'd never have the chance to load in bullets and measure out charges of black powder and affix a percussion cap for each cylinder he wanted to fire. With a bayoneted rifle, he carried a spear longer than a man was tall. That was something, anyhow.
Something, yes, but how much? The Federals' defense of Fort Pillow was coming to pieces before his eyes. Things were falling apart. The center could not hold, and the Confederates poured in on both flanks as well. The flag had fallen. In a few minutes, Forrest's men looked likely to kill or capture every Union soldier in the fort.
Biting his lip, Bradford shouted the order he'd hoped he wouldn't have to give: “Down to the river, men! Down to the Mississippi! If the Rebs come after us, the New Era will give them canister!”
The gunboat had kept firing all through the fight, even if her shells didn't do so much as Bradford wanted. She hadn't tried lobbing rounds up onto the flat ground atop the bluff, but Bradford could scarcely blame her for that. The shells could, and surely would, fall among his command as well as among the Rebs.
Even breaking contact with Forrest's troopers was hard. The howling men in gray and butternut were mixed in with their foes in blue. Soldiers thrust at one another and swung their Springfields like base ball bats. Whenever somebody managed to load a musket, he fired at the closest soldier in the uniform of the other color. Here and there, men rolled on the ground, kicking and kneeing and choking each other in a struggle old as time.
Little by little, whites and Negroes in blue made for the steep side of the bluff and started scrambling and tumbling down toward the Mississippi far below. If some of the Negroes ran-well, some of the white troopers from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry ran, too. Who wouldn't, with sure death behind and possible salvation ahead?
Bradford wished he could do something about Theo's body. His brother lay where he had fallen. Dead men and writhing wounded lay everywhere inside the earthwork, testimony to how fierce the fighting was. If the Federals still held the fort when the battle was over, Bradford would have to bury poor Theodorick. If they didn't…
He shrugged. If we don't, chances are somebody will have to bury me. A heartbeat later, he shrugged again. Even if the Federals held Fort
Pillow, he might stop a minnie or get in the way of a Reb's bayonet. He'd worked hard to preserve the Union in western Tennessee and Kentucky. A lot of Forrest's troopers wanted to kill him not just because he was a Yankee officer. A lot of them carried personal grudges. Both as a lawyer and as an officer, he'd harried Rebs and their families as hard as he could. They had it coming, by God! But he couldn't expect Confederate soldiers to love him afterwards. He couldn't, and he didn't.
He carried the Springfield at high port: held diagonally in front of his chest, ready for a lunge or a parry. He wished he'd done more bayonet drill. Because they were cavalrymen, the troopers from the Thirteenth Tennessee had scanted that tiresome exercise, and the officers even more than the men.
The colored artillerymen seemed better at it than their white counterparts. He watched a colored sergeant keep a Reb off him with a few smooth-looking jabs and butt strokes. The coons had rhythm, no doubt about it. Who would have imagined they could go toe-to-toe with men who might have owned some of them-who might, as a matter of law, still own some of them?
Bradford shook his head. That wasn't so: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation superseded what had been the law. When it was first issued, Bradford had no use for the Emancipation Proclamation. It seemed like a sop to Northern abolitionists and nothing more, because it freed slaves only in regions beyond the reach of Union forces. What did that do, except win the President political capital?
But the answer soon became clear. Federal troops might not be able to free Negroes through most of the Confederacy, but a great many slaves were able to free themselves by running off to the closest U.S. garrison. They voted with their feet against the South's peculiar institution.
Southerners still insisted Negroes were slaves by nature, and never could match up against whites on even terms. Maybe they were right. Though a strong Union man, Bill Bradford had always believed that himself. But what the Negroes here at Fort Pillow were doing was making him change his mind.
No, they and their white comrades couldn't keep Bedford Forrest's men out of the fort. But how many more men did Forrest have? And weren't those big black bucks fighting as well as the whites beside whom they stood? Bradford couldn't see that they weren't.
He also couldn't see that he could stay up here on top of the bluff much longer, not if he wanted to go on breathing. Keeping that Springfield between himself and the enemy, he fell back toward the slope that led down to the Mississippi.
Moving a gun was work for a team of mules or horses, not for men. Like the rest of the yelling, cheering Confederates with him, Matt Ward didn't give a damn. They swarmed over the twelve-pounder, literally manhandling it toward the edge of the bluff.
“We hit that son of a bitch of a gunboat a couple times, we'll kill it deader'n a cow that gets in front of a locomotive,” somebody said.
More cheers rang out. Not one of the troopers shoving the cannon into place was an artilleryman; Forrest hadn't brought his batteries west against Fort Pillow. Considering the state of the roads the cavalry traveled, that had to be wise. But, like any soldiers, the troopers were convinced they could do anything. They had the gun. They had cannonballs. They had bags of powder. And they had a target. What more did they need?
“Look!” Ward's voice broke with excitement. “There's that stinking scow, just sitting in the water waiting for it. Let's give it to the damnyankees! “
“How?” somebody said. “Damn gun won't point so low.”
“We lift the trail up, that'll bring the barrel down,” Ward said.
Half a dozen Confederates suited action to work, grabbing the trail and, grunting with effort, lifting it into the air. Then a sergeant said, “That won't work, boys.”
“Why not, goddammit?” one of them demanded irately.
“On account of you can't fire steady that way, and on account of the recoil'll run the gun carriage right on over you and squash you like a bunch of bugs,” the sergeant answered. “Jesus God, you got to be dumber'n a nigger if you can't see stuff like that.”
The trooper remained irate, but he couldn't very well argue because the sergeant was obviously right. “What'll we do, then?” he asked.