“What if it doesn’t blow?” Eure said.
“Then General Forrest thinks up something new and, unless I miss my guess, Colonel Henry Pleasants turns back into a pumpkin—I mean, a private.” But, being a just man at heart, Lewis added, “He’s not stinted himself, I give him that. I hope it works as he claims; we shan’t have a better chance than this.”
“I hope it works, too,” Caudell said fervently. If it didn’t and the attack went on anyhow, the result would be gruesome, and he would be a part of that result. He wondered whether charging a nest of endless repeaters could possibly be worse than tramping across open fields toward the massed muskets and artillery atop Cemetery Ridge. Maybe not, but it wouldn’t be much better, either.
After darkness fell, men began moving forward in the zigzag network of trenches the Confederates had dug up to the dry wash. To help disguise that movement, long-range artillery fire started up. The fire had to be at long range; no matter how well protected cannon were, fire from the endless repeaters murdered their crews when they tried to get too near the Rivington men’s lines.
Confederate artillery fuses were imperfectly reliable; more than one shell burst above the soldiers’ heads rather than among their foes. But enough came down near their target for the Rivington men to answer with mortar fire. “Damned if I don’t halfway hope they hit somebody,” Caudell growled to Mollie Bean. “I’m sick of my own side shooting at me.” Just then, another shell fell short and made them both throw themselves flat.
Mollie said, “They ain’t tryin’ to kill us, Nate.”
“Does that make it better or worse if they do?” he asked. She thought for a few seconds, then shrugged. He didn’t know the answer either, but army life was easier to take when you had something to bellyache about—for one thing, it kept you from remembering you might get killed in the next few hours.
He broke a piece of corn bread in half, passed one chunk to Mollie. After she ate it, she rolled herself in her blanket, lay down. “I’m gonna sleep while I can—if I can. “The racket from the artillery duel made that anything but obvious.
Caudell wished she were safe in Nashville, but telling her so seemed pointless, since she wouldn’t listen to him and, even if she had, she could hardly get back there against the tide of soldiers moving the other way. For that matter, he wished he were safe in Nashville, which was just as impossible to arrange. He took a cigar out of a tunic pocket, lit it at a tiny cook fire, smoked in quick, savage puffs. The smoke failed to soothe him as he’d hoped. He tossed the chewed butt into the dirt. By then, Mollie had succeeded in falling asleep.
He lay down next to her, not really expecting to doze off himself. But the next thing he knew, someone was shaking him awake and saying, “Come on; get ready now.” He sat up, surprised to see the sky pale in the east. He put on his hat, grabbed his rifle and his haversack. He moved a couple of full banana clips from the latter to his trouser pockets where he could get at them easily. With that, he was as ready as he could be. Beside him, Mollie made the same sort of sketchy preparations.
As darkness faded, he could see farther and farther up and down the wash. There stood Captain Lewis, carefully cleaning his AK-47 one last time. And there—Caudell nodded to himself. He might have known Nathan Bedford Forrest would place himself in the first rank when the fighting started.
Henry Pleasants stood by the mouth of the tunnel he’d proposed and labored so mightily to build, a length of slow match in his hand. He looked toward General Forrest. Forrest was looking from the sky to Pleasants and back again. At last he nodded, a single abrupt motion.
Pleasants stopped, touched the slow match to a fuse that lay on the floor of the tunnel. The fuse caught. Pleasants sighed and straightened. Caudell noticed he was holding his own breath. How long for the flame to run from this end of the tunnel to that?
Before he could ask, Forrest beat him to it: “When will it go off?”
“Shouldn’t be long,” Pleasants answered. A Confederate shell screamed overhead, making him raise his voice. “In fact, it should be right about—”
Before he could say “now,” the ground shook beneath Caudell’s feet. He’d heard of earthquakes, but he’d never been in the middle of one before. A roar like fifty thunderstorms left him momentarily stunned. He saw Forrest’s lips shape the words “God damn!” but could not hear him through that echoing blast.
He did not know whether he was the next man out of the gully after Forrest, but he was sure no more than a couple of others could have been in front of him. Two or three steps past the parapet, he stopped dead in wonder. He’d never had a good look at that strongpoint while the tunnel was being dug: peering through a firing slit only invited a bullet in the face. And the bastion wasn’t there for him to examine anymore.
“God almighty,” he said softly. The gunpowder, brought in bag by bag, barrel by barrel, had blown the biggest hole in the ground he’d ever imagined—it had to be fifty yards across, fifty feet wide, and God only knew how deep. All around it lay broken chunks of earthwork, timbers snapped like dry twigs, guns tossed every which way, and twisted bodies in mottled green.
Like him, most of the others emerging from the Confederate works paused to gape in wonder and disbelief. Up ahead of them, Nathan Bedford Forrest turned, gestured furiously. “Come on, you bastards! And fetch the ladders right now, do you hear me? We ain’t got time to waste.”
That was true. Not only were the guns in the bastion itself destroyed, but the endless repeaters to either flank had fallen silent, the men at them momentarily stunned by the disaster that had befallen their comrades and doubtless wondering if the ground was about to heave up under them as well.
Caudell dashed forward, shouting for all he was worth. He reached the edge of the crater, slid down into it on his backside. More wreckage lay strewn over the bottom, and more bodies. Some of them moved as he scrambled past. He stopped and stared again, wondering how anyone could have lived through that explosion.
But Nathan Bedford Forrest, disdaining to wait for ladders, was already climbing the far wall of the hole and yelling, “Come on, come on, come on!” Caudell hurried after him—a general who went out ahead of his men could always pull them after him.
Forrest, grimy now as any private soldier, reached out a hand and helped pull Caudell up onto the flat ground beyond the crater. Behind them, teams of soldiers were carrying ladders across the bottom of the hole, leaning up against the wall so others could ascend.
Off to either side, the repeaters started their deadly stutter again. But hundreds of Confederates were almost to the crater, inside it, or coming up the ladders. There was Captain Lewis, shouting orders and waving to get the men into a line of battle. “Keep moving!” Forrest shouted. “Come on, keep moving!”
Bullets chewed the grass close to his feet, spat dirt into Caudell’s face. That was AK-47 fire from the bushes ahead; the Rivington men had detached fighters to try to plug the gap the Confederates had blown in their line. Caudell dove behind the closest cover he saw: a corpse wearing mottled green and brown, its head and neck twisted at an impossible angle. He fired several rounds before he realized the blank, staring face a few inches from his own belonged to Piet Hardie.
His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. He gave the corpse a familiar thump on the shoulder. “How many more wenches did you aim to torment to death, Piet? Too bad you won’t get the chance, isn’t it? Quicker than you deserved to go, too.” Maybe not, Caudell decided once he’d said that. A noose would have been quick, and if ever a man deserved a noose, Piet Hardie did.