Shiloh by Shelby Foote

their faces—they were left with what God gave them
at the beginning.
    We lined up. And while Sergeant Tyree passed among us,
checking us one by one to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be,
dawn begun to come through, faint and high. While we were answering roll-call
the sun rose big and red through the trees and all up and down the company
front they begun to get excited and jabber at one another: "The sun of oyster
itch," whatever that meant. I was glad to see the sun again, no matter
what they called it.
    One minute we were standing there, shifting from leg to leg,
not saying much and more or less avoiding each other's eyes: then we were going
forward. It happened that sudden. There was no bugle or drum or anything like
that. The men on our right started moving and we moved too, lurching forward
through the underbrush and trying to keep the line straight the way we had been
warned to do, but we couldn’t. Captain Plummer was cussing. "Dwess it
up," he kept saying, cussing a blue streak; "Dwess it up, dod dam it, dwess it up," all the way through the
woods. So after a while, when the trees thinned, we stopped to straighten the
line.
    There was someone on a tall claybank horse out front, a
fine-looking man in a new uniform with chicken guts on the sleeves all the way
to his elbows, spruce and spang as a gamecock. He had on a stiff red cap, round
and flat on top like a sawed-off dice box, and he was making a speech.
"Soldiers of the South!" he shouted in a fine proud voice, a little
husky, and everybody cheered. All I could hear was the cheering and yipping all
around me, but I could see his eyes light up and his mouth moving the way it
will do when a man is using big words. I thought I heard something about defenders
and liberty and even something about the women back home but I couldn’t be
sure; there was so much racket. When he was through he stood in the stirrups,
raising his cap to us as we went by, and I recognized him. It was General
Beauregard, the man I'd come to fight for, and I hadn’t hardly heard a word he
said.
    We stayed lined up better now because we were through the
worst of the briers and vines, but just as we got going good there was a
terrible clatter off to the right, the sound of firecrackers mixed with a
roaring and yapping like a barn full of folks at a Fourth of July dogfight or a
gouging match. The line begun to crook and weave because some of the men had
stopped to listen, and Captain Plummer was cussing them, tongue-tied. Joe Marsh
was next to me—he was nearly thirty, middle-aged, and had seen some battle up
near Bowling Green. "There you are," he said, slow and calm and proud
of himself. "Some outfit has met the elephant." That was what the ones
who had been in action always called it: the elephant.
    They had told us how it would be. They said we would march
two days and on the third day we would hit them where they were camped between
two creeks with their backs to the Tennessee River. We would drive them, the
colonel told us, and when they were pushed against the river we would kill or capture
the whole she-bang. I didn’t understand it much because what the colonel said
was full of tactics talk. Later the captain explained it, and that was better
but not much. So then Sergeant Tyree showed it to us by drawing Lines on the
ground with a stick. That way it was clear as could be.
    It sounded fine, the way he told it; it sounded simple and
easy. Maybe it was too simple, or something. Anyhow things didn’t turn out so
good when it came to doing them. On the third day we were still marching, all
day, and here it was the fourth day and we were still just marching, stop and
go but mostly stop—the only real difference was that the column was moving sideways
now, through the woods instead of on the road. From all that racket over on the
right I thought maybe the other outfits would have the Yankees pushed back and
captured before we even got to see it. The noise had died down