“Basically you got Grant and the Army of the Tennessee, settled around the church.”
“How many men would Grant have had under his command?” Mildred asked.
“Forty thousand, blue-bellies. Thicker’n ticks on a hog’s belly.”
“And the Rebs?” J.B. asked.
“Rebs? The gallant boys in gray had around the same number.”
“What were these mistakes? I recall someone mentioning plucking defeat from the jaws of victory,” Doc said, beaming at Portillo and showing his fine, strong teeth.
“Don’t know nothin’ about that. First mistake was Johnston’s. Knew that Buell was moving north with reinforcements and decided to get in his blow first. But the roads was bad and his maps poor and his whole army a shambles of confusion. Took a day to sort it out, so he delayed the fight until dawn on Sunday, April 6. Should’ve been three in the morning the day before.”
The sun was rising steadily in a cloudless sky, and the temperature was rising with it. Ryan’s guess put it somewhere in the mid-eighties.
“Second and third mistakes both came from the North.” Portillo paused, fishing out a filthy kerchief and blowing his nose noisily on it, peering at the contents as though he expected to find traces of gold in it. Then he folded it up and put it away. “Grant was drunk in Savannah and never expected an attack. Mistake two. Following on this was the fact that the blue-bellies never bothered to put out proper patrols around Shiloh. Fact is that most of the men were still asleep when we hit them. Number three.”
“Wasn’t Lew Wallace at Shiloh?” Doc asked. “Man who wrote Ben Hur ?”
Portillo pasted on a sneering grin. “Sure was. Gotten himself chilled in leading a breakout a mite later. And he came up with mistake four. Soon as Grant heard firing, he sailed up to the landing here. Brigadier-General Wallace had the Second Division of the Army of Tennessee and he was moving with a long column of men down that narrow road yonder. Away from where the battle had started. Instead of turning the whole column ass-about so the rear became the front, he ordered the men out front to turn and march back through the column. Kind of reversed it, making it march through itself. Total shambles like a dozen drunk men changing their clothes in a small closet.”
They moved across the battlefield while the man’s monotonous singsong voice painted a picture of the way the fight swayed back and forth, with a general movement toward the east of the area.
They spent some time in what had been called the Hornet’s Nest, where the land was completely sodden with blood and you could walk from one side to the other stepping only on the corpses from both armies.
“This more or less like it was?” J.B. asked. “Hasn’t it changed over the years?”
Portillo shook his head. “It was kept as a kind of monument. National Military Park. Right up to sky-dark. Visitor center got blasted by a stray nuke.”
“Fifth mistake?” Krysty asked.
“Supreme commander of the Confederate boys was General Albert Sidney Johnston. In the big charge he’d had a couple of small wounds and had the heel ripped from his boot by a ball. Bit later he got hit in the bend of the knee by a stray round. That was about half after one. Johnston ‘didn’t know it was serious and ignored it. That was number five. Hour or so later he nearly fell from the saddle. An aide, Governor Isham Harris of Tennessee, asked if he was wounded. Johnston replied, ‘Yes, and I fear seriously.’ Bullet severed an artery and his boot filled with his lifeblood. Had a tourniquet in his field pack that would easy have saved him. Died around half after two.”
Doc swatted away another cluster of the importunate flies. “If my memory is not too ailing, I believe that General Johnston was the most senior officer to die in battle during the entire war.”
Portillo shook his head. “Wouldn’t know that. All I know is what happened here.”
Ryan heard the saga of Shiloh winding toward its end, saw in his imagination the scattered bodies of three and a half thousand inexperienced young soldiers, thinking about the horrors of the field hospitals of the day with the blunted saws and no anesthetic. Sixteen thousand had been wounded, three thousand taken prisoner or simply missing in action.