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| Lt. Ambrose Bierce, Co. C, 9th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment |
“This is a simple story of a battle; such a tale as may be told by a soldier who is no writer to a reader who is no soldier.”[*]
With that line, former Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce of Company C, 9th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, opened his narrative of the Battle of Shiloh.
Bierce and the 9th Indiana were part of the three divisions from the Army of the Ohio under Major General Don Carlos Buell that were enroute to reinforce Major General Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee for his advance up the Tennessee River. Buell’s forces were bivouacked ten miles from Pittsburg Landing when the Confederates under Albert Sidney Johnston launched their unexpected assault on Grant’s forces encamped along the bluff above the Landing.
Buell force-marched his divisions to Pittsburg Landing that Sunday, arriving at the Tennessee River crossing on the opposite bank from the Landing in the evening of the first day’s action.
Much is written about this battle – how unprepared Grant was; the counter-attack by the Army of the Tennessee the following day, the recovery of lost ground and the ultimate Union victory. But rarely written is such a poignant description of the actual condition of those Union troops at the end of the first day’s action. As they approached the bluff above the river, Bierce vividly recounted the scene he and his comrades witnessed:
Before us ran the turbulent river, vexed with plunging shells and obscured in spots by blue sheets of low-lying smoke. The two little steamers were doing their duty well. They came over to us empty and went back crowded, sitting very low in the water, apparently on the point of capsizing. The farther edge of the water could not be seen; the boats came out of the obscurity, took on their passengers and vanished in the darkness. But on the heights above, the battle was burning brightly enough; a thousand lights kindled and expired in every second of time. There were broad flushings in the sky, against which the branches of the trees showed black. Sudden flames burst out here and there, singly and in dozens. Fleeting streaks of fire crossed over to us by way of welcome.
In addition to his vivid imagery, Bierce also attempted to describe the variety of sounds that fed the confusion and the panic:
the peculiar metallic ring of bursting shells, and followed by the musical humming of the fragments as they struck into the ground on every side, making us wince, but doing little harm. The air was full of noises. To the right and the left the musketry rattled smartly and petulantly; directly in front it sighed and growled. To the experienced ear this meant that the death-line was an arc of which the river was the chord. There were deep, shaking explosions and smart shocks; the whisper of stray bullets and the hurtle of conical shells; the rush of round shot. There were faint, desultory cheers, such as announce a momentary or partial triumph.
As they crossed the river on the steamboat shuttles, this scene emerged from the darkness as they neared the other side. It is a rare glimpse of just how close Grant and his Army of the Tennessee came to oblivion.
Along the sheltered strip of beach between the river bank and the water was a confused mass of humanity – several thousands of men. They were mostly unarmed; many were wounded; some dead. All the camp-following tribes were there; all the cowards; a few officers. Not one of them knew where his regiment was, nor if he had a regiment. Many had not. These men were defeated, beaten, cowed. They were deaf to duty and dead to shame. A more demented crew never drifted to the rear of broken battalions.
The frenzy that greeted each steamboat landing that night reminds one of the chaos described by Soviet troops as they crossed the river into Stalingrad to stop the Nazis.
Whenever a steamboat would land, this abominable mob had to be kept off her with bayonets; when she pulled away, they sprang on her and were pushed by scores into the water . . . The men disembarking insulted them, shoved them, struck them. In return [the mob] expressed their unholy delight in the certainty of our destruction by the enemy.
Bierce and the 9th Indiana moved into the line that night, and the next day they were part of the vicious counterattack that drove the Confederates from the field.
But that scene described by Bierce – all those years later – indicates just how close Grant, the Army of the Tennessee, and the ultimate course of the Civil War came to a different ending entirely – ‘broken battalions‘ indeed.
There are millions of stories from the Irrepressible Conflict. This was just one of them.
Mac
Works Cited
[*] Ambrose Bierce was a Civil War veteran of the 9th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, who became an American journalist and an author renown for his short stories. His experiences during the Civil War later provided him with much of his inspiration for his short stories. Ironically, Bierce survived the Civil War as a soldier only to disappear fifty years later while covering Poncho Villa and the Mexican Revolution in Mexico in 1913 as a reporter. This account of the Battle of Shiloh is not fiction however. This is Bierce’s memoir of that fateful Sunday in April 1862.
[1] Bierce, Ambrose. “What I Saw of Shiloh”. The Wasp (San Francisco), December 1881.
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