Read Online March Toward the Thunder by Joseph Bruchac - Free Book Online Page A

said, his voice breaking. “T’ explain meself, you need t’ know that I was sending ta money back t’ my sick old mam in County Clare.”
    â€œEnough of that,” Kirk said, “or you’ll have us all crying in our beer. It seems that we’re now the twelve apostles.” He looked around the circle of unwashed faces with a grin. “And not a Judas among us.”
    â€œOr a Jonah,” Happy Smith added with a growl. You could always trust him to think of the dark side of things.
    A Jonah. Yet another new word I’ve learned.
    A Jonah was sort of hapless soldier who seemed to bring misfortune with him wherever he went. A man who would catch his toe on a tree root and fall in such a way that half the company would trip over him. Lose his gun or his pack. Be the man whose shot went awry and hit one of his own. When they were to keep quiet and not alert the enemy to their presence, it was always a Jonah who would sneeze or cough. Like the cursed seafarer in the Bible, his fellows would welcome the chance to be rid of him.
    Like poor O’Day , Louis thought. And what would I do if bad luck should settle next on my own shoulders?
    â€œForm up on the double,” a voice called from behind them. It was Sergeant Flynn. Behind Flynn were Bing and Bang, who’d been given yet another new duty. They were carrying a stretcher between them loaded with boxes of ammunition.
    â€œYer tea party is over, m’boys,” the sergeant said. “Fill up yer cartridge boxes. See that yer well stocked with caps. When t’morrow comes it’ll likely be up and advance.”
    But what the next days brought was more like up and down than advancing.
    Shoot and shovel , Louis thought, wiping the dirt from his face and then raising his rifle. Shovel and shoot.
    Work on their entrenchments, move a stone’s throw forward and then dig again. Beyond their lines was a tangled landscape of brush and trees and smoke. The maze had been made even worse by fallen trees knocked down by minié balls that flew thick as swarms of giant bees. Some of those pines and cedars taken down neck high by countless .58-caliber rounds were as thick as a man’s waist.
    The Southern troops originally hadn’t prepared entrenchments. They’d counted on their ambush working, the Northern army retreating in disarray. But the surprised Union soldiers hadn’t given up or fallen back. Instead, they’d dug in.
    Corporal Hayes came duckwalking down the trench, keeping his head low.
    â€œNo retreat!” he said, pausing by one man after another in the rifle trench, patting their shoulders, squeezing their arms. “Those were the orders sent down by Grant, and by the nails we’re not about to go against them.”
    A hundred feet away the Rebs were digging in too now. Whenever he dared raise his head to look, Louis saw dirt flying into the air. They were piling more logs too. The barricade of logs piled breast high that was now a good three feet higher.
    If there were military maneuvers going on, Louis was not aware of them. Later reports might speak of how Hancock’s gallant Second Corps engaged the Rebel corps of General Ambrose Powell Hill, how they drove the enemy back a mile and a half all through that day, holding off every attempt to outflank them or pierce their lines. But nothing as clear as that was what Louis experienced. It was just claw forward and dig in. Shovel and shoot.

CHAPTER NINE
    FISHING

Monday, May 9, 1864
    Late morning. The Wilderness was now three days and ten miles behind them—though it felt to Louis as if they’d marched a thousand. The road had been clogged with ambulances carrying the wounded in one direction, supply wagons creeping along in the other. The men of E Company had shuffled on through the night, never stopping to sleep, never moving faster than a snail’s crawl. It had been more exhausting than striding forward at a brisk