Read Online Never Call Retreat by Bruce Catton - Free Book Online Page B

artillery fire which overlapped and became a pounding unbroken roar, an ominous bass for the rising treble of the musketry. The uproar came nearer, and there was the far-off sound of the falsetto Confederate battle cry. Down the lanes that led back from McCook's rear came ambulances and supply wagons, rocking and careening as panicky teamsters flogged their horses. Fugitive infantrymen began to appear, singly, then in disorganized squads, finally in a confused broken flood. All chance for a Federal offensive vanished. McCook's entire army corps had been routed, and unless Rosecrans could form a new line and find men who could hold it he might lose his whole army.
    Bragg had planned better and moved faster, and his men had not waited for breakfast. Hardee's corps had been posted far beyond McCook's flank, and when his brigades charged, wheeled toward the right and struck the end of McCook's line, that line broke into fragments. Running back to find new defensive positions the Federal brigades lost contact with one another; the Confederates came in a division at a time, each unit striking with crushing force, and whenever a Federal unit formed to make a stand it was flanked, crumpled, and driven back. One of McCook's divisions led by a black-haired, bandy-legged young general named Phil Sheridan swung back like a gate in a gale of wind, rallied, and for a time held on valiantly, a mile away from its original position, facing toward what had been the Federal rear an hour earlier. Then Bishop Polk began driving his men in beside Hardee's, Sheridan's line gave way, and Rosecrans was desperately pulling men over from the extreme left to save the day.
    The fresh levies and the remnants of the ones that had been routed began to form up, late in the morning, on or near the Nashville turnpike. That fact measures the extent of the disaster; at daybreak this had been a safe roadway, slanting back on a long diagonal from the army's center to behind its left, and troops that had been posted to attack toward the east were now trying to beat off an onslaught from the southwest and west. Rosecrans' tortured army was bent far back on itself, like a jackknife with its blade nearly closed. If the Confederates could break the Federal grip anywhere on the turnpike the blade would snap shut and the Union army would be gone.
    At the angle in the line—the place where the knife blade joined the handle—there was a four-acre patch of trees known as the Round Forest, and by the middle of the morning it was the most important spot on the battlefield. Hardee's men had driven their foes in a huge semicircle and were fighting within musket shot of the pike, but the Federal line had stiffened at last and these Confederates, who had had fearful losses, could do no more. Now Bishop Polk ordered an all-out attack on the Round Forest, which Thomas and Crittenden had packed with infantry backed by a powerful array of artillery—Thomas had been building up a row of guns ever since the battle started, in preparation for this moment of crisis—and the noise of combat became unendurable, so that charging men paused in the fields to pluck cotton from the open bolls and stuff it in their ears. Federals who lay in line of battle northwest of the woods were amazed to see dozens of rabbits, driven wholly out of their wits by the uproar, scampering along the line and trying to crawl under the prostrate soldiers for shelter. Someone remembered that distracted flocks of little birds kept circling over the woods while the fighting was going on.
    Spearhead of the attack on the Round Forest was a brigade of Mississippi troops under Brigadier General James R. Chalmers. These were the lads who had huddled for two days in damp rifle pits, unable to build fires, soaked and half frozen; the order to attack struck them as a positive relief, and they swung forward to expend on the hated Yankees the fury generated by forty-eight hours of misery. They charged on the run but the