The Confederates swarming up the slope clutched their rifle muskets and shotguns and pistols in their fists. Hardly any of them fired.
But not all of Forrest's men were rushing Fort Pillow. Sharpshooters on the knolls a quarter of a mile outside the parapet took a deadly toll on the defenders.
A bullet cracked past Major Bradford's face, so close that it made him jerk back in surprise and alarm. It smacked into the side of the head of a trooper from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry. That sound was too much like the one you made when you chunked a rock at a rotten watermelon. The trooper let out a small, startled sigh-not even a groan-and crumpled as if all his bones turned to water. He died before he hit the ground.
A colored soldier got hit in the side of the neck. Blood sprayed everywhere. The Negro shrieked and dashed wildly through the fort. His wound plainly wasn't mortal, or didn't have to be if someone saw to it, but his pain and fright were liable to kill him if the minnie didn't.
Bradford saw more and more U.S. soldiers hit in the flank. He pointed out toward the clouds of black-powder smoke that marked the Secesh sharpshooters' positions. “Those sons of bitches are murdering us!” he shouted. “Can we stop them?”
“Maybe the cannon can blast them off those knolls,” a sergeant said. But he didn't sound hopeful, and Bradford knew why not: the guns inside Fort Pillow hadn't been able to shift the Confederate marksmen since they gained their places. What with all the fallen timber and the stumps on those low rises, the Rebs enjoyed cover almost as good as the earthwork gave the Federals.
“Have to try,” Bradford said. But how much good would trying do?
Matt Ward's mouth was dry as the Egyptian desert when the bugle sounded the assault. From the barracks buildings the Confederates had captured, Fort Pillow up on its bluff seemed as towering and indomitable as Goliath the Philistine must have to the children of Israel.
But Goliath fell, brought down by David's sling. Bedford Forrest thought Fort Pillow would fall, too. Instead of a sling, Ward had his Enfield. And he had friends who would scale the bluff with him or die trying. (He wished he hadn't thought of it that way.)
“Come on! Move out!” Confederate officers and sergeants shouted, all along the line from the Mississippi to Coal Creek. The better, braver ones added, “Follow me!” Where a superior went forward, the men he led couldn't very well hold back.
The cougar yowl of a Rebel yell filled Ward's throat as he rushed toward the bluff and scrambled up it. Where rush stopped and scramble started he wasn't sure, then or afterwards. What seemed like all the Federals in the world were shooting down at him and his comrades. The muzzle flashes that burst from their rifle muskets stabbed out like dragonfire in a book of fairy tales.
He wanted to shoot back. Here and there, some of Forrest's troopers did. Sergeants swore at the men who pulled trigger. Matt understood why, and held his fire. Stopping to reload on this steep slope was asking to get shot. But if a man didn't reload, he had only his bayonet or his clubbed rifle musket with which to face the enemy once he got to the top.
A Mini? ball hit the ground a few inches in front of Ward's face with a wet splat. Bits of dirt kicked up into his face. He did stop then, to rub at his eyes with grimy fingers. He might have done more harm than good. He was still blinking frantically and shaking his head when he resumed the upward climb.
Here and there on the muddy slope, Confederates tumbled down or sprawled motionless instead of going forward. Their screams mingled with the battle cries and the gunfire to produce a cacophonous din mercifully unknown outside of war. Ward tried not to hear it, tried not to heed it, but it made him afraid even so.
Screams also rose from the men in blue who fired down at the on-storming Confederates. For a moment, Matt Ward wondered how so many enemy soldiers were getting hurt while his own comrades held their fire. Then he realized the troopers posted on the knolls-he'd been up on one of them himself for a little while, before hurrying forward-were taking a steady toll on the U.S. soldiers at the top of the bluff.
He also realized something else: a galvanized Yankee or even a Negro shrieking for his mother or simply howling out his pain to the uncaring world sounded just the same as a luckless Confederate doing the same thing. Were he a different person, that might have persuaded him of the essential brotherhood of man. Instead, it made him want to hear the foe making those noises instead of his own comrades.
At the top of the bluff, just outside their earthen parapet, the Federals had dug a ditch ten or twelve feet wide and even deeper than that. They likely hadn't dreamt any attackers could come so far, but, like any military engineers who knew their trade, they interposed a final barrier between themselves and the enemy. Or they thought they did.
Some of the Confederates reaching the top of the bluff tried to leap the ditch and scramble up onto the earthwork beyond. Matt Ward didn't see anyone who succeeded; that would have been a formidable jump even for a man not burdened with a rifle musket and enough cartridges to do a deal of fighting.
Most troopers showed better sense than to try to imitate a mountain goat bounding from crag to crag. Instead of jumping over the ditch, they dropped down into it. Ward was one of those. The bottom of the ditch was all mud and puddles; the ooze tried to suck the shoes right off his feet. But he was here, at the top of the bluff. Panting, he paused a moment to catch his breath and try to figure out what to do next.
Were the earthwork that protected the Union troops thinner, they could easily have shot down into the ditch and slaughtered the attackers. Instead, they had to crawl out on top of the bank of dirt to fire into the ditch. When they did, they exposed all of themselves to the distant sharpshooters' deadly fire.
“Now that we're here, that damn earthwork does as much for us as it does for the Federals,” said a man near Ward. “We can't get at them, and they can't get at us, neither.”
“But we don't need to be here, “ Ward said. The wet squelching as he shifted his feet underlined the point. “We need to be there.” He pointed to the far side of the parapet. “Long as the bluebellies hold us out, they win.”
“Well, it don't look like them sons of bitches is gonna be able to do it much longer,” the other trooper said. “Look there.”
In the age of chivalry, when knighthood was in flower, besieging an enemy castle was an everyday part of war. Soldiers no more thought of going into battle without scaling ladders than without their pants. Bedford Forrest's troopers knew little of days gone by. They had to improvise if they wanted to get out of the ditch. They had to-and they did.
It all started without orders, which made it seem more marvelous to Ward. Here and there, at the bottom of the muddy ditch, men went down on their hands and knees. Others swarmed up onto them, using them as human scaling ladders to get up to where they could reach the rampart and break into Fort Pillow.
For the first little while, things didn't go smoothly. The would-be ladders didn't perform well. Time after time, they toppled before they got very tall. Then a couple of sergeants who had some idea of what needed doing started yelling their heads off. Most of the time, Matt Ward had no use for sergeants. Just because they had stripes on their sleeves, they thought they were entitled to throw their weight around. Here, though, they turned out to be worth something after all.
With loud, profane encouragement, they got big men on the bottom of what turned out to be human pyramids instead of human scaling ladders. They put smaller men in the next layer up, and smaller men still above them. They still had a couple of collapses…