Fort Pillow

III

Lieutenant Mack Leaming lay on his cot, happily halfway between slumber and wakefulness. Part of him knew reveille would sound soon. The rest was warm and comfortable under a thick wool blanket on an iron — framed bed with a tolerable, or even a little better than tolerable, mattress. A little earlier, he'd been dreaming of a redheaded woman he'd seen in Brownsville. The dream was more exciting than the brief glimpse he'd got of her. He knew he wouldn't get it back — you never did — but he kept trying.

The bugler's horn didn't wake him. The sounds of running feet and shouting men did. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he said, sitting up in bed and groping for his shoes — like most soldiers, he slept in the rest of his uniform.

His first thought was that some of the men had got into the sutlers' whiskey, of which there was more inside the perimeter of the fort than he would have liked. Dawn was a hell of a time for a drunken riot to start, but you never could tell. That was true of his own troopers. He thought it was bound to be even more true of the colored soldiers just up from Memphis.

Then he heard gunfire, and he flung himself into his shoes and dashed out of the barracks. If his men and the coons were going at each other, then all hell had broken loose. He would have to figure out in a hurry whether to try to put out the fire or to make damn sure the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry ended up on top.

But the gunshots weren't coming from inside the earthwork. As soon as he left the barracks, he realized that. The fire was coming from farther away. He looked around, gauging the growing light. It couldn't be later than half past five. A sergeant ran by, as fast as if the seat of his pants were on fire.

“What the hell's going on, Gunter?” Leaming shouted.

“Sir, there's Rebs outside the fort,” Sergeant Gunter answered.

“They're shooting at our pickets in the rifle pits.”

“Rebels?” Leaming shook his head. “There can't be. There aren't any Rebels closer than Jackson.”

As if to make a liar out of him, brisk fire came from the south and east. “We sure as hell ain't shooting at each other,” Gunter said.

Since Leaming had wondered if the men in the garrison were doing exactly that, he wasn't completely convinced. But the distant catamount screech of the Rebel yell persuaded him that Sergeant Gunter knew what he was talking about.

“What in the name of damnation is going on out there?” Major Bradford asked from behind Leaming. Bradford had taken his own sweet time getting out of bed.

“Sir, the Confederates are attacking the fort,” Leaming answered. “What? Have you gone clean round the bend?” Bradford yelped. “There's no Secesh soldiers within seventy miles of this place.”

“I thought the same thing, sir,” Leaming said. “But listen.”

Major Bradford did. Even in the pale, uncertain light of first dawn, Leaming watched the color drain from his face. How? Bradford's lips silently shaped the word. “How could they get here without anybody knowing?” he managed aloud. “Maybe Forrest really did sell his soul to the Devil, the way the niggers say.”

“What are we going to do, sir?” Lieutenant Leaming asked.

“I don't know,” Bradford said, which struck his adjutant as a fundamentally honest response, but not what he wanted to hear from the regimental commander. Bradford gathered himself, or tried to: “I don't see how we can surrender, though. Lord only knows what Forrest's men would do to us, let alone to the niggers here.”

“Didn't Major Booth say we could hold this fort against anybody and anything for a couple of days?” Leaming asked, perhaps incautiously.

“He said it, yes. How old were you, Lieutenant, before you found out what people say isn't necessarily so?” Major Bradford loaded his words with all the scorn his courtroom training could pile onto them. Mack Leaming's cheeks and ears heated. He hoped the light was still too dim to let Bradford notice him flush. He was in luck — the regimental commander had stopped paying attention to him. Bradford was looking toward the tents that housed the newly arrived colored troops and their white superiors. “Where in tarnation is Major Booth, anyway?”

Booth chose that moment to pop out of his tent like a jack-in-the-box. The senior officer's tunic had several buttons undone. He wore no hat. His hair was all awry. But his eyes flashed fire even in the gray light before sunrise. “So the Rebs have shown up, have they?” he shouted, a fierce and unmistakable joy in his voice. “Well, good! “

“Good?” Major Bradford might have been looking around for a judge with whom he could lodge an objection.

“Good!” Major Booth shouted again. Mack Leaming inclined toward Bradford's opinion; no visit from Bedford Forrest was good news for anyone who followed the Stars and Stripes. But Booth went on, “We'll give the bastards a bloody nose and a black eye, and we'll send 'em back to Mama with their tail between their legs! Isn't that right, boys?”

The Negro soldiers spilling out of their tents screeched and capered and carried on. But the screeches were defiance hurled at the Confederates. Many of the capers the black men cut were lewd, but also showed they intended to fight. And the way the colored troops carried on brought smiles to the faces of the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry's troopers, many of whom had seemed as uncertain and afraid as Major Bradford and Mack Leaming himself.

“Are we going to fight those Secesh bastards?” Major Booth bellowed.

“Yes, suh!” the colored artillerymen yelled back.

“Are we going to whip those Secesh bastards?” Booth bellowed, even louder than before.

“Yes, suh!” The Negroes got louder, too. Lieutenant Leaming hadn't imagined they could.

Eyes still blazing, Booth peered this way and that. “Bradford!” he shouted. “Where in God's name are you, Bradford?”

“I'm here, sir,” Major Bradford answered. He had to say it again before he could make Major Booth hear him. “What do you require of me?”

“We don't want to let Forrest's men drive our pickets back into the fort right away, do we?” Booth demanded.

Bradford hesitated. Mack Leaming didn't think the Federal garrison wanted to do any such thing. Some of the ground within the large perimeter Gideon Pillow first laid out was higher than the position at the juncture of Coal Creek and the Mississippi the garrison now held. If the Confederates got sharpshooters on that high ground, they could fire down on the U.S. soldiers inside the present small earthwork. That wouldn't be good at all.

“Do we?” Major Booth repeated, more sharply than before. He knew the right answer, whether Bill Bradford did or not.

“Uh, no, sir.” Major Bradford might not know the answer, but he could take a hint.

“All right, then, goddammit,” Booth said. “Get some skirmishers out to help the pickets.” He cocked his head to one side, listening to the gunfire out beyond the breastwork. “Don't send a boy to do a man's job, either, Major. The Confederates sound like they're here in numbers. “

“Very well, major,” Bradford said, and turned to Mack Leaming.

“Order Companies B and C out to the picket line.”

“Companies Band C. Yes, sir.” Leaming dashed away, shouting, “Company B forward to the picket line! Company C forward to the picket line! We have to hold off the Rebs at long range!”

The men inside Fort Pillow were running around like ants after their hill is kicked. The colored troops' white officers screamed for gun crews to man the half — dozen cannon that had come north from Memphis with them. Negroes not serving the guns took their places along the earthwork with the whites from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry. They started banging away at whatever was out there.

They didn't just shoot at the Confederates, either. To show their scorn for the men who might have owned them in the not — too — distant past, they shouted filthy obscenities out toward the enemy, and backed them up with more lewd gestures.

“Don't you act like those niggers!” Leaming shouted to his white troopers. “Forrest's men are bad enough any which way. You see any sense to ticking 'em off worse?” He spotted one of the officers in Company C. “Logan! Get your men moving faster!”

“Yes, sir!” the young lieutenant answered. “We're doing our best, sir! “

“Never mind your best, dammit,” Leaming said. “Just do what you've got to do.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Logan said again — what else could he say? Before long, about fifty men carrying rifle muskets and cartridge boxes stumbled out through the mud toward the rifle pits beyond the two rows of disused barracks outside the perimeter.

As Major Booth had before him, Mack Leaming paused to listen to the gunfire out there. Booth had it straight — the Confederates were putting a lot of lead in the air. How many men had Bedford Forrest brought through the swamps east of Fort Pillow, anyhow?

Too many, Leaming thought worriedly. That had hardly gone through his mind before one of the troopers going out to the picket line caught a bullet in the face and crumpled, his Springfield falling from his fingers. Another soldier also fell, grabbing at his leg. His howl of pain pierced the gravel- on-a-tin-roof rattle of musketry.

How many men have they got out there? Leaming wondered, and shivered. One way or another, the garrison would find out.

“Fire!” Captain Carron shouted.

Sergeant Mike Clark pulled the lanyard — the white man was in charge of the gun. A friction primer already stood in the touchhole: a goose quill filled with gunpowder and topped with shredded match. A looped steel pin was fixed in the primer, and the lanyard hooked to the loop. When Clark yanked it out, the match caught and set off the powder below. There was a hiss when the finely ground powder in the friction primer caught, then a roar as the main charge went off. Fire and smoke belched from the twelve — pounder's muzzle. Away flew a shrapnel round, to come down — with luck — on the advancing Confederates' heads.

Sergeant Ben Robinson watched for the burst along with Carron and Clark and with the rest of the colored artillerymen who served the gun. “Long!” the captain said, and then something more pungent. “Robinson! Bring the range down fifty yards!”

“Down fifty yards! Yes, suh!” Robinson said. Fifty yards was two turns of the altitude screw. He had to make sure he turned it the one way and not the other. He didn't want to raise the gun's muzzle instead of lowering it.

Meanwhile, the rest of the crew got the twelve — pounder ready to fire again. One Negro soldier used the worm — a giant two — pronged corkscrew on the end of a pole — to bring smoldering bits of wadding and cartridge bag out of the barrel. Another shoved a dripping sponge down the gun's iron throat to douse any bits of fire that remained. When the sponge was withdrawn, yet another black man shoved in the cartridge full of black powder. While he was loading the next round of shrapnel and the wadding that helped give it a tight seal, Sergeant Clark jabbed a sharp awl through the touchhole and punctured the cartridge bag again and again.

The whole colored gun crew manhandled the piece back into its proper position; even in the mud, recoil had shoved it several feet to the rear. When Captain Carron nodded in satisfaction, Sergeant Clark inserted another friction primer and fixed the lanyard to it.

“Fire!” Carron yelled again. The twelve — pounder roared and jerked backward. Nobody in the gun crew stood behind it when it went off. The heavy carriage could crush a man almost like a man squashing a bug.

Fireworks — smelling smoke made Robinson cough. The shrapnel round burst somewhere between a quarter mile and half a mile away: red fire at the heart of another burst of smoke. A savage glee filled Ben Robinson's soul. That burst and the balls flying from it might maim men who'd bought and sold Negroes with no more thought or care than if they were cattle. What could be sweeter?

“Hey, Charlie!” Ben called to the loader. “Ain't this grand?”

“We finally gits to shoot the buckra, you mean?” Charlie Key said.

Robinson nodded. The loader's grin showed a lot of white teeth — one missing in front — in his black face. “The gun go off the first time, I aIm os' quit this world altogedder.”

“Gun go off the first time, I almos' go off myself,” Robinson said.

Charlie Key laughed. His grin got wider.

“Bring it down again, about a gnat's hair,” Captain Carron said.

“A gnat's hair. Yes, suh.” Robinson gave the altitude screw half a turn. That was about as small a change as would mean anything at all. Then, grunting with effort, he helped shove the twelve-pounder back up to the parapet.

“Fire!” the white officer yelled. The white sergeant pulled the lanyard. The gun boomed and rolled back. The Negroes who crewed the piece reloaded it and muscled it into position again.

They worked a lot harder than the whites set over them. Ben Robinson had worked harder than the whites above him his whole life long. He knew that wasn't always so. On small farms where the landowner could barely scrape up the cash for a Negro or two, everybody worked like a mule. On plantations like the one where he'd grown up, though, blacks worked hard so whites didn't have to. Whites made no bones about it, either.

Things were different here. Captain Carron and Sergeant Clark knew more about the business of serving a gun than did the men they commanded. And that wasn't the only difference. As Robinson told Charlie Key, he could finally do what he'd wanted to do ever since he was a pickaninny: he could hit back at the whites who'd treated him like a beast of burden almost his whole life long.

The rest of the guns brought into Fort Pillow were banging away, too. Shrapnel rounds and solid shot hissed through the air. “We gots the range you wants, Mistuh Captain, suh?” Robinson asked as the twelve — pounder got ready to fire again.

“What? Oh. Yes.” Captain Carron checked himself. “Yes, Sergeant, thank you.”

Ben Robinson preened. A lot of whites on both sides of the battle line thought military courtesy a waste of time. Like most colored soldiers, he saw things differently. To him, military courtesy meant treating everybody the way his rank said he should be treated — his rank, not his color. And Robinson had earned enough rank to be treated with respect even by a captain.

Tiny in the distance, a gray — clad soldier threw up his arms and reeled away when the next round of shrapnel from the twelvepounder burst near him. “You see dat?” Charlie Key whooped. “You see dat, Ben? Uh, Sergeant Ben?”

“I seen it,” Robinson said. “Dat one dead Secesh!” They both capered and danced in glee. If their company commander and gun chief watched with wry amusement as they carried on… If they did, Ben neither noticed nor cared. He wished he could kill all the Confederates from the Mississippi to the Atlantic as easily as he'd slain that one trooper.

With only half a dozen cannon, not all the colored soldiers inside Fort Pillow had one to serve. Most of them fought as infantry, going through the foot soldier's practiced motions with their Springfields (Load in nine times!.. Load! The drill sergeant had taught them by the numbers, and the training stuck.) and firing at Bedford Forrest's men along with the dismounted troopers from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry.

Bullets came back at them, too. Mini? balls — minnies to most of the men — whined through the air when they weren't close. When they were, they cracked as viciously as an overseer's whip. Ben found himself ducking whenever he heard one of those cracks. He tried not to, but couldn't help himself.

Shame filled him. The last thing in the world he wanted was to play the coward in front of the whites who'd given him the chance to shoot back at the Confederates. Then he saw that Captain Carron and Sergeant Clark were ducking, too, as were the other Negroes in the gun crew. He realized people couldn't help it when bullets flew by. That made him feel better.

“How's it going here?” Major Booth came up to the gun and peered down the long iron tube at the advancing Confederates. “You fellas giving the Rebs hell?”

“Yes, suh!” Robinson said. His voice was the first and loudest among those of the Negroes serving the gun, but everybody sang out.

“A white crew couldn't do any better, sir,” Sergeant Clark said. Hearing that, Ben wanted to burst his buttons with pride. A white sergeant, an experienced artilleryman, said he and his comrades were doing well! If he couldn't feel good about such praise, what could he feel good about?

Major Booth took their good performance for granted, which made Ben Robinson even prouder. “I didn't expect anything different,” Booth said. “Not one thing, you hear? Only thing that matters is how well trained a gunner is. The only thing — you hear me, Sergeant? The gun doesn't care if the men serving it are black or white or green. It'll shoot the same way for anybody — as long as he knows what he's doing. “

“Well, they do, sir,” Clark said, and then, “Ain't that right, boys?” The Negroes raised a cheer. Robinson had been called boy before. This didn't feel like that. Clark would — or at least could — have called a group of white soldiers boys the same way. He wasn't using it as an insult, or to deny the Negroes' manhood. Just the opposite, in fact.

Major Booth grinned and nodded and slapped Ben on the back. “Well, we've sure as hell trained ‘em, all right.”

That was true. They'd had to start from the very beginning. Even wearing shoes was something Ben Robinson and a lot of the Negroes had had to get used to. Marching in step seemed pointless, but after a while he realized it did a couple of things. It got him used to automatically obeying the kinds of commands he heard in the Army. And it made him understand he was part of something much bigger than he was. He wasn't taking on Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee and Bedford Forrest all by his lonesome. He was part of this enormous outfit, and everybody was doing it together. Knowing — understanding in his belly — that he wasn't alone made soldiering a lot easier, even before he started practicing on a field piece.

“We ain't gonna let you down, Major Booth, suh,” he said. Most of the rest of the black men serving the gun with him nodded. No matter how scared you were, you didn't want to show it, not in front of the man who'd turned you from a field nigger into a soldier.

“I didn't reckon you would,” Booth said. “I wouldn't have let you go into combat if I thought you would.” A minnie cracked past overhead. Major Booth ducked, too, just like anybody else. He grinned and chuckled and shrugged. “I don't expect the bullet with my name on it's been made yet. Now you fellows, I know you're going to work hard here, and I know you're going to be brave here. That right?”

“Yes, sub.''' the gunners shouted as one man.

“Good,” Major Booth said. “Now, I've told the sutlers to put out whiskey and dippers along the line. You need a little shot of nerve, you go on and take one. Don't take too much — you've still got to be able to fight the gun. But a little never hurt anybody, white or colored, and that's the God's truth.”

After Booth went on his way, Sergeant Clark eyed the gun crew. “Soon as you see me havin' a drink, you can take one yourselves. That sound fair to you?”

The colored artillerymen looked at one another. “Reckon so, Sergeant,” Robinson said. The others either spoke words of agreement or nodded. They couldn't very well tell the white man set directly over them no, regardless of what Major Booth said. And Clark's comment did strike Ben as fair. He wasn't asking them to do anything he wouldn't do himself.

Brasher than the other Negroes, Charlie Key said, “I gots me a thirst and then some, Sergeant. When you reckon you ply the dipper?” He mimed dipping up whiskey and pouring it down.

Mike Clark looked at him. “Don't aim to use it at all,” he answered calmly. As the blacks stared in dismay, Clark went on, “We've got lots of men with Springfields on the line. Some of them get plastered — well, hell, so what? They'll still put a bunch of minnies in the air, and some of 'em'll hit. Half the time, riflemen hardly aim anyhow. But we've only got six guns. We've got to make every shot count, best we can. We better have clear heads for that, don't you think? You with me?”

Ben considered. Yes, they called popskull Dutch courage. But with a big slave trader and his men coming at Fort Pillow, how much extra courage did the Negroes inside need? “Looks to me like you's right,” he said to Clark, with regret but without any doubt. “Onliest thing I wish is, I wish we could get them gun muzzles down lower, depress 'em, I mean.” He trotted out the word Sergeant Hennissey gave him. “If the Secesh boys slide down under us, we can't touch ‘em“

“Damn thick breastwork,” Clark muttered. Ben Robinson nodded. He'd said the same thing the day before. The white man went on, “Well, we just got to make sure they don't get that close. Come on, you bucks — quit fooling around here! Let's give 'em another round! “

They served the twelve — pounder with a will.

A minnie cracked past Matt Ward's head, almost close enough to lift the slouch hat right off it. Almost close enough to drill me between the eye, thought the trooper from Missouri. He shoved that down into the nightmare place where such notions naturally dwelt. Losing his hat to a bullet was something he could think about without shivering. But if all the branches and vines in the Hatchie bottoms couldn't steal that hat, he didn't fancy losing it to a damnyankee's Mini? ball, either.

Another bullet zipped past, this one not quite so close. Matt didn't think the Federals had a whole lot of men in the rifle pits out beyond their earthwork, but the soldiers they did have were shooting as fast as they could load. A well-trained man with a Springfield could get off two rounds a minute, and the men in those pits knew what they were doing.

A shrapnel round from the fort itself screamed down and burst with a roar off to Ward's right. Along with the rest of Colonel McCulloch's men, he was on the left of the Confederate line, closest to the Mississippi. He and his comrades pushed north toward Fort Pillow. At the other end of the line, Barteau's regiment of Bell's brigade would be advancing west, along Coal Creek.

Ward and his companions nearby were already inside the first line of works around Fort Pillow, the line laid out by the general who'd named the place after himself. That was high ground. From where Ward crouched, he could see into the much smaller perimeter the galvanized Yankees and their colored stooges held. The range was long-it had to be more than a quarter of a mile-but his rifle would reach that far.

A minnie thudded into a stump not far away. “Thank you, Jesus!” yelled a trooper in back of the stump. The garrison inside Fort Pillow hadn't done much of a job of clearing the approaches to their position. The attackers could take cover behind lots of bushes and stumps and fallen trees.

Cautiously, Ward raised his head from behind the stump that sheltered him. He fired at a man in blue in one of the rifle pits. The Enfield carbine he carried bucked against his shoulder. The rifle musket spat fire and a puff of black-powder smoke.

The Yankee in that rifle pit kept moving around, so Ward supposed he'd missed him. “Shit,” the trooper from Missouri said, without much rancor. He ducked down and reloaded, biting the paper cartridge and pouring powder and a cloth patch into the Enfield's muzzle, sending the minnie after the powder and wadding and ramming it home, drawing back the hammer to half-cock so he could set a copper percussion cap in place, and then raising the carbine to his shoulder and firing.

This time, the soldier at whom he aimed flinched and crumpled. A Mini? ball weighed almost an ounce. When one hit, it hit hard. He bit open another cartridge. After a long fight, soldiers who'd done a lot of shooting had so much black powder on their faces, they looked like refugees from a minstrel show.

Ward wished he had a breech-loading repeating rifle like the ones some Federal cavalrymen were starting to carry. A regiment armed with rifles like that had the firepower of a brigade with ordinary weapons.

“Wish for the moon while you're at it,” Ward muttered, tasting sulfur from the powder. Those fancy repeaters needed equally fancy brass cartridges. Even if you captured one, you also had to capture the ammunition to go with it, and keep on capturing more and more. Otherwise the rifle would be useless, except as a club.

Ward wondered why the Confederacy couldn't make rifles like that and the ammunition to go with them. Probably for the same reason it had trouble keeping its men in uniforms and shoes. A lot of the troopers in McCulloch's brigade wore tunics and trousers and shoes damnyankees didn't need anymore. Some of the trousers were still blue. Forrest insisted that shirts, at least, go into the dye kettle right away. If they turned butternut, your buddies were less likely to try to plug you by mistake.

More than a few Confederates carried captured Yankee Springfields, too. Their.58-caliber minnies and the.577 Enfield bullets both worked in both weapons.

If it wasn't for everything the Federals make, we couldn't hardly fight 'em, Ward thought. That was funny if you looked at it the right way. It was worrisome if you looked at it wrong, so Ward did his best to laugh.

He slipped another percussion cap onto the nipple and looked for a new target. There was some damnfool nigger cutting capers on the main earthwork. The black man acted like a drunk. That not only made Ward angry at him, it made the Missourian jealous. He drew a careful bead and pulled the trigger.

He couldn't have missed by much. The Negro's comic tumble behind the breastwork would have brought down the house in a play. But this wasn't a play. It was real. Matt Ward wanted that man dead. Now the coon might pick up a rifle and hurt somebody with it.

Two or three minnies from the fort cracked past the stump behind which Ward hid. They knew he was here, which meant it was time to go somewhere else. He'd fired several shots, and the clouds of smoke belching from his carbine announced his whereabouts to the world.

He scrambled to find fresh cover a little closer to the fort and to the firing pits in front of it. Other troopers were doing the same thing, and cheering one another on as they moved. Only a couple of wounded men staggered back toward the rear. One had a hand that dripped blood. The other…

“Son of a bitch!” Ward said softly. He'd seen some nasty wounds, but this was one of the worst. A Mini? ball had caught the trooper in the lower jaw and carried away most of it. Blood splashed down the soldier's front. Shattered teeth gleamed inside his mouth. His tongue flopped loose and red, like butcher's meat.

Could you live after a mutilation like that? If you could, would you want to? You'd never be able to show your face-or what was left of it-in broad daylight again. If you had a wife, would she stay with you? If you didn't, how could you hope to get one? Wouldn't you just want to pick up an Enfield or a shotgun and finish what the Yankee bullet had started?

Those were all good questions. Matt Ward did his best not to think about any of them. He tried to move up on the enemy soldiers in the rifle pits.

Major William Bradford had been in some skirmishes before this fight, but never a real battle. This was a different business from everything he'd known up till now. He didn't care for any of the differences.

The Confederates here weren't going to ride off after exchanging a few shots with his men. They meant it. He didn't need to be U.S. Grant to figure that out. They had numbers on their side, too. The volume of gunfire told him that. So did the way they pressed the attack along the whole perimeter, from the Mississippi all the way over to Coal Creek.

Not far from him, a colored soldier from one of the newly arrived artillery units fired his Springfield, calmly reloaded as fast as a white man could have, and fired again. The Negro nodded to him. “Them Secesh keeps comin', suh, we shoots all of 'em,” he said.

“Uh, right.” Bradford made himself nod. He knew Bedford Forrest's men hated the idea of Negro soldiers. They denied that Negroes could be soldiers. If Negroes could fight as well as whites, that knocked the Confederacy's whole raison d’?tre over the head. The Rebs could see as much perfectly well.

But Bill Bradford, though no Confederate, was a Tennessean, and a Tennessean from a county with more slaves than white men. He didn't believe-well, he hadn't believed-Negroes could fight, either. If they made him see they could, he would have to do some fresh thinking, and few men are ever comfortable doing that.

Worst of all, though, was what the battle was showing him about himself. With a major's oak leaves on his shoulder straps, he had rank enough to imagine himself a bold commander like General Sherman-or even like General Forrest, for whom every V.S. officer had a thorough and wary respect.

Now reality was rudely testing his imagination. What happened when the bullets started flying? He got flustered and fearful, and he knew it. He'd been the next thing to paralyzed till Major Booth told him to send out a couple of companies of skirmishers. Would he have thought of it for himself if Booth hadn't? He hoped so, but he wasn't sure. Dammit, he wasn't sure.

When a minnie struck home, it made a wet, slapping sound that chilled the blood. A white man-a trooper from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry-groaned and clutched at his shoulder. Welling blood made his dark blue tunic even darker. He stumbled away toward the surgeons' tender mercies.

That could have been me) Bradford thought with a shudder. Once lodged in his brain, the idea wouldn't go away. Know thyself, some ancient had said. This was knowledge Bill Bradford would rather not have had.

One of the cannon that had come north with the colored artillerymen bellowed. The crew reloaded the gun with the same matter-of-fact competence the Negro fighting as a rifleman displayed. They had a white sergeant and a white captain, but they didn't need anyone to tell them what to do. They knew, and they did it.

No answering Confederate cannonballs came. Forrest's men seemed to have no artillery with them. That was the one bit of good news Bill Bradford saw. Confederate soldiers in gray, in butternut, and even in blue swarmed everywhere out beyond the perimeter. Their fierce yells of fury and defiance put him in mind of the baying of wolves.

Another cannon crashed. Half a dozen guns had seemed plenty to defend Fort Pillow. The earthwork along which they were mounted wasn't very long. But, no matter how many rounds they fired at the Rebs, Forrest's men kept pressing ever closer.

A shell from the gunboat in the Mississippi arched up over the bluff atop which Fort Pillow sat. It burst somewhere to the rear of the attacking rebels. Bradford swore under his breath. The New Era had to supplement the firepower in the fort itself.

“Make' em shorten the range, Theo!” Bradford yelled.

“I'll do it!” His older brother, Captain Theodorick Bradford, passed signals down to the New Era with blue wigwag flags. The system had seemed good enough on paper. In the heat of action… It was liable to be slower and clumsier than Bradford wished it were.

Major Booth went from one gun along the earthwork to the next, encouraging the crews to keep firing. “Give 'em hell!” Booth yelled. “Those bastards don't know what hell is! Show' em, damn you! “

And the colored men responded. They laughed and cheered and served their cannon with a will. Not even white men obeyed Bradford so readily. He envied the more experienced officer for his ability to command.

“Major!” he called.

“What is it, Major?” Booth asked, mindful of the civilities even under fire. A bullet snapped past his head. He ducked, then laughed at himself for ducking. “Warm work, isn't it?”

“Er-so it is.” Bradford couldn't act so cheerful about it. “They're putting a lot of pressure on the skirmishers, sir. Shall I send out more men, or shall I pull back the ones we've already got out there?”

“Neither,” Booth said at once. “If you send out more, we'll lose them. Skirmishers can't stop the Rebs from coming forward. Three times as many men out there couldn't stop them, and the ones we do have are enough to slow the enemy down. If you pull them back into the fort, though, Forrest will push right up to the earthwork. I want to put that off as long as I can.”

“Major?” Bradford said, perplexed.

“If we can hold the Rebs out till reinforcements come up the river from Memphis, the fight is as good as won,” Booth said. “No way in hell Forrest can overrun us then. His men will skulk off and go back to thieving and murdering and bushwhacking. That's all they're good for, and they can keep doing it from now till doomsday without changing the way the war turns out one damn bit.”

“Uh, yes, sir.” Bradford wondered if he could have been callous enough to sacrifice the skirmishers in the hope of saving the fort and most of the garrison. He didn't think so, even if he could see it was the right move.

Along with his other talents, Lionel Booth might have been a mind reader. He patted Bradford on the back. “I know they're your men, and I know you're fond of them, Major. But every now and then we need to take some losses for the good of the greater number. Do you see it?”

“I see it. I don't like it.” When a minnie cracked past Bradford, he ducked as Booth had. He couldn't laugh about it. It made him feel like a coward, even if it was altogether involuntary.

A wounded man screamed. Bradford set his teeth against the appalling cry. Booth hurried on to hearten the next gun crew.