SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

Little Johnny Jump-Up Christine Morgan

Mullins was first to admit to having seen the boy. He did so in a way that said he expected to be ridiculed for it, laughed out of camp, made fun of… or be accused of sneaking the drink, wild tale-telling, or worse.

As it happened, we’d all seen him.

We’d all seen him, and the accounts, they lined up too well to be anything other than the truth.

That we could each describe him to a fare-thee-well, that was nothing surprising. We’d all gotten a plain enough look, plain and sorrowful, when Sergeant Lewis picked him up from the Virginia mud.

How the rain had come down that day. Washed the smoke from the air but raised steam from the ground in its place. It raised steam from the bodies of the fallen as well, even as it washed the blood from their ashen faces. The smell of wet wool hung heavy in the air, mingling with the sharp stink of spent powder, and the lower stink of death.

There was scant dignity in it, death. Same as for war. Might start off proud, with talk of God and glory, flags waving, the fifes and drums, cavalry sabers flashing in the sun, muskets gleaming… but what was there by battle’s end?

Death.

Stiffened limbs and cooling flesh. Mouths agape. Eyes staring. Whether your uniform was of the blue or the gray, there in the mud and blood it no longer mattered.

Some men, the lucky ones, went easy. Went quick. Never saw it coming, or it was over before they barely knew. A shot, a jerk like being horse-kicked, and over they’d go, dead before more than a look of surprise even began to form on their faces, before the red stains blossomed and spread on their shirts.

Others, not so much. Others fell with their legs blown off or their guts blown open, bones shattered; men who were just sacks of shredded meat held together by ropes of gristle; men with their brains bulging through snarls of hair-clots and chunks of broken skull… screaming their agony… howling for mercy and for mother… scrabbling to hold parts of themselves together or pick up parts no longer attached…

No, there was precious little dignity to be found among the dead. Or the dying. Or the living, for that matter. We’d seen brave men cowering, begging, pissing themselves in their terror, and that wasn’t always even in the thick of the battle. We’d seen men who’d been just chock-full of boasting faint like church biddies with the vapors at the first boom of the cannons.

It tried the soul as much as it tried the body, war did. They liked to say how it’d bring out the best in a man. Often as not, it’d do the opposite. We knew of men who’d slunk away and run, deserters, yellow-bellied dogs, despicable, but could anyone blame them? When you’d seen your friends and brothers dying all around you, when you had to crawl over corpses — of those selfsame friends and brothers, like as not — or ignore the pleading clutch of desperate hands so you could save your own wretched life… oh yes, it tried the soul.

Death was bad but survival wasn’t always pretty either. Sometimes, what went on in the surgeon’s tent was more horrible by far. Bonesaws and amputations; the cautery iron heated until it glowed red-hot and sizzled the wound with the smell of roasting pork or frying bacon; the gangrene, and the maggots poured into the sores to gnaw away the infection…

Then, about when you’d thought you had gotten numb-minded to it, inured to the horrors, something would come along to prove you wrong.

Something such as the boy.

He shouldn’t have been there. He had no earthly business being there. On a battlefield, on such a dark and rainy day.

What had possessed him? All we could reckon was that he’d been out looking to have himself an adventure, or maybe hoped to steal himself some food — not that he would’ve had much luck, supplies being what they were. Or could be he was looking for someone, his daddy gone marching off to war or the like.

We’d never know. All we did know was that he shouldn’t have been there. He shouldn’t have been there; none of us had seen him until it was too late… and it was the mules. The damned mules.

If we’d still had the horses it might not have happened. The horses were better about it, not as prone to panic. We’d had six, but two had been shot, one took sick, and that bastard Hollister ‘requisitioned’ the others out from under us — his detachment had more need, he said, more import. A 12-pounder Napoleon was more use than our old bronze 6-pounder, the one we’d dubbed Little Johnny Jump-Up because of the way it leaped when fired.

Lewis had argued, but that bastard Hollister was on better backside-kissing terms with the commander. So, he got our horses and we had to make do with the damned mules.

The mules, they’d killed the boy.

Not themselves, no. He’d thrown himself flat in a ditch, dodging their hooves.

But they’d still been harnessed, the team of six strong and stubborn beasts. Harnessed to the limber that towed Little Johnny. Instead of balking and rolling the way they did when the enemy artillery shells went shrieking overhead, the mules bolted. Downhill and gaining speed, and Little Johnny’s two wheels — hickory and iron — thunked right into that muddy ditch.

If the boy had time to scream, we couldn’t hear him. Nor could we hear what must have been the terrible, mortal crunching sound of ribs and spine.

Another barrage passed by then and that time the mules did buck and squeal and roll, and got so entangled they could go no further. We reached them and as we tried to calm them back under control, Sergeant Lewis gathered up the boy in his arms.

So small, he was. Six years old, seven at the most. Towheaded, in homespun trousers and a sack-shirt, and just… just broken; broken like a jointed twig-doll someone had trodden on. The way his arms and legs dangled… the way his neck lolled… we’d all seen enough death by then to know he never would’ve had a chance.

It had been quick, though. There was that.

We tried to find out his name, where he’d come from, or who he belonged to. There were women who accompanied the army — laundresses, seamstresses, officers’ wives, cooks and nurses, among others — and a few of them had children. There were farms and towns around the area. Some family was missing their boy, some mother her child, some father his son, but nobody ever came forth to claim him.

In the end, we saw to his burying ourselves. Each of us put in toward his coffin out of our own wages. Sergeant Lewis had the detachment’s chaplain say a few words. We called him Johnny, for lack of anything else.

Not six weeks later was when Mullins spoke up, there by the tent as we ate our supper of salt pork, beans and cornbread.

He’d seen the boy, he said.

We’d moved on by then, left that sad spot far behind. Yet not one of us doubted Mullins for an instant, because we’d all seen him too.

The same boy, the same towheaded boy… but not a broken twig-doll. The boy, up and lively, chipper as a chipmunk… capering around the gun limber, happy and clapping, laughing fit to split. Not that we heard him, not that we could hear him, but we’d seen him, sure as Christmas, and there was no mistaking that delighted gap-toothed grin for anything but joy.

So, we’d all seen him, but what of it? No one else seemed to, but what of that, either? Wasn’t doing any harm. Wasn’t like he scared us. If anything, it was the opposite; when Dobbs and I went to talk to him one night, he vanished like a dream upon waking soon as we said a word.

It got so we were accustomed to it. He’d just be there, sitting on the ammunition box or astride the gun’s bronze barrel like it was a rocking horse or broomstick pony. Came to be like he was our mascot of sorts.

And why not? There was another detachment with a dog, a scruffy and spotted mongrel that followed them around, even wore a unit kerchief around its neck. A man with the 16^th had a tame barn owl he’d raised from a fledgeling. I’d seen an artillery unit in Louisiana who lugged around an old ship’s figurehead mermaid as their Lady Luck touchwood.

Was it so strange, then, that we had our boy?

Some of us — again, we didn’t know who’d gone and done it first — took to leaving the odd biscuit or piece of jelly fold-over out by Little Johnny. They’d be gone by morning but that was hardly surprising, what with the birds, mice, and other scavengers about.

Dobbs, hardly more than a boy himself at fifteen, started leaving some of the trinkets he collected: snail shells and buckeyes, interesting stones and the like. These, too, would be gone by morning.

Same with the candy. One of the Brubaker brothers, Tad, had a powerful sweet tooth and a weakness for the sanded hard candies sold by the camp sutlers. Lemon and butterscotch if he could get them, sassafras or horehound if not. He guarded them the way some men might guard lockets with snips of their sweetheart’s hair or letters from home, but now he’d spare at least one from each bag.

Then there was the matter of the socks.

Carey’s maiden aunt had been in the practice of regularly sending him care packages — soap, tinned oysters, sewing packets of needles and buttons and thread, tooth powder, scripture pamphlets, gloves, rum-cake, decks of cards, cookies — which he shared out generously among the rest of us. Some weeks after his father had written to inform him that influenza had carried the elderly lady off, a parcel arrived by mail-wagon. It had undergone months of misdirections and delays before finally reaching Carey. The wrappings were tattered, the ink smudged and worn, but it was intact with the contents undamaged.

There were canned peaches and a drawstring bag of coffee beans, some peppermint sticks, and several pairs of thick wool socks, with a note to the effect that her church knitting circle had made them and she hoped they’d included enough for “you, my dearest nephew, and your gunnery friends. Love always, Aunt Agnes.”

Few comforts in all this world are so simple and so welcome as the putting on of a new pair of warm, dry socks. When you’re a soldier, feet pruned white and rubbed raw inside your boots after miles of marching in the wet and cold, it’s a blessing beyond compare. Only a meal of hearty home cooking comes close.

We praised Carey’s aunt. We doffed our caps and held them to our chests, heads bowed, in a moment of silent prayer for her God-rested soul. Each of us made haste to peel off the worn and ragged old socks he wore and replace them with the new. They felt like cradling mothers’ arms, the woolen embrace of angels.

There were indeed enough for us all. And then, as he was gathering and smoothing the crumpled newspapers with which his aunt had stuffed the parcel — we’d read them, eagerly, however mundane and months-out-of-date they might be — Carey paused.

He’d found another pair of socks tucked into the very bottom of the box, as if they’d gotten in there by mistake somehow. He held them up without a word. We all saw that, unlike the ones we now wore on our feet, this last pair was… small.

No one spoke.

I had a chill; I doubt I was alone in it.

We looked at those socks. Those small socks. The size a child might wear.

Still without a word, Carey got up from his seat by the campfire. He walked over to Little Johnny, where the 6-pounder sat under a canvas shelter between our tents and the mule-pen, and placed the socks under the bronze smoothbore barrel.

Then we went to our bedrolls. In the morning, the socks were gone.

It went on for some weeks. Mullins won a shiny new tin cup playing dice, but left it out and kept using his dented one. Thomas, who whittled, made some spinning wooden tops which he painted with bold striped colors. I traded my old jacknife to a twelve-year-old drummer lad for a pouch of clay marbles. We didn’t discuss it. We just… did it.

And the things were always gone the next morning.

I wondered, suspected even, that Sergeant Lewis was behind it. That he crept out there in the night to retrieve whatever the rest of us might have left. Not meanly, no … kindly, in his way, thinking it better not to dishearten us, to give us something to believe in and cling to, foolish superstition though it may be.

Ghosts, after all…

Who believed in such things?

We did.

So, I soon learned, did Sergeant Lewis. He didn’t collect what we left. He had no more explanation for it than the rest of us.

One evening, he wrote a letter, but instead of taking it to the company post-master, I saw him set it atop the ammunition box and weigh it down with a rock so it wouldn’t blow away.

The sergeant caught me watching. He flushed some, and told me it was a letter to his brother but he would just as soon talk no more about it.

I did not press the matter. After all, I knew Sergeant Lewis had just one brother, who’d died at Fort Sumter, back at the very start of the war. Died fighting for the other side, as it happened. Lewis said how they’d had harsh words the last time they spoke, and there’d never been a chance to square things between them.

Next morning, that letter was gone just like everything else, but the rock was exactly where it had been, atop the ammunition box.

There was not, to our mingled disappointment and relief, a reply.

Bit by bit we began to notice other little peculiarities.

The mules, for instance. The damned, confounded, stubborn mules. They grew so well-behaved, so placid and docile and compliant, that it made us almost uneasy. They stood as calm under fire as the best-trained cavalry horses any of us had ever seen.

Our powder never seemed to come up damp, no matter how bad the weather got. We’d hear that bastard Hollister swearing from halfway across the field how the blue hell he was supposed to fire his Napoleon with damp powder, but ours was always just fine. Bone dry, dry as salt. Our slow match never went out at an inopportune moment, leaving us unready at the fuse.

And we hadn’t had a misfire in… we couldn’t hardly remember. Since the boy. No misfires, no injuries to our detachment, not even with the way Little Johnny Jump-Up had earned his name. We had no powder burns, no poorly-placed toes crushed by the recoil, not so much as a cinder or speck of ash landing in anybody’s eye. Our 6-pounder, sneered at by the likes of Hollister, was proving one of the most reliable artillery pieces in the unit.

Reliable, and accurate.

Uncannily, even eerily so.

The sound had changed, too. Or so it seemed to us. The bark and boom of Little Johnny’s bronze throat now sounded like a shout of laughter, a child’s excited whoop.

Then came the day.

The dark day. The terrible day.

They were as surprised as us, there was that much at least. We hadn’t marched straight into an ambush. Nor had they. Both our armies must have simply been going along, trudging, heads down as the rain dumped in sheets and buckets from black clouds so low in the sky you felt you could reach up and scoop away a sodden handful. The lightning-flash and thunder-rumble all around in the hills made it impossible to hear much of anything else.

Until the bugles rang their brassy cries, that was.

Generals in their right minds, you’d think, might have held off until the worst of the storm passed. Maybe each reckoned the other side would be caught unprepared and unaware enough to offer up an easy victory. Maybe tempers and moods were just as foul as the weather that day.

Regardless, the battle was on before we half knew it. Slick grass and slicker mud… horses and mules stamping with their breath steaming in hot plumes… orders being yelled… men running… muskets and cannons being loaded…

Hollister’s 12-pounder took a direct hit and exploded into twisted shards of smoking metal. The blast shook the earth. Bodies tumbled. A string of rattling, thudding coughs followed — the powder packets from their ammunition box. I saw a man’s severed arm whirl clumsily through the air, a pinwheel of fingers and blood. Another man stumbled from the spot, hands clamped to his char-burned face.

We returned fire. Fast as we could, swabbing and ramming, loading, aiming. Little Johnny jumped with recoil. The wheels dug deep in the soggy earth.

A canister shot burst nearby, spewing deadly iron shrapnel. Mullins and one of the Brubakers went down. Carey’s cap was torn from his head, and a ribbon of scalp torn off with it. I felt a tug at my side, a jabbing needle-stitch from an impatient seamstress.

Our mules got the brunt of it, two killed outright, a third that should have been but was too ornery to die. The rest of the team suffered wounds of varying severity and their earlier uncanny calm was no more.

Sergeant Lewis opened his mouth to give orders but a musket ball smashed his jaw before he got more than a word out. He sat down hard, cupping his chin, blood and teeth spilling through his fingers. Carey started for him and fell, shot in the thigh.

The other Brubaker threw himself on his wounded brother. Dobbs, Thomas and I got the panicking mules unhitched from the limber before they could tip Little Johnny over. Trickling wetness soaked into my shirt.

Our unit was a shambles, disorganized. Some tried to rally a defensive line as the enemy infantry advanced.

Little Johnny Jump-Up fired again. Round shot plowed into the oncoming soldiers.

None of us were anywhere near the 6-pounder. Had we even reloaded?

I wrenched myself around, squinting through rain and pain.

Again, our smoothbore barked that sound so like a child’s whoop of glee. Fire belched from Little Johnny’s bronze muzzle. More round-shot flew, and more men were mown down.

And again.

The boy… our same small towheaded boy…

I saw him there, clear as day, capering and clapping his hands. I heard his bright, joyful laughter.

Then the boom of cannonfire and the crack of muskets shifted as the battle lessened near us and intensified further downfield.

Sergeant Lewis stepped up beside the boy, patting him on the shoulder as if to say that enough was enough. The boy smiled up at him. Lewis smiled back, his chin not smashed after all.

I looked again, looked to where the sergeant still sat, slumped over, a dark gory bib of blood covering him from his ruined jawbone clear down to his belt.

Yet there he stood, by the boy, whole and unharmed.

There also stood Mullins, cheerful while at the same time his own body sprawled dead and face-down in the mud.

Not Carey, and not Jed Brubaker, both of whom were badly hurt… Tad missed it, frantic as he was trying to save his brother’s life… Thomas, Dobbs and I all saw them and agreed.

We saw the three of them walk off together, until they vanished into the haze of smoke and mist rising from the battlefield.

The six others of us survived. The war went on.

But Little Johnny Jump-Up never fired again.