FORT PILLOW

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.