FORT PILLOW

“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…

“God damn you, Riley, you stupid, clumsy son of a bitch, why the hell did you have to go and wiggle then?”

“I'm sorry, Sarge. Stinking bug landed right on my eyelid, so help me Jesus. What the devil was I supposed to do?”

“Likely tell,” the sergeant said. But he didn't waste any more time scorching the luckless Riley, so if he didn't exactly believe, he didn't exactly disbelieve, either. It wasn't as if he didn't have plenty of other troopers to scream at.

The first Confederate who made it up so he could rush the rampart got shot in the face the instant he showed himself. He tumbled back into the ditch, dead before he splatted into the mud.

“Move!” the closest sergeant bellowed to the men in his pyramid. “That Yankee bastard's gotta reload. If you can get up there before he does -”

More and more men went up. A few of them were hit, and fell in the ditch again. Most, though, gained the narrow strip of ground between the ditch and the earthwork. They crouched there, ducking down behind the piled dirt, waiting for their orders. Matt Ward scrambled up himself. He saw Colonel McCulloch no more than ten feet away, waiting like everybody else.

“Be ready, boys!” McCulloch called. “We're almost there!”

On the other side of the rampart, the Federals had mostly stopped shooting, too. They waited tensely for whatever happened next.

“At my order!” someone shouted-a Confederate, Ward thought, though accent was no help in telling the sides apart with so many Tennesseans on both. The C.S. trooper clutched his rifle musket and braced himself, not that that would do any good if a minnie hit him.

“Is that General Chalmers?” whispered the soldier next to him. “Beats me,” Ward whispered back.

“Now!” shouted the officer, whoever he was.

Mack Leaming's saber blade glittered in the sun. He'd never dreamt he might have to fight with his officer's sword. The saber in the scabbard was a mark of his rank, nothing more, and an occasional nuisance that thumped against his leg. But at close quarters a slashing saber was a weapon not to be despised. He wished he had a better notion of how to fight with it, for the coming fight would be at quarters as close as a man could imagine in his direst nightmares.

“Are your pieces loaded?” a Federal officer called to the colored soldiers under his command.

“Yes, suh,” they said, and, “Sure is, suh,” and, “We ain't afraid of no Rebs.”

Leaming wondered why they weren't. He was desperately afraid himself, and trying hard not to show it. Not knowing fear seemed impossible. Carrying on in spite of it… A mere mortal might aspire to that.

Somewhere not nearly far enough away, a wounded U.S. soldier howled. While Bedford Forrest's troopers just outside of Fort Pillow mostly held their fire, the sharpshooters on the rises that looked down into the Federal position kept popping away at the soldiers in blue. Every so often, a round struck home.