FORT PILLOW

MATT WARD HADN'T THOUGHT MUCH of the Federals garrisoning Fort Pillow. Half renegade Tennesseans, half coons-what kind of fight could people like that put up? He figured they would throw up their hands and surrender as soon as that first terrific volley tore into them. Of course, from what he heard, Bedford Forrest had thought they would surrender when he sent in the flag of truce.

Forrest proved wrong, and so did Ward. The soldiers in blue fought with as much courage as anyone could want to see. Maybe that was the desperation of cornered rats. Whatever it was, they showed no signs of yielding even if they were badly outnumbered, even if that blast of gunfire killed or wounded quite a few of the men at the rampart.

If they wouldn't give up, they had to go down. A big colored man in a blue uniform swung his clubbed Springfield at Matt Ward's head. Ward ducked just in time. The rifle-musket butt knocked the slouch hat off his head, but didn't knock out his brains. He swore all the same; he liked that hat.

He stabbed at the Negro with his own bayonet. The black man sprang away. But then he swung again, trying to knock the Enfield out of Ward's hands. Ward wasn't an experienced bayonet fighter. He didn't think any soldiers except former U.S. Army Regulars were expert with the bayonet. But he held on to his weapon, and the black man's swipe left him hideously exposed and unable to get away. Only a sandbag on a practice field could make a more inviting target.

Like anybody who grew up on a farm, Matt Ward had slaughtered and butchered his share of livestock. He knew the soft resistance flesh gave to a knife, knew the feel of a blade grating off a rib and then sliding deeper. But there was all the difference in the world between sticking a hog and sticking a man.

The Negro's eyes opened enormously wide. “Do Jesus!” he screamed. Then he let out a bubbling, wordless shriek of pure agony. He jerked away from the blade and from Ward. An experienced bayonet fighter would have held the lunge and gone on stabbing, twisting the blade to make sure he had a killing stroke. Ward thought the black man would fall over dead. The blood pouring from his side made that seem likely.

Likely or not, it wasn't so. Once free of the bayonet, the Negro went right on fighting-not against Ward, but against a nearby Confederate trooper. That wound had to kill him sooner or later-Ward drove more than a foot of steel into his chest-but it wasn't finishing him fast. As Ward had by the barracks below the bluff, he found out how hard human beings were to kill.

Not far from him, a black soldier threw down his Springfield and fell to his knees in front of a couple of Bedford Forrest's troopers. “Don' shoot me!” he shouted. “Please don' shoot me! I surrender! Ain't gonna fight no mo'!”

“You a runaway, boy?” one of the Confederates asked. Most of the Negroes who fought for the U.S.A. were. By the way this bluebelly talked, he sure didn't come from Massachusetts or New York.

He hesitated a split second, but had to realize lying would do him no good. “Yes, suh,” he admitted. “You kin send me back to my massa. I don' care, so he'p me Jesus.”

Most of the time, the Yankees complained because the Confederates treated captured colored troops as reclaimed property, not prisoners of war. Forrest had offered to treat the blacks in Fort Pillow as prisoners like any others-he'd offered, and the U.S. commander turned him down. Now the bill for such folly came due.

“I'll send you to your master, all right,” the Confederate said. “I'll send you straight to the Devil, because you belong in hell!” He shot the black man in the head from no more than a yard away. Blood and brains and bits of the Negro's skull blew out. The black toppled and lay twitching in the dirt.

“That's telling him, Hank!” said the other C.S. trooper in butternut. “I should've bayoneted him in the guts, let him die slow,” Hank said. “Shooting's too good for a mad dog like that.”

“If you can kill 'em fast, you better do it,” Ward broke in. “I stuck one, stuck him good, and he's still on his feet, the son of a bitch.”

“Niggers is like rattlesnakes-they don't die till sundown.” Hank stirred the man he'd just shot with his foot. “Well, this here one's a goner. Bastard's dead as a stump. But Lord only knows when I'll get a chance to reload.”

If you didn't carry a repeater or a revolver, that was the rub, especially in a close-quarters fight like this. If you fired too soon, you might come to a point where you desperately needed a bullet but didn't have one. If you waited too long, somebody on the other side was liable to shoot you before you pulled the trigger.

Without a minnie in his own rifle musket, the question was as academic for Ward as it was for Hank. When the Federals mounted a counterattack, he defended himself with bayonet and butt because they were all he had. He might have been one of Julius Caesar's legionaries, except their spears were lighter and longer and less clumsy than his.