Columbia is the story of Theodore Lomax, a nineteen-year-old Union solider in the American Civil War, who is as committed as any to the ideal of human freedom. After being assigned to the army of William Tecumseh Sherman, shortly after the general’s infamous March to the Sea, he willingly participates in the destruction of civilian property in Columbia, South Carolina, believing his acts are justified by Southern resistance to the Northern cause of emancipation. But when the destruction escalates into violence against the civilians themselves, he becomes disillusioned, and feels compelled to strike out in opposition to his own countrymen.
Oates had never been scared before. He thought he had. He guessed everyone thought they had, at one time or another. But early on he discovered there was no such thing as being scared until you were scared like he had been at Shiloh.
The novel is told from Lomax’s point of view, but there are ten other supporting characters, each with a story of his or her own. There was a time when I thought these stories, or these “Reflections in Broken Glass,” should alternate with the chapters in Columbia, presenting a richer but perhaps more tangled tapestry of the lives that painfully converge in the novel’s climactic scenes. But Columbia is clearly a more coherent narrative without them. Still, they were valuable to me as an author, and so I’ve decided to share them here.
“Oates,” centers on the character of David Oates, and describes the life he led before joining the Union Army and his first experience with battle.
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He wasn’t even supposed to be there. Not in the thick of it, at least. He had been on detached duty, detached from his own regiment and thrown in with some Illinois farmboys for a reason he had never been able to learn. The first lieutenant had just come up to him that morning and said Oates and about forty other men, two complete companies, had been ordered to fall in with another regiment for some forward maneuvers. That was it. No explanation offered.
Oates had not been in the army long at that time, and he had been actively engaged in the field for almost no time at all. He had volunteered at the mustering office in his hometown of Fond du Lac shortly after the firing on Fort Sumter, but had spent much of his time since then training with other Wisconsin recruits at Camp Randall in Madison. He hadn’t learned until the first winter of the war that he would be part of one of the Wisconsin units slated for duty in the west, and it wasn’t until after the first of the year that he was told he would be serving in a brigade newly formed under the command of one William Tecumseh Sherman. Oates had never even heard the name before, and now, in early April 1862, he had allowed himself to grow somewhat familiar with it, and he realized he still had never actually seen the man other than as a distant figure, usually on horseback. But despite this lack of familiarity with his commanding general, and despite his genuine want of combat experience, Corporal David C. Oates was enough of a soldier to know an order when he heard one, and also to know that orders had to be followed, whether they came with explanations or not.
As expected, after reporting for duty with the Illinois colonel, Oates and the other men from his regiment were taken forward, farther than any of them had ever been taken before. They marched for what seemed like an hour through the Union camp, past countless other regiments, some of whom were forming for what would soon be their own advances, others who seemed sprawled out on the earth as if they had already done all the work they were ever going to do. Although Oates had not made many friends in the army, as they continued to move forward he glanced around at the faces of his comrades and saw the same look of fear and uncertainty he knew had to adorn his own. Seeing so many others who seemed to be in the same position as he, who were suddenly being forced to wrestle with their own frightful inexperience, it gave Oates a small measure of the confidence he needed to keep himself moving forward.
When they were finally brought to a halt, it was in a lightly wooded area atop a small rise overlooking a long plain. Oates and the others who had marched with him looked out across that plain and saw there were no other Union troops ahead of them. There weren’t any enemy soldiers at that time, either. There wasn’t anything out on the plain, it seemed, except for a small white-washed chapel, but that didn’t matter. The absence of any friendly forces meant only one thing to those anxious young men. They were the front. In the battle that was to come, the battle that they had been brought forward to fight, they had been chosen to stand on the front line and receive the first salvos of the enemy.
It was a frightening proposition, and there wasn’t a man in that strengthened brigade who did not feel the significance of it pressing down on him like a great stone weight that had reached the point in its clockwork descent which forced him to crouch beneath its looming shadow. But in truth, none of them had been selected to comprise the forward salient of the Union Army, and as the worrisome minutes ticked by, each man who had seen the weight lower to within the immediacy of his concerns saw it rise again to a safer and less troubling distance as other regiments in blue were marched into positions out in the field before him.
That is when the Illinois colonel turned to his captains, the captains subsequently turned to their lieutenants, and the lieutenants finally turned to their soldiers and privates, and revealed what the general (not their general, the one commanding their brigade, but the general, the one commanding the entire army, the newly-nicknamed Unconditional Surrender Grant) had decided would be their role in the forthcoming battle.
“Okay, boys,” began the second lieutenant through whose words Oates and the other Wisconsin soldiers heard Grant’s wisdom and strategy, “listen up and listen good. The Rebs, they’re all massed up behind those trees on the other side of these fields. They’ve been forming for an attack since early this morning, since before most of you boys were even up. They’re hoping to hit us before Buell gets here. Any minute now, they’re going to pop out from between those trees and launch themselves against us. Those boys out ahead of us, they’re going to take the first hit, but we need to be ready because it’s our job to fill any holes the Rebs are able to punch in our line. We’re what the textbooks call the reserves, and we’re going to be ordered forward by the company, by the regiment, or by the brigade as needed to throw back any Rebs that are slippery enough to sneak through our front. You boys have got to be ready to move at a moment’s notice. Keep your eyes on me and, when the time comes, do exactly what I tell you and do it quick. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” the voices echoed in unison around Oates.
Oates did not know if his voice had been included with those of the others. He had felt the words sound within him, he had felt the strength of his desire to measure up to the orders placed before him and to perform them in a manner exceeding the expectations of he who issued them, but he could not tell if he had been able to express those sentiments in the manner prescribed by the United States Army. He could not tell if he had been able to speak. At the time his mouth was too dry to know if it was even part of his face.
In the short time he waited for the Confederates to make their appearance on what would soon become a battlefield, Oates found his mind filled with thoughts about the home and family he had left behind in order to be positioned like a chess piece in the place he now stood. He was a young man, twenty-three years old, with a wife named Sarah and two small boys: Richard, named after his father, and Parker, named after Sarah’s. He missed them terribly, as he knew he would, but both he and Sarah had thought it important that they offer some sacrifice in the national crisis facing the country which had given them so much.
America, they knew, was a place like no other on earth, where men could live and worship as they chose. It was primarily the freedom of religion clause in the American Bill of Rights that had convinced Oates’s great-grandfather to emigrate here in 1792, and from that time forward, as four generations of his family moved westward from New York to Ohio to Wisconsin, they enjoyed the ability to openly worship their Creator as they saw fit, without any of the censure or interference they would have encountered in any other country around the world. Their community, while small, was tightly knit and wholly committed to the truths as they read them in their Bibles, truths that seemed all too clear to them but which had seemed to elude the leaders of so many other organized religions. Oates had known Sarah since they had been children, their families attending the same church in Fond du Lac, and as they each had grown into adulthood, the feelings of love that connected them intensified not only out of their own desires but also very much out of the bond that connected each of them with the great and benevolent God that guided all their actions. They had been married in the same church they had attended as children, a church they now brought their own children to every Sunday, and whose Bible they were already teaching their young boys to read. Their religion was so much a part of who they were and the lives they led that they could scarcely conceive of what they would be without it. Having the freedom to practice and abide by his own beliefs and not by the beliefs of some foreign power or national government had enabled Oates to develop into what he viewed as a more complete human being. It had allowed him to become more than he would have ever thought possible. He was the head of a loving, faithful family and a member of a devout, respected community. At the current stage of his life, he knew he had no right to ask for anything more.
When the opportunity came for him to lend his small might to the struggle facing the nation that had made all that possible, there had been no way for Oates to refuse. Sarah had understood that. Although terribly afraid of losing him, she had supported him in his decision to join the army, knowing in a way she did not fully understand that the war just beginning in secluded corners of their country was more than just an isolated fight between a group of hardened secessionists and the entrenched forces of the Federal government. Sarah knew that the impending battle was one in which everyone needed to take sides. It was a conflagration that would one day engulf them all, and those that had not aligned themselves with one philosophy or the other would find themselves in the open fire, unprotected by the balms offered by either side.
“Where do you think they’ll send you?” she had asked him in the darkness of their bedroom the night before he intended to leave.
“I don’t know,” he had told her quietly. “To Madison, first, I suppose. They say they’re training regiments there for service in the West. Maybe I’ll go there.”
“The West?” she had said, her voice heavy in the still air beside him.
“Yes. Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi. There’s talk of trying to wrest the whole of the river away from their forces. But perhaps not. Men are needed in the East, too.”
“So you think they might send you there?” Sarah had asked.
“I don't know, Sarah,” Oates had replied gently, knowing she often looked to him for answers to the questions that mystified her in other areas of their life. Sometimes, he thought, she looked to him as if he was some kind of prophet, as if he had the ability to see into the future, even though the answers he gave to her questions were wrong just as often as they were right.
“The boys will miss you, David.”
Sarah’s words had come quietly after a silent pause, spoken almost as if they were unfamiliar to her, as if she was trying to make herself understood in a foreign language.
Oates had sighed softly to himself, his open eyes staring blankly into the darkness above their bed.
“Richard understands what I’m doing and what has to be done,” he had said as gently as he could. “And you’ll explain it to Parker when he’s old enough to understand.”
“You don’t think you’ll be gone that long, do you?” his wife had asked nervously. “Can’t you explain it to him yourself when you return.”
His initial words of response had caught in his throat, unable to escape the tight constriction that seemed to seize him. The words were reflective of thoughts he had had for weeks now, thoughts that had almost seemed to plague him since it first became clear he had a decision to make, that the progression of events outside his small life had forced upon him a choice between allegiance to his family and allegiance to his nation. They were thoughts Sarah had undoubtedly experienced herself, that he may not return from the places the war would send him, but they were thoughts neither husband nor wife had dared to voice to the other, choosing instead to keep them bottled up within themselves, in the place where fears too horrible to imagine were stowed. Even as Oates had lain in bed beside Sarah on their final night together, he could not imagine voicing those four little words which had come to command such unbelievable power over them and their lives. To think them was one thing. Thinking them was easy. I may not return. He had thought them almost constantly since making his choice and they had not yet convinced him to forsake the principles of his country for the convenience of those he loved and who loved him. But to say them was something entirely different. To give them voice, to open them for discussion and speculation; that was a liberty he did not wish them to have. As silent thoughts, Oates was firm in his ability to wrestle them under his control. But as vocalizations, spoken aloud and hurled at him from without as well as within, he feared their capacity to overwhelm him, to beat him down into a position from which he could no longer raise himself.
So Oates had forced those words back down within himself, wondering obliquely as he did so how much of the future he really could see. “I will,” he had answered Sarah fearfully. “I will explain everything to Parker when I return.”
When the Rebels first came bounding out of the trees on the far side of the field, Oates had a difficult time seeing them. His line of sight was largely blocked by the Union troops that had been deployed along their front. Indeed, his first indication that the Confederates had made their appearance was the booming of the Federal cannon that went off up and down their line. The sound had a strange effect on Oates. It was not the first time he had heard the firing of cannon, but it was, he realized, the first time he had been this close to them when they were being fired against their enemy. The explosions and the whistling of the shells had a strange tenor to them, almost as if the projectiles they were using were different from the ones they had used before, as if they were special and more deadly artillery shells, used for the first time in combat against the gathered forces of the enemy. The cannons went off in succession, one after the other down the long line of Federal troops, each team of artillerymen descending on their cannon as soon as it had been fired, struggling to get it loaded and primed for another shot at the advancing Confederates. To Oates’s untrained eye it seemed the epitome of military instruction and precision. Each man performing a single task for which he had been specifically trained, each man acting in synchronization with the other members of his team, and the six of them together achieving the desired end—turning a cold hunk of iron into a hot and flaming weapon of destruction. The team Oates watched worked feverishly to get their cannon loaded again, stood only momentarily aside as it was fired, and then swooped back in to start the process all over again.
The Federal cannon fired continuously like that for perhaps ten minutes, the distinct booming of each individual piece quickly blending themselves into an almost constant roar, thundering in the ears of every man present on the field. To Oates the awful noise seemed to drown out every other sound in the universe except for the quickened beating of his own heart, which he could hear thumping away in his chest like a frightened animal, held fast in a woodsman’s trap but struggling desperately to find some means of escape. Then, without warning or any signal Oates could observe, the firing stopped. The thunder gone, the ringing in his ears the only reminder Oates had that it had ever even existed, silence reigned on the battlefield for a few seconds as he and countless other soldiers peered uselessly forward into billows of smoke the cannon had created, seeking some sign of either the enemy or the destruction they had caused. From his position in the reserves, at least, Oates couldn’t gain an indication of either. The smoke was just too thick.
Then there was a sudden movement across the Federal line in front of them. Up and down its entire length, it seemed, men were rising from crouched positions in the wild grass, men with rifles already held in firing position, all aiming forward into the field before them, all pointing their weapons blindly into the swirling smoke that surrounded them. The men were spaced evenly in groups of forty or so between the cannon, and to the right of each company, an officer stood with his sword held high in the air. In the quiet that existed before those officers began giving the orders to fire, Oates could hear a distant and sporadic popping sound, something, he thought, not unlike the sound of the last few kernels of corn popping in the pan over the evening fire. Wondering briefly what the sound could be, he saw one of the riflemen who had risen with such precision twitch and topple over backward as though he had been physically struck. Even at his distance from the front line, Oates could see the blood that stained the man’s uniform, and he realized with an unexpected kind of dread that the man had been shot. The enemy was out there, all right. They could not yet be seen, but they were out there and they were firing back.
Suddenly, the Union officers up and down the line shouted their commands to fire, swiping their raised swords down in a violent fashion, and thousands of rifles went off, the popping noise they created sounding more like a shower of marbles falling on a tin roof, and adding their own smoky discharge to the clouds that obscured the ranks. The men who fired the weapons, like the artillerymen before them, immediately dropped to one knee to reload their rifles, but fewer than a fourth of them had risen to take their second shot when the unexpected and, to Oates’s way of thinking, unbelievable happened. Rebel soldiers, some dressed in uniforms of gray or butternut, others in the simple dress of farmers or laborers, appeared suddenly out of the rolling smoke, each with a bayonet fixed on the end of his rifle and all of them already on top of the unprepared Union soldiers.
There’s so many of them, Oates thought unconsciously, disbelieving the numbers he saw with his own eyes. They came out of the smoke in a literal swarm, whooping and yelping like maddened demons, charging forward up and down the length of the Federal line and enveloping it with thousands more around each flank. There seemed to be so many that at first Oates thought their cannon and rifle fire must have missed them all, that not a single one of them could have been hit in their trek across the open field. Realizing how impossible that was, Oates however found himself faced with the even more horrifying possibility that the Confederates so outnumbered them that even the casualties they must have inflicted with their artillery barrage had not been enough to slow their advance.
“Line up!” the second lieutenant who had spoken to them before suddenly shouted and Oates instinctively came forward with the other Wisconsin troops to form a line with the rest of the Illinois regiment. Their rifles were already loaded. They had been ordered to load them while they had waited for the Confederates to come up. But now that the Rebels were less than a hundred yards away, Oates felt an almost overwhelming need to load his rifle again. One shot was not going to be enough. Oates could see that already. Like the men on the line ahead of them, the best of them would be able to get off no more than two shots before the Rebels were on top of them. He wished desperately for a weapon that could take more than one cartridge at a time, for a revolver or some mystical rifle he could load with hundreds of shots and keep firing all day long.
“Aim steady, boys!” the second lieutenant shouted beside them. “Wait till you get a clear shot. Make it count. Then forget about a second one. Fix your bayonets and wait for my signal to charge.”
In the rush of events around him, the lieutenant’s words contained far too much information for Oates to fully comprehend. He focused on the first three words and had enough presence of mind to recognize the wisdom they contained. Up ahead of him, Rebels were already streaming through the Union line. Many were engaged hand-to-hand with the Federals, the Union men using their rifles as clubs and their officers slashing viciously with their swords, but many more seemed to stumble easily through the defenders, finding themselves unchallenged in the open spaces between the Federal line and their reserves. There, they took only a moment to orient themselves and then renewed their charge towards Oates and the rest of Sherman’s brigade.
The moment then came for Oates, the moment he had thought about since they had first placed a rifle in his hands, since they had first taught him how to load and fire it. In the heat of that moment, he found himself unconsciously falling almost wholly back on that instruction. Not unlike the drilled and practiced actions of the men who had armed and fired the cannon before him, Oates now selected a solitary target out of the advancing forces, placed the center of its chest in the sights of his rifle, and, whispering a short prayer to God to forgive him, slowly squeezed the trigger. As chaotic as everything seemed around him, there was a calm and rational place within Oates that knew his target was a human being and that, by his actions, Oates would be killing him.
The bullet struck the man a little high of where Oates had been aiming. As Oates watched, still through the sights of his rifle, he saw a red cloud of the man’s blood explode outward from the base of his throat, his head rocking backward with the impact as he dropped lifelessly to the ground and lay unmoving on the earth, no more than fifty yards from where Oates sat clutching his rifle. There had been no sound. In the moments following the act, Oates found himself terrified with the idea that such a thing could happen without any noise or flourish of any kind. In all the rush and activity of battle, the sound of his victim dying had been so completely masked that it was as if he had made no sound at all, a man dying suddenly and unnoticed amidst the charge and screams of ten thousand others. A man surely not too unlike Oates himself, with a home and family somewhere, a family who prayed for him and waited hopefully for his return. Examining the episode in his mind, an exercise Oates at that time had no idea he would find himself repeating for years to come, he could not even be sure if he had heard the sound of his own rifle going off in his hands.
“Bayonets!” the second lieutenant screamed beside them, knocking Oates momentarily out of his introspection. Suddenly, the endless drilling they had forced upon him at Camp Randall took over again and he mechanically removed his bayonet from its holding clip and attached it to the mount on the end of his rifle. The weapon now transformed from a firearm to a pike, Oates remained crouched in the scrub grass with the rest of the regiment, waiting for the order to charge. The Confederates were still advancing, many more than Oates would have thought possible. He had killed one, and so had many others in the regiment, but like the cannon and rifle fire sent forward from their front line, they seemed to have had little effect on the overall advance of the enemy. The Rebels were descending upon them in great numbers, more than Oates had the ability to count in the seconds before the forces collided, and as he watched them draw ever nearer, bayonets fixed like his own and lowered for the attack, Oates could see by the looks on their faces they were each in their own minds selecting a single target, each picking an individual Union soldier in the line before them to try and skewer with their bayonets. One had chosen Oates, a short and squat little man with an angry face.
“Charge!”
The command came at the last possible moment and was all but superfluous in Oates’s mind. In a state of near total fear, Oates saw his only hope to avoid impalement was to leap up and stab his attacker first. There was no military training or instruction underlying this realization; it was rather his own survival instinct guiding him now. Oblivious to the actions of those around him or to the orders of the company commander, Oates ran forward, his rifle desperately thrust forward, and closed the remaining few yards between him and the Confederate soldier.
The impact was unlike anything Oates had ever experienced before. His bayonet caught the man on his left side, snagging briefly on one of his ribs before the momentum of the collision forced it past the bone and sank it deeply into the man’s upper abdomen, so deep that the entire blade and first few inches of his rifle barrel went completely through him and poked out through his back. The Rebel’s bayonet was deflected upward in the collision, passing harmlessly over Oates’s right shoulder, but the speed of his advance carried him forward, pushing Oates’s rifle out of his sweaty grip and knocking him over backwards. His attacker fell on top of him, the butt of Oates’s rifle planting itself firmly on the ground beneath him and forcing its barrel through the man’s body up to the trigger guard. As he dropped on top of Oates, the man’s blood came pouring out of him in a flood, covering Oates in haphazard splashes from his chin to his crotch.
Oates lay there silently for a moment, the body of the Confederate soldier briefly protecting him from additional attacks. The man’s dead weight pressed down on him heavily—his blood seeping deeply into Oates’s clothing and pressing them wet and sticky against his flesh—but the man was not himself dead, the soft moans he breathed humidly into Oates’s ear clear evidence of his continued state of consciousness. Horrified with what had just occurred and with the accidental intimacy of their contact, Oates roughly threw the man off, rolling him over onto his back and gasped desperately for breath through a throat constricted with sudden panic.
The battle raged furiously all around him. Oates found himself thrust back into the land of the living on the very edge of terror. The line he and his comrades had formed in anticipation of the Rebel approach was all but gone, Union and Confederate troops struggling against each other in every direction he looked. Still visibly outnumbered by the enemy, two Rebel soldiers came rushing toward him, bayonets lowered and thrust forward in an attempt to pin him to the ground beside their fallen compatriot. Instinctively knowing that the process of removing his own weapon from the body of his victim would take more time than he had available, Oates scrambled desperately for the Rebel’s rifle, snatching it from his feeble grasp and pointing it blindly towards his new adversaries just as they descended on him.
Oates caught one of them in the face, the bayonet stabbing him just below the left eye, and causing his own thrust to go wide, his blade gouging harmlessly into the earth beside Oates. The other would have surely injured if not killed Oates had it not been for the unexpected appearance of another Union soldier, who clubbed the Confederate viciously on the back of his head with the butt of his rifle, cracking the Rebel’s skull open and dropping him suddenly on top of the man Oates had previously impaled. The man with the face wound stumbled blindly into this Union soldier’s path and the larger man delivered a similar blow to the top of his head. Oates watched as the impact forced blood to spray out of the man’s ears and he crumpled lifeless to the ground at Oates’s feet.
Dear God, Oates thought simply, momentarily overcome with the horror of what he had just seen. It wouldn’t be until long after the battle ended that he would come to realize how relieved he had been to see that particular man killed, how thankful he had felt for this unknown stranger who had miraculously saved his life.
“Ha, ha!” the large and somewhat grizzled Union soldier shouted wildly, stepping over the dead man at his feet to offer Oates his hand. “A little too close for comfort, eh?”
Oates nodded his head quickly in response. In the howl of activity that surrounded him, he wasn’t at all sure what the other man had said to him.
William Floyd shook his hand before the younger man’s face like a country preacher calling down the wrath of God, trying to catch his attention and show him he meant to help him to his feet. “Come on!” he shouted almost joyfully at Oates. “Take my hand. There’s plenty more where these bastards came from!”
Understanding crept slowly into Oates. He grasped Floyd’s hand and was pulled enthusiastically to his feet. The events that transpired over the next several hours comprised a trial and hardship unlike any Oates had ever faced before. Shouting, cursing, struggling, bespattered with blood and grime, Oates fought, initially at the side of the man who had saved his life, at later times as part of an improvised phalanx of Union soldiers, and often, whenever the whim and flow of battle dictated, completely on his own. He fought against whatever opponents presented themselves to him, fought them blindly and without precision, the way men do in saloons when they’ve had too much to drink. He fought them with blade, with club, with fist, and with teeth. He fought them any way he could because even to his untrained mind, Oates knew to fight was to stay alive. He knew that fighting with everything he had was the only way to pass through the battle and come out intact on the other side. The passage would not leave him clean, he allowed himself no delusions of that. This baptism of battle washing over him would not leave him or anyone else it touched clean. It was sure to leave him hungry and scarred in ways Oates had never dreamed of before. But it would leave him alive.
To detail every single event, every solitary sensation Oates experienced during that time would be impossible, even for Oates himself, who came out of the conflagration with little more than the memory of a constant roar of adrenaline and terror, feeding continually on itself until it seemed to consume him totally. Oates necessarily allowed himself—the part that was truly himself, his soul, Oates would have said—to drift away from the actions his body performed, to shield himself from the horrors that surrounded him, until the nightmare ended and he could allow himself to drop back down into awareness. In this state, Oates acted as little more than an automaton, as no more than a soldier, lashing out at any figure that seemed to threaten him, at times unconsciously attacking friend and foe alike, stabbing, smashing, or clawing them until they retreated or dropped out of their threatening poses, and then striking out at the next.
There was only one moment in that long and exhausting afternoon when Oates found himself thrust back in command of his own senses, painfully and singularly aware of himself and his position in the hell around him. A Confederate bayonet caught him wildly in the meat of his right thigh, slipping into him like fire and tearing its way out like a burst of lightning. It brought Oates immediately out of his stupor and he was suddenly himself again. For the first time in hours, he felt his heart pounding away in his chest, his blood rushing through his veins, blood now spilling fresh and hot down the inside of his trousers, and the air rushing in and out of his lungs as he struggled to draw enough sustenance from it to sustain him. In that instant he was no longer just a soldier, he was David C. Oates again—David Charles Oates, a tool maker and child of God from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, with a plain-featured wife named Sarah and two small boys named after their grandfathers—and there had never been a moment in his life when he wanted more than anything else to stay alive.
Mercifully, the moment passed. Even as Oates turned to attack the Rebel who had stabbed him, the moment passed, his instinct for survival forcing him back into his shell, protecting him from the feelings and sensations threatening to overwhelm him and leave him in the clutches of the fear and chaos that surrounded him. The Confederate who had wounded him had actually been fleeing from a group of six Union soldiers, his gaze turned back over his shoulder to watch their advance and his bayonet bouncing erratically from side to side as he ran. The man was past him and gone before Oates could do anything in retaliation, likely unaware that he had even drawn Yankee blood. No matter. There were other Rebel soldiers advancing from many sides. Pressing the loose flap of his torn trousers against the wound, the sticky blood holding it as a ready-made bandage after a few moments of pressure, Oates turned to grapple with the closest one, dropping deeply back into his intuitive and already hardened battle trance.
Their generals and officers tried their best to direct their efforts, shoring up defenses, launching counter attacks, executing flank movements, but for Oates and the men around him in the very crucible of the battle, their voices were unheard and the strategies they offered were useless. From Oates’s detached and troubled point of view, there seemed to be no organized movement anywhere near him, ally and enemy alike flying in and out from every direction, exactly like a group of hornets swarming around their nest under the eave of some country barn.
Eventually, it ended. With no concept of how many had been killed or how much ground had been given or taken, the roaring fury around Oates quieted and abruptly stopped. Oates found himself facing no more opponents. The Confederates he could still see were moving far out in the field before him, retreating sedately back to the protections of their own entrenchments as the sky above them darkened, not just with the coming of night but also with the approach of storm clouds. Flashes of lightning could already be seen, long echoes of thunder pealing out after each brilliant bolt, sights and sounds that must have been with them for some time but which had gone all but unnoticed in the tempest of battle. The only other Rebels to be found were those laying on the ground all around him, most of them dead but some with wounds so severe they were unable to drag themselves after their retreating comrades. The struggle finally over, Oates experienced two collapses. The first was physical; his body giving in to the exhaustion it had been ignoring for hours and dropping thankfully to the ground. The second was mental, as the wall Oates had built up between himself and the ugliness of battle vanished, and his full sense of awareness came crashing down from the lofty tower in which it had been chained.
His leg hurt. That was his first sensation. His leg hurt in a way he had never felt before, an intense kind of throbbing that seemed to match his racing heartbeat, each thump causing the pain in his thigh to flare up like a fire after receiving fresh fuel. Oates looked down at it and saw the entire leg of his trousers was saturated with blood. There was a tear in the fabric, about midway between his hip and his knee, and that seemed to be where the blood had come from, although it looked now as if it had stopped. Oates snaked his hand down along the ground to the injury and gently grasped an edge of the torn fabric. He had to see what had been done to him. It suddenly seemed like the most important thing in the world. He tentatively began to pull the torn fabric away from the wound, but the dried blood held it tightly against his body. Without thinking, Oates pulled harder and it suddenly came free, tearing itself out of the wound with an audible crackling and sending a terrific bolt of pain directly from the injury up into his brain.
The blood started to flow almost immediately, seeping out of his leg in a startling quantity, reminding Oates of water rising up around his boots when walking on muddy ground. He clamped the loose trouser fabric over it roughly, giving himself another shot of pain, and pressed it tightly against the flow, praying he hadn’t started something he couldn’t stop. He forced himself to look away, tilting his head back and closing his eyes tightly. He could feel the thick, warm liquid pooling up between his fingers.
Please God, Oates thought silently. Please let it stop. I won’t look at it again. I don’t want to look at it anymore. Just make it stop bleeding. There’s so much blood, I can’t have much left in me. Please make it stop bleeding before it’s too late.
Oates felt dizzy and light-headed, the ground seeming to revolve beneath him as his body turned in the other direction. He put the back of his free hand against his sweaty forehead and began to shake helplessly with fear. He did not want to die. It was a simple desire, not unlike wanting a cold glass of milk or a warm fire on a Sunday night, but he felt it at an intensity beyond anything he had ever felt before. He wanted to see Sarah again. Sarah and Richard and Parker. Dear God in heaven above, he wanted to see them all again. He had promised to tell Parker all about why he had to leave. He had said it in the darkness to his wife in order to ward off the larger fear they shared, but it was still a promise he meant to keep. He did not want to die out here, alone in some strange field. He didn’t even know where he was.
As he lay there praying to his God to spare his life, filling his mind with images of his home and family as if the very images had the power to sustain him, Oates began to hear noises around him, noises apart from the thunder which still boomed occasionally over his head, noises detected first on the very edge of his awareness, but slowly growing in both their volume and frequency. They were strange noises, unfamiliar to his ears yet compelling at the same time. They crept into the center of his attention like wild dogs stalking their prey, and when Oates was finally able to make room for them between his desire to be reunited with his family and his fear for his own life, wild dogs is what he thought they were, wild dogs crying with the approach of night.
“Sarah,” a voice sounded plaintively beside him, dragging the name out with mournful emotion.
Oates opened his eyes. The sky above him was nearly full dark now, but Oates turned his gaze away from its comforting blackness, rolling his head to the left. Laying there on his side, not ten feet away from him, was a Confederate soldier, a stab wound bleeding freely from his stomach and the top part of his skull split open, steam escaping out into the cool night air.
“Sarah,” the soldier whispered repeatedly, the faltering syllables growing softer and softer, his eyes already glazed over with the vacant stare of death.
He’s calling out for his wife, Oates realized with hollow satisfaction. His wife or some other beloved. Her name is Sarah and he’s thinking about her as he dies.
The strange noises all around him suddenly crystallized into perfect clarity and he knew exactly what they were. All over the field men were dying and each of them, in their own moments of solitude, were crying out in one fashion or the other. Some, like the man next to him, were crying out for their wives or girlfriends, others were crying out for their mothers or other loved ones, others simply for water, or for someone to come and finish them, and some were crying out in pain, not forming any specific words, just crying for the sake of their own agony and sorrow. Oates heard them all, each of them singularly and as part of the whole, meshing together into a rare kind of murmur, something, Oates supposed, heard only on battlefields or during times of plague. The sound of thousands of men dying.
Lightning flashed high above Oates, and as the thunder sounded and the rain began to fall, he turned his head to look out into the field before him, where the Union line had stood before the battle began, and where the Confederates had marched across in order to engage them. In the darkness Oates could just make out the shape of the small white chapel he had seen earlier, now a black and featureless shape. The field itself seemed to be undulating in places, the ground rising and falling in isolated areas as if a brigade of gophers were burrowing their way across it just under the surface. Another burst of lightning filled the sky above him, allowing Oates to see that the ground was not in fact moving, but that it was covered with moving shapes. Some of the shapes were men, to be sure, men from one side or the other whose wounds would only permit them to crawl slowly back to the safety of their own lines, but far more of the shapes were clearly not men at all. They were too large to be men dragging themselves along the ground, too large and too round, moving about on stumpy little legs.
Hogs, the rational part of Oates’s mind was able to supply for him. That’s what they are. They’re hogs. Hogs feeding on the ungathered dead.
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“Oates” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/shermans-march
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