March Toward the Thunder Part 11

Then, while Louis's friends from Company E tried to figure out what was so funny, the two of them laughed till tears came to their eyes.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

THE IRISHMAN AND THE INDIAN.

Sunday, May 15, 1864

The time to themselves Flynn had told them to take was short-lived. No sooner had they returned from their swim than the order came to re-form their companies.

Artis Cook was with another New York regiment. Chances were they'd be close enough to see each other after the battle. Providing they survived it.

"Good luck on you, Nolette," Artis said, shaking Louis's hand. "Lord watch over you-as our old priest up at St. Regis says."

"You, too, Cook. Olipamkaani. Travel well."

And now, long after midnight, they were marching along yet another muddy and rutted road.

Sergeant Flynn, who'd chosen to walk beside Louis, was in an expansive mood.

"I've been thinkin' on something, Louis, m'lad."

Thinkin', Louis said to himself, means I'm about to hear one of Flynn's lectures. His legs and his lungs both of iron must be made.

The sergeant leaned closer. "Now, me son, this is for yer ears alone. I'm hoping that it's not crazy ye'll be thinkin' me, but I have been cogitatin' upon this for some time. And what I have concluded is that ye Indians and we Irish are one and the same."

One and the same? What white man has ever said that to me before?

The image of the gang of boys throwing stones at them as he and his mother came into town returned to Louis's mind.

Sergeant Flynn cleared his throat.

"Now, I'm not talking about that common kinship of humanity that we all share, ye and me and all those poor deluded Rebels and even those whose skins are as dark as the pitch-black of midnight. That common humanity is nothing to scorn, begorrah. For like Shakespeare's Shylock said, if ye p.r.i.c.k us we all do bleed, and I've never seen a man of any race whose blood is anything but red. We all breathe in the same air. We eat the same and sleep the same and our bodies have those same private functions, each and every man."

Flynn tapped himself on the chest and then reached over to thud his broad hand against Louis's shoulder.

"It's the same mix of meat and blood and bone in us all, every one. But it's more than that upon my mind. What I've been thinking on is that there's a deeper bond between us, lad. There's a common thread sewn between those of us who come from the dear lost soil of the Emerald Isle and those like ye whose homeland is the earth beneath our feet. D'ye know what it is?"

Flynn paused.

No need for me to make a reply, Louis said to himself. It was clear that the Irishman would do enough talking for both. Plus Flynn seemed to understand better than most how Louis could answer a question by listening.

"Arghhh," the sergeant from Killarny said, his voice half growl and half sigh. "It's the cloth of history into which we've both been sewn, the red-haired Irishman and the red-skinned Indian. Put those histories side by side and it'll be the thing itself and its image in the mirror. Y'know how the English came over here and tried t' wipe out yer people? Well, they tried t' do it t' us first. Cromwell and his evil band of murderers hoped t' wipe our race off the face of the land like we was no more than dirt on the floor. Because the color of our hair was different-they said we was savages and vermin and a curse upon the land, better dead and gone. We fought back against them as men fight, hand t' hand, as brave and foolish as ever a warrior might be. But they cut us down with their finer weapons and their greater numbers. They even bought off some of our own people with gold and promises and turned 'em t' take up arms against us. And does that sound familiar t' you, boyo?

"Then they gave our land t' their own people and pushed us into the roughest, hardest places to live, sometimes allowin' us t' work for them, for a few potatoes and a crust of bread t' survive upon. And then when they could not kill us all or force us all t' leave the land, they tried t' force us all t' speak their tongue and not the beautiful Gaelic that my sainted parents made sure I cut me eyeteeth upon. Erin go bragh.

"Then they saw another use for us and that was in their armies, trusting we'd show the same courage we did when we fought against 'em. And we did it in spite of all that history. We did it t' prove to them the kind of men we were and to make a place in the world for us and our children to come."

Flynn's voice caught.

Louis felt a similar lump in his own throat.

He understands. And so do I.

Bad as it had been and as bad as he knew it would be in the days ahead, Louis knew then that he was in the right place. It was not just a white man's battle that they were fighting. There was no place he'd rather be than in the presence of his sergeant whose words touched the heart of his heart.

What would Jean Nolette have thought of Sergeant Michael Flynn?

He would have shaken his hand.

They plodded along in silence for a mile or more before Fynn cleared his throat and spat.

"And here we great fools both are," the sergeant said as they began to labor up a slope. "In this brigade, that's always called upon when there's work t' be done that is desperate, absurd, or forlorn. And what do we get in the end? A small bit of ground t' bury our bones? A handful of coin and perhaps a bit of ribbon and metal to wear on our chest? Or the right to call ourselves men?"

Flynn raised his arm.

"Column halt!" he called out.

They stopped, more or less. Some of the exhausted men who'd been walking in a half sleep kept on for a step or two before being stopped by the backs of the soldiers in front of them.

They'd reached a high hilltop. A line of lights flickered below them from the farther hills beyond a wide field. Hundreds of Southern lanterns, candles, and campfires burning behind their entrenchments.

And there's the line we'll be attacking at dawn without the benefit of a wink of sleep or a bite of food. Two hundred yards of open ground to cross while being pounded by artillery and struck by a storm of bullets.

Louis looked to their left. The rest of Hanc.o.c.k's Union forces were coming up, Artis Cook's company among them. The Irish Brigade and the Corcoran Legion would hold the extreme right.

Louis sighed.

"So, lad," Flynn asked, "what do we do, the Mick and the Indian?"

Louis answered that question with spoken words.

"The best we can, sir."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

MARY O'SHEA

Wednesday, May 18, 1864

The sh.e.l.l that whistled by was ten feet above him. Not that close, but Louis kept his head down anyway.

Doesn't sound like a Napoleon, he thought. Too small.

Napoleons was what everyone on both sides called the Model 1857 twelve-pounder field guns. Favorite artillery pieces for both North and South, they were smooth-bored weapons that could throw a twelve-pound sh.e.l.l, solid shot, or canister 1,600 yards.

Louis crawled nearer, keeping low. The half-light before dawn and the way the land folded like the crease in a palm made it simple to stay out of sight. He reached the ridge across from the Confederate gun crews that had begun firing on E Company at 5:00 a.m.

Louis raised up, a finger's width at a time, squinted through the binoculars Flynn had lent him for his scouting mission. He focused in on trees, the back of a horse, then an artillery wagon.

Just as I figured. Six-pounders.

It wasn't that hard to find them from his vantage point. As always, the artillery had been placed on a ridge behind and above the Rebel line. The four Southern guns and their crews were silhouetted by the near-dawn sky, a lighter blue than the dark sky to the west.

Guns had to be in plain sight for their crews to see where their shots fell and adjust their next rounds. But they were an easy target for counter-battery fire. Gun crews were often the earliest casualties. And even if the sh.e.l.ls fired at them missed, they could still hit the nearby munitions wagons. A man with a gun crew had to just stand upright, a target for small arms fire. He had no weapon other than that big hungry gun that he kept feeding with sh.e.l.ls and cannonb.a.l.l.s.

Louis watched, fascinated.

The eight-man crew that moved around each gun seemed to be doing a dance. Deadly, but graceful, getting off four rounds in a minute. One crew member cleaned the bore with a long-handled rammer. Another handed the cartridge to the third man who inserted it into the muzzle where the first man could shove it in with the rammer. Behind the gun a fourth gunner cut and inserted the fuse as a fifth and sixth brought up more heavy cartridges. The chief of the gun crew checked the aim, raised his hand. The eighth man pulled the lanyard. A dense cloud of white smoke suddenly appeared at the muzzle as the cannon violently recoiled six feet to the rear. Half a second later, Louis heard the thunder-clap boom, close enough to make his ears ring.

Must be ten times louder where that gun crew stands.

Most men in the artillery were not only easy targets, they were also deafened by their work.

I would, no way, want to be in the artillery. That work it is not just too dangerous. It is too dang noisy.

He lowered himself down and began to crawl backward.

"Well?" Sergeant Fynn asked.

"Model 1841 six-pounders," Louis said. "Four of them."

"I'd thought they was not Napoleons by the sound of them," Flynn replied. "A bit too tinny."

In battle, the sergeant's ears were as accurate as most men's eyes. Better, in fact, when the smoke and dust blinded your vision.

"If ye don't know which way t' go, then march toward the thunder," Flynn would say. "Ye can do that with yer eyes closed."

The sergeant turned to the men lined up in the shadows of the pine woods behind him. A shower of needles and small branches fell on their shoulders as a sh.e.l.l went whistling through the treetops.

"'Tis lucky we are today," Flynn said. "All they have up there is four little peashooters. And as ye can clearly see, our dear Rebel friends are shooting high as they always do." The sergeant chuckled. "There's not an artillery man in the South kin hit the side of a hill. Now with the dawn coming behind 'em and the blessed dark of the west behind us, we'll be seeing 'em better. Their sharpshooters'll be cursing their bad luck at not being able to find a target. Now, with the Corcoran Legion by our side, who kin stop the boys of the Irish Brigade?"

"No one at all, sir," Devlin's voice called out from the crowd of men whose faces were hidden by the darkness.

"No Johnny Reb," Kirk said.

"Not even the divvil hisself," Belaney affirmed.

Their voices sound as eager as if we are being asked to take a walk through a park in spring.

Despite all they'd been through in the past days, no matter that they had seen so many friends fall, the spirit of the 69th that day was high.

It makes no sense.

Yet Louis felt his own spirits raise and his heart pound in pride.

"On the double quickstep then. When they see our green flag and realize who's coming at them, they'll run."

Two hundred yards to cross. Shots whistled overhead.

A hundred yards. Sh.e.l.ls began to fall among them.

Fifty yards. Despite the poor light, sharpshooters behind their breastworks were now picking out targets. Grapeshot and rifle b.a.l.l.s were reaping a deadly harvest.

As he trotted forward, Louis saw men fall to either side of him. But their own rifles and the Union cannon were taking a toll on the Rebel ranks. Minie b.a.l.l.s whistled over his head. Sh.e.l.ls burst to either side, but he was untouched. As he neared the first entrenched position, the shots were fewer, the cannons silent. Louis leaped up, grabbed at a branch that was thrust out of the parapet, and pulled himself over.

The rifle pit on the other side was almost empty. Only three wounded men in gray with their rifles on the ground and their hands in the air. The main body of the Rebels had abandoned the position and were retreating through the pines.

"After them!" a man with a captain's bars on his uniform shouted as he ran. Louis recognized him as one of the officers of the 69th. Captain Blake.

Louis and all those of the Legion and the Brigade who could still run or hobble or limp followed Blake. Their line was ragged, but they crossed the uneven ground and picked their way through the pines.

Another line of fortifications, larger than the first they'd just taken, rose up ahead. The Rebels had fallen back behind it. A withering fire burst forth at them. Bark flew from tree trunks, blood misted the air.

"Re-form!" Captain Blake shouted.

"Re-form ranks," Sergeant Flynn repeated, his words echoed down the blue ma.s.s of men.

Louis quickly looked around. All the faces were strange to him. The soldiers from several regiments were rallying together behind the captain and sergeant at their head, unmindful of the tempest of bullets, the sh.e.l.ls falling like driving rain.

A flag bearer next to Louis grabbed at his hip and fell. Louis's left hand closed around the pole before their green flag with its Irish harp struck the soil. It was the only color on their part of the line. You needed a flag to rally the regiment.