Beyond was a magnificent field, swept of its fences, but stuck all over with abandoned tent-supports, showing where our finally victorious legions had lain. “This field was just like a city after the fight,” said Zeek. I noticed that the trees in the surrounding groves were killed. “The Yankees skinned ’em for bark to lay on,” Zeek explained.
Crossing Shiloh Branch,—a sluggish little stream, with low, flat shores, covered with yellow sedge and sentinelled by solemn dead trees,—we ascended a woody hill, along the crest of which a row of graves showed where Hildebrand’s picket line was attacked, on that disastrous Sunday morning. Each soldier had been buried where he fell. The boughs, so fresh and green that April morning, waving over their heads in the sweet light of dawn, though dismantled now by the blasts of winter, had still a tranquil beauty of their own, gilded and sparkling with sunshine and frost. Fires in the woods had burned the bottoms of the head-boards. I stopped at one grave within a rude log-rail enclosure. “In memory of L. G. Miller,” said the tablet; but the remainder of the inscription had been obliterated by fire. I counted eighteen graves in this little row.
We rode on to Shiloh Church,—formerly a mere log-cabin in the woods, and by no means the neat white-steepled structure on some village green, which the name of country church suggests to the imagination. There Beauregard had his head-quarters after Sunday’s battle. It was afterwards torn down for its timbers, and now nothing remained of it but half-burnt logs and rubbish.
Below the hill, a few rods south of the church, Zeek showed me some Rebel graves. There many a poor fellow’s bones lay scattered about, rooted up by swine. I saw an old half-rotted shoe, containing a skeleton foot. But the most hideous sight of all, was a grinning skull pushed out of a hole in the ground, exposing the neck-bone, with a silk cravat still tied about it in a fashionable knot.
A short distance southeast of the church we visited the ruins of the Widow Ray house, burned to the ground in the midst of its blasted orchard and desolated fields. “A girl that lived hyere fell mightily in love with a Yankee soldier. Saturday night, he allowed there was going to be a battle, and come to bid her good-bye. He got killed; and she went plumb distracted. She’s married now to a mighty clever feller.”
Zeek had another romantic story to tell, as we returned to the church. “Hyere’s whur the bale of hay was. When the Rebs was brushing out the Yankees, an old Reb found a Yankee soldier nigh about this spot, that had been wounded, and was perishing for a drink of water. He just took him, and got him behind a bale of hay that was hyere, and give him drink out of his canteen, just like he’d been his own brother. Some of the time he’d be nussing him behind the hay, and the rest he’d be shooting the Yankees over it.” Some one asked him why he took such a heap of pains to save one Yankee life, while he was killing as many mo’e as he could. “They’re fighting enemies,” he said; “but a wounded man is no longer an enemy, he’s a feller being.”
Members of one family after all, though at war. Some were so in a literal sense. I recall the story of two Kentucky regiments that fought on this field, one for the bad cause and one for the good. Two brothers met, and the Federal captured the Rebel. The former recommenced firing, when the latter said, “Don’t shoot there; that’s daddy behind that tree.”
Cantering over the hills towards the northeast, we came to the scene of a severe infantry fight in the woods. There was a wild burial-place, containing some fifty patriot graves, originally surrounded by a fence of stakes wattled with saplings Both the fence and the head-boards had been broken down and partly burned. All around us were sheep feeding in the open woods; and withdrawn to the seclusion of the little burial-ground was a solitary ewe and a pair of new-born lambs.
“All these hills are just lined with graves,” said Zeek. Not far away was a fence surrounding the resting-places of “two officers and seventeen private Rebels,” as an inscription cut in the side of a black-jack informed us. There was a story connected with these graves. A Federal soldier found on the dead body of one of the officers, a watch, his likeness, his wife’s likeness, a letter from his wife, and a letter written by himself requesting that, in case he should fall, these relics might be sent to her. The soldier faithfully fulfilled this duty; and at the close of the war the wife, following the directions he forwarded to her with them, came and found his grave.
We rode a mile due north through what Zeek termed “the long avenue,” a broad, level opening through the woods, at the farther end of which, “on the elevatedest part,” a Yankee battery had been posted, doing terrible execution, if one might judge by the trunks and boughs of trees lopped off by shot and shell. The Rebels charged this battery repeatedly, and it was captured and recaptured.