The aide wagged his head. “Even so, we can beat them, General.” D.H. Hill looked at him a little sardonically. “Of course, of course, we can beat them! But have you noticed how many men we lose in beating them? And have you any idea how we are to continue to get men? It takes time to grow oaks and men. What the South needs is some Cadmus to break the teeth out of skulls, sow them, and raise overnight a crop of armed men! There are plenty of skulls, God knows! We are seeing in our day a curious phenomenon. Armies are growing younger. We are galloping toward the cradle. The V. M.I. Cadets will be out presently, and then the nine- and ten-year-olds. Of course the women might come on afterwards, though, to tell the truth,” said Hill, “they’ve been in the field from the first.”
“Here’s General Forrest.”
Forrest rode up. “General Hill, ain’t it? Good morning, sir. I am going to fight my men dismounted. This is going to be an infantry battle.”
“I have heard, General,” said Hill, “that you have never lost a fight. How do you manage it?”
“I git there first with the most men.”
“You don’t hold then with throwing in troops piecemeal?”
“No,” said Forrest, with a kind of violence. “You kin play the banjo all right with one finger after another, but in war I clutch with the whole hand!”
He rode on, a strange figure, an uneducated countryman, behind him no military training or influence, no West Point; a man of violences and magnanimities, a big, smoky personality, here dark, here clearly, broadly lighted. “He was born a soldier as men are born poets.” “Forrest!” said General Joseph E. Johnston long afterwards. “Had Forrest had the advantage of a military education and training, he would have been the great central figure of the war!”
The sun of the eighteenth of September sank behind the mountains. A cool night wind sprang up, sighing through the bronzing wood and rippling the surface of the Chickamauga. Three brigades of Hood’s division, marching rapidly from Dalton, had come upon the field; with them Hood himself, with his splendid personal reputation, his blue eyes and yellow hair and headlong courage. He had now his three brigades and three of Bushrod Johnson’s. That churchman militant, Leonidas Polk, held the centre at Lee and Gordon’s Mills, and D.H. Hill the left. Joseph Wheeler and his cavalry watched the left flank, Forrest and his cavalry the right.
The country was rough, the roads few and poor, the fords of the Chickamauga in the same category. Dusk of the eighteenth found Hood and Walker across the stream, but other divisions with the fords yet to make. At dawn of the nineteenth, the Army of the Cumberland began to put itself into position. In the faint light the outposts of the blue caught sight of Buckner’s division fording the Chickamauga at Tedford’s. In the mist and dimness they thought they saw only a small detached grey force. Three brigades of Brannan’s division were at once put forward. In the first pink light Buckner’s advanced brigade clashed with Croxton’s. With a burst of sound like an explosion in the dim wood began the battle of Chickamauga—one of the worst in history, twice bloodier than Wagram, than Marengo, than Austerlitz, higher in its two days’ fallen than Sharpsburg, a terrible, piteous fight.