“Birds all fly away from battle-fields”—“Not when there are nestlings! Saw a tree set on fire by hot shot from Yankee gunboat on the Tennessee. Marched by it when it was jest a pillar of flame, and, by gum! there was a mocking-bird dead on her nest, with her wings spread out over the little birds. All of them dead.... It made you wonder. And, by gum! the captain, when he saw it—the captain saluted!”
“The young folks roll on the little cabin floor,
All merry, all happy and bright;
By ’n’ by hard times comes a-knocking at the door,
Then, my old Kentucky home, good night!”
“Whew! That’s a pretty line of breastworks over there before Helm’s brigade! Reckon that’s what Billy Yank was building all night long!—Helm’s going forward—” Kentuckians! Charge bayonets! Double-quick!
Helm was killed, heroically leading his brigade. The colonel of the Second Kentucky was killed, the colonel of the Ninth badly wounded. The Ninth lost a third of its number. “I went into the fight,” says the colonel of the Second, “with thirty officers and two hundred and seventy-two men, and came out with ten officers and one hundred and forty-six men. Both officers and men behaved gallantly.” The colonel of the Fourth was badly wounded; the Sixth had its losses; the Forty-first Alabama went in with something over three hundred men, and lost in killed twenty-seven, in wounded, one hundred and twenty. Three captains of the Second were killed at the foot of the works, and the colour-sergeant, Robert Anderson, having planted the flag a-top, died with his hands about the staff. Adams’s Louisiana brigade came to the help of Helm. Adams, severely wounded, was taken prisoner. The combat raged, bitter and bloody. There was a long, long line of well-erected breastworks, with a shorter line at right angles. The divisions of Thomas fought grimly, heroically; the brigades of Breckinridge went to the assault as heroically. Nowadays no Confederate brigade, no Confederate regiment, had full complement of muskets. They were skeleton organizations, gaunt as their units, but declining to merge because each would keep its old, heroic name. Spare as they were, they threw themselves, yelling, against the log-works. Breckinridge was tall and straight and filled with fiery courage. Vice-President, on a time, of the United States, now grey general on the chessboard, he showed here, as there, a brilliant, commanding personality. His men, proud of him, fought with his own high ardour. The withering blast came against them; they shouted and tossed it back. Now there came also against the breastworks the division of Cleburne.
Patrick Romayne Cleburne,—thirty-six years old, but with greying hair above his steel-grey eyes, Irishman of the county of Cork, one time soldier in the English army, then lawyer in the city of Helena and the State of Arkansas, then private in the Confederate army, then captain, then colonel, then brigadier, and now major-general,—Patrick Cleburne commanded a division that, also, had its personality. The division’s heart and his heart beat in unison. “He was not only a commander, but a comrade fighting with his men.” Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and the Irish regiment adored Cleburne, and Cleburne returned their love. “To my noble division,” he wrote to a lady, “and not to myself, belong the praises for the deeds of gallantry you mention.” Cleburne’s division had its own flags, and on each was worked a device of “crossed cannon inverted,” and the name of the battle-fields over which it had been carried. “Prior to the battle of Shiloh,” says General Hardee, “a blue battle-flag had been adopted by me for this division, and when the Confederate battle-flag became the national colours, Cleburne’s division, at its urgent request, was allowed to retain its own bullet-ridden battle-flags.... Friends and foes soon learned to watch the course of the blue flag that marked where Cleburne was in the battle. Where this division defended, no odds broke its lines where it attacked, no numbers resisted its onslaught—save only once—and there is the grave of Cleburne and his heroic division.” Now at Chickamauga, Cleburne and forty-four hundred bayonets swung into battle to the support of Breckinridge. Before Cleburne, also, at short range, were breastworks, and now from these there burst a tempest of grape and canister, with an undersong of musketry. It was a fire that mowed like a scythe. Wood’s brigade had to cross an old field bordering the Chattanooga road, an old field marked by a burning house. Crossing, there burst against it, from hidden batteries to right and left, a blast as from a furnace seven times heated. Five hundred men fell here, killed and wounded. On the left Lucius Polk’s brigade came against breastworks cresting a hill covered with scrub oak. Blue and grey engaged with fury. Down poured the blast from the ridge, canister and grape and musketry. Lucius Polk’s men lay down behind the crest of a lower ridge, and kept up the fight, losing in no great time three hundred and fifty officers and men. Deshler’s brigade moved forward. A shell came shrieking, struck Deshler in the breast, and killed him. Cleburne shook his head. “Too much loss of good life!”—and withdrawing the division four hundred yards, took up a strong defensive position.
Breckinridge and Cleburne, there was loss of life enough. What was gained was this: Thomas called for reinforcements, and Rosecrans, to strengthen his left, began to weaken his right. To the aid of Baird and Johnson, Palmer and Reynolds behind the breastworks, came first a brigade of Negley’s division, then regiments from Palmer’s reserve, and then from the left troops of McCook and Sheridan.
The divisions of Gist and Liddell, Walker’s corps, moved to the aid of Breckinridge, Gist throwing himself with fury against the works before which Helm had fallen. It was eleven o’clock. Bragg ordered in Stewart’s division. The three brigades—Clayton, Brown, and Bate—charged under a deadly fire, “the most terrible fire it has ever been my fortune to witness.” Brown’s men, exposed to an enfilade, broke, but Clayton and Bate rushed on past the clearing, past the burning house, past the Chattanooga road. They drove the blue within entrenchments, they took a battery and many prisoners. Thomas sent again to Rosecrans, and Rosecrans further weakened his right. His adjutant forwarded an order to McCook. The left must be supported at all hazards, “even if the right is drawn wholly to the present left.” After Van Cleve had been sent, and Sheridan and Negley, there came yet another message that the left was heavily pressed. The aide bringing it stated that Brannan was out of line and Reynolds’s right exposed. Rosecrans sent an order to Wood, commanding a division—