Every man almost was out and listening intently. Louder and fiercer the reports came, though still irregular. Now and then, in the intervals, a low, quick crepitation reached us, an undertone that no soldier could fail to recognize as distant musketry. Ominous sounds they were, portending—what? What, indeed, if not actual battle? If a battle, then certainly an attack by the enemy. Were our comrades up at the Landing prepared for it?
The first cannon had been fired scarcely ten minutes, when General Nelson rode by toward headquarters, down in the busiest part of the town, aides and orderlies following upon the gallop. Presently came orders:
'Three days' rations in haversacks, strike tents, and pack up. Be ready to move at a moment's notice. They are fighting up at the Landing.'
There was no need for further urging. By ten o'clock every disposition for the march had been completed. Nearly three long hours more we waited with feverish anxiety for the final command to start, while the roar of that deathly strife fell distantly upon our ears almost without intermission, and a hundred wild rumors swept through the camp. General Grant had gone up the river on a gunboat soon after the cannonading began. It was not long after midday when we struck tents, were furnished with a new supply of cartridges and caps for our Enfields, and waited several minutes longer. At length, however, the column formed, and, though still without orders, except those which its immediate commander had assumed the responsibility to give, the Fourth division was on the march for Shiloh. The Tenth brigade had, as usual, the advance, and, in our regular turn, the Sixth came the third regiment in the column. We had just cleared the camping grounds, I well remember, when General Nelson rode leisurely down the line, his eye taking note with the quiet glance of the real soldier of every minutia of equipments and appearance generally. Some natures seem to find in antagonism and conflict their native element, their chief good—yet more, almost as much a necessity of their moral organism as to their animal being is the air they breathe. Such a nature was Nelson's. His face to-day wore that characteristic expression by which every man of his command learned to graduate his expectation of an action; it was the very picture of satisfaction and good humor. He wheeled his horse half around as the rear of our brigade passed him, and a blander tone of command I never heard than when, in his rapid, authoritative manner, he rang out:
'Now, gentlemen, keep the column well closed up!' and passed on toward the next brigade.
Gentlemen! how oddly the title comes to sound in the ears of a soldier!
From Savannah to the Tennessee, directly opposite Pittsburg Landing, is, by the course we took, perhaps ten miles. The route was only a narrow wagon-path through the woods and bottoms bordering the river, and the wisdom was soon apparent which had beforehand secured the services of a native as guide. Most of the latter half of the distance was through a low, slimy swamp land, giving rank growth to an almost continuous forest of sycamore, cottonwood, and other trees which love a damp, alluvial soil, whose massive trunks were yet foul and unsightly with filth and scum deposited by the receding waters at the subsidence of the river's great spring freshet a month before. Stagnant ponds and mimic lagoons lay all about us and in our very pathway, some of the deeper ones, however, rudely bridged. Very rapid progress was impossible. It had already been found necessary to send our artillery back to Savannah, whence it would have to be brought up on the transports. The afternoon wore on, warm and sultry, and the atmosphere in those dank woods felt close, aguish, and unwholesome. Not a breath of air stirred to refresh the heated forms winding in long, continuous line along the dark boles of the trees, through whose branches and leafless twigs the sunlight streamed in little broken gleams of yellow brightness, and made a curious checkerwork of sheen and shadow on all beneath. Burdened as we were with knapsacks and twenty extra rounds of ammunition, the march grew more and more laborious. But the noise of battle was sharpening more significantly every few minutes now, and the men pushed forward. It was no child's game going on ahead of us. We might be needed.
We were needed. A loud, tumultuous cheer from the Thirty-sixth Indiana came surging down through the ranks of the Twenty-fourth Ohio to our own regiment, and away back beyond to the Twenty-second and Nineteenth brigades in the rear. 'Forward!' and we were off on the double quick. General Nelson was at the head of the column; there a courier had met him—so at least runs the tradition—with urgent orders to hasten up the reënforcements: the enemy were pressing hard for the Landing. Unmindful of all impediments—trees and fallen logs, shallow ponds and slippery mire shoetop deep; now again moderating our pace to the route step to recover breath and strength; even halting impatiently for a few minutes now and then, while the advance cleared itself from some entanglement of the way—so the remainder of our march continued. It seemed a long way to the Landing, the battle dinning on our ears at every step. At length it sounded directly ahead of us, close at hand; and looking forward out through the treetops, a good eye could easily discover a dark cloud of smoke hanging low in mid air, as though it sought to hide from the light of heaven the deeds that were being done beneath it. Suddenly we debouched into a level cornfield, extending quite to the river's verge. The clearing was not a wide one, and the farther bank of the Tennessee was in plain sight—the landings, the bluff, and the woods above stretching away out and back beyond.
What a panorama! The river directly before us was hidden by a narrow belt of chaparral and the drift that had lodged along the banks, but the smoke stacks of three or four transports were visible above the weed stalks and bushes, and the course of one or two more could be traced by a distant, trailing line of smoke as they steamed down toward Savannah. The opposite bank rises from the river a steep acclivity, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet in perpendicular height, down whose sides of brownish yellow clay narrow roadways showed out to the landings below. Cresting the bluff, woods overlooked the whole, and shut in the scene far as the eye could follow the windings of the Tennessee. In their depths, the battle was raging with unabated fury. A short distance up the river, though completely hidden from view by an intervening bend, the gunboats were at work, and even our unpractised ears could easily distinguish the heavy boom of their great thirty-two pounders in the midst of all that blaze of battle and the storm of artillery explosions. Glorious old Tyler and Lexington! primitive, ungainly, weather-beaten, wooden craft, but the salvation, in this crisis hour of the fight, of our out-numbered and wellnigh borne-down left. A signal party, stationed a little above the upper landing and halfway up the bluff, was communicating in the mystic language of the code with another upon our side the river. What messages were those little party-colored flags exchanging, with their curious devices of stripes and squares and triangles, their combinations and figures in numberless variety, as they were waved up and down and to and fro in rapid, ever-shifting pantomime? The steep bank was covered with a swaying, restless mass of blue-uniformed men, too distant to be distinctly discriminated, yet certainly numbering thousands. 'Reserves!' a dozen voices cried at once, and the next moment came the wonder that our march had been so hurried, when whole brigades, as it seemed, could thus be held in idle waiting. We were soon undeceived.
Out into the cornfield filed the column, up the river, and nearly parallel to it, halting a little below the upper one of the two principal landings. Here there was a further delaying for ferriage.