The War Raged On: A Short Story Read online

to identify who fought for which side. In death there were no politics to separate them, only the clothes on their backs could distinguish them from one another.

  Although his mother never spoke badly of either the northern states or the southern states, he knew she still loved the south with all of her heart. Once, when he was 11, he’d found a letter from his aunt in Tennessee and inquired about it. His mother began sharing details of the letters with him, mostly about his cousin Samuel, only 3 months younger than Jeremiah. Although they were raised hundreds of miles apart, and never met each other, from his mother’s description they sounded exactly the same. Maybe if the war ever took him to Tennessee he could try to find Samuel. It shouldn’t be too hard to find the Galloway plantation in Franklin.

  The men he fought against were nameless, faceless enemies. Some of the gray clad soldiers down the hill died from shots fired from his rifle. Tomorrow morning he’d march away from here to the next battle and do it all over again. Hopefully, the next battle wouldn’t involve as much bloodshed, but Jeremiah was ready for it now. Then, if he hadn’t made it to Franklin by the end of the war, he’d make a trip there to meet his family. He drifted off to sleep, visualizing that day in his head.

  Only two miles from where Jeremiah fell asleep, Samuel awoke, just before dawn, to a booming voice directing the men to begin marching forward.

  “Two miles away,” the officer, perched atop his muscular white horse, recited, “lies a ravaged Confederate unit. Surprised while on march yesterday, and almost decimated during battle, your job is to provide reinforcement for the surviving men. Our men retreated, leaving the Union army believing the battle was over. We must engage the remains of their army while they are vulnerable and unaware of our presence.”

  The officer rode to the front of the line while the men hastily gathered their few belongings and immediately fell into a march. The first mile flew by too quickly for Samuel. He always dreaded marching into battle. With each step his stomach lurched and tumbled. It always felt like a death march to him. He knew some of the men around him really were marching to their death. Glancing around he wondered who wouldn’t be making the return trip with them tonight.

  As they drew nearer to the battlefield, the landscape around them abruptly changed. Thousands of green leaves, once covering the thicket of trees around them, carpeted the ground under their feet. The bare trees, now stripped of their summer glory from massive cannon fire, were eerily haunting in the early morning light. The air reeked of smoke, and Samuel cringed at the thought of how bad the fight must have been if the smoke still lingered hours later. He knew they must be drawing close to their destination as the smell of smoke gave way to a much more putrid odor. It was the same foul smell that attacked his senses at Shiloh two years earlier, the stench of rotting bodies. That second day at Shiloh was the first time Samuel became aware of how fast human flesh decays in the blazing summer sun. Now here he was, about to enter another Shiloh. Lucky to survive the first one, he feared his luck would soon run out.

  Reaching a clearing in the woods, Samuel’s stomach dropped at the site of hundreds of dead and dying men littering the ground in front of him. Hearing the command to “CHARGE!”, the men in Samuel’s unit rushed into the open field, completely surprising the sleepy federal troops remaining there. Samuel, so caught up in making it across the sprawling field alive, and not wanting to see the carnage lying at his feet, refused to look down. Halfway across the field, he tripped over a heavy object and toppled to the ground. Without thinking, he reached down to push the obstruction away. His hand closed around something hard and wet. Looking at his hand in horror, he clasped the bloody lower leg of a fellow soldier. Gagging, he tossed the leg bone aside, wondering how many more pieces of that unfortunate soul lay scattered nearby. Samuel, knowing cannon fire obliterated everything in its path, didn’t want to find out the answer. Scrambling back to his feet, he spotted a small entrenchment about 75 feet away and dashed toward it like a sprinter nearing a finish line.

  Throwing himself into the entrenchment, he closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Opening them again, he watched men he’d marched next to all night fly by in pursuit of fleeing Union soldiers. With each explosion of nearby gunfire, Samuel watched men lurch, grab at their bodies, and crumple to the ground like rag dolls. A few of the mangled, bloody bodies fell into the ditch next to him, their lifeless eyes staring up at him. Samuel tried to ignore their gaping wounds and expressionless faces, but that was impossible with them lying next to him. As shots rang out again, another injured soldier stumbled into the hole, falling on top of Samuel. The boy groaned in pain, holding his stomach with his right hand and reaching for Samuel’s left arm with his free hand. Looking into the innocent blue eyes of a teenage boy who had recently joined the unit, Samuel felt nauseous. He slowly removed the boy’s hand from his stomach and viewed the mortal wound. He held the shaking boy in his arms and slowly stroked his blond hair in an attempt to soothe him. Then, knowing death was inevitable, he rolled the boy off of his lap and onto the ground next to him. As the shaking boy stared up at him blankly, he couldn’t bear to look the child in the eyes. Rolling the soldier onto his back, Samuel did the only humane thing he could think of. He picked up his rifle, aimed it at the young boy, and fired. Within seconds, the shaking ceased and the body lay motionless. Samuel ran the back of his hand across his check wiping away an unexpected tear. Nothing about war was easy, he thought to himself, turning away from the boy’s body.

  Samuel knew he couldn’t just lie in the shelter of a ditch all day. If he didn’t fight back, eventually he’d end up surrounded by Yankee soldiers. The last thing he wanted was to be taken as a prisoner of war. No one knew what would become of the countless men taken as prisoners when the war finally ended, and no one knew when the end would come. When the war began in 1861, many people believed it would only last a couple of months, but here they were still slaughtering each other three years later. The only choice he had was to keep fighting for his life and hope that when the war finally did end that he’d be alive to see it. Mustering enough courage to continue his assault on the opposing army, Samuel quickly popped his head out of the entrenchment with his rifle aimed, ready to fire at anything in his path.

  Earlier that morning when the first line of confederate reinforcements broke through the tree line at the edge of the field, Jeremiah woke, startled and confused at the commotion around him. Men were running in every direction, picking up their weapons, and searching for shelter from the shower of bullets headed in their direction. It only took spotting one gray clad figure in the open field for him to know that the Confederate army had sent more troops during the night. He silently cursed his commanding officer for ordering his men to remain on the field for the night, overly confident that the rebel army was too decimated to muster any kind of fight the next morning. Wasn’t the first time his officer was wrong, Jeremiah thought bitterly, rushing to hide behind a nearby tree.

  Surveying the disaster before him, he tried to negotiate his way around the field in his head. Off to the right sat the wall of Union cannons. Artillery men rushed behind the wall, prepping the cannons for an assault on the tree line the rebels continued to emerge from. Jeremiah, with no intentions of becoming a jigsaw puzzle courtesy of his own army, ruled out the right side of the field. To his left a group of rebels who successfully eluded the bullets whizzing past their heads, now engaged in a brutal hand to hand combat with the startled Union soldiers. The only other option was to weave his way through the center of the field to the entrenchments waiting there. Without the protection of the thickets surrounding the field, his death was almost certain. It made more sense to remain cowering behind the safety of his tree, but Jeremiah’s pride outweighed his common sense. Real men didn’t hide from danger, he convinced himself, even if it meant giving up their lives.

  Jeremiah reminded himself why he was in this situation in the first place. He’d enlisted thinking the war would end quickly. He never imagined a rebel army coul
d wage war for more than a few weeks, let alone a few years. For a long time he couldn’t fathom how they were still able to deflect an attack from the Union army. The south was outnumbered. Not only did the Union have more soldiers, they had more ammunition, more industry, more food, more everything in Jeremiah’s view.

  He left the comfort of his hiding place and scurried several hundred feet across into the open terrain before flinging himself on the ground amid the growing masses of fallen men. Panting, he kept his rifle aimed toward the advancing rebels. When the firing slowed briefly while most of the men reloaded their guns, Jeremiah leapt to his feet and dashed a few hundred more feet across the field. Seeing the men raising their rifles to resume firing, he threw himself on the ground again. He slowly and methodically worked his way through the barrage of bullets, running while the rebels were reloading and dropping to the ground just before they began firing again. Just as he stepped in front of the entrenchment, a rebel soldier popped his head out from inside and Jeremiah found himself staring down the barrel of an