Shiloh - A Walk In History

                                                    Shiloh

        The soft drizzle that had fallen all night ended by five this morning.  The gray fog blurring the dark tree line beyond the dirt road was starting to burn off as the sun rose higher over the trees.  From the window of the white cinder-block building I can see the muddy back road which leads into the national park at Shiloh.  In the large room behind me the boys are out of their warm sleeping bags and dressing in the tan and green uniform of the Boy Scouts.

        Shiloh is the site of the bloodiest battle in the western theater of the Civil War.  For two days in this lush, green country, cut by many small gullies and streams, almost 110,000 men from the North and South fought.  The Battle of Shiloh made a national hero of one general and killed another.

        By seven the grass is dry and the scoutmaster and I are walking on a well-worn trail a hundred yards behind a group of ten exuberant boys.  This is the way it always begins.  The old men trailing behind and the troops foraging ahead.  This arrangement will not last.

        In March of 1862, the Union Army, twenty miles ahead of General Ulysses S. Grant, was camped at Pittsburg Landing on the west bank of the Tennessee River.  This was part of a campaign that would to lead to the capture of the Mississippi River Valley cutting the Confederacy in half.  Facing Grant's army was a Confederate Army at Corinth, commanded by General Albert Sidney Johnston.  On the sixth day of April, Johnston sent his army north and, covered by an early morning fog fell on the sleeping Union troops.

        By ten in the morning the old men and young scouts have covered five miles of winding hardtop roads and narrow grassy trails.  Throughout the park are plaques that mark the location and time of the events that happened on those two days in April.  The boys are still ahead as the old men stop to read these footnotes of history.

        In the late afternoon of that first long, hot day in April, the Gray sea had pushed the Blue wall to within yards of the Tennessee River.  On the crest of the last hill before Pittsburg Landing, Grant positioned every cannon that could be rescued from the Confederate advance.  As the Southern tide swept up from the gully of the Dill branch creek, these cannon changed the gray wave to small, still, red pools in which broken men floated.

        By noon the boys have reached the half-way point of the hike.  This is a place that is just West of Pittsburg Landing, at what is called Grant's last line. Here is located a park store, a museum, a small theater, the park headquarters, and the National Cemetery.  In this quiet place, scattered around the green lawn, among the tall trees and marble markers, are black cannon of iron and steel, all with muzzles aimed to the south.

        That night the battle was over for too many men.  The cries for water from the wounded and dying could be heard throughout the dark green wood.  For those who could still move, the one pond between the two armies became a peaceful meeting place where all men came to drink and some men came to die.  That night it received the name it carries today, Bloody Pond.  Grant used large white paddle-wheel boats on the Tennessee River to bring fresh troops from the rivers East bank and then to serve has makeshift hospitals for those who could reach them, both Blue and Gray. Earlier that afternoon General Johnston had bled to death when an artery in his leg was torn open by a musket ball.  That night there were no more Southern men to give to the battle.

        The old men, now somewhat ahead of the plodding boys, lead the way past the ten-mile marker, a monument erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy.  It is now becoming still as late afternoon enters the park.  Only a few brightly colored birds sing in the trees and a single red squirrel rustles in the leaves along the edge of the trail.

        As the sun burns off the early morning fog of April 7, 1862, the Union Army, now reinforced, charge out of its hard-held position and drive the Confederate Army south toward Corinth.  The cost of this two-day dance of death, 4,000 husbands, fathers, and sons dead, 16,000 husbands, fathers, and sons maimed.

        In the late afternoon the scoutmaster and I set on the porch of the white cinder-block building with two large, cold, half drunk cokes resting on the steps between us.  Down the dusty road leading from the park, we can see ten tired, footsore boys creeping in our direction and, around them we can almost see the transparent shapes of men in older uniforms with flags still unfurled.  We strain and can almost hear the sound of beating drums coming from deep in the distant forest.  The boys hear nothing and, the only thing they see is the ground beneath their dusty feet.