A Thousand Words a Battle: Shiloh

Battle of Shiloh
April 6-7, 1862

Some of the men who fought at Shiloh, Tennessee, had seen action at Belmont, Mill Springs, and Fort Donelson, but they were the minority. Among the inexperienced was Henry Morton Stanley, a Welshman who found himself in the 6th Arkansas Infantry. In the Union army, there was Ambrose Bierce of the 9th Indiana Infantry. Both men would go on to fame after the Civil War as journalists and writers. For each, Shiloh was a turning point in how they saw the world.

Stanley, among the first to attack the Union camps on the morning of April 6, recalled the anticipation of marching in line, but “thought it strange that a Sunday should have been chosen to disturb the holy calm of those woods.”[1] When the first shots of battle came, it was a moment of intensity as his regiment pressed ahead:

We had no individuality at this moment, but all motions and thoughts were surrendered to the unseen influence which directed our movements. Probably few bothered their minds with self-questionings as to the issue to themselves. That properly belongs to other moments, to the night, to the interval between waking and sleeping, to the first moments of the dawn — not when every nerve is tense, and the spirit is at the highest pitch of action. Though one’s senses were preternaturally acute, and engaged with their impressions, we plied our arms, loaded, and fired, with such nervous haste as though it depended on each

‘They fly!’ was echoed from lip to lip. It accelerated our pace, and filled us with a noble rage. Then I knew what the Berserker passion was! It deluged us with rapture, and transfigured each Southerner into an exulting victor. At such a moment, nothing could have halted us.[2]

On April 7, Bierce’s men marched towards the unsuspecting Confederates at dawn through a forest untouched by the fight; Bierce mused, “It was as if we had broken into glades sacred to eternal silence. I should not have been surprised to see sleek leopards come fawning about our feet, and milk-white deer confront us with human eyes.”[3] Bierce’s column, after advancing slowly for hours, suddenly came under fire.

Then—I can’t describe it—the forest seemed all at once to flame up and disappear with a crash like that of a great wave upon the beach—a crash that expired in hot hissings, and the sickening “spat” of lead against flesh. A dozen of my brave fellows tumbled over like ten-pins. Some struggled to their feet, only to go down again, and yet again. Those who stood fired into the smoking brush and doggedly retired. We had expected to find, at most, a line of skirmishers similar to our own; it was with a view to overcoming them by a sudden coup at the moment of collision that I had thrown forward my little reserve. What we had found was a line of battle, coolly holding its fire till it could count our teeth. There was no more to be done but get back across the open ground, every superficial yard of which was throwing up its little jet of mud provoked by an impinging bullet. We got back, most of us, and I shall never forget the ludicrous incident of a young officer who had taken part in the affair walking up to his colonel, who had been a calm and apparently impartial spectator, and gravely reporting: “The enemy is in force just beyond this field, sir.”[4]

For both men, the experience of battle was a shock. Stanley was overwhelmed by the horror.

As I moved, horror-stricken, through the fearful shambles, where the dead lay as thick as the sleepers in a London park on a Bank Holiday, I was unable to resist the belief that my education had been in abstract things, which had no relation to our animal existence. For, if human life is so disparaged, what has it to do with such high subjects as God, Heaven, and Immortality? And to think how devotional men and women pretended to be, on a Sunday! Oh, cunning, cruel man! He knew that the sum of all real knowledge and effort was to know how to kill and mangle his brothers, as we were doing to-day! Reflecting on my own emotions, I wondered if other youths would feel that they had been deluded like myself with man’s fine polemics and names of things, which vanished with the reality.[5]

Bierce, even as he noted the horrors of the war and its absurdity, felt a longing for the days when he wore blue and marched across the American South.

O days when all the world was beautiful and strange; when unfamiliar constellations burned in the Southern midnights, and the mocking-bird poured out his heart in the moon-gilded magnolia; when there was something new under a new sun; will your fine, far memories ever cease to lay contrasting pictures athwart the harsher features of this later world, accentuating the ugliness of the longer and tamer life? Is it not strange that the phantoms of a blood-stained period have so airy a grace and look with so tender eyes?—that I recall with difficulty the danger and death and horrors of the time, and without effort all that was gracious and picturesque? Ah, Youth, there is no such wizard as thou! Give me but one touch of thine artist hand upon the dull canvas of the Present; gild for but one moment the drear and somber scenes of today, and I will willingly surrender an other life than the one that I should have thrown away at Shiloh.[6]

— Sean Michael Chick

Part of a series.

[1] Henry Morton Stanley, Autobiography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, Dorothy Stanley, editor (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 188.

[2] Stanley, 191.

[3] Ambrose Bierce, Civil War Stories, (New York: Dover, 1994), 7.

[4] Bierce, 11.

[5] Stanley, 196.

[6] Bierce, 17.