1824: The Arkansas War: Chapter Eighteen

Arkansas Post
October 5, 1824

    Sheff dealt with the first fusillade fired by Crittenden’s men by just gritting his teeth and marching forward. He’d been trained; and, now, clutched to that training the way he’d clutched to the Bible, in other frightening moments of his life.

    They’d been told—told and told and told—to expect this. It was a lesson the Laird himself insisted on imparting to the units in their training.

    Let the bastards shoot first. Some of you will die. Some of you will be crippled and maimed. We all die soon enough anyway, and old age will cripple you and maim you as sure as any musket ball. Just take it. Take it and keep coming. You do that, boys—don’t fire till you get the word—you’ll hammer ‘em. And then you’ll hammer ‘em again, and again, and again, and again. Until there’s nothing left but victory. Those of you who survive standing tall, and the bastards lying bloody in front of you, wailing like whipped curs.

    You don’t matter. The regiment matters. Victory matters. That’s all that matters.

    “Level arms!” Colonel Jones had a good battlefield voice. Real high-pitched. Much more so than when he talked normal-like.

    Sheff had to fight off an instant’s urge to aim, reminding himself that he was holding a regular musket now, not a rifle. There was no point in aiming, in line formation on a battlefield. Just level the weapon at the mass of the enemy.

    “Fire!”

    He even remembered to yank the trigger, instead of squeezing it. So he didn’t embarrass himself by having his shot go off after all the others.

    For a moment, the world seemed to dissolve in a thunderclap. Everything he could see was white. Well, some gray. Gunsmoke always had impurities.

    There wasn’t much wind, so the clouds lingered. All he could see ahead of him was maybe twenty feet—and that, only here and there. But he was too busy reloading to be looking around much anyway, especially since he had to be sure to be the first one in his squad ready.

    “Ten paces forward!”

    That was Sheff’s cue, since he was the corporal. A half-step ahead of the others, he led them through the paces.

    “Level arms!”

    The next man over to his left stumbled back, falling on his rear end and dropping his musket. He’d been shot in the head by one of the many shots being fired by Crittenden’s men, but Sheff paid him no more mind. He didn’t matter. Only the regiment mattered. Only victory mattered. At the moment, Sheff couldn’t even remember the dead man’s name.

    “Fire!”

    Another thunderclap, another dissolution of the world.

    Victory mattered. And Sheff could start to feel it coming. The first angel he’d ever seen approaching in his life.

    Taylor was genuinely shocked by that first volley fired by the Arkansans. He’d never in his life seen such a clear, crisp, perfect volley—from even a company, much less two regiments working together.

    True, his whole experience had been on the frontier, almost entirely fighting Indians. Traditional battlefield tactics weren’t very applicable under such conditions. Still, he’d trained his men, no differently than Driscol had. But he’d never gotten results like this. Not really even close, being honest.

    Winfield Scott had, probably. Jacob Brown, too. But they’d served in the Canadian theater in the war, fighting British regulars.

    It took a few seconds for the huge cloud of gunsmoke produced by that first volley to roll sluggishly over Crittenden’s men. So Taylor was able to see, very clearly, what effect it had.

    The first thing it did was eliminate Crittenden himself. Still racing back and forth when his men began firing singly and indiscriminately, the volley picked him up and hurled him a good five to ten yards. The sword went flying, along with the hand holding it. When his body hit the ground, his right leg came loose at the knee, held to the rest only by the cloth of his trousers and maybe some ligaments. It flopped over onto his hip like the limb of a broken ragdoll.

    Which was a pretty good depiction of him, Taylor knew. Those two wounds alone would probably have killed Crittenden, just from blood loss. But he had to be dead already. At least two or three other rounds must have struck him to have thrown him that far.

    Except for Lallemand’s unit, Crittenden’s whole army reeled back. Gunfighters and roughnecks they might be, most of them, but this was something completely outside their experience. Driscol’s tactics might leave a lot to be desired, but not even Napoleon’s Old Guard or one of Wellington’s elite regiments could have fired a better volley.

    Truth be told, it was outside of Zachary Taylor’s experience also. But at least he understood the matter intellectually. He might not be the same sort of voracious reader of military manuals and accounts that Winfield Scott was, but he had studied his profession. And he’d talked to plenty of officers and men who’d fought British regulars in the war.

    On the battlefield, outside of artillery, the volley reigned supreme. That went far beyond any crude and simple arithmetic. By now, Crittenden’s men might quite possibly have fired just as many shots as had come to them in that opening Arkansas volley. But, first, a much higher percentage would have gone wild. And second—more important still—shots fired singly hit an enemy like a hail of rocks. A volley hit like a landslide; or an earthquake. There was simply no comparison in terms of the key factor of shock.

    Taylor had always known that, abstractly. Now he could see the truth of it with his own eyes. Crittenden’s men weren’t simply torn and bleeding in the body; their minds were stunned.

    They weren’t going to get any respite, either. Lallemand’s unit managed to get off a ragged volley. A number of other individual shots were fired.

    Then—again. The second volley shattered Lallemand’s unit, and they stumbled back in the general inchoate retreat to the river.

    Taylor cursed himself, and started counting. He needed to get a sense of the timing.

    Driscol’s regiments were still advancing. That same, steady, disciplined cadence. Again, the guns came level. Again, a volley.

    He stopped the count, and hissed in a breath. He knew for a fact that not more than one or two regiments in the U.S. Army could fire two disciplined volleys in that short a time—and the Arkansans were going to do it yet again.

    Half-dazed, Charles Lallemand stared down at the corpse of his brother.

    “Henri-Dominique…”

    There was no time for that. He turned, to steady his men and bring them ready.

    But there was no time for that, either. All of them were running away. To a river that was nothing but a trap.

    He leveled a silent curse on Robert Crittenden and his own folly. Then, turned back, thrust his sword into its scabbard, squared his shoulders, and faced the enemy.

    He had no illusions. But he was still a general in Napoleon’s army, even if the Emperor himself was gone. A condemned officer would die by firing squad. Not a hangman’s noose.

    The fourth volley came and granted him his last wish.

    There was nothing left of Crittenden’s army but a shrieking mob, fighting with itself for space in one of the surviving boats along the riverbank. You could hardly call this a battle any longer. That first volley had broken the freebooters like a rotten stick. Now, it was going to be nothing but a massacre.

    For the first time, Taylor was able to get a good look at the banners being carried by the Arkansas color-bearers. That wasn’t the regular Confederate flag, with its simple salmon field and a blue triangle with the six stars of the chiefdoms. The triangle was still there, with the white stars, but the field was now five stripes. The outer two, salmon; the next in, white—and the fifth and center stripe, pure black.

    That’d probably cause a political ruckus amongst the Confederacy’s politicians. But Taylor was pretty sure Driscol was making a point to them, here, just as much if not as brutally as he was to the men who’d invaded Arkansas.

    That black stripe was only one of five, true enough. But even from this distance, Taylor could sense the spirit of those oncoming Arkansas regiments, and the man who commanded them. They might as well have been flying the solid black flag of no quarter.

    “There ain’t no more room!” Thompson shouted. But the man trying to clamber into the already overloaded flatboat wasn’t paying him any attention at all.

    Cursing, Scott Powers managed to pry loose his musket from the mass of men pressed against him in the boat. No way to aim, so he just jammed the butt against the ribs of the man next to him, half-leveled the musket—good enough, at this range—and pulled the trigger.

    The man trying to clamber into the keelboat went into the river, with the top of his skull missing. The man next to Powers, against whom he’s jammed the musket butt, screamed and grabbed his ribs. A couple of them were probably broken.

    There were still too many men on the boat. Even as frontier flatboats went, this one was on the small side.

    The man whose ribs he’d broken was at the keelboat’s port rail. Powers brought the butt up against his jaw—then again; and again—and shoved him over the side. He’d probably drown, now stunned as well as having some broken ribs. But Powers didn’t care in the least. He didn’t care about anything except getting out of this nightmare.

    No one had really noticed what he’d done anyway. Well, except Thompson—but the smile on Ray’s face made it clear he approved heartily.

    Things got better, a moment later. Another one of those hideous Arkansas volleys went off. The flatboat was still close enough to the bank that some of the stray shots hit two of the men in the bow. One went over the side on his own; the other was helped on his way by the man next to him. Clearly a fellow thinker.

    “Let’s get out of here!” Ray shouted.

    The one drawback to being on the side now meant that Powers had to man one of the poles. He didn’t mind the work itself. He’d have willingly labored like Hercules to get them out of there. But there was no way to pole a flatboat except by standing up and making a better target.

    “Damn,” he hissed. Still, it was better than staying there. Anything was better than staying there. Powers was pretty damn sure—would have bet every penny he’d made during his years in the slave trade—that the Arkansans weren’t going to be taking any prisoners.

    So, he heaved himself up and began poling. Ray, the bastard, had managed to squirm still lower into the boat.

    “There they come,” Totten said. “’Bout time.”

    Looking up, Taylor followed the direction of the major’s gaze. Then, brought up the eyeglass.

    So Driscol did have cavalry, after all. Cherokee irregulars. Maybe Creeks. They’d not have been of much use in the battle. Not in tight ground like this.

    But they’d be of use, now. No use Taylor would have put them to, though.

    Well…

    He liked to think so, anyway. But he was fair-minded enough to realize that his way of looking at the world probably wasn’t much the same as the way a freedman did. Especially one who’d been driven out of his home by exclusion mobs and maybe seen some of his family die. If not at the hands of the mob, from the rigors of the forced journey overland to Arkansas.

    He brought the glass back to his eye and swept the terrain. Sure enough. Around three hundred Cherokees or Creeks. Maybe four hundred. It was hard to be certain, between the distance and the fact they were scattering out.

    Inevitably, some of Crittenden’s men were escaping the ever-closing trap on the little peninsula on the south bank of the Arkansas. Some, leaving by boat; others, by swimming downstream; still others, simply by scrambling and running. Driscol was still keeping the regiments in formation, and probably would until almost the very end. So, like a piston driving into a very loose and sloppy cylinder, a lot of steam was escaping from the sides.

    Most of them wouldn’t get far. Not across that terrain, with hundreds of Indian light cavalry hunting them down.

    Another volley came. By now, that was like hammering porridge. But if nothing else was clear to Zachary Taylor about the man they called the Laird of Arkansas, one thing was. All of war, for that man, would be a hammer or an anvil. Beat or be beaten against, he’d not yield at all. Taylor had always wondered a bit, how such a peculiar unit as the Iron Battalion had managed to break British regiments on the Mississippi. He didn’t wonder any longer.

    He brought the glass down to examine the situation at the river. What was left of Crittenden’s army—still a good half of it, in sheer numbers—was now crammed along the bank, many of the men spilling into the water. The Arkansas regiments were still coming, ten paces at a time.

    The volleys were finally ending, though. Now, lifting the glass again, Taylor could see that Driscol had given the order Charge bayonets. The two regiments had their muskets in the proper position, the right hand holding the stock at hip level, the left keeping the barrel and the bayonet about chest high. The bayonet assault would begin momentarily.

    The charge itself was well executed, overall. A bit ragged, finally, but bayonet charges usually were. The emotion involved was intense, and much more difficult to control than ranked volley fire.

    The resistance put up by Crittenden’s men with whatever musket butts, pistols, knives and sabers they had—and could bring to bear, so tightly were they crowded against the river—killed or injured some of the Arkansans.

    Not many, though, and almost none at all once the butchery began.

    Taylor stepped away from the firing slit, and handed the eyeglass back to the aide.

    “Thank you, Lieutenant Morton.”

    “You’re done with it?” Totten asked. “You’re welcome to keep it through to the end.”

    “No need, thank you.” He could have had and certainly no desire, but didn’t. The officers and men in the blockhouse might have taken that as a veiled insult, which it actually wasn’t. Taylor had no difficulty at all understanding why those men, most of whom were black, were watching the scene across the river with an intensity that bordered on fervor. Had they lost this battle, they'd have been butchered or enslaved, their babes murdered, their womenfolk ravaged.

    No, he didn’t blame them. But he wanted no part of watching it, either.

    He decided to go below and find Julia Chinn and her daughters. The sight of those two fresh-faced girls would be good for him. He liked daughters, fortunately, since he had several of his own.

    Sheff would never be able to explain to anyone, afterward, the sensation that swept over him when he plunged his bayonet into the chest of his first victim. As strong as he was, despite his relatively short stature, the narrow triangular blade slid all the way through with no difficulty at all. Prying it out had actually been much harder.

    He’d had the time, doing so, to watch his opponent die. The face, its mouth contorted, eyes wide, had resembled nothing so much as the faces he remembered beating his father to death. Except the froth coming out of this white’s man mouth was bright red, and the eyes were filled with terror instead of glee.

    Welcome to your afterlife, white boy. The direction you’re headed is down.

    The sheer, savage exultation of that moment was like nothing he’d ever experienced in his life. So grand, so glorious…

    And he never wanted to again. Some saner part of him recognized the abyss, and dragged him away from it lest he follow his enemy.

    He slew two more, and probably a third with a strike of the musket butt to the skull. But that was done much as he’d fired the volleys. Effectively, well, according to his training. But what mattered was no longer him, simply the regiment and the victory.

    At the very end, he found himself using the bayonet—the threat of it, at least—to drive off some of the men in his squad. The killing was done, but they’d kept on.

    “Stop it, boys!” He shifted the musket to his left hand and dragged off one of his privates. “He’s dead, Adams. You just mutilatin’ yourself now. Obey me, damn you!”

    Fortunately, the Laird arrived then, and the pointless business ended immediately.

    Sheff took a few deep breaths and looked around. Now that it was over, he was feeling exhausted. Only the superb conditioning of the Arkansas army’s training regimen was keeping him on his feet.

    There was still some killing going on, but that was being done by squads under the direction of officers or sergeants. No bayonet work—there was nobody left alive on the bank—simply shooting at enemies in the water trying to swim downriver.

    There was no room on the bank for Sheff’s squad, anyway. He was more relieved than anything else.

    To his surprise, he saw the Laird was watching. Then, summoned him over with a wave of the hand.

    “Yes, sir?”

    “You’re Parker, aren’t you?”

    “Yes, sir. Sheffield Parker.”

    “One of Crowell’s so-called volunteers?”

    There seemed to be a twist in that craggy mouth, which might be humor. Hard to tell, though, as it always was with the Laird. He really was something of a troll.

    “Yes, sir.”

    The Laird nodded. “If you’re willing to go career, I’ll give you a field commission. Right now.”

    Sheff’s eyes widened. “Sergeant, sir?”

    The Laird chuckled. “I said commission, lad. Second Lieutenant.”

    Sheff couldn’t think of anything to say. Except…

    “I’m just turned seventeen, sir.”

    “I figured. That’s why I’m making the offer. Any lad your age who can… Never mind. Let’s just say I couldn’t have done it at the age of seventeen. Find it hard enough at the age of forty-two. Which is why I’ll always be a sergeant and you’ve got the makings of an officer. So what do you say, Corporal Parker?”

    Now Sheff couldn’t think of anything to say at all. His mind seemed to be a complete blank.

    The Laird waved his hand. “All right, think it over. The offer will stand for a week.”

    He left, then. Attending to whatever business a general attended to, after a victorious battle.

    Once Sheff was sure his squad was settled down, he decided he had a bit of time for personal matters. He went looking for Callender.

    But Callender was gone. Struck down almost at the very beginning. Still alive, apparently, when two of his squadmates carried him off to be loaded into a boat and taken across to the Post. But nobody knew what had become of him since.

    “Oh, blast it,” Sheff muttered. He stared at the carnage all around him. The cleared south bank of the Arkansas River, across from Arkansas Post, was a slaughterhouse. Corpses or pieces of them everywhere he looked, mashed in with enough blood to make them seem like bits of meat in a stew cooked by the Devil.

    There were a few black corpses, here and there, that hadn’t been carried away yet. One white one, also in a green uniform. But nine out of ten—more like nineteen out of twenty—were white men. The same sort of white men who had terrified Sheff all his life, until a short time ago.

    They’d never terrify him again, he knew. And realized also, with genuine surprise, that the main reason wasn’t really that he’d been able to kill them. It was because, now that he’d proven he could, he found himself a lot more concerned over the fate of a white boy who might be dead, than he was over all the ones who most certainly were.

    His uncle Jem was still alive. Alive and uninjured, except for a small powder burn.

    Sheff found him on his knees, praying.

    Probably for deliverance, although he couldn’t make out the murmured words. And probably words from one of Gospels, this time. The day had started as an Old Testament day, sure enough, but Uncle Jem was plenty smart enough to know that it was much wiser for a man to end it in the New. Probably for a black man, even more than a white one.

    And, thankfully, Cal had survived too, although Sheff didn’t find out until late in the afternoon, when his squad was rotated for a rest period in the Post.

    He found Callender in the mess hall, which had been transformed into an infirmary. He was lying on a blanket on the floor, there being no more cots available and—thankfully again—him not being one of the really bad cases.

    He’d suffered the proverbial flesh wound, which had torn through the muscles of his right arm but hadn’t broken the bone. That was something of a minor miracle right there. Sheff knew full well from the accounts of veterans that the .69 and .75 caliber bullets used by most of the muskets on either side of the battle usually pulverized the bone so badly that the only treatment was immediate amputation. Cal wouldn’t even lose the use of the arm, he’d been told by the surgeon who’d given him a quick examination.

    On the other hand, he’d need to spend weeks in recuperation—and the Laird had a rigid policy that soldiers recovering from wounds would be billeted in private residences. He had some sort of peculiar detestation of army hospitals. Called them “guaranteed death houses,” from what the veterans had told Sheff.

    That posed a bit of a problem, though, since the whole McParland clan lived way up in Fort of 98. Too far for Cal to travel, for at least a week or two.

    The problem was solved almost immediately, once the surgeon came back through and pronounced Callender fit to be removed to a billet. For, as it happened, Senator Johnson’s folks had been gathered around him when Sheff arrived.

    He didn’t understand why. Couldn’t even really think about it, since he was too nervous about the one girl—that was Imogene, he thought—who kept her eyes on him the whole time. Real pretty eyes, hazel-colored.

    When the surgeon left, the other twin immediately piped up. A peculiar sort of imperious wail.

    “Mama!”

    Julia Chinn took a deep breath through tight jaws. Then, glared at Callender for no reason Sheff could figure out. Then, glared at him.

    “Oh, Hell and damnation!” she muttered. “Fine. It ain’t worth listening to it for the next God knows how long.” She looked back at Callender and gave him what someone as dumb as a carrot might call a “smile.” It was really just a baring of naked teeth.

    “Mr. McParland. I believe the lodgings Senator Johnson has reserved for us at the Wolfe Tone Hotel are reasonably spacious.” She was talking a lot more formal-like than she had been earlier, too. That was even scarier than the smile.

    “I therefore extend the offer to provide you with billeting in our rooms.” The smile vanished like dew under Sam Hill’s breath. So did the formal speech. “Only till you be strong enough to go to y’own folks, y’hear? Mind me, now!”

    She was even shaking her finger under Cal’s nose, as if he’d done something wrong. Sheff was starting to wonder if the woman wasn’t a little off in her head, or something.

    “Sheff can come sing for him, too!” Imogene said brightly. “Pick up his spirits. That’s important, Mama, for someone’s been hurt so bad.”

    Julia glared at her. Then, swiveled her head and glared at Sheff again. That was about the most unfriendly look Sheff had ever gotten from anyone, except a white man in a killing mood. And he hadn’t done nothing!

    “Is there anything you can do besides sing, boy?” she demanded.

    Sheff thought about it. Well, tried to. Those hazel eyes made it hard to think. Blast it, the girl was only twelve!

    But it made a decision easy. Real easy.

    “Pretty soon I will, ma’am. I’ve been offered a commission in the army. So I’ll be an officer come next week.”

    For some reason—the woman really had to be a little crazy—that just made her glare even more.

    Imogene, on the other hand, was smiling so wide it looked like her face might split in two. Sheff had to remind himself—again—that she was way too young for him to be having any such thoughts like the ones his brain was skittering around like spit on a hot griddle.

    “Well, it’s all settled then,” Adaline pronounced. She was giving Cal a smile just about as wide. And, weak though he might be from blood loss, Sheff could tell that his friend’s brain was skittering around on the same griddle.

    “Oh, Hell and damnation,” Julia repeated.