Terrible Swift Sword Read Online Free PDF

telling him: "You
must either fight beside us or look on at a safe distance and see us fight all
alone the army you dare not attack even with our aid." 12 In
the end Price won the argument by putting himself and his entire command under
McCulloch's orders; and McCulloch at last ordered that on the night of August 9
the combined force take to the road and crush Lyon's army.
    Defective military equipment can modify
tactics. It rained that night, and McCulloch—reflecting that the men had no
proper ammunition boxes but carried their paper cartridges in cloth haversacks,
where they would almost certainly get soaked on a march in the rain—canceled
the orders. 18 It made little difference, in the end, because at the
same time Lyon issued his own orders for an attack on the Confederates, and on
the morning of August 10 the two armies collided in a remarkably bloody battle
at Wilson's Creek.
    Lyon's
plan was bold—the sort of plan that is called brilliant if it works and
foolhardy if it fails. His troops plodded out of their camp in the evening
drizzle. Sigel, with 1200 men, swung south on a wide flanking march, to come in
on the Confederate right and rear. His men were ragged, wearing gray shirts
trimmed in red, many of them shoeless, some of them lacking pants; they looked,
indeed, much like the Arkansas and Missouri soldiers, which led to a good deal
of confusion during the fight. While Sigel was moving, Lyon with the rest of
the troops—4200 men, or thereabouts—marched straight ahead to fall on the
Confederate center and left. Lyon apparently shared McCulloch's feeling:
Price's Missourians were so poorly trained and armed that he could attack
despite their advantage in numbers.
    Just
before the columns moved, Lyon rode down the lines on his dapple-gray horse,
telling the men they were about to go into battle, urging them to fire low, and
repeating: "Don't get scared; it's no part of a soldier's duty to get
scared." As an inspirational eve-of-battle speech, it was not a success;
Lyon looked exhausted and spoke in a monotone, and one of the Iowa
irrepressibles was heard to mutter: "How is a man to help being skeered if
he is skeered?" 14 Some time after midnight the men halted for a rest. At daylight they moved on
and the battle was begun.
    Just at first things went well for the
Federals. Sigel got into position, wheeled up his artillery, and routed a camp
of Confederate cavalry, then led his men forward across an open valley to
press bis advantage. But this move was made slowly and inexpertly; McColloch
saw that the force was not large, and put on a sharp counterattack; Sigel's men
broke and fled, abandoning five guns and streaming away so incontinently that
the battle saw them no more, Sigel himself going all the way back to
Springfield, the private soldiers going off every which way. 16 Lyon,
meanwhile, drove in the pickets in his front and got into a savage fight on a
low ridge, an open meadow and a strip of timber, where he quickly learned that
he had been mistaken about Pap Price's militia. The ridge became known that day
as "Bloody Hill."
    It
was a small battle but a very hard one, devoid of tactical subtleties once
Sigel's flanking move dissolved. It came down to simple head-on slugging, on a
battlefield hardly more than half a mile wide—the smallest major battlefield in
all the war. A Confederate officer said about all that needs to be said of it
when he called it "a mighty mean-fowt fight." Now and then, inexplicably,
silence would fall on the field, while the two armies caught their breath; then
the fighting would flare up again, deep smoke settling on the ground, the
opposing lines no more than fifty yards apart. Pap Price kept riding to the
front to see what the Federals were up to, his men calling to him to get back
out of danger; on the Federal side, Lyon was twice wounded and his horse was
killed, and he confessed to an aide that he feared the day was lost. Strange
little pictures survive: the 1st Iowa