The State of Jones Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mississippi Battalion surged through the woods in massed columns and began a slow but steady progress across a field toward the Union works. There was enough of a breeze to blow the dust and gun smoke away, so that the federals could clearly see the rebels approach; their lines were so long, it seemed they might overlap.
    Newton and other men experiencing battle for the first time were stunned to realize they could actually
hear
the Minié balls flying around them. The thumb-shaped lead bullets weighed an ounce or more, and their buzzing whine gave the illusion that they could be dodged. But that was “as impossible as dodging chain lightning,” remarked an Iowa infantryman named Lewis F. Phillips, “for the savage little ‘zip’ noise they made in passing could not be made ’til they were opposite the ear and gone.” Still, some couldn’t resist ducking. When a man put his hand to his ear, you knew one had just missed.
    Those who were hit likened the feeling to being struck by a club, followed by scalding water. A Minié ball almost invariably shattered a bone and at best left a large, ugly perforation in the flesh, large enough to pass a handkerchief through. Which some surgeons did, to clean the wound.
    The first shell and grapeshot tore into the neat Confederate lines and left sudden gaps, as if the hand of God had swiped men away. Musket fire punched into them and dropped them. Cannonballs ploughed through the woods, shearing off tree limbs and making bark fly. To John McKee of the 2nd Iowa, the man who’d eaten grape pie for supper, the rebels “only came on the faster” in the face of the fire, their colonels in front rallying them onward.
    As the 7th Mississippi Battalion pushed ahead into the open field, climbing through the abatis, two Yankee batteries on a distant hill, eight guns in all, roared to life and further cut them up. Their brigade commander, General Martin E. Green, brought up some artillery to answer, and the sound of orders rang out: “Caisson limbers forward!” Newton and the other infantrymen dropped down and hid behind logs, hugging the ground close, while for the next forty-five minutes the two sides exchanged cannon fire.
    Men were injured almost randomly in the artillery duel. Hugh Carlisle of the 81st Ohio lay facedown in the dirt next to a boy named John, who lifted his head and wiped a drop of blood away from the end of his nose.
    “John, are you hurt?” Carlisle asked.
    “No, I scratched my face when we laid down.”
    A lieutenant said, “John you’re hurt, you better go to the rear.”
    “No, I’m not hurt. I can stay as long as the rest of you.”
    He pushed back his cap, and more blood trickled down his head. He drew a hand across his brow, and a handful of brains came away in his hand.
    “I believe I’m hurt after all,” he said. He went to the rear.
    Shelling did freakish things. An Ohioan lucked out when a shell struck the visor of his cap, knocking him into a daze and turning half his face black, but leaving him otherwise unhurt. Two Iowa companies were lying under a tree when a cannonball blasted into it and sailed clear through the center of the trunk, showering them with splinters but sparing their lives.
    As Newton and the men of the 7th Mississippi Battalion huggedthe ground under the artillery fire, the outfit’s lieutenant colonel, James Terral, organized a charge against the Union batteries that had them pinned. He collected a group of men from Jones and surrounding counties and led them in a rush toward the gun barrels. The men scrambled over obstacles of every kind—fencing, heavy timber, and thick brush—under fire.
    As the rebels came on, the Yankees cut the fuses down progressively, until shells exploded just three-fourths of a second after leaving the mouth of the cannon. Still Terral urged the Mississippians on. The officer, on horseback, surged twenty yards ahead of his men—straight into a blast of fire. A ruddy-cheeked, sleepy-lidded boy from