Unholy Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

their arms and muskets to paddle back toward Harrison’s Island.
    It had also started raining very hard. The drops were roiling the water around the boat like a summer storm lashing the surface of a pond. I remember being puzzled not to feel any moisture on my face. Then I realized it wasn’t rain.
    I looked back toward the top of the bluff. All the brilliant red-and-gold foliage was gone, destroyed by the musket fire. Confederate soldiers stood several rows deep along the crest and were firing down at the men still trying to get away. For the Southern boys, it was nothing more than a grand turkey shoot.
    For those of us down below, it became a desperate race for survival. Many of the men had shed their equipment and were trying to swim for it. They were shot as they struggled in the water, trying to make headway against the strong current. A hundred others who couldn’t swim, or were afraid to try, just huddled along the riverbank as volley after volley of murderous fire poured down on them.
    Johnny Harpswell was beside me in the skiff, his boyish face streaked with dirt and blackened powder. He was churning the water with the butt of his rifle in a fine, fast, rhythmic cadence.
    â€œSo this is your reward for being the stroke of the Harvard crew,” I said.
    Grinning, he was about to give me a proper retort when his head jerked to the side and a fountain of blood, bone, and teeth burst from his open mouth. A ball had struck him in the lower jaw, carrying most of it away. The exposed muscles in his upper jaw were still expanding and contracting as the force of the ball took him over the side.
    I must have fallen unconscious again because when I next opened my eyes I was lying on the ground and a large, hairy, sad-eyed man was leaning over me, examining my wound.
    â€œSo … thirsty,” I whispered.
    â€œI cannot let you drink, Lieutenant,” he said in a shaking voice. “But I must do something with your vitals. They are covered with hen grass and dirt.”
    I was fully awake now and the pain was coming in stabbing waves. Oddly, it seemed to be centered in my groin at first, although I was not wounded there. As I turned away from the obscenity of my exposed viscera, he gently rinsed them using an oaken bucket filled with river water. After repacking the entrails into my stomach cavity, he covered my abdomen with a strip of clean cheesecloth.
    Tears were streaming silently down his face as he finished the job. Before moving on, the great hairy beast knelt on the ground next to me, just staring into my face and mouthing what might have been a prayer. Then his face drew closer and closer to my own until I felt the pressure of his lips on mine. It was only for a second, and then he was gone.
    God knows what possessed him to do it. Perhaps, he was overcome with emotion. I’ll never know. It was certainly not the kiss I had been longing for. As the pain grew to raw torture, I concluded it was God’s way of mocking my lustful prayer before the battle.
    I raised my head high enough to see that I was lying in one of the pastures around the old farmhouse on Harrison’s Island. Hundreds of wounded men were scattered along the ground in every direction. One day earlier we had all been full of confidence, standing proud with our shiny muskets and handsome uniforms, part of a seemingly unstoppable force. God help the Rebels I had thought then. Now we were just individual mounds of filthy rags, stinking from sweat and urine, and dying in agony.
    An elderly surgeon came along as night descended. He briefly examined each man, after which he pinned a colored card on the man’s chest. The cards were red and blue. When he came to me, he leaned over, raised the edge of the now blood-soaked cheesecloth from my stomach, and without any expression in his face pinned a red card on my chest. Then he poured some amber liquid into a tin cup and helped me to swallow it.
    â€œThis is laudanum,” he