Distant Flame

May 22-31, 1864

May 22-31,1864 ALLATOONA TO DALLAS O ACH TIME CHARLIE THOUGHT he was awakening, a gray, crowding cloud would descend upon him, elemental and roaring, full of voices and horses, hail on a shingled roof, artillery caissons creaking on bridge slats. Once he thought he smelled apricots, rich and tart. Someone said, "Bloody flux," and another said, "Crack in the cascabel ." Then he was descending again, frayed, awkward as a spring colt. The sound of water ran close beneath him on a swaying bridge, pouring like an open wound across the countryside, but there were also insect sounds, so they moved in silence, in darkness. Charlie awoke finally into darkness. He tried to sit up, but his skull was monstrous and clotted. He was in woods at the edge of a field, and below him thousands of campfires blinked like dying stars. Then, a drone: prayer. He pushed himself up on his elbow and fell back, did it again, and the blast shattered his skull, a heavy pain, and he thought he would vomit. He flailed and found himself on a litter, on the ground, with a blanket over him, and his crotch itched a little, and the pestilence spread up into the hair in his armpits. He breathed through his mouth for a long time, and then tried to sit up again, and this time he managed, but his head fell forward, and only with a groaning effort did he raise it. Thousands of men knelt behind their clasped hands. Not far away, a E A Distant Flame 141 soldier without a coat dripped water from a dented tin cup on the heads of soldiers, moving down the line, just a few drops each. Charlie balanced, felt the crusted bandage on his head. Then the throbbing took him, but he decided to bear it. After a few moments, the stench came, sweated clothes, urine and excrement, and something else, a hint of rot or worse. A man next to him on the ground groaned and shuddered , and Charlie looked at him, a fellow too old for war and who bore a suppurating wound in his chest. When he wheezed, air squeaked from the hole in his lungs. A coughing broke out, contagious, it seemed. Charlie looked down at his chest and his legs and sawno blood or shattered bones, felt no pain from them as he shifted in the blanket. The night was stifling, as if a thunderstorm were near. Charlie saw no stars. "For the love of God, would you look at this," a voice said, sounding far away at first then coming very near. Charlie lifted his head, but the effort was exhausting. He focused on a man striding toward him, stepping around the wounded, perhaps even the dead. "At what," said Charlie, but his throat was so dry the words cracked off his tongue, seemed to spill down into his lap. He crawled backward on his elbows and lay down. He realized only then that he had wet his pants, no doubt more than once. Nothing worse, perhaps. "Charlie, boy, it's your lord and savior Duncan McGregor, who brained you afore you could have yourself shot at Cassville," he said. "And it's some effort for a man with a shot arm to brain a friend, I'll grant you that." "What's happened?" "What's happened is just as we were about to go forth under General Johnston at Cassville, the bleeding Federals flanked us again," said Duncan. "Now we're south of the Etowah River and they say not fifty mile from Atlanta. Nothing's happened for two days, but they say there's a battle aborning tomorry. Asto what happened to you, I believe that in the heat of things you'd lost what little reason you had, and I rushed forth and tapped you a mite on the back of the head with my rifle butt. But in my holy errand I seemed to have tapped you a mite harder than I had planned." "My head is killing me." "I'm sure it is that, and it was only with the compliments of the kind General Patrick Cleburne himself that we have kept you off your pain with morphine, but there's little left to share now. Most of the wounded 142 PHILIP LEE WILLIAMS and sick have been evacuated to Atlanta. We hear it's overrun with...