March Toward the Thunder by Joseph Bruchac Read Free Book Online Page A

him by the hand and pulled him up. It had to be Songbird, for he was reciting poetry.
    â€œWe miss full well a comrade’s smile, the grasp of many a friendly hand,” Devlin chanted. “Come on now, Nolette. ’Tis no time yet for a nap.”
    Devlin was alive too. But not Bad Luck Bill. O’Day’s head had been broken open like a melon by a spinning piece of shell. Nor was it likely that Shaky Wilson was still breathing. The last he’d seen Wilson, he was leaning on a fallen tree and trying to hold in a red writhing mass spilling like snakes out of his belly.
    Why is it that I see those men who’ve been killed so clear in my mind, but I can’t recall who else among us isn’t hurt?
    It was strange. Even stranger that all through the confusion of gunshot and smoke, shouts and screams and the sounds of men calling for water or their mothers, not once had he seen the face of an enemy soldier.
    One moment he’d been walking along, moving down the road that had become wider, though the surrounding woods were just as thick. Then he’d heard a sound from the forest. The cracking of twigs underfoot, the tinny sound of a canteen hitting a tree, the sound of a musket being cocked. No time to get back to the company just coming now around the bend. He took a deep breath, shouted.
    â€œAmbush! Get down!!”
    Then he was crouching down, crawling back to the company, the whole of the 69th under fierce fire from an enemy they couldn’t see. What they shot back at were the flashes of flame from rifles thrust out from behind trees and rocks. Louis loaded and fired again, loaded and fired again.
    â€œFollow me, lads,” Sergeant Flynn’s voice bellowed from somewhere in the smoke.
    Some were dead or too injured to stand, but the rest of them rose up to follow the green flag of the Irish Brigade. Through the smoke and the mist, the only ray of light visible was that bright design of a sun bursting through the clouds above an Irish harp and the words Faugh-a-Ballagh . “Clear the way.”
    Clear the way.
    Those words kept going through his mind as Louis ran and stumbled and fired, loaded and fired again at flashes of flame and gray shapes that wavered in and out of sight like ghosts.
    Then they were in another clearing, this one littered with what looked like sticks bleached white by the sun. Until O’Day spoke the words that made them all look again at the scattered piles.
    â€œThere’s dead men’s bones all around us,” Bad Luck Bill yelled—just before the shrapnel found his skull.
    It was later that Louis learned how another terrible battle had been fought between Blue and Gray for the same wilderness a year ago. So bloody and brutal that the bodies of the dead were left unburied. As Louis pushed his way through the woods, he saw the ghastly remains of that struggle again and again. A rib. A long leg bone. A gap-toothed skull. Sometimes, next to those remnants of what had been a breathing human like himself, the rusted remains of a canteen, a bit of tattered cloth, the rotting bill of a cap too worn by the weather to say which side it was from. By the bank of a little creek, Louis came across skeletons of three horses half buried in sticky mud.
    It was moist in the creek bottoms, but the rest of the land was as dry as those abandoned bones. So dusty dry that muzzle blasts from muskets began touching off fires. Artillery was coming into play now, the Union gunners shooting blind. Where shells struck, bigger blazes roared into infernos. Blue and Gray soldiers caught in the path were burned alive, especially the wounded as they tried to crawl to safety.
    â€œHelp,” someone had called.
    A hand reaching up from the smoke. Louis grabbed it, dragged the man from the blinding fire that crackled hot at their heels until they stumbled into one of the small streams that meandered through the thick forest.
    The wounded man was stripped of his coat, had