The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins Read Free Book Online Page B

Robinett, bodies lay crumpled, heaped, and tangled together on the ramparts, arms thrown over legs, legs over hips.
    In the ditch before Robinett, Union soldiers found the corpse of Rogers. They propped him up for a photo, his eyes open and staring at the sky, his beard and face blacked with powder, his coat torn open, and his sleeves pushed up, businesslike, to his elbows. A young Iowa infantryman counted fifty-four other forms in the ditch with Rogers, including a regimental chaplain, a boy no older than fifteen, and Rogers’s horse.
    Soldiers wandering the fields came across odd, spectral images. Aconical shell was embedded in the center of one of the huge oak trees sheltering Robinett; it had almost passed through the trunk, but not quite, its point just showing on the other side. In some sun-baked parts of the battlefield, bodies had turned black from the heat and gunpowder.
    In another place, someone had lifted a stiff-dead Union soldier and braced him against a tree, his gun in hand, as at parade rest.
    October 11, 1862, Holly Springs, Mississippi
    The bloodied, beaten Confederates’ trail away from Corinth could be followed by their discarded gear: gray coats, blankets, guns, canteens, knapsacks, broken wagons. To one federal, there was “evidence of great demoralization, in the way their arms and equipment were strewn upon the road. More and more was to be seen as we advanced. Finally their wagons were abandoned and much commissary stores were left, until one might think that everything they had” was thrown away. Troops patrolling through the surrounding thickets came across Southerners who simply sat, still, staring into space, and refused to move.
    Van Dorn, distraught with the epic extent of his failure and frantic to recover, considered turning around and trying another assault. His generals furiously argued him out of it. Price thought Van Dorn was almost crazed, his mind “rendered desperate by misfortune,” and Maury accused him of loving danger for its own sake. As it was, the army was hard-pressed to recross the Hatchie River without getting cut off. Only the slowness of Rosecrans’s pursuit allowed them to get away, and not before another 452 men were lost. The rebels worked desperately to lay planks over an old dam, and from there, they slogged disconsolately through rain, back toward their headquarters at Holly Springs.
    The battle of Corinth was one of the most costly of the war for the South. A number of Confederate companies were “almost annihilated,”and Van Dorn’s army was “shattered.” In two days of fighting, he had wrecked two of his three divisions and suffered a horrifying casualty rate of 35 percent. In some places “the dead bodies of Rebels were piled up … eight and ten deep,” and in one spot two hundred bodies were arrayed as if in one long, thin coffin.
    Strategically, the loss was “crushing” for the Confederacy, as General Grant put it, for it closed off Southern transportation lines, gave Grant control of northern Mississippi, and opened the way for his campaign against Vicksburg. General Sherman, nearby in western Tennessee, heard Southerners “openly admit that their cause had sustained a death-blow.”
    But to Newton and the other infantrymen who trudged into Camp Rogers at Holly Springs, the loss was more personal. They were past endurance, done in with fatigue, disheartened, and filled with disgust at their officers. Van Dorn was to be court-martialed: there was talk that he had been drunk. Other commanders had been incompetent. During the retreat soldiers were marched in the wrong direction and then countermarched, and many were half-starved for want of food. Even when they reached camp at Holly Springs, there were shortages of everything, including tents. Worst of all, some of the wounded had been abandoned or lay uncared for.
    A train, at least five cars long, was left overnight full of men with undressed wounds, some without blankets, and all of them with