THE RED POND

THE RED POND IN THE WOODS.

                                                   1,034 words

   I remember the Red Pond. It haunts my sleep these past twenty-five years. Fellow veterans on the Chicago Fire Department want to go back. They still talk about the battle and now our GAR Lodge is organizing a train trip. Civilization must have caught up, for no train ran to Pittsburg Landing in the long ago.    

   I know the war is still part of our lives. We do favors for one another. We try to look out for each other at a bad fire. The war is like an over bearing parent, pointing us in this direction and that and not to be disobeyed. Yet, what I witnessed at the Red Pond makes me start to believe that no country is worth dying for. Sure, we were dumb kids back then, eager for a fight, eager to prove ourselves and save the best government that was ever inaugurated. Then, the boys in blue went on to exterminate the Indian tribes, semi-automatic weapons against sticks and stones. Three hundred murdered at Wounded Knee, alone.

Why do such matters bother me? I do not even go to church, which has put a strain on my marriage these many years. To not go on the trip might be the final straw. She had beat the drums of war back then, eager to see young men off to die, me among them. I thought I was in love, so enlisted to please her. She is very proud of my useless arm and does not hesitate to talk about it to strangers, even. Therefore, I played the coward again, and signed up for the train trip.

We arrived by steamboat back then in the long ago to find a very dire situation. Our army suffered a terrible defeat the previous day 6 April and now lay trapped with its back against the Tennessee River. The enemy expected to drive it into the water, except we arrived 6 April in a terrible downpour. That is how close a call it was. We saved the blundering commander’s hide, but he went on to be president, a very bad one.

Next day, 7 April, became the severest battle fought in the west during the war surpassing even Vicksburg. We became the attacking force, 15,000 of us, whereas the enemy had attacked all day the 6^th. We fought in Gen Nelson’s Division and did not get much sleep as he threw us across the River on the night of 6 April to fight and die in the morning.

We had never been in battle before, but were exceptionally well trained at Camp Douglas in Chicago. Mainly we became proficient in loading and firing our new Springfields. We proved that 7 April. We were on the extreme right of our line, but fighting became general by daybreak. Nowhere was the fight fiercer than in front of Nelson, as we attacked two enemy divisions and turned their right flank. It was like shooting crows in a tree. I fired and reloaded every 20 seconds and never missed seeing my target go down. Suddenly, I felt a terrible blow to my right shoulder that knocked my rifle down, I had taken a Minnie ball that paralyzed my right arm.

Like all wounded, I craved water and crawled away to see if I could find a filled canteen. We had no field hospitals, no ambulance corps. Wounded died where they lay, but this is not the memory that haunts me. I had moved away from our firing line into some deep woods when I heard loud screams and moaning. Soon I came in view of a pond, about fifty yards long and 100 yards wide. Many wounded soldiers lay half in and half out. Enemy soldiers and our soldiers bathing bloody faces and bodies together. Many crawled around in the water in agony. No scene from hell could match the horror.

I stripped off my jacket and shirt to pour water on the wound. It was almost into the chest with the ball still inside. The. Finally, some comrades came along and hauled me away while the battle still raged. The last I saw was that the pond had turned from green to red They loaded me aboard a hospital boat, but the field hospital at Pittsburg Landing had no skilled surgeons, so I ended on another boat that took me to Armory Square in Washington, where I remained eight months and got discharged with a crippled right arm. The Chicago Fire Department hired me as clerk, and now twenty-five years later I am going back, reluctantly. How right I was! For another horror awaited me there, an even worse one than twenty-five years ago.  

Thirty of us slept in a new hotel at Pittsburg Landing, and a boat took us down river to the battlefield, only it looked more like National Cemetery. We found a marker at the spot we fought that morning 7 April. The boys wanted to visit the pond from there. It was only two hundred yards away, and I immediately saw that the water was red. It was supposed to be green again, and I noticed a terrible odor in the air, and all plant life had died along its edges.

I Came close and saw the red was a blood red. How could this be after twenty-five years of rain, snow and drainage? I kneeled down and put my hand in the water. It came out the same as when I bathed my wound twenty-five years ago. I slowly raised my hand to my face and tasted it. The overpowering odor drove me back in terror.

“It is blood! I screamed to my comrades. “It is blood! Not Water! Blood!”

 I remember dimly my comrades carrying me back to the hotel, where a doctor said I had suffered a nervous breakdown. Now, I just rock on my front porch, living on my pensions. Addicted to morphine. Now I know what the red pond is waiting for. It wants all of us to come back, all who bled into it. Then, it will turn green again.