THE RED POND

RETURN TO SHILOH              

                                                       1,057 words

          The pond 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 Post is organizing a train trip. Civilization must have caught up, for no train ran to Pittsburg Landing back then.   

 I know the war is the most important part of our lives. We look after one another’s families. 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 pond makes me feel that no country is worth dying for. Sure, we were dumb kids, 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, automatic weapons against sticks and stones. Three hundred women and children 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 this trip might be the final straw. She beat the drums of war loudly back in sixty-one, eager to send young men off to die, me among them. I thought I was in love, so I enlisted to please her. War has a long history of such foolishness. She is very proud of my useless arm and does not even hesitate to talk about it to strangers. Therefore, I played the coward again, and signed up for the train trip

Our regiment had arrived by steamboat that April 6 to find a very dire situation. The army suffered a terrible defeat and now lay trapped with its back against the Tennessee River. The enemy expected to drive it into the water, except we appeared in cold mist and rain as darkness set in, fifteen thousand of us eager for vengeance. 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 proved the severest battle fought in the west during the war surpassing even Vicksburg. We fought in General Nelson’s Division and did not get much sleep as he unloaded my regiment at midnight and sent us to take up positions on the ground for the fight in the morning. We went into the attack determined not to take a backward step.

        My regiment had never been in battle before, but proved well trained at Camp Douglas in Chicago, very skilled in loading and firing our new Springfields. We were on the extreme left of the battle line, and fighting became general by daybreak. Nowhere did the battle rage 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 me down. I had taken a Minnie ball that paralyzed my right arm.

   Like all wounded soldiers, 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 left our firing line for some deep woods where I heard loud screams and moaning. Soon I came in view of a pond, about 50 yards long and 100 yards wide. Many wounded soldiers lay half in and half out of the water. Enemy soldiers and our soldiers bathing bloody faces and bodies together, all animosity lost among our mutual sufferings. Many thrashed around in the water, while a deafening moan covered the scene like a dense fog. Meanwhile, the pond began turning red.

       I stripped off my jacket and shirt to pour water on the wound. I had been struck in the upper right arm, causing agonizing pain. Finally, some comrades came along and hauled me away while the battle still raged. The last I saw the pond had turned 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 Hospital in Washington. I remained seven months and received my discharge plus twenty dollars per month under the 1862 Pension Act for loss of use of a limb. The Chicago Fire Department hired me as clerk, and now twenty-five years later I am going back, reluctantly. How right I was! 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 that stood on the exact spot the field hospital once did. A boat took us down river to the battlefield, only it looked more like a National Cemetery, with grave markers stretching away to far horizons. We tried to find the graves of some comrades who died that day, but the avenues of death carried no signs.

      We did find a monument where we fought that morning April 7, and the boys wanted to visit the pond only two hundred yards away. I saw the water was red as I neared. How could this be after twenty-five years of rain, snow, and drainage? I kneeled down in the same spot I did twenty-five years ago and put my left hand in the pond. It came out the same as when I bathed my wound. I slowly raised my hand to my face and tasted it. An overpowering sweetness drove me back in horror.

     “It is blood!  I screamed to my comrades. “Stand back!  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, and injected me with morphine. 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.