[The following takes place during the American Civil War.]
Green ordered the men forward. “With a wild shout,” the Mississippians leaped across a railroad cut with the rest of the brigade. A command came to charge at the “double-quick.”
It was the last order that could be heard, as at least fifty federal guns opened fire on them. The trembling thunder of artillery was joined by the shrieking, concussive outbursts of shells and the short, almost muffled spat-spat-spat of Springfield rifles, hammers hitting soft gunpowder, followed by the metallic raking of ramrods. “The very atmosphere seemed filled with shot, shell, grape and canister,” Green reported.
Suddenly it seemed as if they were in a rainstorm of blood. Horses plunged and caterwauled, and men screamed incoherently. There was something about such a charge that forced the breath from men’s throats, almost reflexively, without their even knowing it. As one Mississippi soldier recorded in his diary, “I always said, if I ever went into a charge, I wouldn’t holler. But the very first time I fired off my gun, I hollered as loud as I could, and I hollered every breath until I stopped!”
The Confederates sprinted heedlessly forward, over logs and fallen timber toward the Union lines that belched flame and smoke. “Not for a moment did they halt,” observed a horrified Union soldier watching the approaching slaughter. “Every instant death smote. It came in a hundred shapes, every shape a separate horror. Here a shell, short-fused, exploded in the thinning ranks, would rend its victims and splatter their comrades with brains, flesh and blood. Men’s heads were blown to atoms. Fragments of human flesh still quivering with life would slap other men in the face, or fall to earth to be trampled underfoot.”
Source:
Jenkins, Sally, and John Stauffer. “Corinth.” The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy. Anchor Books, 2010. 32. Print.
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