White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke

looked
into space, his jaw flexing. "I was glad."
    Willie turned and looked at
Jim's profile, a gunpowder burn on his right cheek, the bitter cast in
his eye.
    "They're no different from us,
Jim," he said.
    "Yes, they are. They're down
here. We didn't go up there."
    A young lieutenant strolled
through the enlisted men sitting on the ground. He wore a goatee that
looked like corn silk, and a wide-brimmed cavalry officer's hat, with a
gold cord strung around the crown, a bared sword carried casually on
his shoulder. Blood had drained from inside his coat onto the leather
flap of his pistol holster.
    "Our cannoneers are about to
start banging doors again, gentlemen. Then we're going to have another
run at it," he said.
    "We been out there eleven
times, suh," a private on the ground said.
    "Twelve's a charm. Stuff your
fingers in your ears," the lieutenant said, just as over twenty cannons
fired in sequence, almost point-blank, into the sunken road and the
woods beyond.
    Then the cannon crews began to
fire at will, the barrels and gun carriages lurching off the ground,
the crews turning in a half-crouch from the explosion, their hands
clamped over their ears. They swabbed out the barrels, then reloaded
with more caseshot, canister, and grape. They snipped the fuses on
explosive shells so they detonated as airbursts immediately on the
other side of the sunken road. When they ran short of conventional
ordnance, they loaded with lengths of chain, chopped-up horseshoes,
chunks of angle iron and buckets of railroad spikes.
    Through the smoke Willie and
Jim could see bits of trees flying in the air, the staff of an American
flag lopped in half, blue-clad men climbing out of their rifle pits,
running for the rear, sometimes with a wounded comrade supported
between them.
    The barrage went on for thirty
minutes. When it lifted, the sun looked like a broken egg yoke inside
the smoke, the acrid smell of gunpowder so dense they could hardly
breathe.
    Willie and Jim advanced across
the clearing with the others, once again the cry of the fox hunt rising
hoarsely from their throats. They
    crossed the sunken road and
stepped over the Federal dead who lay there and entered a woods where trees were split in two, as though divided by lightning, the bark
on the southern side of the trunks hanging in white strips.
    The ground was littered with
Springfield rifle muskets, boxes of percussion caps, ramrods,
haversacks, canteens, torn cartridge papers, entrenching shovels,
kepis, bloody bandages, bayonets, cloth that had been scissored away
from wounds, boots and shoes, newspaper and magazine pages that men had
used to clean themselves.
    Inside the smoke and broken
trees and the fallen leaves that were matted together with blood was
the pervasive buzzing of bottle flies. In the distance, over the heads
of the Confederates who were out in front of him, Willie saw a white
flag being waved by a Union officer in front of a silenced battery.
    The firing ended as it had
started, but in inverse fashion, like a string of Chinese firecrackers
that pops with murderous intensity, then simply exhausts itself.
    Willie and Jim slumped against
a stone fence that was speckled with lichen and damp and cool-smelling
in the shade. Even the sunlight seemed filtered through green water.
Jim's eyes were bloodshot, his face like that of a coal miner who has
just emerged from a mine shaft, his teeth startling white when he
grinned.
    The tall man, with the concave
face, from the 6th Mississippi, walked past them, his body bent
forward. A huge barrel was mounted on his back with leather straps that
were looped around his shoulders. The barrel had been hit in four
places across the middle with either grapeshot or minie balls, and four
jets of water were spraying from the holes, crisscrossing one another
as the man labored with his burden back toward the sunken road.
    "How about a drink, pard?" Jim
said.
    "What's that you say?" the man
asked. His jaws were slack, unshaved, his