He set his pack down and propped his rifle up next to a post. Silent sentinels surrounding him dutifully watched over the quiet Virginia country side. In the newly awakening fields they were lined up, like blown over picket fences after a storm had passed. In the woods they were haphazardly strewn about. The effect was chilling.

Johnny shuddered, in spite of the warm sunshine, as he pulled his blanket out of his haversack. He had seen horrible things recently, thousands of men cut down, pieces of their bodies flying in every direction. He heard men, mortally wounded, lying in pools of blood, surrounded by ever-growing mounds of comrades and former enemies, pleading for an end in whatever voice they could force out of their shattered bodies. Johnny had answered their prayers, sometimes with vengeance, usually with mercy. He slipped and slid in pools of blood. He bathed and drank from crimson streams. Yet nothing he had seen had prepared him for this sight.

He fished in the pocket of his filthy gray trousers and removed a well-worn pouch of tobacco. As he filled his pipe he was careful to keep his eyes focused on the menial task at hand. Only when he had finished stuffing the bowl and sat down to relax to a quick smoke did he allow himself to take in the horror that engulfed him.

There were thousands of them. The heavy Spring rains had washed away the feeble covers of their shallow graves, turning the make-shift cemetery inside out. It had only been a year since the previous battle raged over this otherwise tranquil land but it seemed like a lifetime had passed. For the remains of the bodies of the soldiers lying silently in the warm afternoon sun, it had.

The Blue and the Gray armies met here last May in a terrible day-long battle. Johnny remembered it with a churning feeling in his gut. Eager, motivated young men clashed together, living out their fantasies of chivalry and grandeur. They intended to continue the time-honored tradition, experiencing the romance of war and warriors. Instead they slaughtered each other. Young city and country boys, using modern weapons too sophisticated for any of them to understand, respect, or fear, under the guidance of equally ignorant leaders who had never studied this type of warfare at West Point, stood in perfect rows in these fields and orchards and blew each other to bits. Both sides, battered and bloodied, staggered away at the end of that day, horrified from their first taste of modern war. Their encounter left disturbing fingerprints on the landscape.

Nature, however, had worked it’s rejuvenating magic on this former battlefield in Chancellorsville, Va. Where last year the fields were covered in human debris left behind by armies at war, flowers now pushed hesitantly up from the fertile soil. In another time this would have been a pleasant sight, one in which Johnny could have reveled while smoking, if not for the many flowers working their way through the bones of the fallen men. It was the most unsettling thing Johnny had ever seen.

Just over the ridge was the spot where General Jackson had been fatally shot, a long, long year ago. In spite of what he knew, Johnny had always kept his silence about that day, but it was something that haunted him to this day. He shuddered and looked away.

This was a much different Johnny than the one that started out to war three years ago. When the cannons opened up on Fort Sumter, in the spring of his twelfth year, a new life opened up for him. His father died when Johnny was eight, leaving him to take over the Tennessee farm. He was of average size, but he worked hard and his tenacity compensated for his stature.

His mother insisted he learn to read. He resisted at first, but once he discovered the stories of the glorious Roman gladiators and the pageantry of war they described, he was hooked. He devoured any book involving military history that he could get his hands on. He taught himself horse and marksmanship, becoming an expert at both, not only because the rural farm life required it, but more importantly, to emulate his military heroes. Studying the campaigns of former generals and admirals, Johnny showed particular interest in the infantry and cavalry tactics developed by Friedrich the Great. He drew them in the dirt and committed them to memory, dreaming of the day he could take his rightful place amongst his own fellow countrymen, fighting for his homeland. He read with a voracious appetite, stealing away time from his chores every possible chance he could, to read by the muddy stream that ran through the east side of the family’s property. He regularly traded books with the old schoolmaster in town who shared his passion and seemed to have an endless supply on hand.

Johnny documented his acquired knowledge, writing in a small black journal he kept with him at all times. He wrote of his future battles and strategies, waiting for his turn. The tone of his journal transformed quickly as his experiences on the battlefields of Tennessee and Virginia taught him the true meaning of modern war. The pages no longer described the glamour he previously associated with war. Previous delusions were swept away by the sights, sounds, smell and taste of mortal combat. The dust, heat, gunpowder, tears and blood lent a sense of realism to his narrative that no homogenized, store-bought book could ever hope to accomplish. The ragged pages of his journal were stained with misery.

In spite of his written accounts, Johnny’s memory had begun failing him a few months ago. The losses were isolated at first - forgetting the name of his faithful hounddog, Fred, drawing a complete blank when trying to tell Otis about his second grade school teacher - but now the incidents ebbed and flowed relentlessly, pounding his head like the turbulent waves of a windy bay.

Johnny no longer knew where he had come from. The Tennessee of his childhood had slipped and faded from his memory. He couldn’t remember his mother’s face. His journal gave him some sense of bearing but it too seemed to be affected by the ominous shadow that enveloped his brain. Pages that had once been full of Johnny’s surprisingly elegant writing were now bleached white like some whale he vaguely remembered reading about. New pages appeared overnight. Other pages, once narrating his escapades long ago on the farm, were now saturated with strange squiggles that Johnny assumed were words in another language. The peculiar markings had worked their way across the pages of his journal until only one entry remained that he could still comprehend. The entry was from less than a year ago and he had read it several times this very morning, fearful it too would mutate into the foreign looking words that contributed to the obliteration of his memory. He read it once again.

_________________________________________________
June 29, 1862-Chickahominy River, Virginia
We spent most of the day stalled at the Chickahominy. It was a welcome rest after all the marchin we’ve been undergoing of late.
When we got to the river, if you can call it that, the old man decided the blasted bridge had to be rebuilt, so that’s what was done. The water looked to be no more than two or three feet deep and looked like it could easily be forded, but no one was going to tell that to Old Jack. He said rebuild the Grapevine Bridge so that’s what we went about doin. Oddly enuff the engineers that were normally responsible for buildin bridges sat with us, ate and played cards while some of the Rev. Major’s men worked on the bridge. I’m too exhausted at this point to try and figure that one out. Maybe fatigue is weighin heavily on the General’s mind as well. I don’t know. Don’t really care. I’m tired enuff for the both of us.
Every onct in a while, whenever the officers were busy or just didn’t care, a handful of Yanks would sneak down to the opposite banks and yell over at us. Hell, they were just kids! After exchangin the usual round of insults and braggin about what we were going to do to each other come tomorrow, the conversation always turned to the necessities of army life.
“Hey Reb, got any tobacco?”
“Maybe.” Of course we did.
“Give me some.”
“If you’ve got some coffee maybe we can talk.”
Of course they did too. It’s just a ritual we go through to break the monotony. In fact, while on picket duty a few weeks back, we shared a cabin with some Yank pickets, arrivin at dusk and holdin the cabin until daybreak, leavin just before the Yanks showed up at dawn. We left tobacco fer them and they always left coffee fer us. Most times there would be a hot pot sittin on the stove waitin. We almost walked in on them once but when we realized they were still there, we made our way back into the woods until they left. We left a note for them later telling them to keep better track of time. We’d hate to have to shoot them. They got a kick out of it and wrote us back about what they were going to do to us whenever they saw us on the battlefield.
So we spent most of this morning sendin coffee and tobacco back and forth across the river in little boats made from newspapers. I always get a charge out of readin what the Yanks think they are going to do to us. Why don’t they just leave us alone?
After lunch I won six dollars playin Poker with four of the engineers. They got frustrated and went back to bridge buildin.
At about three o’clock in the afternoon, the General sprawled out on the open ground and went to sleep. I think I will too. I haven’t heard a gunshot since yesterday. Maybe we’ll get a few days rest. HA! Better do it while I can.
____________________________________________________

Still lost in thought, Johnny finished his smoke and instinctively scattered the ashes on the ground, yielding to the habit he picked up from the scouts, a time he no longer remembered. He closed his journal and looked up, tormented and frightened by his grisly surroundings. The other men were going about the business of preparing for the imminent Blue onslaught. Sarge said to be ready before daybreak.

Johnny worked diligently, shoveling mounds of dark, rich Virginia soil, building a barrier in front of the trench and clearing a small area for him and his fellow soldiers to move around in as they set up their killing station. Sweat poured down his face and back. He was able to ignore the neighboring skeletons as long as he kept busy, but now that he was finished and resting on his blanket he couldn’t keep his mind off them.
No matter which direction he faced, skulls penetrated him with vacant stares. He closed his eyes and tried to think of other things, but nothing could keep out the macabre scene.

Unable to sleep, Johnny pulled out a stub of pencil he had recently procured from a dead Blue soldier and began writing. The words that came from his hand, while appearing to be English did not form words that made sense to Johnny. Yet he didn’t, or couldn’t stop. The words flowed effortlessly across the page and with them, Johnny’s remaining memory. By the time he was finished, Johnny couldn’t remember yesterday.

Johnny slept fitfully that night, tossing and turning as he fought off the rotting corpses that invaded his dreams. Over and over, the dead rose from their resting-places to fall on him. His limbs twitched as the bodies piled on, crushing his chest and driving his final breath from his lungs. To his horror, it was a feeling he was becoming accustomed to.

He awoke abruptly as shots thundered out from the woods surrounding him. Dawn was just breaking; the Blue attack was beginning. As he looked up, Johnny saw the shadows of several hundred men running from the woods about four-hundred yards down the right flank. Rapid flashes from the muzzles of their rifles confirmed they were using Spencers like Buford’s men had at Gettysburg. They were called “Yanks 7 Devils” for good reason. A man could fire seven shots as quick as he could cock the hammer. The men defending that position were in for a tough fight, but they had some good breastworks in front of them that should just about even the odds. The frantic digging yesterday could prove to be the edge the defenders needed, but the appearance of the Spencers, as always, caused the defenders to emit a noticeable groan.

Johnny jumped up, fastening his ammunition belt, grabbed his Springfield and pushed his way to the barricade. He saw an opening in the row of men lined up along the wood and dirt barrier, and jostled himself into position. He loaded his rifle last night before he went to sleep, so he was ready to fire as soon as he could get the barrel over the top of the wall.

Reaching the wall, he raised the gun to his shoulder and quickly lined up the sights. He now saw thousands of shadows charging out of the woods in front of him. In an hour the sun at his back would be a great advantage, obscuring the vision of the crashing wave of blue, but for now it provided only enough light to allow Johnny to slightly distinguish one shadow from another.
The closest advancing figure presented the best target. Johnny cocked the hammer, aimed and squeezed the trigger. A direct hit. The man fell like a stone. At this range and with this kind of time, there was no way he could miss. But time was limited. The swarm was great. Where were all these Blue soldiers coming from? No time to think about that now.

The only way the Gray soldiers could match the firepower of the advancing Blue repeating rifles was to shoot in tandem. Three or four men gathered together in groups along the wall in a coordinated effort that they had experimented with and gradually perfected during previous battles. After firing his rifle, the soldier at the wall stepped back to the rear of the group to reload as the next man, rifle loaded and ready, stepped up to take his place. A trained infantryman can reload, aim and fire a Springfield twice a minute with decent accuracy. Under conditions like this, however, aim was of little importance due to the sheer volume of advancing troops. You could point and shoot and still have a good chance of hitting someone. With four men working together in this fashion, an almost continuous rate of fire can be sustained.

As Johnny turned to step back from the barricade to reload, a bullet whisked past his left ear, knocking his cap off and exploding into the jaw of the soldier next to him. The private’s face disintegrated in a shower of red.

Johnny scrambled down to his knees, splattered with the blood and bone of his comrade, and crawled back behind the men who were busy reloading their rifles. He followed the routine that had now become instinctive to him as another wounded man, a Corporal from Alabama, lay screaming at Johnny’s feet, his cries blending in with the sounds of gunfire and confused, charging men.

Crouching, Johnny intuitively placed his four foot eight inch rifle upright between his feet at a distance of approximately eight inches from his body. His right hand removed one of the forty, paper-wrapped powder-and-bullet cartridges from the box on his belt and moved up to place the powdered end between his teeth. He bit down on the paper and broke the cartridge in half. He brought the torn cartridge to the muzzle of the rifle and poured the powder in. The screams of the dying soldier were fading away.

Johnny removed the remains of the paper, tossed it aside and seated the Minie’ bullet in the bore. The Minie’ heats up and expands in the barrel as it’s fired, allowing the bullet to take full advantage of the rifling grooves. The simple innovation of cutting grooves into the inside of the barrel raised the effective range of the rifle ten-fold, from less than fifty yards to five-hundred yards. The accuracy at these distances is equally impressive. One time at four-hundred yards, Johnny put eight out of ten shots into a silhouette of the man in the stove-pipe hat.

With the bullet in place in the muzzle, he reached for the rammer, pulling it out of it’s holder under the walnut stock and using it to drive the bullet down the barrel onto the powder charge. A kid from Mississippi fell to the left of him, taking a bullet to the chest. The boy fell onto Johnny’s leg but he hardly noticed, so intense was his terror.

Johnny replaced the rammer in its slot and lifted the weapon. He pulled the hammer back to the half-cocked position and reached into his cap pouch. He removed a copper percussion cap but in his excitement dropped it on the fallen soldier. Fumbling in his pouch, he grabbed another and placed the cap on the nipple at the rifle’s breech. Having completed the preparations, he moved up to take his turn at the wall.
Less than thirty seconds had gone by since Johnny started his mechanical actions, and two men in his group had fired their weapons during the time it took Johnny to reload. There was one soldier remaining before him at the wall. A loud roar rumbled from the boy’s gun and he turned to vacate his spot. Smoke surrounded the area where the soldier had stood.

Johnny stepped up to the wall and brought the nine-pound gun to his shoulder. He still saw thousands of shadows pouring out of the woods. The ice-cold terror began to work its way up his spine. There were so many of them, and they all seemed to be firing directly at him. Bullets thudded into the wood and dirt barrier that separated him from being torn to pieces.

He thumbed the hammer to the full-cock position and aligned the opened “V” with the blade sight at the muzzle. His finger moved to the trigger and after quickly locating a moving form through the sights, he squeezed. The gun roared in his ears. There was no way to tell if he had hit anyone. There were too many shadows running and falling out in the field, and the impatience of the next soldier moving into position at the wall, forced Johnny to move to the rear without looking to follow his shot.
Over and over Johnny reloaded his rifle, firing into the continuous swarming line of men. The taste of powder in his mouth was nauseating, and he gagged frequently.

They say you never see the fatal bullet coming. It’s a lie. A solitary puff of smoke off to the left, one of thousands rising from the blue line like exploding bales of cotton, froze Johnny in his tracks.

Dead silence.

A single puff of smoke from one of a thousand rifles.

But Johnny saw it with the clarity of an eagle’s eye. He rose, rooted to the bloody ground, unable to move his feet.

A lone puff of smoke.

Nothing else existed. The world had stopped spinning, frozen in that horrible moment.

Images flooded into Johnny’s head, too fast to grasp. Faces, one after another, too many to count, one blurring into the next crashed together like a kaleidoscope. He stood face-to-face with a Roman Legion as the broad sword came crashing down. A tattered Russian plunged his ax into Johnny’s back. A black man dressed only in a cloth hanging from his waist aimed a spear at Johnny’s chest. A wild-eyed, pony-tailed man, flamboyantly dressed, pulled a long barreled pistol from his waistband and fired into Johnny’s face.

The blast of the buccaneer’s pistol brought Johnny back to the Virginia battlefield. The clamor hung like a blanket over Johnny’s shoulders as he stood in the destroyed meadow. The absence of movement and the sudden silence after the pirate disappeared made Johnny feel as if he were in a box.

A dark box.

A coffin!

He stood transfixed, a lone puff of smoke rising slowly from a solitary rifle hundreds of yards away, a whisk of cotton expanding in the wind. Slowly, ever so slowly, a tiny black mass emerged from the smoke created by the blue soldier’s rifle. Johnny still couldn’t move.

The black object flowed from the end of the single, solitary rifle’s barrel over two-hundred yards away, tediously splitting the expanding smoke cloud in two. Johnny stood motionless, mesmerized by the sight. The orb inched sluggishly forward, moving like a marble through molasses. Slowly, agonizingly slow, but steady, relentless. The object increased in size as it progressed towards Johnny.

He recognized it as a ball, knew it was a bullet. His eyesight sharpened ten-fold, beyond that of any animal. From over a hundred yards away he saw the spinning chunk of lead moving toward him, could distinguish the scratches left behind from its explosive journey through the rifle’s barrel, etched into the sides of the advancing mass.

Erupting from the silence, a sound traveled with lightning speed across the meadow, moving directly towards Johnny. It chased the bullet across the field in a deadly hare and tortoise race. The rapidly escalating sound wave roared across the clearing, in turn increasing the speed and momentum of the lead ball until they ran neck-and-neck in a race to Johnny. The surreal, silent, slow motion world of a split-second ago accelerated with lightning speed. The sounds of war, accumulated since time began, converged simultaneously in Johnny’s ears. All the cries, all the sorrow, all the anger, all the pain exploded in his eardrums and ruptured at the exact moment the bullet slammed into his brain.

He set his pack down and propped his rifle up next to a post. Johann shuddered, in spite of the warm sunshine, as he pulled his blanket out of his haversack. He fished in the pocket of his filthy gray trousers and removed a well-worn pouch of tobacco, rolled a cigarette and began writing in a tattered black journal.

The words that came from his hand, while appearing to be German did not form words that made sense. Ashes spilled over the pages. Yet Johann didn’t, or couldn’t, stop. The words flowed effortlessly across the page and with them, Johann’s remaining memory. By the time he was finished, he couldn’t remember yesterday.

At fourteen, he was one of the senior members in his ragtag battalion. The regular Grey armies had scattered to the winds months ago and there was no one left to defend the Fatherland but boys and old men. The old men died off at a much quicker rate, or simply disappeared overnight leaving nothing but the fanatical youths. For weeks they had fought a losing battle against the relentless Red army. Their backs were now at the walls of Berlin.

Johann closed his journal and ground his cigarette out against the crumbling wall he was leaning against. Erupting from the silence, a sound traveled with lightning speed down the battered stone road, moving directly towards him.

At the same moment a squad of Red soldiers burst around the corner, machine-guns blazing. Johann grabbed for his rifle. Running at full speed, a short, red-faced man in a Red uniform lifted his gun up to his cheek.

They say you never see the fatal bullet coming.

Johann did.