The Battle of Shiloh began the morning of April 6, 1862, when six divisions of the Confederate army commanded by General Albert Sidney Johnston and General Pierre G. T. Beauregard launched a surprise attack out of the woods near Shiloh Church in southwestern Tennessee against five divisions of General U. S. Grant’s Union forces. At the end of a day of the fiercest fighting of the war, the Rebels had pushed the Yankees two miles from the opening line of battle. But 25,000 Union reinforcements under General Don Carlos Buell and General Lew Wallace arrived during the night and at daylight on April 7 the Union army counterattacked and regained all the lost ground.
One member of the reinforcing brigades was nineteen-year-old Ambrose Bierce; his recollection of the battle, “What I Saw at Shiloh,” though written almost twenty years later, is often acclaimed as, in S. T. Joshi’s words, “the best piece he ever wrote.” Here he describes being part of the Union counterattack:
But now our commanding officer rode from behind us to the front, waved his hand with the courteous gesture that says après vous, and with a barely audible cheer we sprang into the fight. Again the smoking front of gray receded, and again, as the enemy’s third line emerged from its leafy covert, it pushed forward across the piles of dead and wounded with protruded steel. Never was seen so striking a proof of the paramount importance of numbers. Within an area of three hundred yards by fifty there struggled for front places no fewer than six regiments, and the accession of each, after the first collision, had it not been counterpoised, would have turned the scale.
