Re: Short Story III: last stand (see end of thread)
thanks Ludens. I think the style of this one is a bit clearer, at least i hope so...
25th June 1876
He ran, panting, gasping, disbelieving. All hell breaking out behind him, shots, shouts, screams and whoops, horses screaming louder than men as the remnants of his company shot their mounts to provide some kind of cover. A desperate hope, the enemy had trapped them in a bowl shaped depression in the hills, leading up to a shallow series of ridges and valleys, fine ground for a massacre.
He stumbled, weighed down by fear, only his single-shot Springfield carbine and his ammo box for encumbrance, sweat soaking his coarse blue shirt and dusty breeches, uncomfortable army issue boots grinding the blisters on his heels. The ground was rocky, dry, all long grass and dried branches.
They’d set out that morning from the bluffs to the south, heading across the ridge. They’d marched all night before, a forced march, tired and blundering in the dark, terrified that they’d be found by the enemy. The General’s confidence had not been shaken, but then he was a veteran, a war hero, one of Little Phil’s hard riding horse-boys. The rest of his men were not. At least a fifth of the men in the unit had seen no action beyond popping cartridges at rabbits and shining boots, and some of them didn’t even speak English, Polish boys and German farmhands and even Italians and Irish.
The ground was dipping now, sloping into a lengthy hollow running behind the ridge. ‘Cover!’ he thought, maybe even a way to escape, get out of there and hide, and find the other companies in daylight, if they’d survived. They’d all heard firing from below the river, south of the camp, moving away east, which the scouts had decided must have been Reno’s company engaging the village…
It had happened so fast. One minute they’d been crossing the coulee, which the General’s famed scout Mitch Bouyer had called Medicine Tail, the next minute Indians had come pouring out of the village below them, shots and arrows whistling around. Men had been hit immediately, lurching in their saddles, thumping to the ground, screaming in pain. The General had stood in his stirrups, shouting ‘Hurrah, boys, we've got them! We'll finish them up and then get on home!’
Even as he spurred his horse towards the water, he was hit, the solid axe-blow sound as the Winchester bullet smacked into his ribs clearly audible to those nearby. Face painted with shock, the General lurched over his horse’s neck, blood running from his mouth. His brother Tom spurred to his side and grabbed him, holding him up in the saddle, shouting for help, and the lead companies dissolved into a scrambling chaos back up the slope into the tangle of bluffs above the valley, as Indians continued to pour from the village…
Gasping, chest pounding painfully, he stopped beside a withered bush, desperately checking the chamber of the Springfield, unable to remember if it had been loaded, if he’d fired at anything. Looking across the hills to the west, he froze, horrified, limbs dangling as though the strings had been severed on a puppet.
The remaining five companies of the famed 7th Cavalry were strung out in a vague semi-circle of struggling soldiers and horses, firing, loading, cursing, dying. Even as he gaped helplessly, one company was overrun, men disappearing under swarms of Indians clubbing, hacking, stabbing. Fierce gunfire still crackled from I and F Companies, Captain Keogh discernible even at this distance, tall and powerful. A brave and respected officer, the captain had taken command at the river, yelling at the men to fall back uphill and get firing, but only his own company had paid him any heed, trying to form skirmish lines as the arrows plunged over the skyline and the horses reared and fought…
With a sudden shriek, an Indian burst from the low ground not ten yards away, warclub hurtling through the air, warpaint streaked features contorted with hatred for the white soldier crouched in terror before him. Desperately swinging his carbine round even as he tumbled backwards, the soldier pulled the trigger, smoke and flame gouting, and watched in utter relief as the Sioux was catapulted backwards to land in a twitching, sprawling heap.
The soldier kept stumbling, passing below the ridgeline, sparing one final glance back at the final stand of the 7Th cavalry. In those brief moments, the last for so many men, he saw the Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer himself, slumped on hands and knees groggily peering about him, blood soaking his shirt, unseeing, the body of Tom Custer next to him riddled with arrows, his men falling and failing as the enemy closed in…
Lone Horse Dances kicked his pony on, the scalp of the horse soldier dripping still-warm blood over his left hand, as he used his knees to control his mount, scanning the ground for more white enemies to kill. Son of the Morning Star was dead, and all his kin and all his troopers lay about him. Lone Horse Dances had watched approvingly as Custer’s feebly moving body was stripped and slashed, warriors struggling for choice souvenirs. A warrior, bonneted like a warchief, unfamiliar to him, had suddenly shoved another aside, knelt down and calmly shot Custer through the head with a captured Colt. The rebuffed warrior, a lone Lakota among the group of whooping Cheyenne, had turned, face stony with rage, and vented his anger by turning over Morning Star’s brother’s body and cutting the heart out, raising his own whoops of triumph alongside his gory fist. Thus is Rain-in-the-Face avenged, he yelled. All around him similar scenes were taking place, warriors looting and mutilating, the people coming from the village with knives and axes to take their share of victory.
Sudden squalls and shouts broke out to the west, quarry spotted. Lone Horse Dances kicked his steed down the slope, stuffing the scalp under the saddle girth and gripping his Winchester rifle in his other hand, the stock decorated with carvings and bits of string woven with colours for luck, his metal headed axe bumping on his thigh…
Private Richard Saunders of F Company of the 7th Cavalry, aged 23, formerly a mason from Nova Scotia and a soldier for less than a year, holding a jammed Springfield carbine, ran in hopeless terror towards the setting sun, the sound of hooves thundering behind. He never heard the rifle shot that sent a bullet like a shaft of ice straight through his back, never saw the warrior who leaped from the pony and sprang onto the ground behind him, never managed to scream a final plea into the dust of the Little Bighorn as the metal axe split his skull with such force that his nose broke against the earth.
Two days later, the working party found his body, burying him in a shallow scrape of a grave where he had fallen, marking the position on a map, moving on. The legend of Custer’s Last Stand was already spreading in the newspapers and the society gossip, but here in the dry heat of Dakota, amid the stink of mutilated and exposed bodies of their fellows, the soldiers know that glory is just a word. Lonely and windswept, sun-beaten and desolate, the soldier’s graves at the Little Bighorn bear mute testament to the eternal fate of the soldier when glory comes calling.
Ahaaaaaar
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Re: Short Story II: Lancers
Originally Posted by Franconicus
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