On the Shiloh battlefield in Tennessee, visitors keep hearing a drum with no drummer — a slow military 'Long Roll' rolling in from the empty Federal lines. It beats over ground that took 23,746 casualties in two days, more than three earlier American wars combined.
Spend enough time on the Shiloh battlefield in southwest Tennessee and, visitors say, a drum starts up. It is slow and methodical, beating the old military "Long Roll" — the cadence that once called soldiers to arms — and it comes from the direction of the Federal lines, where no re-enactor, musician, or event is anywhere on the grounds.
The drum sits on top of a number that stunned the country when it came down the telegraph wires. Over two days in April 1862, near Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, this ground took 23,746 casualties — more men than the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War put together.
The heaviest killing happened along a sunken farm road the soldiers nicknamed the Hornet's Nest. Benjamin Prentiss's Union division dug in there and held off charge after charge for six or seven hours on April 6. To break them, the Confederates massed roughly 60 cannon at the field's edge, the largest concentration of artillery yet seen on a North American battlefield, and shelled the road until about 2,200 men laid down their arms. Somewhere near that line, Confederate commander Albert Sidney Johnston bled to death from a severed artery in his leg, the highest-ranking soldier killed in combat in the whole war.
That sunken road is where visitors report the most. People walking it describe gunfire and cannon fire coming out of empty trees, and under it the moans and screams of wounded men.
There is an older layer to the place, too. Up on the bluff above the river sit the Shiloh Indian Mounds, earthworks raised by a Mississippian people some 400 years before the battle. Visitors there report their own strange things: cold gusts that cut through the summer heat, colored orbs darting above the mounds, and faint chanting with no source. Whatever lingers on that bluff was there long before the war found it.
A short way off is Bloody Pond, named for the legend that wounded men crawled to its edge to drink and rinse their wounds until the water turned red. A former park ranger who studied the battle found no contemporary evidence the water ever ran bloody, or that a pond even sat on that spot in 1862. The name was pinned on afterward. The drum is the harder part to explain. It keeps beating the Long Roll toward the old Federal lines, on a field where no drummer stands.
