Bruce Catton Mr. Lincoln’s Army
The books
which makes up this trilogy began, very simply, as an attempt to understand the
men who fought in the Army of the Potomac. As a small boy I had known a number of these
men in their old age; they were grave, dignified, and thoughtful, with long
white beards and a general air of being pillars of the community. They lived in rural Michigan
in the pre-automobile age, and for the most part they had never been fifty
miles away from the farm or the dusty village streets; yet once, ages ago, they
had been everywhere and had seen everything, and nothing that happened to them
thereafter meant anything much. All that
was real had taken place when they were young; everything after that had simply
been a process of waiting for death, which did not frighten them much—they had
seen it inflicted in the worst possible way on boys who had not bargained for
it, and they had enough of the old-fashioned religion to believe without any
question that when they passed over they would simply be rejoining men and ways
of living which they had known long ago.
This was
too much for an adolescent to understand.
Perhaps it is too much for anyone to understand, in a skeptical
age. But there is was: these old
gentlemen, drowsing out the greater part of their lives in the backwoods, had
once been lifted beyond themselves by an experience which perhaps was all the
more significant because it was imperfectly understood. They gave a tone and a color to the lives of
the people who knew them, and they put a special meaning on such a word as
“patriotism”; it was not something you talked about very much, just a living
force that you instinctively responded to.
I can remember one old man who lost his left arm in the Wilderness, and
he used to go about town in the summer peddling cherries and blackberries in a
bucket—there was just enough of his left forearm so that he could hook it over
the bail of the bucket and carry it conveniently—and it never once entered my
childish head to feel sorry for him because he had been a cripple for half a
century. On the contrary, I thought he
was rather lucky. He carried with him
forever the visible sign that he had fought for his country and had been
wounded in its service. Probably only a
very backward boy could have thought anything of the kind.
Still, that
was what it was like. A generation grew
up in the shadow of a war which, because of its distance somehow had lost all
resemblance to everyday reality. To a
generation which knew the war only by hearsay, it seemed that these aged
veterans had been privileged to know the greatest experience a man could
have. We saw the Civil War, in other
words, through the distorting haze of endless Decoration Day reminiscences; to
us it was a romantic business because all we ever got a look at was the legend
built up through fifty years of peace.
We do learn
as we grow older, and eventually I realized that this picture was somewhat out
of focus. War, obviously, is the least
romantic of all of man’s activities and it contains elements which the veterans
do not describe to children. This aged
berry-peddler, for instance, who lost his arm in the Wilderness: he had never
told me about the wounded men who were burned to death in the forest fire which
swept that infernal stretch of woodland while the battle was going on; nor had
any of his comrades who survived that fight and went on through the whole
campaign to the last days at Petersburg ever mentioned the lives that were
wasted by official blunders, the dirt and the war-weariness and the soul
numbing disillusionment that came when it seemed that what they were doing was
going for nothing. There was a deacon in
the church, who used to remind us proudly that he had served in the 2nd
Ohio Cavalry. Not until years later did
I learn that this regiment had gone with Sheridan
in the Shenandoah Valley, burning barns, killing
livestock and pillaging with a free hand so that the Southern Confederacy, if
it refused to die in any other way, might die of plain starvation. In a sense, the research that went into these
books was simply an effort to find out about things which the veterans never
discussed.
Yet, in an
odd way, the old veterans did leave one correct impression: the notion that as
young men they had been caught up by something ever so much larger than
themselves and that the war in which they fought did settle something for
us—or, incredibly, started something which we ourselves have got to
finish. It was not only the biggest
experience in their own lives; it was in a way the biggest experience in our
life, as a nation, and it deserves all of the study it is getting.
In any
case, these books try to examine a small part of that experience in terms of
the men who did the fighting. Those men
are all gone now and they have left forever unsaid the things they might have
told us, and no one now can speak for them.
Here is my attempt to speak about them.
Bruce
Catton, 1962
No comments:
Post a Comment