Saturday, October 25, 2008

The history that can never be known

At the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center, built on the remains of Battery Robinette – the only remaining earth work of what used to be the defense works occupied by both Confederate and Union infantry before and after Shiloh, there is a bronze relief of Union soldiers maneuvering in line. The image of a soldier running with musket at right shoulder shift reminded me of my reenacting days.

It also got me to thinking. Even as the participants, north and south, entered their waxing years many concluded that the war could never fully be known by those who did not live through it, both civilian and military. Even the memory of the war caused events and facts to meld into gloried fiction or wishful truth. The horror of the war faded into dark memory thankfully forgotten or tucked away deep into sub-conscious. The war was retold in the heroic vein and not in the grotesque as it had been experienced. Meanings were sought to quell the realization that battlefields were mere slaughter pens were men acted brutishly and killed in wanton abandon. Meanings were needed, for the fear that the war was nothing but the expression of decades of hate filled emotion loosed upon one another was too sickening to behold. Yet, they were left with only the memory, as if in slow motion, of what had become. Did the south gain anything by the experience? Did the north? Did anyone? Southern independence was nullified and the strength of the federal government grew. One nation was created from separate states. But the bloodshed was copious and the graveyards filled with diseased corpses.

The historian today cannot grasp what is only left in two dimensions. Reenacting can add a curious third dimension, but only as if vaguely seen in a mirror. Moments, as at the 135h Gettysburg reenactment of Picket's Charge for example, are just momentary glimpses of what might have been. Even in the photographs of the event there is an air of surrealism, they do not capture the widest scope of the eye and the tactile feel of the ground or the July sun. They are two dimensional. Only the memory can conjure them up again in three dimensions and even then only in clips. Trying to describe the event is something akin to trying to describe the war en toto. We can take dead animals and shoot them with mini balls and see the type of destruction can be wrought on flesh and bone. We can do this also with grape and canister. We can take separate parts of the experience and recreate them but we can never fully understand them, even academically. Thousands of us gathered in Pennsylvania in 1998 to commemorate Gettysburg, some say up to 25,000 civilian and military reenactors and there may have been more or less for no one took an accurate count. All of these people, including myself, were after something and I guarantee not all of us found it. We call them magic moments and they come and go at the least expected time. It could be the camaraderie of camp, the morning fog as it blankets a field covered in tents, the battle line being formed under fire, or the standing of sentry duty. Everyone paid to be there and for different reasons.

Like a participant, I am left trying to describe something that others did not participate in. Even those that did find it hard to recollect to one another what it was like. Yet, there is something missing. The dimension is not full and it never will be full. The fear of death. The discharge of musketry and cannonade do not bring death with them on the reenactment field. They only bring sound, hollow booming that carry no projectiles. We can only stand in line and flop down in pretend agony. We do not experience the fear, only the action of fighting. In that, no one who has not experienced war cannot know of it beyond the academic. We read and read voraciously what others have collected in research or read that penned by the survivors of the war and can only see what they saw in this inadequate dimension of fact and word picture.

My own novel, They Met at Shiloh, is an inadequate picture of the battle of Shiloh as I was able to envision it through my characters. Description can cause the mind to graphically put scenes and people together into a whole panorama but it lacks the truthfulness of experience. Only those who were there can truly know Shiloh. Only those who were there can truly know the 135th of Gettysburg. It came and it went, just like the real battle and it left the participants with scattered images of what they experienced. I remember the camp of the 12th Connecticut, the unit we fell in with, and the long procession of Confederate brigades tramping down our road prior to the start of the first day of the reenactment battles. The procession went on for over an hour. Jackson's column at Chancellorsville stretched on for about 10 miles along a narrow track and some witnesses attest that it took six hours for the entire column to pass by from start to finish as Jackson made his famous flanking march. I remember standing to as the first day battle unfolded around us, marching through the Confederate camps to get to our starting point while thousands of others started the battle. We stood and watched as other brigades executed their part in the script before we were called to recreate Schimmelpfenning's division arriving late on the first day of battle. We wanted to get into the fight, but thousands upon thousands of the people that we portrayed wanted only for the war to be over, for victory for their side to end the hostilities. They did what they did because it was supposed to happen and not because they wanted to be there.

The civil war fascinates us still because it occurred here. Yet, we are different from the Europeans who would sooner forget that twice there was bloodshed for nothing more than the want of power. Yet even there, WWII reenactor groups gather to "play war" even in the former Soviet Union. There is a strong need to know, and to know more than can be read in a book. The need to experience something of the reasons why. I think that is why I wrote They Met at Shiloh. I needed to experience more than I could through reenacting or reading. I needed to see what it would do to fictional characters who put into life practice what I had learned of the war and of battle, Shiloh in particular. Perhaps it is only in the mind's eye that we can move one step closer to that third dimension of knowledge.

What was Pickett's charge like? Noisy, grandiose, awe inspiring, and hot. We occupied a spot to the left of the "Bloody Angle", next to Lt. Cushing's Battery A, 4th US light artillery. For an hour we baked under the cloudless sky while the artillery duel took place. Yet, any attempt to describe the emergence of the Confederates from the tree line and their advance across the Hagerstown Pike and into our waiting line would, as Lt. Frank Haskell wrote after the real battle, "would be weak". This photograph is perhaps the closest one can come to seeing some glimpse of what was the reenactment of Pickett's Charge. Yet, it is a "weak" reminder of the real thing, and especially the reason we were there. http://www.gettysburg.com/livinghistory/pastpics/1998/07059809.htm

Saturday, October 04, 2008

Petersburg, circa 2008

I was able to visit the Petersburg National Battlefield Park on my recent trip to VA and I was impressed that so much of the earthworks had survived the post war era. Erosion has rounded out the edges of the batteries and trenches, the Crater is visible still and though mostly filled in stands as a testament to the uniqueness of the gambit and as a reminder of the sacrifice of both the USCT regiments and the white volunteer regiments who were slaughtered in the deep hole that trapped them.


Again, Petersburg is a battlefield bereft of monuments or other visual markers save for the grassy mounds of earth that trace the driving tour. Nine months of daily warfare are encapsulated in the now quiet pastureland. Areas of tall grass mark where entrenchments used to exist but were plowed under by post war occupants. Cannon, that obsequious marker to be found on most civil war battlefields mark some areas or actually re-occupy old forts.




One of the few monuments to sit on the field marks the spot where the 1st Main Heavy Artillery vainly charged Colquitt's Salient early on in the siege and suffered for their obstinacy. The marker, a ways down a walking trail takes one through the second line of entrenchments and rifle pits (when one knows that they existed, every undulation in the ground suddenly heightens the perception that it could have been part of the picket line) takes one from Fort Steadman to a spot perpendicular to the future Union entrenched line on a bee line to the Confederate fort where today sit a few cannon marking Colquitt's Salient. You walk over ground that was bloodied by the men from the 1st Maine who died or received wounds one for every foot of ground that covered the distance towards the fort they never reached, about 200 yards of open space. The monument lists the names of those who died or died of wounds a few days later and for a battle that saw much death and misery, is a singular testament of the bravery required to charge alone. Markers along the way describe what you are seeing and would have been seeing during the battle or soon after (often with period photographs) and I found that nice, especially since little of the period surroundings survive to this day.


The Fort Steadman/Colquitt's Salient area is one of the few surviving no-man's-land that you can actually walk with a clear view of the opposite line, the forest having re-claimed other areas of the park. You can stand at the apex of Colquitt's and look at the earthworks of Fort Steadman and the intervening ground and try to envision what it would have been like to live day in and day out in the forts or on the picket line. Cannon trace the embrasures of Fort Steadman today. I was struck by how small each fort really was. These surviving earthworks were untouched by man and have sat mute for these tens of decades. The trenches that once held the abitis logs are still visible and indeed offer formidable defense against a frontal attack by a wary and on guard garrison. The trenches still make the fort walls at Steadman eight feet high and one can stand at the parapet and see the guns at Colquitt's easily, the lines being close enough for rifle fire to easily pick off targets. It is also hard to imagine the countryside as it was then. Everything is green and lush today, but from photographs one can see that all was a dirty brown and bark/wood colored: this was what they saw every day. In the book, Mother, May You Never See the Sights I've Seen, a unit history of the 57th Massachusetts Veteran Volunteers during the last campaign of the war speaks of stints on and off of the line and endless parades and inspections when off the line. These men lived this life through heat of summer and cold of winter, in huts and tents, crowded in trenches or hugging the earth on the picket line and ever mindful of snipers. Standing between the forts in silence, brings to mind the inability to imagine it even after reading so many accounts.


I also ran into a fellow reenactor who was manning a section of line at the base of Battery 9, a trench dug and revited with logs as it would have been during the siege and occupied by two very hot Federals who came out of their shade to talk to anyone who wondered down. http://www.appomattoxtours.com/ We shared some of the same experiences at a few events where his group, the Skulker's Mess and my unit the 23rd NY, both members of Dom DalBello's Army of the Pacific. It was nice to talk to a fellow hardcore reenactor and someone whose knowledge of the area and battle far surpassed my own (I hadn't time to read up on the battle before visiting, a must for anyone who wants to experience a battlefield). John Marler is his name and someone who has obviously put a lot of himself in allowing others to experience the history of the area.


My main interest in Petersburg was research for a novel/screenplay on the role of the USCT regiments who were there from the beginning of the battle to its end. Writing about history is one thing, and doing it with fiction gives one the freedom to extrapolate on experience, sight and sound, and emotion that is often missed or unavailable when writing non-fiction. But seeing the landscape, its undulations and surroundings gives fodder to the minds eye of a writer. I wanted to see what those USCT regiments saw as they took on Battery 8 and 9 early in the battle.


I do not get the opportunity to wander the battlefields much, living in New Mexico keeps the history that I love out of arms reach. But standing on mute fields is still a treat.

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