Tonight, I sit with an open window.Listening to crickets seesaw back and forth.
A family of owls is sending signals into the dark.
And a breeze shakes the leaves on their hinges.
The air is autumn cool.
Only the light of my monitor illuminates my room.
Not a cloud in the night sky.
Mauve around the edges, inky blue on top.
In the distance I hear a train.
Following the Harpeth river on the east of town.
A place some hundred and fifty years ago.
Boys in butternut charged into the twilight.
Two miles.
Over open fields.
Against boys in blue.
Fortified with osage.
Behind breastworks.
Supported by cannon.
Three miles or so from where I sit.
A union bullet one day I found in my yard.
Where ten thousand pieces of metal found flesh.
This fifty-eight calibre did not.
I read last night our campaign in North Africa.
Lasting six month of 1943.
Accounted for 4893 casualties.
Our boys in gray and blue.
Just to the West of that railroad track.
Suffered 10000 dead and wounded.
In five hours.
Most of which, it is reported.
Occurred in the first waning hour of twilight.
Just a few miles from here.
Where that whistle blows.
Where they were buried.
Under the very breastworks charged.
On a chilly December morning.
Their final coat.
Of rich Tennessee soil.
15 comments:
My great great grandfather, George Washington Snyder, was a proud rebel from Tennessee. He died in that war on rich Tennessee soil. I have a photograph of him that is one of my treasures. He was Granny-O's grandfather. He was young and left a tiny baby daughter - my great grandmother. I have heard so much about him, I've always felt I actually know/knew him.
Limes, do you know the details of his unit, which battles he fought and eventually died, where he is buried?
Yes, I think I can get that. My family has been pretty diligent about keeping family histories. I'll see if I can scan the photo and get some details. Their home was near Knoxville where he was a school teacher before the war. I'll look into getting the scoop. It's interesting to me. George Washington Snyder looks astonishingly like some of my male cousins who wore long hair and beards in the day. You can truly see the family resemblance which intrigues me . . . he'd have been born about 1830.
I'm always dumbfounded when I consider the horrific carnage of the Civil War compared to casualties in, say, Iraq. We've lost about 5,000 in the nearly seven years in Iraq. That's about one hour's worth of slaughter in places like Antietam, Gettysburg, Shiloh, Franklin, Fredricksburg, Cold Harbor, on and on.
Despite what most people probably think, our 21st century tolerance for war deaths is far less than 200 years ago, yet we have killing power well beyond what our ancestors could ever imagine.
It's a very hard situation to reconcile.
Greg, Franklin, at the time of the battle, had a population of 750. The union troops retreated through the night to Nashville. The confederates followed them. Left behind, 44 buildings, houses, churches as hospitals. The town had to bury approximately four times their number in dead. There are reports that on the morning after, one could walk the entire breastworks and never touch soil. Some of the eyewitness accounts we have come from the children of Franklin. Hard to imagine what they saw.
horrific stuff, this man made war. it does not matter what time or era, but that we are decimating one another is just tragic.
OH and civil war - what is so civil about it?
:P
Happy Tuesday!
Catherine, a couple years ago I found a bullet, just like the one in the picture, in my front yard. It is a .58 caliber bullet used by the union. When you hold this piece of lead in your hand, two things strike you, no pun intended: (1) the sheer weight--why this is surprising I'm not sure, lead is lead and this is a big chunk, no different than the lead weights I used for fishing; (2) the size, it's big. Then the thoughts combine. The weight, the size and the intent. This piece of lead was meant to rip and tear living flesh from bone, to break a man, to maim or kill. When you hold the bullet in your hand and you think of it coming at you at 1000 feet per second and it hitting your soft tissues, hitting your bone, well, as silly as this sounds, it changes your view, your perspective somehow. The carnage seen the next morning--the Battle of Franklin was mainly fought at night, one of few night battles of the war--the sights described were horrific, of blood running sole deep in the trenches, of men standing dead because of the dead stacked against them, of hand to hand combat where both combatants had killed the other with bayonets, both dying in each others deadly embrace. I'll spare you the visuals of what all this lead did to those bodies, but I will say, what was observed was observed by man, woman and child--for days. Not to mention the 5000 some odd wounded this small town of 750 had to tend.
I'm reminded of the spirited protests of my youth - we were rabidly against the escalating war in Viet Nam. We were in this century's major social upheaval, reflected in the music and movies of the day.
Gregory LeFever has it - modern day wars have fewer deaths. Many of my male classmates were being inducted 2 weeks after gradauation. Fast forward: I am only one woman who happens to know and know of (friends of friends) many men of my age who are horribly afflicted by exposure to Agent Orange. And what about those who came back and were never again right in the head. Could we say they died there?
It is wrong, it is wrong, it is wrong. There is nothing OK about killing another person.
Limes, my uncle was in Vietnam. Two tours as a helicopter pilot. I wrote this in his memory a few months back. It speaks to your comment:
Calvin
I REMEMBER reading Calvin - it is wonderful! It was when I first found your blog. I can't tell you how many friends, lovers, pen pals, relatives who were affected by that terrible war (I know, they're all terrible). The Badger was a fierce resister who represented himself for YEARS in support of his absolute refusal to participate in that business in any way. It's one of my biggest topics of pride in him.
Funny thing is, my uncle went willingly, twice, as if war was an addiction, the one that preceded his need for alcohol, to deal with the absence of the first, or perhaps just the demons that returned with him.
I believe many of them did that. They hated it. They had to have it. And when it was over for them they took up something else and made sure it was hateful, as well. I repeat: it is wrong. It ruins everyone who takes part in any way.
Holy shit.
Perhaps the most poignant thing you've ever written
and so it was written long ago
more poignant than any word.
wow.
and somehow,
inconceivable.
Erin, the more I think about what happened here, the more difficult it becomes to imagine it, to believe it, to see it in my mind. From the distance of 150 plus years, it doesn't seem as if it could have ever been real, what happened here.
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