Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

There's more to report on the 2010 Gettysburg Seminar, but those stories will have to wait for another day, or two, or five. In the meantime, while you're drumming your fingers in anticipation, here's a book to consider adding to your collection or downloading to your eReader.

This somehow all seemed interconnected: gray sky, rain, Gregory Coco's book "A Strange and Blighted Land," and Peggy Seeger's version of "O the Wind and Rain" playing on the radio. I'd never heard it from her before, but it was dark and haunting with the sparest of musical accompaniment. The song, with countless variations and titles, each touching on the same theme, has been around for something like 350 years. Songs like this, that tell a story, will never die. To listen to Peggy's version, follow this link.

One thing that has always struck me when standing on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg and looking across the expanse of field, past the Emmittsburg Road, to the woods from which Pickett's, Trimble's, and Pettigrew's troops emerged on July 3rd, 1863 is how difficult it is to imagine 13,000 plus men standing in formations spread out over a mile wide front. Nearly everyone has been in a large concentration of people, at a ballgame, a concert, a rally, a parade, but still it's hard to visualize what Union troops saw that day. We can read their individual accounts, all of which are near unanimous in describing feelings of jaw slacking awe, but as non-participants 147 years later we'll never be able to fully comprehend that moment no matter how vivid our imaginations.

Likewise, unless we've personally experienced combat, we really haven't got a clue, knock wood, as to the smoke, noise, disorientation, fear, savagery, bloodlust, bravery, cowardice, screaming, yelling, calm, mayhem, hiss, thuds, and explosions that surrounds a soldier. We're mere bystanders who flip through photos that will horrify us to a point, but we're inevitably spared by editors or censors who chose not to let us see the real gore, the stuff that shows a head half blown off or entrails hanging down to the knees or a still smoking stump where nanoseconds before a limb was joined to flesh and bone . When we walk through Gettysburg today we don't step on bodies, body parts, or in pools of blood, and we certainly don't have the stench of thousands of bloated, rotting bodies wafting through our nostrils making us puke our guts out.

So I leave you with these passages from "A Strange and Blighted Land," Gregory Coco's somber and reflective recollection of the battlefield as told by those who walked across its landscape days after two armies seeking the annihilation of the other moved away. This is one we should all read, to remind us of the stillness that returns following the quieting of the guns and the willingness to sacrifice and lay down lives.

"Boots with a foot and leg putrifying within, lay beside the pathway, and ghastly heads, too - over the exposed skulls of which insects crawled - whole great worms bored through the rotting eyeballs. Astride a tree sat a bloody horror, with head and limbs severed by shells, the birds having banqueted on it, while the tattered uniform, stained with gore, fluttered dismally in the summer air.

"Whole bodies were flattened against the rocks, smashed into a shapeless mass, as though thrown there by a giant hand, an awful sight in their battered and decaying condition. The freshly turned earth on every hand denoted the pits, from many which legs were thrust above the scant covering, and arms and hands were lifted up as though pleading to be assigned enough earth to keep them from the glare of day."



"On the north side of Big Round Top and near the summit I saw the whitening bones of a Johnny who had killed and wounded 17 of our men during the night. He rolled a rock as big as a bushel basket ahead of him, while he crawled behind it. He could see our men toward the sky, while they could see only the flash of his gun, which they shot at all night. At the dawn he could not retreat, and our boys got him. They could not dig a grave there. They cut brush and laid it across him...and carried dirt and weighted down the ends of the brush. His head had rolled down hill some 10 feet; his shoes with the bones of his feet had fallen sidewise and lay there. A soldier (convalescent) of the Pennsylvania Reserves, who was on the top that night, and whose brother was killed by this rebel, showed me and explained as above."