RIDING by a cemetery, years ago, with our five year old in the back seat of our car we asked if he knew what a cemetery was. "Yes," he replied promptly, "It's where the dead people live."
I suppose that was not the first time a five year old has said something like that, but it amused his parents at the time.
Wandering through the cemeteries which are a feature of every New Hampshire town, the Phantom has been repeatedly impressed how many contain the markers of young men who died between the years 1861 and 1865. Some of these, like Pine Grove at Gilmanton, list the Civil War dead from the town on a plaque near the entrance.
Every little town seems to have Civil War dead. But this is the 21st century so the Phantom does not have to simply wonder--the internet tells him that 38,000 men from New Hampshire served during those four years and about 1/4 died.
The population of New Hampshire in 1860 was 326, 000.
What is really remarkable, when you scroll through the regiments is the proportion who died, not in battle or from hostile fire, but from disease.
Most of the New Hampshire regiments had roughly 1,600 men and about 200 from each died of wounds and 200 of disease. This was a relatively high proportion of death in battle; two thirds of the over 600,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War died not from bullets but from disease.
There is a scene in the movie version of Gone with the Wind where Scarlet O'Hara receives the letter informing her of the death of her husband and when she gets down to the last sentence it tells her he died of measles, never having had the chance to strike a blow for the honor of the Confederacy. I remember the audience laughing at that. It did seem mordantly funny, having seen all the young men whooping it up, riding off to whip the Yankees, only to die in bed before they got to fire a single shot.
But Margaret Mitchell knew her Civil War--that was an accurate depiction. More died of disease than gunshot.
Which reminds us all of the folly of war. In order to get men to join the ranks and march off to war, you've got to fill heads full of dreams of glory.
After 9/11 Pat Tillman, a NFL football player signed up and joined the Army, only to be killed by friendly fire in the confusion of battle. He was a hero. He was a fool. Or, as Rhett Butler would say, he was a gallant fool. The War on Terror was more terror than war.
The Civil War has the distinction of being a sacred effort. When, in the history of the world, has a war been waged by people who were not directly injured on behalf of a people who were enslaved? There were wars of liberation in South America, throwing off colonial power, but then people were fighting for their own interests. In the case of the American Civil War, those armies from New England and the north were formed of men who had not felt the lash of the slaver, had not had money taken out of their pockets by the plantation master. They were simply affronted by the cruelty and immorality of slavery. To be sure, many if not most of the Union soldiers did not sign up to fight for abolition, in the beginning of the war, but the movement to arm them happened because abolitionists stirred the pot. And, ultimately, as the war ground on, it became clear to everyone, it was a war to end slavery. Even men who claimed they would quit the war if it became an abolitionist's war, changed their minds once they got South and saw what slavery was and once colored troops started fighting along side them.
No comments:
Post a Comment