The 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg has just passed, and the throngs who came for the reenactment and speeches have departed. The national park is relatively quiet again. Very peaceful.
Yet only a few hundred yards away was fired the first shot of the greatest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere. Shortly afterward, Hell broke loose, and by nightfall the Union Army had been pushed back through the village of Gettysburg and had dug in on the hills beyond.
Mother and I had supper in Gettysburg last evening and a swim at a motel located on the spot where General Rodes’ Confederate divisions lined up for their bloody assault on Cemetery Hill. “Hills,” by the way, turn out not to be what we call hills in New England. They’re mostly just lumps. Cemetery Ridge, that famously defended Federal line, is almost indiscernible to us from the Confederate position a mile away.
We’ve been taking an auto tour of the battlefield, an oral guide to all the important scenes of the battle. I especially wanted to see the woods at the left of the Federal line heroically defended by Joshua Chamberlain’s 20th Maine, and the field where George Stannard’s Vermont brigade swung to attack the flank of Pickett’s charge.
Visiting a battlefield dissolves many preconceptions. I’d thought Devil’s Den to be a part of Little Round Top, but it’s separated from it by tiny Plum Run. After the Rebs took it, they posted sharpshooters to pick off Union officers across the way. I spotted a man in a camouflage jacket. “Could you hit a Yankee officer over on that ridge from here?” I asked. He was pretty sure he could, with a dead rest.
Battlefields – Culloden, Little Big Horn, Normandy – are fascinating for their insights into geography and human nature. I recall the small political steps by which Gettysburg’s ghastly climax was reached, and wish that each session of Congress could begin with a visit here, for a look at the results of disputes allegedly based on ideology. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” says it best: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center cannot hold....The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
When General Meade telegraphed President Lincoln that the retreating Confederate Army had “left our soil,” Lincoln, whose vision was larger than anyone else’s at the time, protested, “Our soil? This country is all our soil!”
We must persuade our representatives – and ourselves – to remember what happens when the center doesn’t hold; to rein in stupid rhetoric; to set an example for folks who substitute passion for reason; to honor that promise of “a new birth of freedom” made over the graves of the dead at Gettysburg.
This is Willem Lange in Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.
