It's been a summer of introspection lately. I got around to finishing Jeff Shaara's trilogy about the Civil War, knocking off Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure while at the beach. I've long been a history buff and keen on the Civil War in particular. I grew up in a household that still referred to the conflict as "The War of Northern Aggression" and I didn't know the south had lost the war until sometime around 6th grade. I was the only kid in elementary school who could perform all the dialogue from "Gone With the Wind." I relished the idea of being called to duty, answering a higher purpose, meeting a date with destiny on a battlefield far from home and earning a share of glory. It was some time before I realized there was precious little glory in the whole affair, that it was a four year agony of violence and suffering for millions in and out of uniform on both sides of Mason-Dixon. Still, I've always hungered for more, to understand what happened in those nightmare years, what compelled so many to leap headlong into it, what it felt like to live the reality of those days. Of course, the question always arises: what would I have done?
I spent a day this summer at the battlefields in and around Petersburg, Virginia. For those who don't know, this was the death knell of the Confederacy. North and south had struggled for four years with staggering losses on both sides, and the pendulum had swung both directions by 1864, favoring the south at first, then the north. For a long time, Union strategy had focused on the capture of Richmond as the key to ending the war. It took three years for them to realize that Richmond was in fact only a city, that the capitol could be easily relocated and Confederate armies in the field could continue to operate if Richmond fell. The key to ending the war was to eliminate the forces capable of continuing it. That meant targeting Lee and bleeding him of manpower through engagement after engagement. It meant a war of attrition.
Petersburg was the artery by which Richmond (and Lee's army) was supplied with food and munitions. Railroads crisscrossing eastern Virginia came together here, and so it was here that the two armies came together as well, settling down to a long siege of nearly a year. Visiting Petersburg today, you can hardly throw a stone without hitting 150-year-old earthworks. You find trench lines side by side with subdivisions and peaceful farms watched over by earth forts. These people live alongside history.
I came here in late July, around the same time of year as some of the major engagements of the campaign, including the Battle of the Crater (you know, the opening sequence in "Cold Mountain"? You gotta see it if you haven't already.) I soaked it all up, reading the signs and listening to the stories and following the maps and trails and reading the monuments, but there were a few moments that crystallized the whole affair for me.
The first was at a place called Five Forks. It's just a few miles out of town at what was a major intersection in 1865 that now barely merits two stop signs. I stopped in the visitor center - a tiny little place that I almost skipped, it looked so insignificant - and learned more about what happened here that was worth a visitor center.
Holding the railroads was key to Lee's ability to supply his army, but holding the roads was key to survival itself. Lee might be able to hold the Union army at bay around Petersburg and so save Richmond, but if Union cavalry managed to take control of these five roads, it would cut off his escape route to the west. Five Forks was critical, and so of course it was contested.
Here on April 1, 1865, Union cavalry charged lines of trenches hastily dug by Confederate infantry. Their attack on the right end in particular was so powerful as to knock the rebels back on their heels, so to speak, forcing them to re-fuse their line. This meant that rather than breaking and running, they turned at a right angle to face the enemy trying to get around behind them. It's a bold move and a desperate one.
The ranger at the visitor center had already stunned me by taking a name I'd been carrying around for fifteen years and turning it into a service record with a person behind it. The name was William D. Brooks, my husband's great-great-grandfather whom we had known only through pictures. Our sole knowledge of him was that he married the widow of Peter Kesler, who died at Gettysburg. With that name and a few minutes internet research, the ranger soon was able to tell me that William had in fact been here himself as part of Pickett's division, Steuart's brigade (formerly Armistead's). He even showed me on the map where he had fought - stop #2, The Angle.
I drove out to the Angle along an unlined lane-and-a-half road through thick woods, thinking to myself how much it looked like my road at home - the same road Bill had lived on, by the way. I parked in a tiny pulloff at stop #2 and stepped out into the sultry air. Grasshoppers hummed and the sun beat down on overgrown roadside cornflowers and Queen Anne's Lace. I stepped into the woods and caught my breath.
I was looking at a line of pits - three-sided squared earthworks between two and three feet deep - that stretched off some 200 feet into the woods. They were rough, shallow, clearly thrown up in a hurry. This was the work of desperate men. I turned, looked back across the road, tried to imagine the sound of horses coming, shouting, shots. It would have been agony, waiting here in a hole in the ground, understanding that this might well be your grave you're sitting in.
Bill would have known this for sure. He'd seen many of his neighbors and friends die in places like this already. I wondered how much he understood about what was going on, why he was here and why it mattered and how close they were to end of this thing. Could he feel the end coming? Could any of them sense that there just weren't men enough and food enough and time enough to win anymore? And if they did, why did they stay here in this ditch in the woods with death bearing down on them?
That's when I realize I don't know that I would. With all of it lost and nothing to show for it and nothing to gain, why would anyone? The only answer I can think of is those around you. You stand your ground because the person on each side of you stands theirs. You know this person, you've been through hell with them, and you stand with them. It looks like courage, like devotion, but it may in fact simply be cowardice of a different kind.
I tried to imagine who I would stay in this ditch for. I imagined my colleagues and friends, people I knew, hunkered down here in this pit beside me, looking at me with an unspoken question on their face: are you going to run? And in each case, I answered the same: no. Even people I didn't much care for, I couldn't bring myself to leave them. It wasn't courage. It was shame - the fear of the feeling I'd carry if I left them behind.
I have no idea what I'd really do if the chips were ever down. I'd like to think I'd do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, not because I'm afraid of being embarrassed or ashamed of myself. But I suppose whatever calls us to courage can't be wrong. Can it?
I don't know. Maybe Bill and his messmates stood their ground because they were afraid of being shot for desertion if they ran. Maybe they still believed this was the good fight. Maybe they knew they were beaten in the long run but determined not to go down easy. Maybe they stayed and fought because the enemy stayed and fought. But whatever motivated them to stay, the end was the same. The intersection and the roads fell into Union control, Petersburg was surrendered soon afterward, and Lee retreated west, trying desperately to hook up with a supply train to feed his starving soldiers before escaping to the south to continue the war. The train - and the Union army - were waiting for him two weeks later at Appomattox.
If a soldier falls in a forest for a lost cause, does his legacy make a sound?
I think so. For me, it was the call to come to Petersburg this summer and to Five Forks in particular, where I finally found the source of the sound I've been chasing since I was a kid. Not bugles and drums calling souls to martial glory, but the sound of human voices, caught up in extraordinary times, speaking their truths as they lived it. Of this I am certain: that's courage.
