Photo courtesy of farm9.staticflickr.com/8014/7497321358_99429108b4_z.jpg

The echo of a low and constant rumble comes to us from the far horizon. Is it difficult to determine if it is a summer thunderstorm or a ghostly cannonade. Dimly heard on the wind is the mournful mutter of a far off battlefield. Spectral voices call back to us from a century and a half ago, hollow and distant.

On a sunny July day.

Two former colleagues, now opposing generals, meet when one is captured. The man in blue greets the other in grey,

“Good morning, Archer! How are you? I am glad to see you!”

To which the man in grey replies,

“Well, I am not glad to see you by a damn sight!”

His misgivings are well founded. The Confederate officer will languish for many months in a POW camp, costing him his health and eventually his life soon after being exchanged late in the war. A day later the Union officer will be relieved of command to his enduring shame. His relief is despite starting the first day of the battle as a division commander and finishing it commanding a full corps in a desperate situation. His timely actions likely saved the Union Army from defeat, but his commander is unimpressed and annoyed by the timing of his retreat. The general’s fear at the time is that his legacy would be that of an incompetent and dilatory leader and no credit will be given for his valuable service.

His fears are unfounded as he is destined to be remembered for neither. Instead, he will enter American myth as the supposed inventor of the national pastime of baseball.

A day and a night follow.

A soft spoken Abbeville Alabama lawyer standing on the lower slopes of a steep rocky hill  witnesses his brother fall mortally wounded beside him. He hoarsely shouts the same word he has shouted five previous times in the last thirty minutes; “Charge!”  Unbelievably, the boys from South Alabama follow him once more up that bullet-swept slope, past their fallen comrades from the previous fruitless attempts. Men from the small towns of Loachapoka and Auburn, urged forward by their own officers, follow on his extreme left.

A professor of rhetoric from a small rural northern college standing wearily on the hillside above the lawyer gives his own command in a fatigued shout, “Fix Bayonets!” His boys from Maine along with two of his brothers follow his command too. In the next fifteen minutes, he will earn his nation’s highest honor for valor.

A night and another day follow.

“Up men, and to your posts,…” says an immaculately dressed dandy who was the ‘goat’ of his West Point class. His perfumed ringlets drip with sweat in the summer heat as he raises his voice, “Remember today that you fight for old Virginia!”

“Steady, men,” says a mounted officer in blue as he rides slowly along a three foot wall. Shells burst and round shot ricochets off the top of the stonework, spraying the huddled ranks behind it with rock chips. Answering another officer who begs him to take cover he states calmly, “No. There are times when a Corps commander’s life does not count.”

Half a mile away, under white oak and hickory trees along a small intermittent stream bed, his lifelong friend steps out from under the shade and into the blazing July sunlight. He and 13,000 other men begin to cross a whirlwind of shot and shell that will result over half their numbers lying bleeding and dying on the wide fields between. He will also receive a mortal wound less than a hundred yards of the spot where the mounted officer encourages the Union men, in a place known forever afterwards as the ‘Bloody Angle’.

There are other places here too, given names by the soldiers who fought there on those three long days and remembered as such forevermore.  They are small, quiet places otherwise unremarkable on all the days before or since that fateful meeting: The Devil’s Den, the Peach Orchard, the Wheatfield, Little Round Top, Culp’s Hill, Seminary Ridge, Cemetery Ridge. Small shallow streams meander through this ground: the Plum Run, Pitzer’s Run, Rock Creek.  Those streams are crossed or paralleled by roads with names from more peaceful times: The Fairfield Road, the Emmitsburg Road, the Chambersburg Pike, the Baltimore Pike. They all meet at a tiny hamlet amid the quiet fields of rural Pennsylvania with a name forever engraved in the annals of American History.

Gettysburg 

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