Leave them their sad stone angels, their tattered flags, and dirty sheets. Their crushed drums and tuneless fifes. Painted cannons, broken swords, and rusted bayonets. Hearts that deserved breaking, souls unredeemed. The haunted ballroom memories of a dozen decades of twisted honor, dreadful behavior, and fanciful dreams.
In the end, which is just another beginning, their part in the circumstances of the times, that carry us all, from then to now, and along into tomorrow, is not tallied and weighted but instead reflected in the cracked and faded mirrors of memory. As insubstantial as the fog in the valleys, the mist from swamps and smoke from campfires hastily abandoned.
They deserved their Golgotha and the rain that damped their fires, cold nights, foul rations, soiled trousers, and useless boots. Screaming untended, tabletop abattoir surgeries, limbs piled in horrible cords, night fevers. Nameless shallow graves or a long hobble back to scorch walled homes, fields unplowed, a mule unshod and spavined, pigs half feral, sickly children gone surly. Weary women whose hearts remain forever unmended.
Of those who survived many would die early in the decade after from the effects of the struggle. Some of those that lasted to the new century, a good few of whom, had never fired nor heard an angry shot, would don their new feathered grey hats, and shiny presentation swords and strut about in polished high boots on their day of memory and declare the whole thing worthwhile, even glorious while grayed widows, spinster sisters, lips long unkissed and undoweried daughters tended flowers in the gardens of death, lamenting the loss of handsome brave men gone to mansions in the clouds.
For the length of another century, when the sun went down and the moon came up, sons and grandsons, nephews and aged younger brothers, vain and cowardly, would ride ghostly through the night and mock redemption with noose and torch.
They had been daring, and sometimes brilliant, even in rags, their flags a tatter, they inspired awe. Their courage was reckless and they paid unflinchingly in blood and suffering for every chapter of their myth, but the sacrifices were too great for such an unworthy cause. Their lives spent uselessly on the machinery of war they were too stubborn to stop.
For war is a machine, and this one took a river town shopkeeper, a clerk of records, inventories, and percentages to understand and manage it. This dark engine needs three things to fuel its dreadful work; people, resources, and time. What you lack in one you make up for with more of the other two. The failed Galena merchant did not lead, he commanded and drove, though he had led and well, instead he promoted and supported those who did. Then tallied his bloody sums. Still a merchant by temperament he said to the Springfield Lawyer "I will get you what you want but this is the cost".
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Broken but unbowed they still could not bear the burden of truth or read the lessons of history. They were rebels, yet they could not accept that rebellion festers in the hearts of all who suffer oppression. They fancied themselves gallant; yet broke their oaths and were unashamed to kill those who kept faith in justice and reason. They thought that arrogance would trump reality and that form would triumph over function. They were foolish, they were traitorous and they were damned. So leave them their death angels and silent cannons, let fly their false flags, play on their sad laments and chirpy hollow anthem.
They still march, in dusty route step, or astride good horses, retreating back in fogged memories, to tree-shaded village streets and town squares alive with music. Porches full of laughing young women, fans aflutter, fragrant and pretty as flowers. A smile and a nod for memories locket. The smells of tanned leather, new dyed wool, starched cotton, saddle soap, patent hair oil, and spring blossoms fill the air. By Christmas, all will be home again, and the New Year’s ball will be the grandest.
All the while unnoticed shaded faces peer from kitchen windows, alley stable doorways, pig sty shacks and brutish forges. Some with ankles and wrists cuffed with scars, they wave calloused hands and sweaty kerchiefs wishing them luck, but none of it good.
There was no grand ball that new year, though they had victories. The first sons died for them. Then the next year, the second sons fell and months later the third. Most of the reliable ammunition was gone by the summer of "64"and many of the best horses lame, petticoats went for bandages. There was a pall that crept like fog into the pillared manses, Cookie stole food and old Mammy became bold.
The last year of it, stragglers clad in butternut and bits of grey, claiming unapparent injuries caused their early discharge, made camp in the barn; but were able enough to creep in at night and steal the candlesticks. They snuck away without a "much obliged', and took the only laying hen. Sam, the houseman, kept them from the women by his presence and the threat of an empty flintlock.
Yankee wagons were loaded with anything that could be found and the rest burned. They did not kill, but it might have been a mercy if they had, with the colored soldiers sleeping in the beds. The great generals’ fields were turned into gardens of stone. When the worst was finally over and the counting began, these once-gay Belles gave us this day of sadness and the obligation of memory, real or imagined.
"Look Away.....Look Away.....Look Away...
T.P. Dunne 2014
This was written after returning from a trip to Savannah, Georgia in 2014 with my friends Mike and Kitty Kalasunas. Kitty whom I have known for decades was appalled at the numerous memorials large and small that seemed to be in front of every public building and every municipal park. Mike and I were nonplused and gave them no second thought, Kitty was insulted that treason was being mythologized. It seemed the whole bloody mess was glorified, of course, it turns out she was right, (once again I might add) and recent events have reinforced her viewpoint.
This was my view at that time and I still think it puts it in a perspective that might have at least kept the conversation alive.
T.P. Dunne 2019
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