At Shiloh, Once More with Memory

Then the whole congregation of the Israelites assembled at Shiloh, and set up the tent of meeting there. The land lay subdued before them.
-- Joshua 18:1

The land referred to by the author of the Biblical book of Joshua is a conquered Canaan, its people divinely and militarily subdued to make room for Hebrew tribes about to move in. A shrine at the ancient town of Shiloh made it a sacred place. The name resonates across the millenia, along with the echoes of battle.

On the evening of April 7, 1862, the land around Shiloh church in Southwest Tennessee lay subdued, after two days of fierce fighting. Bodies were spread thickly across the battlefield, and it was hot, so General Grant, the victorious commander, ordered them hurriedly buried in mass graves. In 1866 a national cemetery was established, and Union dead were eventually re-interred there in individually marked graves that continue to be well-kept. Confederate dead remain in the trenches, the largest of which received about 700 bodies. Markers for the Southerners in trenches are limited to single gravestones purchased half a century later with funds raised by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

My first trip to Shiloh National Military Park was in 1961. I was a 12-year old Boy Scout on an adventure--a 14 mile hike through the park. I don't remember learning much about the details of the battle. Images that remained with me described a small pond bloody with dying men trying to slake their thirst, and a peach orchard where a lot of bullets flew, dropping tender blossoms from the trees onto the ground among the fallen soldiers. I recall getting the information that the Federals won, and browsing, in the bookstore, a thin volume of Confederate lore from the period that claimed a natural superiority for the Rebel soldiers. Most shockingly memorable to me was the existence of burial trenches. I knew what graves were, but this was my first encounter with grave-digging on this scale.

Sometime in the mid-19th century, a handful of people built a log church in southwest Tennessee, and called it Shiloh, after the ancient Hebrew town. The battle came to be known by the name of the church. In out time, it's a peaceful setting, undulating low hills beside the Tennessee River. I have strained to think what it must have been like during that brief local cataclysm. It would have been recognizable, yet arrestingly different.

In the first day's fighting, a lot of the troops formed on opposite sides of a road that had become sunken by wagon travel, the Union to the east with the river behind them, the South to the west, near the route they'd marched up from Corinth, Mississippi. Southern troops spent the day trying to take the ground Union soldiers were defending, which, at very high cost, they finally captured, driving the Federals back to the river. The next day, reinforced Union forces would push the Confederates back to the west across the ground they'd taken the day before, and send them in retreat back to Corinth.

On a trip there several years ago, my wife and I walked along the sunken road and had what I will call a fleeting feeling of presence in the dark time of the long-ago battle, a sense conjured out of what had happened there, with the relentless firing of weapons, the screams of the injured and dying, and dense clouds of black-powder smoke adding their confusing influence to the chaos.

No, I don't believe in ghosts, or in strange, lingering "energies" that leave physical or supernatural traces perceptible by people with keen sensitivities decades or centuries later. And I don't think I'm a reincarnated soldier who died there and "remembers" the battle, as George Patton's character does in the very compelling 1970 film on that quintessential soldier's WWII experiences. Early in the film Patton, on landing in Tunisia after Rommel had thrashed the ill-organized Allied troops there, heads out with an entourage for a tour of the battlefield. He directs his driver to a site that he declares to have been where "the battle" was. But Patton's battlefield is not where Rommel fought the Allies. The soldiers with him are puzzled until Patton reveals that he's talking about the final battle between the Carthaginians and Romans at the end of the Third Punic War in the 2nd century B.C.E. "I was here," Patton said. And he believed it.

That's a good story, and adds color and interest to the character. But my wife and I see our ephemeral moment on the Shiloh battlefield differently. I mentioned it to her after a trip to Shiloh just a few days ago, our second visit since the striking and unexpected wave of emotion at the sunken road. In the last two trips, we hadn't had the same experience. I thought as I was talking about it that it's possible for the human mind, in its inseparable bundle of cognition and emotion, to extend itself in an empathetic way across history. Historic episodes are stories, and we enter into stories of history as we do into novels and films when we allow ourselves to become immersed in them. In a deep tragedy, it may lead to something like Aristotle's notion of cartharsis, the release that comes from an emotional identification.

The U.S. Civil War is tragedy writ large. And it's on our soil, and among our people. It's a good example of what Faulkner pointed out in Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Our sources of tragedy are far from being limited to Aeschylus telling tales of Greeks fighting Persians, or Shakespeare's Lear raging his devastation into the stormy moor.

But back to Shiloh, that bucolic spot a couple of hours from my house. I thought I might, in writing these musings, discover something about why I've made several trips to that particular spot. It has a natural beauty that, for me, is congenial with the kind of country I have seen as beautiful all my life. It's not the only beautiful country, just the kind closest to me. My body feels at home here, and in places that look something like this place. I am situated naturally within stories that unfold here--the story of a battle, stories shared through day trips driving and walking around the space.

And what time do I really live in? Stories that came from my parents, grandparents, and others who lived in rural places where mules pulled plows and wagons and houses were lit by coal oil lamps describe a time for me that remains vivid, a time of made of memories from years before I was born. The fact that the memories are transmitted memories rather than my own primary memories removes them only a short distance from my own experience. These kinds of memories place me in a time little changed from the late 19th century.

The moment on the sunken road, filled somehow with impressions that connected me to a larger time than the span of my own life, was brief as we generally reckon time, yet the experience of it felt timeless. In that moment, however long it might have taken, I went out of the realm of my own ordinariness. I was conscious of something more than I'm typically aware of and able to attend to in time and space. The moment came unbidden, and took me out of myself, which is to say out of my own narrative and into a more capacious one.

The poem at the end of Robert Penn Warren's Audubon: A Vision is titled "Tell Me a Story," and appears after the poet has told a richly textured story of John James Audubon, a story based on an event reported in Audubon's journals, and extended into a vaster territory by the poet's vision, or perhaps the interweaving of the experience and vision of Audubon and Warren, with the event and Warren's tale over a hundred years apart. Here's the poem, where Warren wraps up his particular tale by talking about a more universal conception of story:

[A]
Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
the great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse. I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart.

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.

The sound was passing northward.

[B]
Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.
- -

I have had a small number of other sunken road moments in my life. During those moments, "I did not know what was happening in my heart." I can speak of Time when I recall these experiences, but pronouncing its name fails to deliver a description of what it felt like--naming the Time I knew in any meaningful way is a task I'm just not able to perform. The delight I take in those experiences is no mere burst of exuberance. It's deep.

What could be delightful about such a bloody event as a battle? In its etymology, the OED defines delectare, the Latin root of "delight," as "to allure, charm." What is alluring may well be something one takes a kind of joy in. Tennyson's aging Ulysses fondly recalls having " . . . drunk delight of battle with my peers . . ." Again, the film version of Patton, on seeing his army on the move: "I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than my life. "

Even the gentle Walt Whitman, who was a nurse during the war, writes of a soldier's good moments in "Song of Joys":

O to resume the joys of the soldier!
To feel the presence of a brave commanding officer--to feel his sympathy!
To behold his calmness--to be warm'd in the rays of his smile!
To go to battle--to hear the bugles play and the drums beat!
To hear the crash of artillery--to see the glittering of the bayonets
and musket-barrels in the sun!
To see men fall and die and not complain!
To taste the savage taste of blood--to be so devilish!
To gloat so over the wounds and deaths of the enemy.

Finally, General Robert E. Lee, speaking to his subordinate General Longstreet at the battle of Fredericksburg: "It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we should grow too fond of it."

I don't think I personally would ever be in danger of growing too fond of war. But the remarks by these poets and generals reveal a passion for its drama. And Homer's Iliad stands at the beginning of Western literature with one of the greatest war stories ever told.

My own attitude is less a fondness for war than an affinity for the human struggle with tragedy. Tragedy has its allure, its charm, and thus a kind of delight. It allures--draws us in--by way of the depth and range of universal human feeling it portrays. It shows us that folly is not only universal, it is often "mightiest in the mighty," to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. In the U.S. Civil War, the Southern folly involved a handful of rich people convincing or coercing millions of ordinary people to defend the lavish way of life they'd built on owning human beings, buying and selling them and using them as we use farm machinery today. The phenomenon of powerful people managing to convince the less powerful to fight and die for their interests is, unfortunately, all too common in human history.

The war was costly, well over 600,000 dead, hundreds of thousands more sent home maimed, mostly with amputated limbs. The Southern economy was devastated. A huge number of the small farmers who, by their lights, fought to defend their invaded homeland, were dead or, maybe lacking an arm or a leg, returned home unable to work their farms. The institution of slavery was wiped away, but some of its residue remains with us, a Faulknerian past that isn't dead or even past.

So in this level of tragedy, we feel with the players on that long-ago stage, deepening our sense of the human condition through our identification with the characters in the great drama.

The spectacle of the entire war is complex and in a way overwhelming. It may well be that its human impacts are most easily seen through particular stories that describe what it was like to be in a particular place at the time these events were unfolding. Shiloh, the quiet place in West Tennessee, is one place to do that.