A Day at Gettysburg

PBS is reshowing Ken Burns' great documentary The Civil War.  As I write this they are showing the episode on Gettysburg, and I am reminded of the day I went to the Gettysburg National Military Park.  It was a February day in about 1991.  It was clear, cold, and still.  I was on a business trip in central Pennsylvania, and I had an afternoon free.  I drove my rental car to the battlefield monument not knowing at all what to expect.  I found that on that cold winter weekday I almost had the entire site to myself.  I went through the exhibition spaces and learned the facts of the 1863 battle.  Then I walked out through the park on the top of Cemetery Ridge.  Past the place where Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, which I had memorized as a young schoolboy so many years before.  To the viewpoint on top of the hill where Pickett had led his famous and disastrous charge.  I was alone, except for the ghosts.  It was still, so peaceful, as I contemplated the carnage that had taken place there not one hundred thirty years before, the mere blink of an eye in historical time.  I thought of all the Americans who died there, for everyone who died there was an American.  Yes, one side was fighting to preserve the diabolical institution of slavery, but every one of them was a man.  Every one of them was an American.  And there they died.  They died in their thousands, almost eight thousand of them, nearly twice the number of American deaths in the entire Iraq war in one three day battle.  Over twenty-seven thousand of them were wounded.  Every one of them a man.  Every one of them an American.

And I was overwhelmed.  Not by the bravery, though surely there was bravery.  Not by the heroism, though surely there was heroism.  Not by the nobility of it, for there is no nobility in slaughter.  By none of that, but by the unspeakable horror of it all.  And by the incomprehensible insanity of it all.  By the incomprehensible insanity of war.  All war.  Every war.  There in the beautiful silence of that cold, clear February day I could only stand in numb horror at the willingness of human beings to massacre each other.  At our willingness to do on a massive scale in an organized military what we consider the gravest crime, the gravest sin, when otherwise done by one person to another person.  The word that kept occurring to me over and over again was madness.  Gettysburg was madness.  All war is madness.  Every war is madness.  In the words of the great Pete Seeger, when will they ever learn.  More to the point, when will we ever learn.