Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 17, 1990 TAG: 9005170459
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GLENN M. AYERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
To them, the war is eternal flags and bugles; the gunfire, puffs of smoke. The shrapnel, the screaming, the bodies blown to giblets are realities that elude them. There was nothing nice about the war. Even its neglected facts are bloody and hard.
Consider Bentonville, the last battle fought by the last major Confederate army to capitulate.
Though the battle occurred only 23 days before that army's surrender and 18 before Lee's, 1,472 men were killed among 4,206 casualties. A minor, meaningless battle at the end of the war killed more men than modernly march on parade at Virginia Military Institute.
If Gen. Joe Johnston had had just the spectators' vehicles at the most recent redux, he could have hauled away his 1,694 wounded. As it was, he had no wagons.
Gen. Lee, looking over the Appomattox scene, muttered to an aide that his army seemed to have dissolved. At the carnival 125 years later, television caught his surrogate smiling and waving astride a gray hore. Glorious!
The suffering had a personal side as well.
Grandpa always told of Uncle Alpheus Wilson. Shot through the jaw at Gettysburg, he groveled into a bloody stream between two dead horses, only to discover water oozing from a bullet hole on each side of the face. In later life, all his food had to be shredded and mashed.
Still, Uncle Alpheus was one of the lucky ones. He came home.
364,511 did not. Walt Whitman ". . . saw battle corpses, myriads of them/white skeletons of young men, I saw them . . . ."
At the Sanitary Commission, Mary Ashton Livermore reported: "In every ward there were dying men; in every deadhouse, the coffined dead; ambulances standing nearby . . . ."
Mary B. Chesnut described the Lost Cause in lyric poginancy:
Suppose we do all we hoped. Suppose we start up grand and free - a proud, young republic. Think of all these young lives sacrificed . . . . best and bravest of their generation swept away! . . . is nothing to show they were ever on Earth.
It was the South, of course, that was annihilated. Of all affected, Southerners should be the least insistent on redramatization.
What is the sanity in it? We know the ending. Why nurture recidivism?
Are there sons of Auschwitz who want to resuscitate those shaved heads and hollow faces? Certainly not. But so-called sons of the South can't seem to let holocaust alone.
Yet as Chesnut proves, they are not true sons. The best and bravest died. Only their mutants remain.
by CNB