After a hundred years the history of a great war waged by a successful
nation is commonly reviewed by that nation with retrospective
complacency.
Distance dims the panorama; haze obscures the ragged gaps in the pageant
until the long lines of victorious armies move smoothly across the
horizon, with never an abyss to check their triumph.
Yet there is one people who cannot view the past through a mirage. The
marks of the birth-pangs remain on the land; its struggle for breath was
too terrible, its scars too deep to hide or cover.
For us, the pages of the past turn all undimmed; battles, brutally
etched, stand clear as our own hills against the sky--for in this land
we have no haze to soften truth.
Treading the austere corridor of our Pantheon, we, too, come at last to
victory--but what a victory! Not the familiar, gracious goddess,
wide-winged, crowned, bearing wreaths, but a naked, desperate creature,
gaunt, dauntless, turning her iron face to the west.
The trampling centuries can raise for us no golden dust to cloak the
flanks of the starved ranks that press across our horizon.
Our ragged armies muster in a pitiless glare of light, every man
distinct, every battle in detail.
Pangs that they suffered we suffer.
The faint-hearted who failed are judged by us as though they failed
before the nation yesterday; the brave are re-enshrined as we read; the
traitor, to us, is no grotesque Guy Fawkes, but a living Judas
of to-day.
We remember that Ethan Allen thundered on the portal of all earthly
kings at Ticonderoga; but we also remember that his hatred for the great
state of New York brought him and his men of Vermont perilously close to
the mire which defiled Charles Lee and Conway, and which engulfed poor
Benedict Arnold.
We follow Gates's army with painful sympathy to Saratoga, and there we
applaud a victory, but we turn from the commander in contempt, his
brutal, selfish, shallow nature all revealed.
We know him. We know them all--Ledyard, who died stainless, with his own
sword murdered; Herkimer, who died because he was not brave enough to do
his duty and be called a coward for doing it; Woolsey, the craven Major
at the Middle Fort, stammering filthy speeches in his terror when Sir
John Johnson's rangers closed in; Poor, who threw his life away for
vanity when that life belonged to the land! Yes, we know them
all--great, greater, and less great--our grandfather Franklin, who
trotted through a perfectly cold and selfishly contemptuous French
court, aged, alert, cheerful to the end; Schuyler, calm and
imperturbable, watching the North, which was his trust, and utterly
unmindful of self or of the pack yelping at his heels; Stark, Morgan,
Murphy, and Elerson, the brave riflemen; Spencer, the interpreter;
Visscher, Helmer, and the Stoners.
Into our horizon, too, move terrible shapes--not shadowy or lurid, but
living, breathing figures, who turn their eyes on us and hold out their
butcher hands: Walter Butler, with his awful smile; Sir John Johnson,
heavy and pallid--pallid, perhaps, with the memory of his broken
parole; Barry St. Leger, the drunken dealer in scalps; Guy Johnson,
organizer of wholesale murder; Brant, called Thayendanegea, brave,
terrible, faithful, but--a Mohawk; and that frightful she-devil, Catrine
Montour, in whose hot veins seethed savage blood and the blood of a
governor of Canada, who smote us, hip and thigh, until the brawling
brooks of Tryon ran blood!
No, there is no illusion for us; no splendid armies, banner--laden,
passing through unbroken triumphs across the sunset's glory; no winged
victory, with smooth brow laurelled to teach us to forget the holocaust.
Neither can we veil our history, nor soften our legends. Romance alone
can justify a theme inspired by truth; for Romance is more vital than
history, which, after all, is but the fleshless skeleton of Romance.