I
[Note: The ambitious title, "Two Wars," has been restored to the
headline by typographical pressure.]
[Note: History is philosophy teaching by examples. Ps. Dionys. xi, 2
(399R): [Greek: historia philosophia estin ek paradeigmatôn].]
I had intended to call this study Two Wars, but I was afraid lest I
should be under the domination of the title, and an elaborate comparison
of the Peloponnesian War and the War between the States would
undoubtedly have led to no little sophistication of the facts.
Historical parallel bars are usually set up for exhibiting feats of
mental agility. The mental agility is often moral suppleness, and nobody
expects a critical examination of the parallelism itself. He was not an
historian of the first rank, but a phrase-making rhetorician, who is
responsible for the current saying, History is philosophy teaching by
examples. This definition is about as valuable as some of those other
definitions that express one art in terms of another: poetry in terms of
painting, and painting in terms of poetry. "Architecture is frozen
music" does not enable us to understand either perpendicular Gothic or a
fugue of Bach; and when an historian defines history in terms of
philosophy, or a philosopher philosophy in terms of history, you may be
on the lookout for sophistication. Your philosophical historian points
his moral by adorning his tale. Your historical philosopher allows no
zigzags in the march of his evolution.
In like manner, the attempt to express one war in terms of another is
apt to lead to a wresting of facts. No two wars are as like as two peas.
Yet as any two marriages in society will yield a certain number of
resemblances, so will any two wars in history, whether war itself be
regarded as abstract or concrete,--a question that seems to have
exercised some grammatical minds, and ought therefore to be settled
before any further step is taken in this disquisition, which is the
disquisition of a grammarian. Now most persons would pronounce war an
abstract, but one excellent manual with which I am acquainted sets it
down as a concrete, and I have often thought that the author must have
known something practically about war. At all events, to those who have
seen the midday sun darkened by burning homesteads, and wheatfields
illuminated by stark forms in blue and gray, war is sufficiently
concrete. The very first dead soldier one sees, enemy or friend, takes
war forever out of the category of abstracts.
[Note: JOHN AUGUSTINE WASHINGTON, 'as always in the Washington family'
W. GORDON McCABE.]
When I was a student abroad, American novices used to be asked in jest,
"Is this your first ruin?" "Is this your first nightingale?" I am not
certain that I can place my first ruin or my first nightingale, but I
can recall my first dead man on the battlefield. We were making an
advance on the enemy's position near Huttonsville. Nothing, by the way,
could have been more beautiful than the plan, which I was privileged to
see; and as we neared the objective point, it was a pleasure to watch
how column after column, marching by this road and that, converged to
the rendezvous. It was as if some huge spider were gathering its legs
about the victim. The special order issued breathed a spirit of calm
resolution worthy of the general commanding and his troops. Nobody that
I remember criticised the tautological expression, "The progress of this
army must be forward." We were prepared for a hard fight, for we knew
that the enemy was strongly posted. Most of us were to be under fire for
the first time, and there was some talk about the chances of the morrow
as we lay down to sleep. Moralizing of that sort gets less and less
common with experience in the business, and this time the moralizing may
have seemed to some premature. But wherever the minié ball sang its
diabolical mosquito song there was death in the air, and I was soon to
see brought into camp, under a flag of truce, the lifeless body of the
heir of Mount Vernon, whose graceful riding I had envied a few days
before. However, there was no serious fighting. The advance on the
enemy's position had developed more strength in front than we had
counted on, or some of the spider's legs had failed to close in. A
misleading report had been brought to headquarters. A weak point in the
enemy's line had been reinforced. Who knows? The best laid plans are
often thwarted by the merest trifles,--an insignificant puddle, a
jingling canteen. This game of war is a hit or miss game, after all. A
certain fatalism is bred thereby, and it is well to set out with a stock
of that article. So our resolute advance became a forced reconnaissance,
greatly to the chagrin of the younger and more ardent spirits. We found
out exactly where the enemy was, and declined to have anything further
to do with him for the time being. But in finding him we had to clear
the ground and drive in the pickets. One picket had been posted at the
end of a loop in a chain of valleys. The road we followed skirted the
base of one range of hills. The house which served as the headquarters
of the picket was on the other side. A meadow as level as a board
stretched between. I remember seeing a boy come out and catch a horse,
while we were advancing. Somehow it seemed to be a trivial thing to do
just then. I knew better afterwards. Our skirmishers had done their
work, had swept the woods on either side clean, and the pickets had
fallen back on the main body; but not all of them. One man, if not more,
had only had time to fall dead. The one I saw, the first, was a young
man, not thirty, I should judge, lying on his back, his head too low for
comfort. He had been killed outright, and there was no distortion of
feature. No more peaceful faces than one sees at times on the
battlefield, and sudden death, despite the Litany, is not the least
enviable exit. In this case there was something like a mild surprise on
the countenance. The rather stolid face could never have been very
expressive. An unposted letter was found on the dead man's body. It was
written in German, and I was asked to interpret it, in case it should
contain any important information. There was no important information;
just messages to friends and kindred, just the trivialities of camp
life.
The man was an invader, and in my eyes deserved an invader's doom. If
sides had been changed, he would have been a rebel, and would have
deserved a rebel's doom. I was not stirred to the depths by the sight,
but it gave me a lesson in grammar, and war has ever been concrete to me
from that time on. The horror I did not feel at first grew steadily. "A
sweet thing," says Pindar, "is war to those that have not tried it."