When former Brigadier General Joshua
Lawrence Chamberlain and fellow veterans of the 20th Maine Volunteer
Regiment returned to the Gettysburg battlefield 23 years after the day they had
saved “Little Round Top” – and perhaps The Union itself - Chamberlain began his
dedicatory remarks with these words:
“In
great deeds, something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change
and pass; bodies disappear, but spirits linger, to consecrate the ground for
the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and
generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where
and by whom great things were done and suffered for them. . .”
Each time I have visited
Gettysburg, I have felt myself “heart-drawn”
to places such as “Spangler’s Spring” and “Barlow Knoll”; to “Devil’s Den” and the “Peach Orchard”; to
Culp’s Hill” and “The Wheat Field”; and yes, above all to “Little Round Top”
from whose high perch I have gone to view a Pennsylvania sunset and to consider
what transpired there during the first three days of a hot July in1863. I have
never left with dry eyes.
Even if it were not for my
nearly-lifelong admiration for the scholar from Brewer, Maine who studied for
the ministry, but became a great self-taught soldier, I would find myself
revisiting those spoken words over and over again through the years, enlarged
upon and made even more eloquent in the shadow of my own experiences.
While there is no scientific
evidence that “spirits linger”, I
devoutly believe that the spiritual imprint of great human endeavors does. I
have felt it where autumn foliage cast deep reflections on a small body of
woodland water not far from “Shiloh Church” on the Tennessee River which is
still known as “Bloody Pond”. I have been touched by it in Antietam’s cornfields
and at the sight of the old Dunker church nearby. One day as I explored a patch
of woods at the “Wilderness” battle site, I came across the still-discernible
outline of old trench works, where men in Gray took cover as the woods around
them burned, and I found myself lying down on the weed-encrusted ground, where
so much confusion and fear had overwhelmed those who sheltered there so long
ago.
Because I knew the exact spot where
“Stonewall” Jackson fell – mortally wounded by friendly fire – I knelt there
one summer day, at a place called Chancellorsville, where the “victors”
suffered a loss they would never regain.
And one cannot ascend the hill above Fredericksburg’s “sunken road” and walk among
the dead buried there and not feel one with those Union troopers who succumbed
to the folly of Union General Ambrose Burnside’s suicidal orders. It is a
solemn journey.
As a very young lad, living within a
stone’s throw of the New Jersey Palisades, I was a regular visitor to the exact
spot where, in November, 1776 General George Washington watched through a
telescope as his ragtag Army across the Hudson River was being shredded by
Cornwallis’s rampaging invaders. Helpless to save them in the collapse of their
New York fortifications, it is said that Washington was so moved by the scene
that he turned away so his lieutenants would not see him weeping. That November
tableau was painted by the brush of history 238 years ago, yet today I see and
feel Washington’s inconsolable grief as if I were there. To realize that I grew
up climbing the Palisades (unknown to my parents!) where so much history had
been written only adds to the sense of connection which seems to follow my own
footsteps wherever I go.
While it is unlikely I will ever
realize a long-time wish to walk the beaches of Normandy, or visit the place
near Chateau Thierry in France where my own father fell to enemy fire 96 years
ago in another war, I have
experienced the heart-pounding thrill of walking through an early morning ground
mist in the company of the aluminum-cast and ghostly figures of “brother
warriors” at the Korean War memorial in Washington, D.C., where there was no
need to apologize to anyone for the tears that filled my eyes.
In
great deeds, something abides. On great fields something stays. This
I know!
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A Gettysburg sunset as seen from Little
Round Top.
Al Cooper Photo
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