On Memorial Day the Memory Is Alive & Vital

IN the quiet winds of Memorial Day, epic voices echo from the grassy graves of the Civil War--Stonewall Jackson, vibrant and vital, writing his wife about his glory at First Bull Run: "God made my brigade more instrumental than any other in repulsing the main attack"; Ulysses Grant, daring, dazzling, slashing through the sleet against Fort Donelson without benefit of orders: 'Wo terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works"; Robert E. Lee, the superb exemplar, bareheaded astride Traveller at Spotsylvania, held back from leading the charge: "General Lee to the rear, General Lee to the rear"; Phil Sheridan, little god of war, red-faced and raging beneath his fork-tailed battle flag along the rutted road to Appomattox: "Now smash 'em, I tell you, smash 'em"; Farragut, fabulous admiral, lashed to the mast in Mobile Bay: "Damn the torpedoes! Go ahead." Back of the epic lines echo the epic songs: Battle Hymn of the Republic, Maryland, My Maryland, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, Dixie, Marching Through Georgia, Tenting Tonight, and, most popular of all, a tender Victorian love song called Lorena:

The years creep slowly by, Lorena The snow is on the grass again

Echoing too, through Memorial Day, sounds the Civil War's fearful counterpoint of hurt and disease: "When I was carried into the butchering room," a wounded Union colonel is saying, "I could not help comparing the surgeons to fiends. It was dark and the building lighted partially with candles . . . Some ten or twelve tables were covered with blood; near and around stood the surgeons, with blood all over them, [beside] a heap of feet, legs and arms. On one of these tables I was laid . . ."

There are many such echoes, because the Civil War was a destiny-sized war--2,300,000 Union men v. about 1,000,000 Confederates--crackling like a flaming canebrake from New Mexico to Chesapeake Bay. It was a costly war--about 500,000 men dead in both armies. It was also total war, the New World's first. "If the people raise a howl," red-bearded William Tecumseh Sherman is rasping, "I will answer that war is war and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace . . . they must stop the war."

Universal voices echo, too, for the Civil War was a universal war--Abraham Lincoln, man of anguish, defining the issue: "We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth"; Ulysses Grant, man of victory, summing up: "Our republican institutions were regarded as experiments up to the breaking out of the rebellion, and monarchical Europe generally believed that our republic was a rope of sand . . . Now it has shown itself capable of dealing with one of the greatest wars that was ever made, and our people have proven"themselves."

Across the graves at Appomattox, perhaps, the memories and meanings of the Civil War echo most truly and most nobly. "Not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum, not a cheer, nor word, nor whisper of vainglorying," the voice of a Union brigadier general, Joshua Chamberlain, sounds down across the ages as he accepts the surrender of arms, "but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding as if it were the passing of the dead . . . How could we help falling on our knees, all of us together, and praying God to pity and forgive us all . . ."

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