On a Wednesday morning in late May, my older brother Ken stood near the window in our motel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and ran an electric razor over his tan scalp. He wore blue jeans, and on the front of his gray t-shirt were the words “Pink Floyd” above a pink pig in profile. I sat on the end of the bed nearest the door and tied my shoes; my dark t-shirt said, “Run Rest Repeat,” the three green words stacked in a small pyramid. We lugged our bags down the hall and past the housekeeper’s cart to the small lobby, where we dropped off the key cards at the desk. After we put our things in the back of my blue Jeep, we stopped at a 7-Eleven for coffee and then drove east on 34 toward the Potomac River and Sharpsburg, Maryland. An hour later we stood on the edge of a field where, on a September morning in 1862, the blood of 12,000 men — wounded and dead — soaked the soil.
This ground is part of Antietam National Battlefield, the site of the single deadliest day of the Civil War. It’s located 23 miles south of the Pennsylvania-Maryland line and less than seventy miles northwest of Washington, D.C. Here General Robert E. Lee’s 40,000 Confederates first invaded the North and engaged General George P. McClellan’s 60,000 Union troops along a 5.5-mile north-south line between Antietam Creek and Sharpsburg. The main battles occurred in three places: in this 24-acre cornfield near the small white Dunkard church, in and around a sunken farm road, and on a 125-foot-long stone bridge. By 6 p.m.—after just nine hours of fighting — 23,000 men were dead, wounded, or missing. This is nearly four times the number of American casualties at Normandy on June 6, 1944.
Quantifying the war with statistics, maps marked with blue and gray rectangles symbolizing corps and divisions and arrows indicating troop advances and retreats, charts comparing North and South agricultural and industrial production, and lengthy lists of regiments and brigades and their commanding officers provides interesting and useful information. However, doing so also abstracts events so severely that it minimizes and even obscures the physical hardships of soldiers and civilians in a landscape that embodied the battle and both exposed and concealed the human frailties engaged upon it.
Walk through the grass along the Smoketown Road, a snake rail fence on your left. Gnats fly up your nose, wood ticks creep under your clothes, and your socks squish inside dew-soaked shoes. Stare into the dense West Woods near the Dunkard Church where undergrowth and trees might conceal hundreds of armed men. Lay on your belly on the slope that parallels the Sunken Road, your feet toward the dirt track, and peer over the edge where thousands of blue uniforms charged into the breach. Sit in the still grass on the height above the stone bridge as the sun drills into your back and neck. Wait and watch: a doe’s lifted head, the veil of rain slanting across the hills, a distant field dimpled with blossoms of fleabane. Brown water pooled in a footprint, vultures congregating at a swollen carcass, a goldfinch flashing into trees welded with the darkness of dusk.
Ken and I walked the trails and read the markers and inscriptions on monuments. We touched the rifling inside of cannon, wondered at the dogwood blossoms in the Mumma Cemetery, and looked over the landscape from the top of the sixty-foot-tall observation tower. During a midday downpour, we ate pulled pork sandwiches and fries at the Public House & Eatery in Sharpsburg and then walked through the black wrought iron gate of the Antietam National Cemetery and among the white stones. Near the back where purslane had pushed out most of the grass, markers for ten Minnesotans stood side by side, the leftmost nearly white and the others yellowed with algae and progressively darker shades of yellow-green on those nearest the shadows of large trees along the stone wall on the right.
That evening we drove south into Virginia and spent the next day at Manassas National Battlefield, site of the two battles of Bull Run. By late afternoon we stood on a hilltop across the road from the Groveton Confederate Cemetery, where nearly 500 unknown Confederates lay buried in trenches. Lightning flashed on the horizon. Across the hill, a row of five artillery pieces pointed west, their hardware black; spokes, axles, and trails brown; bronze cannon weathered a greenish-blue. As we walked past them, a purple martin shot out of one of the muzzles. Ken peered at the darkness inside and then shined his phone’s flashlight into the bore. “A nest,” he said.
Might they all be loaded with such weaponry. Might the long dead rest in good faith. And might we all commend ourselves to those memories of the corporeal countryside.
