National Crises and War Recorded by Poets

Herman Melville, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania

Dear readers and friends. Before I begin on my doctoral papers I wanted to share part of a rather long poem by Herman Melville about the battles in the Wilderness, including Spotsylvania which I wrote about yesterday. Melville, one of the great American writers of the Nineteenth Century who wrote such works as Moby Dick, was one of the epic poets of the American Civil War. He chronicled the experiences of soldiers and sailors across the land, honoring and remembering them in his poetry.

One of his poems, The Armies of the Wilderness, dealt with the terrible battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, opened his campaign to destroy Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and end the war. The campaign was costly in human terms. Unlike previous Union commanders, Grant, his commanders and soldiers were determined to bring Lee to battle and to give his army no respite. The battlefields are well kept by the National Park Service, and unlike Gettysburg they are not major tourist destinations, and such give the visitor time to take in what happened in relative calm and quiet. Thus a chance as they stand where thousands of men fell in battle, bodies riddled with bullets, and literally falling on top of where there comrades fell, sometimes four or five deep, often with the wounded underneath the dead.

In the second half of the poem, Melville wrote:

The May-weed springs; and comes a Man, And mounts our Signal Hill; A quiet Man, and plain in garb— Briefly he looks his fill,

Then drops his gray eye on the ground, Like a loaded mortar he is still: Meekness and grimness meet in him—The silent General.

Were men but strong and wise, Honest as Grant, and calm, War would be left to the red and black ants, And the happy world disarm.

That eve a stir was in the camps, Forerunning quiet soon to come, Among the streets of beechen huts, No more to know the drum.

The weed shall choke the lowly door, And foxes peer within the gloom, Till scared perchange by Mosby’s prowling men, Who ride in the rear of doom.

Far West, and farther South, Wherever the sword has been, Deserted camps are met, And desert graves are seen.

The livelong night they ford the flood; With guns held high they silent press, Till shimmers the grass in their bayonets’ sheen—On Morning’s banks their ranks they dress;

Then by the forests lightly wind, Whose waving boughs the pennons seem to bless, Borne by the cavalry scouting on— Sounding the Wilderness.

Like shoals of fish in spring, That visit Crusoe’s isle, The host in the lonesome place—The hundred thousand file.

The foe that held his guarded hills, Must speed to woods afar; For the scheme that was nursed by the Culpepper hearth, With the slowly-smoked cigar—The scheme that smouldered through winter long

Now bursts into act—into waw—The resolute scheme of a heart as calm, As the Cyclone’s core.

The fight for the city is fought, In Nature’s old domain; Man goes out to the wilds, And Orpheus’ charm is vain.

In glades they meet skull after skull, Where pine-cones lay—the rusted gun, Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat, And cuddled-up skeleton;

And scores of such. Some start as in dreams, And comrades lost bemoan: By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged—But the Year and the Man were gone.

At the height of their madness, The night winds pause, Recollecting themselves; But no lull in these wars.

A gleam!—a volley! And who shall go, Storming the swarmers in jungles dread, No cannon-ball answers, no proxies are sent—They rush in the shrapnel’s stead.

Plume and sash are vanities now—Let them deck the pall of the dead; They go where the shade is, perhaps into Hades, Where the brave of all times have led.

There’s a dust of hurrying feet, Bitten lips and bated breath, And drums that challenge to the grave, And faces fixed, forefeeling death.

What husky huzzahs in the hazy groves—What flying encounters fell; Pursuer and pursued like ghosts disappear, In gloomed shade—their end who shall tell?

The crippled, a ragged-barked stick for a crutch, Limp to some elfin dell—Hobble from the sight of dead faces—white, As pebbles in a well.

Few burial rites shall be; No priest with book and band, Shall come to the secret place, Of the corpse in the foeman’s land.

Watch and fast, march and fight—clutch your gun? Day-fights and night-fights; sore is the strees; Look, through the pines what line comes on? Longstreet slants through the hauntedness?

’Tis charge for charge, and shout for yell: Such battles on battles oppress—But Heaven lent strength, the Right strove well, And emerged from the Wilderness.

Emerged, for the way was won; But the Pillar of Smoke that led, Was brand-like with ghosts that went up, Ashy and red.

None can narrate that strife in the pines, A seal is on it—Sabaean lore! Obscure as the wood, the entangled rhyme, But hints at the maze of war—

Vivid glimpses or livid through peopled gloom, And fires which creep and char—A riddle of death, of which the slain Sole solvers are.

Long they withhold the roll, Of the shroudless dead. It is right; Not yet can we bear the flare, Of the funeral light.

Melville was one among many who put the hardship of war and its suffering to poetic meter, describing the sights, sounds, and smells of war and death that sometimes come across stilted in prose. The authors included famous writers like Melville and Walt Whitman as well as many regular soldiers, doctors and nurses who tended to the wounded and dying, and townspeople who helped bury those killed near their homes, doing what they could to chronicle as much about them as possible in hopes that it would help people find their husbands, children or others who loved them.

As a historian, priest and man who has experienced war, I find it important to walk the great battlefields of the past. To study them up close and do so when I can experience the heat, or the cold, the rain and the mud. When one does so when one is tired, hungry, freezing or sweeting experiencing the elements were so many men fought, fell and died it brings one a far greater appreciation for the hardships of war than doing so when comfortably ensconced in a recliner sipping on one’s favorite beverage. The French-German from the Alsace, Guy Sajer who was conscripted into Hitler’s Wehrmacht to fight on the Russian front, wrote in his book, The Forgotten Soldier:

“Too many people learn about war with no inconvenience to themselves. They read about Verdun or Stalingrad without comprehension, sitting in a comfortable armchair, with their feet beside the fire, preparing to go about their business the next day, as usual…One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired, as I am writing about it now, at dawn, while my asthma attack wears off. And even now, in my sleepless exhaustion, how gentle and easy peace seems!”

Unfortunately, most of the leaders in Trump’s cabal have never experienced war, and Trump himself found ways and had help to avoid military service in Vietnam. His life has been one where he mocks veterans and current Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen. They are to use his words “suckers and losers” who are best used as campaign props.

Now we are in a national crisis brought about by Trump and his cult like followers. The social and economic crisis is already upon us, as is political oppression, we only wait for him to begin his wars. We do not know when or where, but my bet would be a joint strike by the United States and Israel against Iran. The consequences of such a war will be felt around the world, and he does not care as he only cares about himself and what is in it for him.

I am encouraged by the increasing resistance to Trump’s actions by many Americans and people around the world as they see how malevolent, ill-intentioned and destructive they are. However, the worst is yet to come and we must steel our hearts for the coming storm.

Well, I must get to work on doctoral papers. Have a good night. So until the next time, be safe and watch your six.