Hicks' Farewell

Nothing like some stirring, 185-year-old music to bridge the gap.

"Hicks' Farewell," performed by Tim Eriksen.

Arms and the Boy

I can't pinpoint the moment in my childhood when I first became obsessed with the Civil War. I do know that I was in middle school when I fervently began reading every Civil War book I could get my hands on. It was around this point that I first turned a page to find a photograph of a teenage Confederate soldier lying dead in the trenches. The caption indicated he was fourteen years old and had been killed by bayonet during the Union assault on Fort Mahone, part of the defenses of Petersburg, Virginia. Something changed. I don't know what happened; maybe this marked the first moment that the Civil War became real for me. Not really became, it was more like a flicker, a glimpse.

I've been struggling to understand my fixation with this image ever since. Fixation is the wrong word. Inability to escape? "Haunted" sounds cliched, but I can't think of a better word. The indescribable, familiar strangeness I've encountered studying history ironically drove me away from history as a discipline and into poetry. Fourteen years after I first encountered the dead Rebel, his likeness became the driving force behind my first book, Jerusalem Plank Road. By that time I had learned that the photographer, Thomas Roche, likely had no knowledge of the boy's age and conceivably even invented his cause of death. The only thing we can know with any amount of certainty is that this anonymous young man died early in his life, a week before Lee's surrender at Appomattox. He lost his youth and his future for a cause that was already lost. Then a photographer came along and immortalized his corpse. We choose what to take from this. A reminder of war's horror? A memorial to an act of bravery?

This was nothing new.


Consider Joseph Bara, the fourteen-year-old French soldier killed by Breton royalists in 1793. Robespierre, architect of the Terror, declared him a martyr to the Republic. His story grew into legend, his death the subject of various works of art, including a painting by Jacques-Louis David. Today, who can tell who Joseph Bara really was, what he thought, said, did? Or the pain and fear he may have felt in his last moments. Or how his mother and father took the news, or whether his comrades were haunted by what they saw and the memory of the friend they lost. Joseph Bara ceased to exist as a person. Yet he lives now in art. Is that even life? I understand why some people hate artists. It infuriates me that Roche lied to add a little more "color" to his photograph. It seems tragically ironic that the image of Joseph Bara's death was used as propaganda to inspire more to kill and to die. Yet wouldn't it be equally egregious if his death served as nothing but a warning that war is horrible? I grappled with this as the young Confederate came to "life" in some of the characters in my work. I didn't want him to be a symbol or a warning or a juxtaposition. I wanted him to be a boy. But the idealization of boyhood in art also troubled me. Boys aren't angels and they should never represent innocence alone. They are walking, running, dancing, killing, living paradoxes. Which makes their deaths all the more difficult to bear. Wilfred Owen was undoubtedly moved by the beauty of the boys he saw dying around him. I believe it made his compassion (and his outrage) all the more powerful.

Sometimes I think I just wanted the Rebel boy to breathe. I've considered writing him without the war. Like Bara without his uniform. Or his death, for that matter.


Mort de Bara by Jacques-Louis David


Pro Patria by Emile Edmond Peynot

Santa Claus on the Western Front

Photo source: Wooway1

Miners

MINERS
by WILFRED OWEN

There was a whispering in my hearth,
A sigh of the coal,
Grown wistful of a former earth
It might recall.

I listened for a tale of leaves
And smothered ferns,
Frond-forests, and the low sly lives
Before the fauns.

My fire might show steam-phantoms simmer
From Time's old cauldron,
Before the birds made nests in summer,
Or men had children.

But the coals were murmuring of their mine,
And moans down there
Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men
Writhing for air.

And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard,
Bones without number.
Many the muscled bodies charred,
And few remember.

I thought of all that worked dark pits
Of war, and died
Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed.

Comforted years will sit soft-chaired,
In rooms of amber;
The years will stretch their hands, well-cheered
By our life's ember;

The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids,
While songs are crooned;
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground.


Photograph by Lewis Hine


Photograph by Ben Shahn

Far, Far Beneath

I've always been fascinated by sea monsters. The giant squid in particular is a creature that represents the intersection of myth and reality, where the tall tales of sailors proved based in truth. The image of a tentacled behemoth--a kraken--has fascinated artists and writers for millennia, but not until recent times have scientists finally been able to begin to illuminate this entity previously consigned the deepest depths of fantasy, science fiction and cryptozoological speculation. Even as we begin to understand the great beast as a living, breathing creature, it still maintains its allure as a manifestation of the darkest reaches of the human psyche.


Illustration source: Somefield.



"The Kraken" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Soldier as Child

A parent's memorial to a teenage son killed in the last days of the U.S. Civil War. The childhood tintype of a soldier named Carl is accompanied by a lock of his hair and a note which quotes from Shakespeare's Hamlet:

"My beloved son Carl taken from me on April 1, 1865, at age 18, killed at Dinwiddie. Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

Source: Liljenquist Family Collection, Library of Congress.

With an Identity Disc

(Note: "Identity disc" refers to the British equivalent of the U.S. "dog tag" worn to identify a soldier in the case of his death)

WITH AN IDENTITY DISC
by WILFRED OWEN

If ever I had dreamed of my dead name
High in the heart of London, unsurpassed
By Time for ever, and the Fugitive, Fame,
There taking a long sanctuary at last,

I better that; and recollect with shame
How once I longed to hide it from life's heats
Under those holy cypresses, the same
That keep in shade the quiet place of Keats.

Now, rather, thank I God there is no risk
Of gravers scoring it with florid screed,
But let my death be memoried on this disc.
Wear it, sweet friend. Inscribe no date nor deed.
But let thy heart-beat kiss it night and day,
Until the name grow vague and wear away.