In 1938, on the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, they had a reunion of surviving veterans on the battlefield ...
All I can think of as I watch this is: Imagine, meeting living people with active memories of the Civil War.
It's sort of like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game or the equivalent in life (more or less debunked since, as best articulated by Malcolm Gladwell in his fascinating book The Tipping Point, where he explains that the whole small world aspect of it is ruined by the fact that a certain, smallish number of people create nodes by knowing A LOT of people), the idea of being just one step away from the actual experience of the Civil War. Or maybe the Gettysburg Address:
But then it makes me think: Something like the Civil War or the American Revolution seem so distant and out of reach at 150 or 200-some-odd years away, but it's really not that far. My father could have had a conversation with those men when he was nearly an adult (he was 16 in 1938), and now he is older, at 91, than many of them were at that reunion.
Which leads to a second thought: This coming June (2014) is the 70th anniversary of D-Day. Our World War II veterans (my father served in the Army Air Corps after being drafted) are as old now as those men were then. World War II, though something I didn't experience, is still something with which I am familiar, the last Big War, the thing that all my friends' parents and grandparents talked about. It was still close enough to touch.
Is that how my parents saw the Civil War? I mean, James Thurber, for example, often references his grandfather as a Civil War vet, but I took that sort of distantly -- I read Thurber's work as an artifact itself from the 30s, and it was after all his grandfather, and old man in a past time. But this makes it all much more immediate, like I walked into a room just after the old guy stepped out.
And here's the thing: we haven't been around that long. Put simply, it's only been about 200,000 years. Yeah, that's a pretty big number, but considering the earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old ... well not much. I mean, the dinosaurs were here for over 100 million years. That's about five-hundred times longer than we've been so far. And we can reach back with any reasonable certainty only, what, about 3,000 or 4,000 years? What's that: a millisecond relatively?
Now in human terms, it's an eternity. Figuring the Biblical three-score ten as an easy lifespan, that's around 43 generations, laid end to end. (Probably twice that, if you figure reproduction between 20 and 35 years old for each one, but one could expect to be able to talk directly to one's grandparents, so this seems a simple way to do the math.) Michael Barone figures that you can divide US history at least into 76-year increments, as a friend pointed out in his blog. "We are as far away in time today from
passage of the Social Security in 1935," Barone explains, "as Americans then were from the
launching of post-Civil War Reconstruction." Each 76-year period, he says, represents the development of a mode of governing or approaching societal organization, its effective use, and then its dissolution.
Forty-three generations then, and we lose contact with actual experience in around four generations (can you summon up the experiences of your great grandfather?) and start to lose any information about things not long after (in around 300 years or so?) We have archeologists to figure out what the Egyptians did because we forgot, and no one asked grandpa.
Which brings me back to the idea of being able to actually converse with a veteran of the Civil War, and how that compares with our veterans today. I often tell people that they need to save their stories, and they dismiss the thought by saying they're "nobody," but that's the very thing. Letting these simple stories go, losing the actual experience is how we forget what a time was like ...
So as I set out this evening to catch up with the cadets, I encountered the rest of the VMI student body practicing for Friday's New Market parade. They use a special formation, much closer to the road around the parade deck and centered on the statue of Virginia Mourning Her Dead, erected in honor of the cadets killed in the battle.
As I prepared to leave, this scene developed, featuring what I can only assume to be passing tourists...
The heavy metal style contrasted with the pristine white, orderly ranks of cadets was too much, especially with the one fellow slouching on the cannonball (a minor monument on campus). And yes, I included the "Do Not Enter" sign on purpose.
That's House Mountain in the background, the central local landmark. Recent rains have really cleared the air around here of haze and pollen, and the view was spectacular.
Meanwhile, on the road...
This is what I found at 11 this morning, when I finally located the cadets marching to New Market in Verona, Virginia. They had already reached the halfway point of their daily distance, and broken for lunch. The two at far left are asleep, and the entire group would be before the hour was out.
Also, note the bandaged feet of the cadet second from left, mostly covering hotspots and blisters. However, before the day was out, he would roll one of his ankles. He walked through the pain (though with the ankle wrapped) to their destination.
Foot pain seems to be the main problem for the cadets, caused more by the hard surface of the road than their shoes, they claim. Their morale is disgustingly high...
Seven VMI cadets are reenacting the march their predecessors did over 100 year ago, when they left the campus in Lexington,Virginia, in May of 1864 and marched 85 miles in five days to New Market, to the north, where they took part in the battle there on May 15. The 2009 cadets are dressed in period clothing and (perhaps most importantly) wearing period shoes.
I had often said that it would be an interesting little film to follow such an adventure, but no one had done it since the last effort in 2005. So when I was told it was happening this year, I could hardly back out.
Here we see the cadets marching up Route 11, having already been on the road over a day:
And at their campsite at the end of the second day (last night), at the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Virginia:
It's not much helping the drama of my show that they all seem rather cheerful, with high morale, and not very worn down by the beating their feet are receiving, after an 18-mile march on the first day and 19 miles on the second...
So I had been talking about this idea: sometimes (turns out to be far less often than I thought), VMI cadets march the route from their Lexington campus to New Market, Virginia, where VMI cadets turned out for the only time in America a cadets corps fought as a body. This year, a First Classman (senior) decided he hadn't had a chance. So he made it.
VMI Cadet Ben Scudder contemplates the gear he wants to take with him on his march to New Market.
Scudder and Cadet Charlie Gerkin (right, a Third Classman, or sophomore) pack for the march.
I just began filming their adventure. It'll be a helluva' dtory, I think. Let's see if anyone will pay for it.
