The Dawn

I had occasion this week to refer back to Mr. Lincoln’s Army, volume one of Bruce Catton’s landmark work on the Army of the Potomac.  I recently talked to one of my colleagues about the writing style of modern Civil War authors.  Much of it is certainly historically accurate but has an element of dryness and structure that makes it difficult to enjoy.  My friend is actually going back to read Shakespeare to improve his own prose style.  Maybe I should do that as well.  It is no wonder that some of the best Civil War history is written by journalists like Bruce Catton and Douglas Southall Freeman.  It was Catton’s work that ignited my interest as a youngster some 45 years ago and I am still drawn to it.  Without ever having to been to Antietam as a twelve year old, I could visualize it thanks to passages like these I offer below.  This post today, is nothing more than an opportunity to go back and enjoy some of the beautiful writing that I dare say many of you read and which drew you into your own study of the Civil War.  All of these passages beautifully evoke the early morning dawn of September 17, 1862 on the fields north of Sharpsburg but the second one is my favorite.

"There was a tension in the atmosphere for the whole army that night.  Survivors wrote long afterward that there seemed to be something mysteriously ominous in the very air-stealthy, muffled tramp of marching men who could not be seen but were sensed dimly as moving shadows in the dark; outbursts of rifle fire up and down the invisible picket lines, with flames lighting the sky now and then when gunners in the advanced batteries opened fire; taut and nervous anxiety of those alert sentinels communicating itself through all the bivouacs, where men tried to sleep away the knowledge that the morrow would bring the biggest battle the army had ever had; a ceaseless, restless sense of movement as if the army stirred blindly in its sleep, with the clop-clop of belated couriers riding down the inky dark lanes heard at intervals, sounding very lonely and far off."

"And while they slept the lazy, rainy breeze drifted through the East Woods and the West Wood and the cornfield, and riffed over the copings of the stone bridge to the south, touching them for the last time before dead men made them famous.  The flags were furled and the bugles stilled, and the hot metal of the guns on the ridges had cooled, and the army was asleep-tenting tonight on the old camp ground, with never a song to cheer because the voices that might sing it were all stilled on this most crowded and most lonely of fields.  And whatever it may be that nerves men to die for a flag or a phrase or a man or an inexpressible dream was drowsing with them, ready to wake with the dawn."

"The morning came in like the beginning of the Last Day, gray and dark and tensely expectant.  Mist lay on the ground, heavy as fog in the hollow places, and the groves and valleys were drenched in immense shadows.  For a brief time there was an ominous hush on the rolling fields, where the rival pickets crouched behind bushes and fence corners, peering watchfully forward under damp hat brims."