their disillusion
was deep and they had to fall
farther to reach it
Based on :
Those fanciful old ideas about the glory of a waving flag, the shame of running from danger, the high importance of dying with one’s face to the foe — since that war they have come to seem as out of date as the muzzle-loaders that were used for weapons in those days.
The American soldier of later, more sophisticated eras may indeed die rather than retreat, and do it as courageously as any, but he never makes a song about it or strikes an attitude.
His heroism is without heroics, and fine phrases excite his instant contempt, because he knows even before he starts off to war that fine phrases and noble attitudes and flags waving in death’s own breeze are only so many forms of a come-on for the innocent; nor does he readily glimpse himself as a knight of the ancient chivalry.
But in the 1860s the gloss had not been worn off.
Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it.
From Mr. Lincoln’s Army by Bruce Catton, Doubleday & Co, Garden City, NY, 1951
It would be another two years before Mr. Lincoln said:
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,
that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,
that this nation,
under God,
shall have a new birth of freedom,
and that government of the people, by the people,
for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.
And what kind of nation was Mr. Lincoln talking about?
A new nation,
conceived in liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
On this Memorial Day, 2024 I close with this thought from Mr. Lincoln’s 1st Inaugeral Address, March 4, 1861.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave let us know that we didn’t get this far on our own.
We are standing on the shoulders of a lot of other folks.
To slip now …
Time to depend on those better angels of our nature.
No Haiku For You 