Prologue The Photographer (1863) Oh yes, we shifted the body. And yes, we positioned him somewhat, turning his face toward the camera. We found a musket and propped it up against that wall, suggesting a story--someone's, possibly his. It is conceivable that blood from his ears and nose meant concussion. A Federal gunner could have cut his fuze so that a shell exploded precisely overhead, killing our young man. The blunt facts are indeed that he was in the battle and that he is dead. But of course we created a composition. What is art? Selection and arrangement. Photography is an art. A bloody face is only horrible. We didn't mean only to frame the grotesqueness of war. Our photograph, our portrait, was not of gore--was not even of him, exactly; we meant to photograph his folks back home. Not their faces, but their love and grief. We tried to picture pathos and pity, and the loss his mother felt, his sister felt, perhaps a young and hopeful wife waiting. His body was insensate, empty, an object, but their sorrow, unspeakable, found expression in the photograph: a young man, someone's darling, someone's child--childhood innocence recalled in that repose--that's what we meant. War is loss; war is families destroyed. Oh yes, no doubt he was not innocent, and neither was his family. Could be he was the sharpshooter who murdered Hazlett and Weed. And Southern women were the backbone of the war; the rage of battle was partly their rage. None of us is innocent. But somewhere beside our murderousness, does there not flutter the better angel of our nature? Is there no light within? That is what we're after, like all the portrait artists of the past. Our medium is light. The medium of everything is light. Without art, it's all a hash of flesh and blood and gore. Our photograph shows nothing of the stench. Can you imagine what the odor was the day we photographed that boy? Horses and men unburied; flies in brazen billions. We vomited what little food we ate. Decay is everywhere; we're dying now. Even Vermeer was forced to catch his light between the sausage and the privy, the rank sweat of a summer afternoon thickening the musty air in his studio. "In the midst of life, we are in death," the old saying goes, but also in the midst of death, there's life. And so we bare its light; we make visible the invisible. It's all murder: creation feeds upon creation, flesh devours flesh, and the wise die, Solomon wrote, no better than the fool. And yet, isn't there something else--something essential, that is ordinarily unseen? It's all here on this battlefield: cruelty and courage, senseless death and higher purpose, horror and nobility, the flesh and the spirit. Battle is life compacted. One little bit of light enters the camera, the eye, illuminates the dark, imprisoned soul, and the blind see. Colonel Cross The Rebel bastard shot me from that rock--a vicious, futile act that earned him a body full of bullets from my men. To shoot an unarmed officer, even amid the rage of battle, is nothing but brute stupidity. I always told my boys to kill the ones who carry muskets; the officers will be replaced, perhaps by better ones who've learned from their commanders' mistakes. I had a higher opinion of Rebel infantrymen than of their officers, who had at least some pretense of education and should have known better than to fight for what they were fighting for. But it is my considered judgment now that the whole lot of them are imbeciles with little more claim to being human than possessing facial hair and Bibles. The uniformed dog on that rock might have believed he did God's will by shooting Yankee officers. They could not be doing what they are doing, fighting to keep an entire race in chains, without their Bible-thumping preachers shouting God's approval--no, His outright favor, and His holy desire to see as many Yankee Philistines murdered on His altar as could be effected by those Christian gentlemen--illiterate, armpit-scratching gentlemen. In them, Christianity is an obscenity--hypocrisy drawled in a ridiculous fog of whiskey. Without their preachers, they could not rush in and die like lunatics in front of my men, line after line coming at us with that childish yell of theirs, swarming forward in the hope of everlasting bliss in a non-Yankee heaven, where black angels, no doubt, light up their seegars and serve them juleps for ever and ever amen, hallelujah! And the Good Lord sending all of us mudsills to the place of sulphur, fire, and brimstone. We'll see. We'll see if there's a heaven or a hell, and if there is, we'll see what Jesus thinks of gentlemen who whip mere children and women to do their work for them. We might not be gentlemen, but we do our own work! I can sense that you are the reconciling sort, but even you can see that all this mayhem came about because the South would not suffer themselves to lose an election, and for their own self-interest, therefore, they tore at the very principle of democratic government so they could keep their so-called property. We Northerners entered the war too kindly. The Rebels hated us right off, and won the battles, because war is not Sunday school. We didn't understand that when you take up the cross of war, you must carry it to Calvary. You must abandon your delights and your beliefs, and descend into hell, with no angels to comfort you except your musket and bayonet. I taught my men to hate the gentlemen--"The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman," you read in Shakespeare. And the war itself taught my soldiers to hate. If the Rebels yelled like banshees, then we would yell like Indians! The Rebels fix bayonets; then we fix bayonets and charge first. You may start a war with prayer books, but you must finish it with steel. I knew that I would die out here. "He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword." Always before battle I would wrap a red kerchief around my bald head to tell my men to be about their business. This time I asked my orderly if he had a black bandanna, and I tied it tight around my head, as if to tell my boys, Don't be dismayed. We are going to die, quite a few of us, but we will give them hell first, and after we are gone, you rest must drive it home. If war begins in church, it ends in the graveyard. It ends out here, with nothing in between but rage. Give it to them! Give them the bayonet! Let them come on. Shoot the bastards down, and keep your prayers to yourselves until afterwards. Come on, men! Give them some New Hampshire hell! This time we've got them on the run! After them! Major Dunlop's Hat That's it right there, perfectly preserved. You see the ragged hole where a fragment of shell went in and where his soul went out. A little blood is visible inside, though it's almost black, but I'd rather not unlock the glass case to take it out and show you. Humidity and temperature are controlled. One time a member of his family came in and said she had the right to it. But I said the major's hat belongs to the public, owned by the nation for which he gave his life. It belongs to the ages. She sued my museum, claiming that we charged admission and were a private, for-profit company. We argued that her claim of descent from Major Dunlop was fraudulent, because he had no children. Well, the hat is here, as you can see. It's one of our most popular attractions. Actually, we didn't know that Major Dunlop had no children, but the burden of proof was on her, and she was no historian. She came to the hearing drunk, or probably on some medication, which did her case no good. All these little things affect the court, which is to say the judge, who is a human being first to last. Essentially, there is no justice. Or at any rate, there is no justice in this world. Justice might be blind, meaning impartial, but I think she's just stone blind, and subject to a pinch now and then. What's that? I have no idea whether Major Dunlop died for justice. He died for orders, sure enough. For Liberty and Union I might say, but not being a New Englander, he most likely didn't die to abolish slavery. Died to prove he was no coward. He died for his friends is a pretty safe bet, because that's usually what it comes down to in battle. But as to some abstraction--justice, or what have you--one's best not speculating is how I view it. We load on those poor nineteenth-century people a lot of our own ideas, our own hopes and wishes. Yes, I mentioned Major Dunlop's soul. Does that surprise you? Because you think I have none myself. I'll pass on feeling insulted, because I think the question is a fair one. I mean the question you implied, whether we have souls. I sense your assumption is that we do. But I ask you what it is. If Major Dunlop is somewhere now, alive and well, it's not as Major Dunlop. Maybe a luminescent orb, some eerie floating thing the ghost hunters claim to see. Or he has reentered earthly life as a plumber in Detroit or a rickshaw driver in Calcutta--with no thought of Major Charles Dunlop in his head. Who is he, then? Maybe he's a Civil War buff like you now. Or, say, he could be me. Now that would be justice. But if there's justice, who's holding the scales? Who's putting a thumb on one of the plates? Let's say the major died for justice. For what? Where is the justice for which the major so nobly died? Do we have it? So he died for nothing, if he died for justice, which, if I remember my high school algebra, means justice is nothing. I mean as a thing in itself. Maybe it's fairness, whatever that is. He died, basically, for people like me to figure out what justice and fairness are. He died, and I'm left holding his hat. What does that mean? It means that he handed the whole ball of wax to me. Justice is what I say it is. I decide. I am "We the People," and I'm the judge and jury, not someone else, a king or a duke or a dictator. I'm basically corrupt. I'll grant you that. And I'm ignorant. The only person less qualified than I am to govern me is someone else. Died for justice? Well, he died for me. That's what I mean when I say I'm holding his hat. And I'm not letting go. Excerpted from Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead by Kent Gramm All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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