GETTYSBURG

I DROVE DOWN TO GETTYSBURG the weekend of the Fourth, the anniversary of the battle, along with my wife, who grew up on different books than I and doesn’t care two cents about the Civil War. She is crazy about fiction, especially Gabriel Garcia Márquez whose latest she happened to have in her bag, and after we walked around the battlefield monuments for a half-hour that Saturday afternoon and ate a hot dog and watched a Union battery demonstrate artillery firing, she found a place in the shade back behind the crowds near the Gettysburg Volunteer Fire Department’s refreshment tent and sat and read. All around us on Cemetery Ridge were men and scenes out of books I passionately loved as a boy. Row after row of cream-colored pup tents straight out of Brady photographs. Bearded sunburned men bundled up in wool uniforms, baggy pants, the caved-in caps and worn-out shoes, leather ammo bags and tin drinking cups on their belts, carrying single-shot carbines six feet long with narrow steel bayonets, and among them some teen-agers, one with long blond ringlets who looked exhausted. They had camped on the ridge for a week, part of the National Park Service’s 125th anniversary commemoration, all volunteers. I watched two hundred Union troops fire a volley and charge across a meadow toward Plum Run, re-enacting the charge of the First Minnesota Regiment on July 2,1863, realizing a moment vivid in my imagination since I was twelve or so. I stood by the road along the crest of the ridge as a regiment of Confederates swung along in ragged formation singing “Bonny Blue Flag” in tender and weary voices, brave fellows in motley gray-and-butternut outfits with scraps of uniform laced together, like a band of old deer-poachers. I saw it all clear in my mind, not seeing the other tourists in their red shorts and yellow haltertops, men in dazzling green pants shooting pictures, just the blue and gray. If General George Meade had walked up to say hello, I’d’ve just reached out and shaken his hand. Fifty yards away, under the trees where the Pennsylvania reserves must’ve sat on July 3 waiting Pickett’s charge, my wife in white jumpsuit reclined on the grass, so absorbed in the passions of a man on the Colombian coast that she didn’t answer when I came over and said hello to her. Eyes on the page, she just reached out and took me by the ankle.

Sunday morning I borrowed a bicycle and rode around the battlefield, a pleasant ten-mile circuit along shady roads. Hot dry weather, as it was in July 1863, and along the Emmitsburg Pike south of town, fields of wheat and oats stood in the mile-wide valley between the long low ridges where the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia faced each other on the third day of the battle, July 3. The first day’s fighting was wild and sudden and scattered west and north of Gettysburg; the second was intense and murderous and located at the Union flanks on Culp’s Hill and around Little Round Top, The Wheatfield, The Peach Orchard, and Devil’s Den, where men in close quarters battered each other to death by the thousands; but it is the third day, when the lines had been drawn, that is clearest in the imagination. At three o’clock that afternoon, about thirteen thousand Southern men came out of the trees on Seminary Ridge and marched through the fields straight into a Northern artillery barrage and up the slope against Northerners drawn up in a superb defensive position along Cemetery Ridge. The slaughter lasted a half-hour, and two-thirds of the men who left Seminary Ridge did not return.

This half-hour is so vivid to anyone who has read accounts of it that, as you bike up through the red brick Lutheran campus and along Seminary Ridge, cruising in low gear through McMillan Woods, where Pettigrew’s Brigade of North Carolinians waited, you can hear them rustle in the weeds in the ditch where they lie listening. Of the brigade, some two thousand arrived on July 1 and about six hundred marched away in the middle of the night, July 4, their cause lost. “To the eternal glory of the North Carolina soldiers who on this battlefield displayed heroism unsurpassed, sacrificing all in support of their cause. Their valorous deeds will be enshrined in the hearts of men long after these transient memorials have crumbled into dust,” reads the inscription on a nearby monument. In a tree overhead, a mockingbird went through its entire routine of six or seven songs. I rode on, to the figure of Robert E. Lee on his horse looking east watching his men die in the sun. The sculpture has been given a protective coating against acid rain that makes it look like dark-brown plastic, the color of a toy man on a horse. I dismounted and walked the bike out beyond the tree line and up to the first stand of wheat.

It seems dumb to be so caught up in a battle that ended more than a century ago and that you don’t even begin to understand. You hear them whisper as they edge forward, gray-butternut figures crouching in the woods, and hear skittish horses nicker and whinny at the whump of distant cannon, but it’s dumb if you can’t imagine why they would fight this battle, which I can’t. The wheatfield was fresh and untrampled. The silence was like the terrible stillness that, according to most accounts, fell over the field just before Pickett’s Charge began—a wall of silence like a dam about to burst open, then the flood of Confederates marching double-time across the mile and up toward the stone wall in the distance, cheering, yelling, the flags, and then the storm of fire. Now it is so quiet on the losers’ side of the battlefield that you can’t imagine what made them mad. The phrase “states’ rights” means no more to me than the phrase “warm boot. ”

I walked the bike up the road toward Little Round Top, the crucial hill where a brigade of Maine men held off Longstreet’s South Carolinians and Georgians and saved the Union flank. It was a formidable position to attack, impossible even, and as I walked up, the boulders looming above, I could barely imagine the sort of rage that might impel a man to lead such a charge. I tried to imagine. I made a speech to myself, “You SOBs, hide in the rocks, we’re coming to haul you out. Bastards. Shoot you, stab you, cut your throat, pound your head open with a rock, or whatever it takes. This was a good country until you decided you could do what you damn please, when you please, and to whom, chop off people’s rights and go to make every poor sinner be exactly like you—you do that, you kill what’s beautiful in this country. A century from now, if you win, which you likely will, nobody in this country will feel like they are part of anything. Thanks to you, asshole. Everybody’ll be loose as gravel and nobody’ll be free. Nobody’ll even care which state they’re from and it won’t matter, everywhere will be one paved paradise. Well, I don’t care to live in your country and I don’t want you to either. Let’s die.” I swore a little more for flavor as I reached the top of the rise, the woods and sunny meadow where thousands perished in an afternoon, and climbed on the bike and rode north, toward the crowds and the monuments.