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TOPICS IN CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND Literature was the course I’d taught at Princeton the previous spring. A bright-eyed student had asked, “But why Telemachus—what does he matter to the story of Odysseus’s return? And why should Odysseus’s son risk a journey to Pylos and Sparta and abandon his mother, the hard-pressed Penelope, as if information about his father’s fate would necessarily await him in those places, much less make a difference to the outcome? What is the plot function?” (Needless to say, the kid was a budding screenwriter.) I explained to my brilliant students that without certainty as to his father’s fate, Telemachus was stuck in uncertain limbo and in danger of losing his patrimony. The wise Athena had encouraged his journey to Nestor’s Pylos to gather rumors of his father’s return from Troy as a way of proving to himself that his father’s intrepid spirit coursed through his own veins, a man of both words and deeds.
Just as Vlada had said to me on the night we broke into Fort Devens and almost got ourselves arrested and kicked out—or killed! While the subject of Laura’s paternity was the third rail we dared not touch: the last trump card Suzanne held defiantly to her steamy breast.
After docking in Piraeus, where my Land Rover was garaged, Laura and I headed south into the Peloponnese, with quick stops at Mycenae and Tiryns, getting as far as the picturesque fishing town of Nafplio on our way to Pylos, where the vivid tales of an old Resistance fighter, Neokosmos Grigoriadis, aka Nestor, awaited us on the following day. For some reason, I had found our short tour of Mycenae oppressing, something about the massive walls, cyclopean, according to ancient sources, which put me unaccountably on edge, even after the many times I’d led my students through the ruins. Once I had looked on Bronze Age Mycenae as a backwater to my more exalted scholarship on classical Athens. Now those massive battlements, from which Agamemnon had sallied forth to a ruinous war against Troy, struck me as depressing evidence of a dynamic martial culture unable, at the end, to withstand the inroads of a relentless enemy, or enemies. If such a citadel with all its natural defenses could be so overwhelmed by the mysterious forces arrayed against it—still a riddle to this day—what hope for any of us? Somehow, Laura’s presence at my side, her constant probing, much less my father’s letters, only heightened my foreboding, as if those walls heralded yet another invisible nemesis lying in wait—stones best left unturned. Nor did the hubbub of Nafplio exactly soothe my nerves, a tourist trap, just another overnight stop for blue-and-white Argos buses on their way to and from Mycenae and points south. My back was a mess after our crawl through the smog-choked outer suburbs of Athens, and the chance of a decent hotel room, a hot bath, and good mattress was not to be dismissed. I parked the Land Rover and she lingered on the waterfront while I went in search of a room.
“Don’t bother with separate rooms—I’m a big girl now—just make sure there’s a good-size tub and plenty of hot water.”
After registering, I went back to the quay and the Land Rover to get our bags. I spotted her in a phone booth next to a bar. She was talking, listening intently, and when she hung up, it was with a stricken look on her face. She walked slowly out onto a dock off the quay. When I went to her and touched her shoulder, she didn’t move a muscle.
“I’ll never hear his voice again.”
She had checked in with her friend and onetime dance partner long-distance. They’d danced at the Met and Covent Garden together. She told me how sick he’d sounded and how he didn’t want to talk about it. Instead, he asked her to tell him about where she was, to describe the picturesque fishing town, the surrounding hills and walls, the blue of the bay and the color of the boats, and the smells. “Calamari—fried in olive oil,” she’d told him. She’d heard him sigh. “Not that, dear, I’ll be sick to my stomach.” And then he’d hung up. She hoped her call had helped.
“He says he likes to travel in his mind.”
The embayed blue was broken only by the moored fishing skiffs of beige and green and rusty red, nodding on the crescent of the inner harbor. It was late afternoon, the sun low to the surrounding hills, the remainder of the day held in peaceful suspension before the nightlife of the harbor would send it on its way. The many restaurants and tavernas along the waterfront were gearing up for a night of music and dance to entertain the tourists. Creak of a rope on a rusty davit, and nearby, the crank of a blue awning being rolled up outside a quayside restaurant, a waiter setting the tables, a scent of sea and garlic and roasting lamb.
How to imagine AIDS in such a world?
With all the passionate voices surging in my head, I wondered if it might be time for me to play the second-chance lover. Even with a bum back, I was considerably younger than Elliot Goddard, the great love of Laura’s life was dead, and another colleague was dying at that very moment. So maybe I would get my chance simply by outlasting all my rivals.
Then she reached for my hand with the instinct of one just awakened from a dream.
“So, is our room all set?” “What the doctor ordered.”
“A big tub, right? The knee needs lots of soaking.”
“Huge tub, and I made sure there was plenty of hot water.” “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”
“For what?”
“For putting up with me.”
“I never stopped wanting to put up with you.” “You were always so . . . gallant.”
Her shoulders sagged as she looked out on the jagged hilltops behind the town of whitewashed buildings, and the jostling waves of red-tiled roofs corralled by the long crenellated walls of the old Venetian fortress. The blushing pink of the cloudless sky silhouetted the walls where they peeked above the hill crest. She took my hand and led me back to the hotel. I noticed that her wrist, where she’d wrapped the strap of her bag, was banded with red welts.
The room was small, sparsely furnished, two beds side by side facing French doors and a balcony overlooking the bay. On a side wall hung a simple cross. We went and lay on our beds, resting, perhaps contemplating the first moments of new intimacy. Actually, my back was hurting so much that I could barely think of anything else. I went into the bathroom and downed a double dose of Demerol, noticing her toilet kit packed with prescription bottles, a small pack of Tampax discreetly tucked behind the toilet. The mattress was firm and I warmed to the chance of a good night’s sleep as the medication did its thing. From the restaurant below came the sound of laughter and cutlery being set out; on the bay, the chug of diesel motors, fishing boats returning. Above us, the white stucco ceiling shimmered with reflected light off the water. Pale, pale blue dusted with lilac . . . out of which her voice and other voices floated up to me.
“Does your back bother you a lot?”
“Good days, bad days; damp weather is the worst. That and driving for more than an hour.”
“Remind me to give you a massage. I’m something of an expert.” “Don’t worry about me. A little rest along with some wine and I’ll be as good as new.”
That was an exaggeration, but compared to the condition of the man at the end of her overseas line, I wasn’t going to complain, or mope.
“Why won’t you tell me what happened to you in Vietnam?” “Because I don’t want to think about it. . . I’d rather think about you.”
“Well, you’ll see how the massage helps. And then I’ll show you a whole bunch of exercises for your back and spine I learned in my physical therapy sessions. Pilates, it was developed for dancers, but it will do you a world of good. I do the stretching exercises every morning, without fail.”
I was impressed with her businesslike attitude about body pain, for I knew something about injured bodies and physical therapy, as my father had, as Suzanne had. But the oscillating light on the ceiling, like a skylight into a realm of disembodied voices, guided me elsewhere— to Maureen, my physical therapy nurse at the VA hospital in San Diego.
Maureen’s voice was throaty and comic. She dealt with the quadriplegics and burn cases, and me. As such, it was an intimate relationship, and the body remembers kindness; it never forgets who’s been good to it.
In the ward on the top floor, we could watch the sunset over the Pacific. She always began with a massage of my lower back and so was the first each morning to endure my bitching and complaining. It had taken a battery of small operations to get all the shell splinters out. And she would be there to work the torn-up muscle and return something of the lost flexibility. She had strong and wonderful hands, and a croaking laugh at my groans as she’d chatter on with her stories about her two daughters, who were champion cheerleaders and baton twirlers, and her husband, who was a flight sergeant on an aircraft carrier in the China Sea. And when she got the kinks out and the pain would ease, sometimes I’d get these terrific erections in my shorts. Not a little embarrassing. But Maureen would give a wicked laugh and call me her “lucky boy” and tell me to stop bitching, because I was in a lot better shape than her quads, not to mention the poor bastards who had had their genitals shot off. And once, as if to prove her point, she just yanked down my shorts and started pumping with her latex glove and baby oil, and then, to my astonishment, stuck in a finger and massaged my prostrate. It was like my very life flooded out of me. I never felt anything quite as incredible before or since. Maureen just laughed. “Jesus, worse than my husband on the first day of shore leave,” she scolded, efficiently swabbing the decks with Kleenex. She put a raised finger to her lips after stripping off the latex—a vow of silence on my part—and told me to stop feeling sorry for myself.
“Dream, why not, about the wonderful sons you will have with a very lucky girl.”
I think she said such things to all the guys who were still functioning—to keep them going.
Such thoughts caused me to adjust my crotch and look over at the other bed, where Laura was lying, staring out the French doors. She might have been napping; I wondered what she was taking. The double dose of Demerol was certainly taking me down. I turned my gaze to the undulating hillsides beyond the doors and the fortress wall, miles and miles of them snaking up and down like sturgeon’s fins, like some miniature version of the Great Wall of China transported to charming Nafplio. The crusaders and then the Venetians had built those walls against the depredations of raiders, in hopes of keeping the forces of chaos and ruin at bay. Walls, walls, walls . . . how many wrecked walls had I unearthed? Like the massive walls of Mycenae and Tiryns I’d shown Laura on the way to Nafplio, thrown up in the decades around 1300 b.c. by the Mycenaeans as their world came under threat from the mysterious Sea People. Which should have offered a little perspective on those forty-five-year-old walls of wire and concrete a few hundred miles to the north, portions of which were, at that very moment, lying breached and unattended at points along the Hungarian-Austrian border. The Iron Curtain through which my father had passed, never to return . . . walls perversely designed to protect Europe’s heartland from chaos, death, and ruin.
Where Vlada awaited our return.
As I lay on my bed, the gentle light flooding inward prompted another voice, that of my grandmother on the back porch of Elsinore overlooking the lake during her Inness hour, when the lake and shoreline came alive with rich and sensuous greens, when she liked to write letters or read her Thoreau and Emerson—or impart essential truths. I realized, after my father’s letters, how much of his identity and mine had been shaped in the gentle admonitions that came our way like clockwork, and the scrutiny of her eagle-eyed glare.
“Oh, I think they’re missing someone who didn’t come home from the Civil War—don’t you think?”
This in reply to a young boy’s question about the lonely watchers on the dusk in the Inness landscapes in my great-grandfather’s collection.
The “Old General” was her name for my great-grandfather when she nursed him at the end. She told me how he had gone on and on about a friend of his, a southerner from Natchez, Mississippi, Pearce Breckenridge. A story he got out as he lay dying, sprays of pine shadowing his face, wheezing hideously from the Spanish flu.
“Pearce Breckenridge,” I whispered to myself, stunned I’d forgotten all about that story—that I’d failed to connect it with the name encoded in the Saint-Gaudens memorial. It was as if Laura’s presence and the love letters had the effect of recalibrating my memory for deeper dives. “Rollicking days at Harvard they had in the 1850s, he and his friend, the handsome, poetry-spouting Pearce. But it wasn’t Harvard days, or even the Civil War he talked about at the end, but a trip before the war as a Harvard student to visit his classmate’s plantation in Natchez, Mississippi. Pearce Breckenridge, the soul of southern dignity and rare intelligence, but living in a land of ‘such degeneracy, injustice, and shame.’ He went on so about the appalling misery of Negro enslavement he had witnessed, to which his noble friend seemed blissfully oblivious. He talked about the lines of bowed heads and scarred backs of those chained souls marched along rural roads or transported in filthy carts. ‘How could the sensitive mind of dear Breckenridge be so blind to such darkness and depravity?’
“You see, I think that’s what put your great-grandfather—that visit to the plantation in Natchez—irrevocably in the abolitionist camp. I’m almost sure of it.”
More than sure: she knew for a certainty.
“The Old General talked more and more about the hours I WALKED FOR HOURS THAT NIGHT, WAITING for the booze to wear off, going down to the river, trying to get things clear in my mind. It was difficult to figure out which was worse, failing to perform or hearing those words about my father from her lips. But where was the evidence? Why should I believe anything she said? Maybe her parents had put her up to it. The only irrefutable evidence was that I had flopped. I tried to think it through—a thought experiment: step back from present emotion and retrofit the possibility of my father’s affair with Suzanne. Did it square with memory? Certainly my mother’s cold ambivalence and reluctance to talk about her marriage made sense in light of Laura’s little bombshell, much less her refrain of delay, echoed by my grandmother at childhood swimming time: “She’s still at the beach.” And that embrace on the moonlit veranda—an ice pick in the belly: Suzanne was all about performance.
And the “worse” part?
It was crushing to think my father betrayed my mother for such a woman, a Soviet spy—was that the implication? KGB—FBI . . . And Bobby, too. It was one thing to be a Communist, another to be a KGB agent. Elliot’s and Virgil’s interest in Suzanne and Bobby made terrifying sense. Was I staring at a pattern of betrayal in my father’s life, as well—a perfidious private life echoing something even worse in his professional life, another nauseating ripple of doubt from that overheard conversation in the gym?
I stood on the bank of the river, staring across the glimmering void at a tall oak that greedily held its cache of shriveled leaves as if never he spent in Hannibal on the banks of the Ohio River while he waited for a train east, a train back to Boston and sanity. He told me how he lingered on the boat landing after taking a paddle wheeler up the Mississippi from Natchez, and something about how that river, a geographic body, a line on a map, could divide lands free and unfree, that bothered him greatly. He said he found the abstraction unnerving. Even then, on his deathbed, he wrung his hands. How was it that a few hundred feet of water could demark such ‘absurdly noxious notions of human inequality? And this when Ohio was teaming with great things: free men busily building towns and engaging in fevered commerce, and everywhere the most beautiful farms, while just across that slow-moving river lay a land of darkness and diseased souls, broken-down and abandoned farms, unimproved lands and malarial marshes and primeval woods.’ He just couldn’t believe that such a thing could exist. ‘Weren’t we a young and enlightened nation? It beggared my youthful mind that a mere watery line could demarcate freedom and abysmal servitude. We Americans, a free people—how was such degradation of the human spirit possible? And to this evil, my dear Pearce Breckenridge was in complete thrall!’” The sound of my grandmother’s voice, as if she’d suddenly come alive in me after more than twenty years, sped me back to a muddy and shallow and malarial river snaking its way along the western border of Hâu Ngh˜ıa Province. The Vam Co Dong River didn’t quite border on Cambodia, but seven kilometers was close enough. In the spring of 1972, I was part of an American advisory team to a South Vietnamese regiment of militia that patrolled the Vam Co Dong River and tried to keep the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army from infiltrating men and supplies from Cambodia. How many days had I spent in observation posts along that godforsaken mosquito-breeding river, peering through binoculars into the impenetrable jungle distance beyond its far banks, knowing full well from the reports of deserters and captured documents what hunkered down there, in deep bunkers and jungle lairs, waiting and probing, subsisting on lies, preying on primal emotions of fear and envy and resentment, and threats of murderous violence and midnight assassinations. Talk about a fragile line between freedom and despotism: Pol Pot’s terror and bloodlust breeding a nightmare beyond reckoning.
What would the Old General have made of Pol Pot, after the Cornfield of Antietam, after the trenches of the Western Front, after Buchenwald and the gulag?
“Something is either right or wrong, Peter—which is it?” My grandmother invariably asked me.
Her forebears, like her husband’s, came over on the Arabella in 1630 with John Winthrop. And like an old spring that still produces a trickle of fine clear water, something of Winthrop’s claims for a covenant with God and a faith that the rule of justice and mercy is the great good and end of life flowed within her. It was the same simple vision of good and evil—good men make a good community—that energized the abolitionist faith of General Alden and the founding of Winsted.
To bring her point home for a young boy, she removed a black leather book from a leather carrying case and handed it to me. It was an old traveler’s Bible, tattered, worn, and inscribed with the names of the men in General Alden’s regiment, whom he’d vowed to keep safe. When I opened the pages, I found a diagonal bloodstain, like the suspended blade of a guillotine. Half the pages were stained, many stuck together. He’d carried the Bible in his uniform pocket while mounted on his horse at the Battle of Antietam. I remembered how my hands shook at the blood-soaked pages as I sat in my wicker chair by the lake with a glass of pink lemonade. Mightily impressed with this heirloom, I remember asking, “Did he die?”
He did and he didn’t, or at least Pearce Breckenridge did.
It was a lovely green landscape of hazy light and vaporous heat on that hot morning of September 17, 1862, as my great-grandfather strained to see into the distance, mounted on his nervous mare. Beyond a swath of golden corn, Confederate troops were massing in front of rolling hills. On that day, more Americans would die in battle than on any single day in the nation’s history. The early fog had burned off quickly, revealing to the waiting Union troops the green hills and farmers’ fields along the meandering Antietam Creek. The first Union troops attacked into Lee’s northern flank, right through the rows of corn in front of where General Alden had posted himself on horseback—“a fool thing to do,” opined the regimental historian—so offering a clear target for a rebel sharpshooter. For a generation, reference to the Cornfield would invoke thoughts of slaughter and a killing ground running with blood. But for a few minutes more, it was just a cornfield and the cornstalks were high and green, flowing with silk tassels like liquid honey in the morning sun. That was how my great-grandfather spoke of the field of battle in his declining years, a glimpse of a lovely world before it was imprinted in the minds of thousands with disaster and heartbreak.
His Massachusetts boys entered the Cornfield itching for a fight, for they were not green troops and had already known their share of humiliation and slaughter in the Seven Days’ Battles of the Peninsula, when, just miles from Richmond, incompetent generalship had denied them victory. They were frustrated; they thought they might have had the war won three months before in Virginia. The unit in front of them was hit by a murderous fire from a brigade of Georgians stationed in the grassy pastures just to the south. The Confederates directed their aim to the spaces between the rows of corn. The boys in blue were stopped cold by the concentrated fire, their bodies littering the rows of shattered stalks. General Alden was bringing up his reinforcements of Massachusetts men to be fed into this hellhole of concentrated shot and canister fire; they had already been receiving artillery rounds from Confederate batteries on the small plateau near the Dunker Church to the west. Alden was clearheaded and concise about the terrible business at hand. He was sure he had a preponderance of forces on that field and he was willing to take the risk—and this, he wrote years later, was the worst decision any commander had to face—to take high initial casualties in order to make a breakthrough, roll up the enemy’s rear, rout him, and pave the way to victory. With the greater number of troops available to the Union forces, a sharp concerted pressure would break the Confederates and pin them on the Potomac.
Alden was a veteran, an engineer by training, an abolitionist by disposition, and a man of enormous physical vigor. He saw it in his mind and knew exactly what needed doing: bring the entire division in together in a single coordinated attack, not seriatim, as had happened over and over in the Peninsula Campaign. But the smoke was confusing. There was yellow-black smoke cascading like a fiendish exhumation of Hades. And then the terrible screams and shouts. Chaos as shells exploded nearby. Walking wounded filtered back to the dressing stations, getting in the way of troops moving forward. His good friend Brigadier Hartsuff had been wounded by a shell fragment when he went forward to reconnoiter, while Colonel Christian, who had been commanding a brigade of reinforcements going in just ahead of Alden, had lost his nerve under the deadly hail of canister fire and was found wandering aimlessly in the rear. For a while, there’d been a command breakdown. “Fatal delays” was how Alden had described it to one newspaper reporter. He was growing increasingly impatient, intent on getting his Massachusetts veterans into the thick of it before the Confederates could further reinforce their positions. He was more and more convinced of the chances for a breakthrough if pressure could be maintained, and he believed in his men: They had the moral fervor to do the necessary thing.
The Fifteenth Massachusetts was edgy for a fight. Many were veterans of useless marches and frustrated attacks in the Peninsula Campaign. They had scores to settle going back to Ball’s Bluff in the first months of the war. They wanted to prove themselves and the rightness of their cause. Among their ranks were staunch abolitionists, men who cared little one way or another for the cause of union, but everything for freeing the slaves. This was their religion, their being, and if an idea was to triumph over evil self-interest, they were the men to do it. There were few like them in the Union army. They were disciples of the slain abolitionist John Brown. They had popularized an old revivalist hymn by setting new words to it, about how John Brown’s body might be moldering in the grave, but his soul was marching on. Their commander, the prissy Gen. George McClellan, who had provided them the means but not the moral fervor to win—another Alden contribution to the regimental history—had taken an instant disliking to this marching song, but it stuck. Possibly those lyrics were playing through their minds as they headed into the smoke and din, that and a lot of praying. Alden maneuvered his brigade into the battle for the Cornfield, past scenes of stygian butchery. Men lay in heaps, many torn apart by canister fire, the still-living clutching at their wounds, tearing at their clothing, calling out for water and help. Alden heard those cries to his dying day; he sometimes walked the paths at Elysium alone, he explained, to escape them.
As fate would have it, the Fifteenth Massachusetts ran smack into a charge of Confederate reinforcements, a tough hardscrabble brigade of Louisiana Tigers from the bayous and docks of New Orleans, the men ornery and belligerent as two-hundred-pound catfish—this from one of their Confederate officers. Alden troops were cut to pieces by accurate rifle fire, and he was an obvious target, mounted on his horse. As he moved forward, directing his troops toward the breakthrough he knew could be theirs, a minié-ball tore into his right ankle and knocked him sprawling to the ground. His horse probably took the same bullet, because it was found later wandering the field, whinnying in pitiful terror, with its intestines trailing in the dirt. Two of his officers rushed to Alden’s assistance and got him to his feet, at which point he used his sword as a cane to move around on his shattered ankle. He shouted and hobbled, trying to make himself heard above the din of battle and reclaim some order among his ranks. He was desperate for a view of the field through the churning gun smoke, desperate to rally his men and redirect them for the breakthrough. Chaos. Rank upon rank of the most godly souls had gone down as if scythed, falling by the tens and twenties as each rebel volley found its mark. The regiment took unheard-of casualties of something over 60 percent. Where were the other regiments? Where were the reinforcements? When Alden finally gave the order for withdrawal, only about thirty-two men were able to accompany the regimental colors to the rear.
The battle raged on as more Union reinforcements were slowly and haphazardly brought up in uncoordinated assaults, an inauspicious beginning to a numbing host of lost opportunities.
General Alden tried to remain close to the action, to help direct Hooker’s First Corps into the next attack on the weakened Confederate northern flank. His boot was dripping blood. He was beginning to pass out. His officers forced him onto a litter, which they carried around as he continued to give orders and prompt his fellow commanders to move with alacrity and spirit, but when he began to lose consciousness, they took him to a dressing station in the rear, where a surgeon immediately attended his ankle.
He described the scene in a letter home to his first wife as a nightmare dreamed in the Inferno. Everywhere, neatly corded stacks of severed limbs in the dirt. Because of his rank, he’d been immediately attended to, his boot sliced off and the shattered ankle washed down and bandaged. The surgeon recommended immediate amputation because a wait would give sepsis a chance to set in, at which point they’d have to take more than just the foot. Alden made it clear he wished to keep the foot and ordered the ankle bandaged and splinted so that he might get back to his command. The doctor obeyed, but when Alden tried to get up, he fainted dead away and found himself minutes later lying on a litter, abandoned by his officers and the shock beginning to wear off, and with it waves of pain running like a torrent up and down his leg. He had lost too much blood to move on his own and so for a time he was forced to lie there with the din of battle in his ears, men rushing every which way, and rumors of victory and defeat flying in snatched yells.
An hour later, two of the general’s officers came to find him and give him word of the battle. Victory seemed in sight. His spirits soared and newfound strength surged through his body. He enlisted their help to carry him to command headquarters, where he found McClellan’s staff stuck, as my great-grandfather described it in a letter to a fellow officer, “in the business of failure . . . failing to take the initiative, failing to exploit quickly where successes has been gained, failing utterly to turn the bloodied and battered northern flank of Lee’s army, which had been our plan from the start.” From descriptions of other officers and reports from the field, Alden was convinced the day could yet be won, if only McClellan would commit Porter’s two reserve brigades on the right, and bring the Fifth and Sixth Corps into action to roll up the Confederates and pin them on the Potomac, and then destroy the South’s army in detail and so end their capacity for war making. His Massachusetts boys had died to provide that opportunity.
Alden’s position was awkward. He had been something of a protégé of McClellan and had admired his organizational skills. Trained as an engineer at Harvard, Alden had won his spurs as a logistics expert in the building of the Army of the Potomac and later in expediting the transport of men and material during the Peninsula Campaign. His general’s commission had been won in some minor but not unimportant skirmishes along the Rappahannock during the retreat back to Washington. Now he pulled himself up from his litter and hobbled to the table, where his commander was studying the field maps, and offered his opinion in no uncertain terms. As usual, McClellan was convinced of the availability of vast Confederate reinforcements ready to fall on his battered and tired troops at any moment. He was intent on conserving his fresh divisions and holding fast to the few acres of savaged and bloody ground already bought at such prodigal loss. Alden was not the only officer aghast at this lack of killer instinct, especially those officers who understood the full magnitude of the sacrifices already incurred, much less the tenuous position of Lee, who had his back to the Potomac and no reinforcements in easy reach. In another letter to a professor friend at Harvard, Alden wrote, “Most of us felt that the battle was only half fought and half won.”
The throbbing pain in his leg, his anger and horror as confirmation of the numbers of men killed and wounded in the Fifteenth Massachusetts that day were brought to him prompted him to vociferous and pointed complaints within the hearing of his commander, not to mention the liberal amounts of whiskey he’d taken for medicinal purposes. That night and in the days following, he would share his misgivings with a correspondent from the Washington Herald, a distant cousin, George Adams: “Questioning the failure to use cavalry for intelligence, the disastrous habit of throwing reinforcements into battle in driblets, without coordination and without mutual support.” He was a logistics expert, after all, and he knew whereof he spoke.
Much of Alden’s diatribe turned up in the Herald the week following the Battle of Antietam, by which time Lee had managed to withdraw his army behind the Potomac to safety. It was patently clear that McClellan, though winning the battle and saving the Union, as the general described it in his dispatches to President Lincoln, had failed to follow through with a concerted punch that might have taken the Army of the Potomac to Richmond that fall, instead of three long years later. Nevertheless, before he himself was relieved of command by Lincoln, “Little Mac” cashiered General Alden a week after the battle (he was lying in the hospital when he got the official letter), and my great-grandfather was out of the war.
But not before he had set in motion a series of events more fantastic than anything conjured in Max’s novels, a tale Max had come tantalizingly close to uncovering when he’d deciphered the name of Pearce Breckenridge in the Williams Memorial by Saint-Gaudens.
General Alden lay on a litter in the shade of a shot-up sycamore after refusing the amputation of his foot. He was woozy from loss of blood and frustrated not to be with his men and desperately worried that the battle was not being brought to a victorious conclusion. Then, in the near distance, he noticed a large group of Confederate walking wounded corralled behind a split-rail fence. They were guarded by a couple of Union soldiers, and a single Union doctor was attending to the more badly wounded lying on the ground. “The most ragtag outfit of exhausted and sullen creatures I ever laid eyes on,” he wrote to his first wife. Many were barefoot, emaciated, dressed in castoffs. But there was one man in particular upon whom his stare lingered. The face was oddly familiar. He was “coffee-complected, with a long pointy nose and dark eyes close together, as if staring down a barrel.” The man, “agitated, frantic,” seemed to be in his mid-twenties, a blood-soaked rag tied around his forehead, and was tending a wounded man on a blanket by the split-rail fence. A gray officer’s coat had been hung across the fence but “offered little shade in that hellish heat.” Through the floating smoke and roar of canister shot and the screams coming from the dressing station, General Alden watched this man going about his ministrations. “The face of the Confederate soldier was so familiar that I thought for certain I was dreaming. It was a face I knew from some other life but could not fix it in my presently deranged life.” Alden noticed the oddness of the man’s dress: “He was one of the best dressed of the group, wearing a silk shirt and a fine pair of tan breeches, certainly nothing in the way of a uniform.” The other Confederate soldiers turned snarling glances in the man’s direction and snapped orders at him, alternately cursing him and pleading with the two Union guards for water. But there was little water to spare at that time in the heat of battle in midafternoon. “The poor soul seemed completely overwrought by the circumstances of his wounded compatriot, the most piteous wails issuing from his lips.”
At some point, Alden’s curiosity got the better of him and he ordered the soldier who attended him to help him up. He staggered over to the split-rail fence, which he could prop himself against for a better view. “The fine—no, beautiful—face of the man in his extremity of grief and consternation had me in its grip.” And then it came to him. “Breckenridge—Pearce—could it be?” Alden called out the name, and the man kneeling by the side of the wounded soldier looked up as if terrified. “He looked a fright, trembling; a bullet seemed to have grazed his forehead, and his white silk shirt was caked with his or his companion’s blood.”
“Pearce?” asked General Alden again. “Is it you?” “Jason, sa.”
“Pearce Breckenridge?”
The man, his face streaming with tears, pointed to the ground, where the soldier lay severely wounded.
“Mista Pearce Breckenridge is terribly hurt, sa.”
“And you are . . .”
If this had been the conceit of a novel, Max might have laughed or rejected a plot that employed such a bizarre coincidence. Jason Breckenridge was Pearce Breckenridge’s slave and manservant. His master lay in the grass, his entrails hanging out and his life slipping away. Alden had actually met Jason in the Breckenridge household when he had gone to Natchez, Mississippi, to visit his classmate in 1855.
His puritan probity had first been outraged, then aghast at Jason’s clear resemblance to Pearce, and worse, that Pearce made no attempt to hide the fact that Jason was, in fact, his half brother, and born of his mother’s house slave, no less, who was herself a fair-skinned mulatto. They hadn’t even bothered to hide the shame of the circumstance, but felt they were doing a great kindness by providing Jason a benevolent arrangement: He had been educated and saved from the fields and slave quarters. As Pearce put it in their college days, “You see, Alden, we are not such fiends as you Yankees like to make us out. Can you say you treat your mill workers any better: that we take our charges into our homes and treat them as near members of the family.”
General Alden, with his aide’s help, moved closer to the figure lying on the blanket, his face in shade from the coat hung across the fence. “My God,” he wrote to Samuel Williams, “it was Pearce, his fairhaired face gazing up at the infernal sky drifting with smoke, his blue eyes wide and unblinking, barely a mark on his skin, though a terrible wound exposed his abdomen. I shouted out his name as I had a hundred times—no, a thousand times—in Harvard days, but I was too late—it was too late, for dear Pearce had given up his soul only minutes before.”
For the first time that day, tears came to his eyes, not for all the men of his regiment who had died, but for a Harvard classmate and a Confederate officer he had greatly admired. “For those happier days when our youthful ambitions were all aflame, before I’d made my fateful trip to his home and we had parted ways forever,” he wrote.
He described Pearce Breckenridge as having one of the finest minds in their class, a scholar, a poet, a philosopher of “more than passing insights.” They had studied together, roomed together, discussed mathematics and Greek architecture. Pearce Breckenridge, scion of a rich and powerful Natchez cotton family, had come north for a Harvard education and to study the classics and English literature. “How many nights full of drink and fellow feeling had we discussed the merits of Plato as against those of Aristotle, or Aeschylus over Euripides.” Pearce had teased Alden about his still-unformed abolitionist views, reminding him that Athens, too, was a slave-owning and a slavemaking society—though forever touting high-mindedness as its citizens exploited their far-flung empire. “They worked them to death in the silver mines. And don’t forget your wage slaves, your factory men—and women, too, I dare say—who labor for starvation wages,” Pearce told him.
For all their spirited talk and disagreements, they had been fast friends—for three of their four years at Harvard, before Alden had taken up Pearce’s invitation to visit Mississippi. And friends, too, with Samuel Williams, Alden’s cousin at Harvard who was studying in the divinity school. Pearce knew his Bible better than Samuel did and could effortlessly quote Scripture supporting the institution of slavery, if not its benevolent purpose of raising the Negro from perpetual darkness. Pearce and Samuel often argued deep into the Cambridge night, as Pearce noted chapter and verse: The right of holding slaves was clearly substantiated in Scripture, both by precept and example. “In fact, the believers and beloved—(first Timothy, chapter six, one through five)— were to be granted even greater respect by their slaves because of their righteous faith.” For both Alden and Williams, their debates with the swashbuckling romantic figure and aristocratic gentleman from Natchez had always ended in a convivial draw, since neither had been south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and “all remained on the level of theory and wine-softened sophistries.” Pearce’s erudition and bon-vivant anecdotes had charmed the Yankee cousins and their Boston families.
“As fine a man, as brilliant a soul—even if we had finally fallen out—as I had ever known. And now he lay butchered at my feet.” So Alden wrote to Samuel Williams, safe back in Cambridge.
Alden had ordered the Union doctor to come over to attend to Pearce Breckenridge, but the doctor only confirmed the obvious: a fatal gut wound, for which the primitive medical know-how of the day had no remedy.
General Alden was in such a weakened condition himself that when the doctor stood back from the dying Pearce Breckenridge with a shake of his head, Alden fainted into the arms of his aide. Only later in the day was he able to regain enough of his faculties to participate in the grand strategy sessions with George McClellan. And throughout those deliberations, which might have changed the course and duration of the war, Alden was plagued by the dead face of his Harvard classmate, and similarly haunted by the face of his slave Jason. “It was as if some part of Pearce was saved from the catastrophe of that day—a mocking salvation, but a Lazarus nevertheless.”
As the night’s deliberation and prevarications wore on, Alden became more and more frustrated, and also filled with dread that his friend’s body would be thrown into a common grave and lost. He knew the parents, after all, as much as he disapproved of everything they stood for. “The thought of annihilation for such a fine name, for Pearce’s fiery intelligence, just one amidst the indiscriminate hecatombs of miserable deaths drove me to distraction.” Finally, bone-weary and a little intoxicated from the whiskey he’d been taking for the pain, he had his aide help him outside to search for Jason and the corpse of his friend. They were still together. Jason was curled up alongside his master in the dewy grass by the split-rail fence, littered with broken sycamore branches. “The stench of that place, even with the heat of the day dissipated, was like nothing I’d ever known.” The dead had been stacked like so much cordwood against the fence to await the morning’s burial detail. “Jason had refused to be separated from the body of his master.” As General Alden approached, Jason screamed in terror. He had awakened from a terrible nightmare. He took a swipe at Alden with his fist, but the aide blocked the blow with his boot and was about to deliver a kick, when Alden stopped him. “The poor man was startled out of some terrifying dream—one can only imagine in such stygian surroundings.” When Jason calmed down, they began to talk. To Alden’s surprise, Jason turned out to be quite well spoken when out of earshot of the other Confederate prisoners. “Pearce’s manservant could read and write and was conversant with books—books that he had often read to Pearce when our old friend had a migraine or by the campfire when Pearce’s poor eyes had wearied. He even had Pearce’s intonation and quick intelligence, something he sought to hide within earshot of the gray-clad rabble round about.” From the flames of a nearby campfire, Alden could just make out Jason’s features as they continued to talk. “It was the strangest thing, the resemblance to Pearce; if not for the complexion and the dark hair, which was long and fell in lank curls, I would have thought it was the spirit of our Pearce in the underworld preparing to cross the river Styx.”
Jason asked Alden if they might say a prayer for the fallen Pearce. It was then that Alden reached into his coat pocket and got out his Bible, and, opening it to a passage from Isaiah, found it stained with blood. “Perhaps with my blood, which had soaked my uniform, or from the operating table soaked with the blood of multitudes. It took me quite aback, since the Bible had come down the generations and was inscribed with the names of the men in my regiment. Jason, seeing my consternation, gently took the Bible from my hands and found the passage from The Psalms: ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ His voice was clear and stately, poised like the eagle upon the breeze—oh, dear cousin, so like the deceased himself. It was I who shed tears and not he.”
General Alden began going over the options with Jason. Perhaps a private burial might be arranged for Pearce and the body reinterred at a later, more propitious date. But then all hell might break loose in the morning and who knew what the battle might bring. And then there was the matter of Jason—what to do with Jason? He refused to leave the body of his master: They had been raised like the brothers they were.
Technically, the slave Jason Breckenridge was not yet free. This was the fall of 1862, before the Emancipation Proclamation. Jason was either a captured rebel soldier and thus liable to be taken to a prison camp or a slave and thus contraband of war. “The brutish rebel prisoners would just as soon have slit his throat if given half a chance.” If a slave liberated by the Union army, he might be held by the government as confiscated property and so employed to do war work, and later, as thousands of blacks were to do, he might fight for his freedom. Within months, with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Jason would be free in the liberated South but possibly not in Maryland, still an occupied northern slave state in 1862.
“Was he truly free? I cannot be sure, Samuel.” So wrote Alden in the letter of explanation that Jason would carry. “And I am near out of my head with fretting and exhaustion and sorrow for my multitudes of dead. What a piteous hell we have made for ourselves, with the groans and calls of the wounded and dying like the screams of harpies in Dante’s Inferno. Do they scream for revenge, do you suppose, or to us to make good on their sacrifice? And this man, Jason, will go nowhere away from the body of his beloved master—our departed friend who held his chains.”
In near desperation to save some “iota of humanity,” Alden came up with a plan that he later admitted was “ill-conceived and fraught with the desperation of the moment.” He forged a legal document of manumission from one Pearce Breckenridge of Natchez, Mississippi, freeing his slave Jason upon his death. He handed this document to Jason along with a hastily composed letter to Samuel Williams, forty dollars, and fresh clothes. Late on the following day, after Lee’s withdrawal, when it was clear that McClellan had no intention of vigorously pursuing Lee, Alden instructed one of his officers to wrap up Pearce Breckenridge’s body and take it and Jason in an army ambulance to the rear, and from there to Hagerstown to purchase a coffin; at which point, the officer was charged to accompany both coffin, body, and Jason on a train to Philadelphia and thence to Boston and Cambridge. The officer was instructed to deliver Jason and Pearce’s body and a hastily scribbled letter to his cousin and Harvard classmate, the Reverend Samuel Williams on Brattle Street. This action was cited, too, when Alden was cashiered: “causing the dereliction of duty of one of his officers and the misuse of government property by commandeering an ambulance.” The young officer managed to carry out this difficult, if not awkward, task with some alacrity, arriving in Cambridge in the evening two days later to present Samuel Williams with the shocking evidence of what their abolitionist fervor had brought to pass.
“Teach this man to love freedom and God in equal measure,” read Alden’s scribbled note to Samuel Williams. “I trust you will find an appropriate resting place for the body of his master, our classmate and dear friend, Pearce Breckenridge. Write me soon, cousin, and tell me what you think, you who loved this man. I bid you adieu from the field of battle. If sepsis does not set in, I will survive, with or without my foot, but if not, I trust you, of all people, to do the necessary and just thing for this ex-slave. The time for debate and exquisite metaphysical flights is over. On this matter, your Bible will no longer save you. Believe me, this bloody war has closed the gate on the past—the stakes now are far too high for return, and we must press forward with alacrity or die in the attempt.”