Sacred Ground

As many of my friends and family know, I've recently started my internship at Gettysburg National Military Park with the National Park Service. Honestly, when I got this internship, it was a dream come true. I've been studying the Battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War since I was in grade school. I was and am still beyond honored to have this opportunity. As an interpretive intern here with the park, I will be developing educational programs for visitors to help them understand the story of what happened on those three days in July in this sleepy little town. I will admit, I've been hitting the books pretty hard to make sure I punch out a good program. My first presentation will be a talk on Pickett's Charge (I prefer to call it Longstreet's Assault, as it's a little more correct, but for simplicity's sake...) where I essentially give visitors an on-site overview of the tumultuous events of the third day at Gettysburg.

In the midst of all this research I've been conducting - hours in the park library, poring over volumes of battle minutiae and fumbling my way through file drawers of participant accounts in search of the perfect information - it's often easy for me to lose touch with exactly what it is I'm trying to evoke. I've always loved military history. Nothing thrills me like following the evolutions of Col. Such-and-such's brigade as it endeavored to escape its enfilade by Maj. Insert-name-here's batteries on Ambiguous-landform Ridge. I revel in studying after-action reports, ordnance expenditures, tactical treatises, and casualty figures. Sometimes I get carried away and forget that those paragraphs and numbers I'm soaking up - particularly the cascading reports of x killed, y wounded, and z captured in action - aren't just some collection of ink on paper in some silly wargame. These are stories. Stories of men. Men who died. Died horrific deaths. That always stops me cold and makes me think, "Ya know, I think it's time to take a break from the research and take a walk..."

The NPS has generously given me housing on the grounds of the Samuel Cobean Farm up north of town. Though the Cobean Farm wasn't an epicenter of battle, this place saw its own forms of hell. In the fields by the long farm lane, a Confederate artillery battery was set up and rained fury upon their enemies. The little farmstead itself - solidly behind rebel lines after the first day - acted as a collecting site for Federal prisoners of war. I can imagine the fear-stricken uncertainty of some of the boys of Oliver O. Howard's Eleventh Corps as they were prodded at bayonet point into makeshift stockades in the once beautiful, now trampled fields. Can you see them? Anxious and frightened as their captors harvest their valuables and taunt them with thoughts of prison camps? Can you hear their whispered wonderings of where tomorrow would take them? Whether or not they'd make it out of this? Whether they'd ever see their friends - or even their homes - again? But I think the most horrible tale this farm can tell is its service as a field hospital. Wounded men filled this little farm, waiting for their turn on the surgeon's table as the agonizing pain of their bloody wounds sapped away at their strength. When they finally reached that table, anything could be destined for them: a path to recovery, the loss of a limb and all their livelihood, the removal of a warped and twisted bullet from inside their torn body, the beginning of an infection and a slow, festering death, or the simple shaking of the surgeon's head as he solemnly laments, "There's nothing I can do for you, son." And then the barn. Oh, God, the barn...  To signify its status as a hospital, from its roof was flown a plain red flag, as red as the blood that freely ran and pooled inside that place. The barn was filled not with grain and produce, not with livestock and implements; no, it was filled to the doors with wounded, dying, and dead men, sometimes piled atop each other like cordwood. The groans and screams of the poor men consigned to misery in that simple, unclean structure surely permeated night and day with gut-wrenching horror. On looking in the doorway to the threshing floor, now carpeted with broken men wallowing in gritty puddles of their own filth and blood mingling with the dust and dirt of the floor, I can't even imagine how someone could take all of it in and not think to themselves, "No... This can't be real. This can't be happening. Things like this aren't supposed to happen to people. This can't be real."

Though their bodies are now gone, we cannot forget
the blood that once stained these fields.

The fact is that that was indeed reality, not just on the Samuel Cobean Farm, but all across this place. After that horrible battle, the vicinity of Gettysburg was called, in the words of 15-year-old Gettysburg citizen Tillie Pierce, "a strange and blighted land." Strange and blighted land... What more can you call a place like that? It's not even a town anymore. It's not even a place fit for living. It's a massive, miles-wide butcher house, hospital, morgue, and... hell - what more can I say but hell? - all rolled into one. This once-beautiful and plentiful Pennsylvania farmland for three July days bore witness to some of the most hellacious and heart-rending sights known to man. I've read about how during the fateful Confederate assault on the third day, a captain in the 28th Virginia watched his own son be shot down before him. The father, weeping, knelt down and kissed his son before struggling onward with his company to the fiery wall beyond. In the gruesome accounts of what people found on the field after the guns fell silent, I found that a local man, exploring the shattered and splintered forests of Culp's Hill on the Federal right flank, came upon a smashed, shell-struck mass of tissue, blood, and viscera that was once a man. Intermingled in the gore were fragments of a daguerreotype photograph of a wife and child. What sort of place is this? What sort of world is this that contains such horrible and mind-searingly brutal events? We in the present have the luxury of viewing all this at a distance. To us, we can brush them off as nothing more than stories. But no. Reality is not kind enough to permit them to just be legends and folktales. No, all this death and destruction actually happened, and the scars of it are still evident today. Many homes and buildings in the streets of Gettysburg still bear pockmarks and furrows where they were struck by bullets. In the upper floor of the Cobean house, a shell still sits buried into the wall. And on Culp's Hill, deep in the forest where visitors never roam, you will find faint and weathered remnants of long depressions and pits in the earth. These pits were burial trenches, the site of mass interments of dozens of Confederate dead and their shallow resting place until Southerners attempted to return them home years after the battle.

This place is more than some hokey tourist attraction where one can buy cheap souvenirs from capitalizing vendors downtown. The people who frequent such places are unknowing of what truly happened here. But can you blame them? Even history textbooks can't convey the true horrors and tragedies of this place. Relatively few of us can comprehend the sheer magnitude of bloodletting across these rocky plains and hills and valleys. It can scarcely be conveyed to us today by the pristine beauty of the park that now encompasses this battlefield. But the fact is this: this place is haunted. I don't mean by specters and apparitions in the night. This place is haunted by pain. From the northern reaches of the Cobean Farm to the rugged heights of Little Round Top, from the embattled lines at the Lutheran Seminary to the bouldered slopes of Culp's Hill, and all the places in between, this place - this sacred ground - exudes the pain it once watched. Even the dirt we walk on this field breathes the despair it once absorbed. Undoubtedly in our traverses of this field, we have stood upon the very spot where a beloved father of three little children back home gasped his final labored death rattle as he clutched his little ones' picture for dear life. We have walked over the ground where a young boy with hopes and aspirations of a long, prosperous, and beautiful life had his entrails torn out in a sudden burst of shrapnel. And for all we know, we have tread upon the very ground where an adored son, once proud and sprightly as summer clover, bled away his life's blood and still lies there beneath his own little patch of blood-soaked sod, neglected and forgotten by the reinterment efforts and by all of time.

Think of all this the next time you come to this sacred ground. As you sit out in the gloaming darkness of the approaching summer night and you watch the fireflies flit effervescently across a quiet field, know that those luminous little insects dance to the songs of misery and horror sung by this very ground. This earth has supped full with horrors and it begs for you to hear its cry.