This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [31]
Soldiers struggled to communicate to those eager to know their fate at the same time that they themselves struggled to understand what they saw. Why indeed were they still alive? As one Indiana soldier wrote in his diary in 1864, his “best men” had fallen around him, yet “I am not better than they.” William Stilwell of Georgia confessed to his wife the day after Antietam, “I am in good health this morning as far as my body is concerned, but in my mind I am perplexed.” Unable to explain, soldiers tried to describe, invoking the raw physicality of carnage and suffering. Even as survivors they could not escape the literal touch of death, which assaulted the senses. First there was the smell. “The dead and dying actually stink upon the hills,” W. D. Rutherford wrote his wife after the Seven Days Battles around Richmond. For a radius of miles, the “mephitic effluvia” caused by rotting bodies ensured that even if the dead were out of sight, they could not be out of mind. And then there were the thousands of bodies. Men had become putrefied meat, not so much killed as slaughtered, with “nothing to distinguish them from so many animals.” Stepping accidentally on a dead man’s leg felt to James Wood Davidson’s “boot-touch like a piece of pickled pork—hard and yet fleshy,” and he leaped back with alarm. Soldiers looked with horror upon bodies that seemed to change color as they rotted, commenting frequently upon a transformation that must have borne considerable significance in a society and a war in which race and skin color were of definitive importance. “The faces of the dead,” one northern Gettysburg veteran described, “as a general rule, had turned black—not a purplish discoloration, such as I had imagined in reading of the ‘blackened corpses’ so often mentioned in descriptions of battlegrounds, but a deep bluish black, giving to a corpse with black hair the appearance of a negro.”41
Witnesses to battle’s butchery often wrote of the impossibility of crossing the field without walking from one end to the other atop the dead. “They paved the earth,” a soldier wrote after the Battle of Williamsburg in 1862. Grant found the same after Shiloh: “I saw an open field…so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping only on dead bodies without a foot touching the ground.” With grim precision Eugene Blackford described a two-acre area at Fredericksburg containing 1,350 dead Yankees; others estimated stretches of a mile or more at Antietam or Shiloh where every step had to be planted on a dead body. Men were revolted both by the dishonor to the slain beneath their feet and by the pollution represented by such distasteful contact with the dead. Like a modern snapshot, this oft-repeated representation of battle’s horror graphically portrayed in the freeze-frame of a picture what soldiers could not narrate in a sequence of words. With vividness and detail, for the senses rather than for the reason or intellect, this recurrent image communicated the unspeakable.42
Men wept. Even as he acknowledged that “it does not look well for a soldier to cry,” John Casler of the Stonewall Brigade knew “I could not help it.” Benjamin Thompson of the 111th New York affirmed that after Gettysburg “no words can depict the ghastly picture.” He “could not long endure the gory, ghastly spectacle. I found my head reeling, the tears flowing and my stomach sick at the sight.” Colonel Francis Pierce confessed that “such scenes completely unman me.” Battle changed the living to the dead, humans into animals, and strong men into “boys…crying like children”—or perhaps even into women with their supposed inability to control their flowing tears. As Walter Lee wrote his mother from the front in June 1862, “I don’t believe I am the same being I was two weeks ago,