Well, tonight at the site of the Harris Farm the
commemoration of the Battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House
will come to an end. While I wish I had been able to attend more of the
commemorative events, those I did have the pleasure of going to or helping to
lead seemed appropriately somber and very well done.
I tend to fall into the camp of folks who believe that
battlefields are no more or less hallowed on the anniversaries of when the
battle took place versus any other given day. And, being blessed to live so
near these fields of honor and horror, I have the privilege of communing with
these sites whenever I wish.
Thus, I will leave the analysis of which tours were the best
and which events were the most moving to those whose participation exceeded my
own.
However...
As some of you know, my other main area of study other than
the American Civil War is the First World War, and I recently came across a
quote from a book on that tragic topic that resonated with my inner reactions to the photographs that kept
showing up on my Facebook page of hundreds of people crossing fields and
forests that were once drenched with blood.
I leave this quote not as a criticism of others, but as a
caution to myself:
“I fear I’d fallen victim to the exuberant nihilism of the battlefield enthusiast, and that soon I would be whooping with joy at coming across a trench in the forest, or a skeleton behind a barn. There is a sort of macho romance to the futility of war, an attraction to seeing things fall apart, born of the same impulse that makes setting fires or watching the wrecker’s ball such a fun pastime for so many men.” – Stephen O’Shea, Back to the Front:An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I
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