There is a sound in war that stays in the mind and will not let go the soul of a
man. When the men around you are wounded there is a sigh, or a sob, that comes up out
of them - it sounds like a soft wind on a summer's day but it has a meaning in it that
a summer wind will never have. You think maybe it's your imagination but you begin to
listen for it and then you realize it comes out of the wounded. It comes out of them
and into you and you carry it inside you until you die and maybe it doesn't let you go
even then. Later, after the fighting is done, when the cannons have ceased their
awful thunder, for a little while a silence as deep as the farthest reaches of space
falls upon everything left alive. Those that fortune has allowed to live, and it was
through nothing unique that they possess, nothing which better men, fallen around
them, did not also possess, suffer from the silence. It falls upon them in thick
blankets and for a minute stuffs their eyes and ears and all their senses with its
fabric. Then, too soon, the cries and whimpers and the terrible mewling of the
wounded, tear the silence into fragments that remain, if at all, only in the memory.
There are the calls for water, the calls for a help that can never come, the calls for
the sweet mothering that young men knew in a simpler time, the prayers for death. Into
the living men the cries travel and they lodge in the deep recesses and will not let
them go; they will hear them for as long as they live.
Around the shattered promise of these young men who will never marry, who will
never bring children into the world, who will never see the look of love in a young
child's eye, who will never speak with the voice of age to the next generation, lie
the remains of the land: crops that will never know the harvest, the bodies of wild
things that did not flee fast enough the rage of men locked in ancient struggle, great
trees whose thousand years are ground into an hour's splinters, orchards that will
never know the laughter of a child's swing. All lie in disarray around the wet bundles
of mothers' pride and love. Then, after awhile, there is an odor that, with the
sounds, enters into the living and there leaves a smudge that no amount of washing
will erase. And the graves that are hurriedly dug are simple ones and shallow.
Those who survive carry a bond between them too deep for words. It is a bond
that goes beyond the weakness of flesh and blood and sinew. It binds them to each
other in a brotherhood that knows no limitation of space or time. And later, when they
meet each other on the street or in another city or another state or another decade a
silent knowledge passes between them. The knowledge passes over and around the crowds
within which they walk and enters in at the eyes. There is a momentary pause as each
man feels the thing enter them; they pause under its influence or stumble slightly in
their walk. Then they might nod or stop a minute to speak together. And as the years
pass the men feel the bond as keenly but time helps the bearing of it; the pause
becomes less noticeable to any who care to look for it. The men of Manassas knew all these things though they wished they did not.
Sometimes, late in the night, the smells and the cries and the sound of men being
wounded around them would take hold of them and drag them gasping and wretched to the
shores of consciousness. There they would lie sweating, calming themselves, and they
would understand that the stamp of strangeness that Civil War had placed upon them
would never pass until they themselves had passed, until they met once again those
comrades who had gone before. |
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