Names from the War

[mikee64]

This probably will not be formatted correctly, but I didn't see it posted. One of my favorite poems about the ACW:

"By Bruce Catton; From American Heritage magazine, 1960

Names from the War

Once the land had no great names and no history.
It was a good land, with wood lots holding shadows beside the
hot fields, blue hills hazy on the horizon, country roads
going in aimless meanders from creek bottom and county store
to places of no particular importance.
Nothing ever happened in it, except that men made homes and towns,
with springtime plowing and autumn gathering,
Finding their drama in corn-huskings and barn-raisings, and in gay
tin-pan chivarees for the young married couples,
Building churches by little groves, looking off the earth
into mystery beyond mounded graves,
Wresting a living from the land, trying to get ahead, having a good life,
happy because the world left them alone.

They put names on towns and crossroads and rivers, borrowing harsh
words the Indians had left behind, using homespun words of their own,
naming their land so they could know it.
The names had no ring or shine to them, then. They were just names,
put there so that a man could say where he was.
A man could put in a crop beside Peachtree Creek, or hunt doves
on the slope of Culp’s hill, or follow the clank of a cowbell into
White Oak Swamp, or try for catfish in Stone’s River—
There was nothing in any of those names to stir remembrance or grief,
nothing to put a catch in the throat or send one’s thoughts far
into the mystery beyond the silent sky.
Not then.

Then the armies came and the names
became terrible.
The armies tramped the lazy roads to ruin
raising endless dust clouds
for a pillar of smoke by day,
Lighting thousands of campfires
for a pillar of fire by night,
Tiny fires that glowed on lonely bivouacs
just this side of nowhere.
By the campfires boys looked into the dark
to the homeplaces they might not see again
(Not looking ahead because of what they might see tomorrow),
Writing letters to the folks to say where they were.
And the datelines on the letters carried the names,
names that had grown menacing and evil,
Names that would echo in American life forever afterward,
telling of fire on farm and hilltop,
speaking of the thousands who found the end of the road
in some obscure place they never heard of.
The letters carried the commonplace news of the camp—
We had hardtack and salt pork again today…Lots of the boys
are sick…I wish I could get some cold water from the
spring behind our house at home…Maybe we won’t have a
big fight for a day or two yet…
And sometimes the news from the battle front reached home before
the letters did, so that what the writers said came from beyond the grave,
And the people back home looked at the datelines, reading the names
that meant fear and heartache and undying loneliness.

Those strange country names from the war—
Sharpsburg and Spotsylvania, Pittsburg Landing and Brice’s Crossroads,
Chickamauga and Gaine’s Mill,
Milliken’s Bend, Olustee, Bentonville, Gettysburg,
Corinth, Manassas, Cross Keys, Mechanicsville,
Chattanooga, Franklin, Resaca, Dover—
Quiet names of doom, borne in soiled envelopes, going across
all of America, weaving a crimson thread into the nation’s memory
names that many families would never dare say again—
Not until years and the growth of quiet pride had done their work.

There were other names that did not get on the datelines,
Names given to stray bits of landscape,
grown equally grim because death and anguish lay upon them—
Missionary Ridge, the Wilderness, Cemetery Ridge, Malvern Hill,
the West Wood and the East Wood, Snake Creek Gap, Cedar Creek;
And the names that came straight from the battlefields,
coined by the men who fought,
Names like Bloody Lane and Bloody Angle, the Round Forest,
Battery Wagner, the Peach Orchard, the Sunken Road,
Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield and the Cornfield;
Names of churches – Shiloh, New Hope, Dallas, and the Dunker Church;
Names of the houses people had lived in – Widow Tapp and Widow
Glenn, the Mumma House and the Henry House, Chantilly;
Names like the Emmitsburg road and the Valley Pike, and at last
the haunted road that led past Sailor’s Creek to Appomattox;
Names that will live as long as America remembers.

The agony is gone, the grief and the loneliness are over,
with those who grieved going to Join the men they mourned;
The bitterness and the hot bewildered fury have faded out;
The last of the tragic overtones has echoed off
to stillness beyond the horizon.
But the names remain, never to be forgotten, never again to be
simple place names from a land history has passed by.
What America was is in them;
What America finally will mean rings through them.
They still clang when we touch them. They are transmuted
by what they say of America’s greatest experience,
America’s most profound and touching mystery."

[mikee64]

I had a couple people PM me asking for a link to this online so they could get the original formatting. Unfortunately I do not know of anywhere this is available online - if someone finds it please post a link here as I would like to have it.

I am attaching a word document with the original Catton indentations intact.