Nothing, to me, is as compelling as reading the accounts of men under the stress and confusion of battle: how they felt, how they reacted, what was going through their minds as they confronted the very real possibility of death.
A Union Cannon at the Angle on Cemetery Ridge
Now, just back from a tour of the great Civil War battleground at Gettysburg, these thoughts have taken on a more tangible dimension. Away from the books, I stood in places where men shot at distant targets and were in turn shot at. Many thousands were killed, many thousand more wounded in three days of fierce combat at places called the Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, Little Round Top and Culp’s Hill. The question I asked myself, as I looked down the barrel of a cannon still poised on the Union lines at Cemetery Ridge, is the question that long has bedeviled me, and perhaps you: would I have the courage to stand and fight, to fix my bayonet, leave my shelter and attack the enemy? Or would the instinct of self-preservation take over, causing me to stay hidden and out of the line of fire?
(This search for understanding is different from, and much more personal, than my enduring fascination with the causes of war; the broader context of politics, economics and social currents that lead to the clash of nations and peoples. What I want to know is how, why and where ordinary men found the courage to go over the top. Gettysburg helped me find an answer).
Much has been written over the years about why men fight (and some die) in war. Until around the time of the Civil War, most explanations centered on a strong identification with an abstract cause (such as freedom or defense of homeland); Confederate troops were said to be more highly motivated than their Union counterparts because they were defending their beloved Virginia or South Carolina from the encroachment of the looming federal government. Yet that explanation makes only partial sense. Something more fundamental is required to fully explain why men do not flinch in the face of certain harm.
Gettysburg’s splendid new National Military Park Museum provides helpful clues. The words of officers and soldiers who participated in the battle on both
A view across the battlefield to Little Round Top
sides are widely quoted. What emerges from the museum exhibits (and the narratives of highly trained and personable tour guides at the battlefield) is that there is a very thin line separating the fighters from the frightened. Those who are able to overcome their fears do so not because they are especially brave (most expressed grave fears of combat) but rather, because they felt a sense of obligation not to let down the comrades in their squad or troop — their friends, their comrades in arms, the fellows who are beside them behind the parapet or crouching in the shell hole or shallow trench. Interviews with veterans after both World War I and II confirmed the finding: amid the horror of war, and perhaps compelled by it, men fight for one another. This is especially true when there are common ties linking the men, such as home town, school or work place — anything that reflects common interests or backgrounds. In the Civil War, units on both sides were composed of soldiers from the same state or city, or calling. At Gettysburg on the third day, with Pickett’s famous charge close to breaking through the Union lines, New York City firemen, serving together in the same unit, helped sway the tide.
It surely has to be this. How else to explain why at Gettysburg, men from Maine and Massachusetts and Mississippi threw themselves into the bloody fray. How else to explain why, with Rebel troops surging towards their entrenched positions, soldiers from the 1st Minnesota Volunteers began a counter-charge in which 215 of its 262 men were killed or wounded in the space of a few short minutes. What other motivation would compel the actions of a young Union officer named Patrick O’Rorke, out of the Irish diaspora struggling to gain a foothold of acceptance in mid-19th Century America, who led a counter-charge of fellow Irishmen to stem a Rebel advance on Little Round Top and lost his life in a hail of bullets. Ardant du Picq, a 19th- century French colonel and military theorist, explained the influence of common bonds forging a fighting spirit this way: “Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely.”
The answer, then, is so simplistic that it risks sounding trite: soldiers do what they are trained to do, and they do what they are trained to do because they don’t want to let down the men they are with. So it is both a professional (I am a soldier) and a personal (I’m going to do my part) rationale that appears to motivate men in battle. They are drilled to act, but to act, they must draw upon a deep and abiding willingness to sacrifice even their own lives for the sake of those around them.
Which makes the verdant fields of Gettysburg, nearly 150 years after three days of mortal combat, such a melancholy and yet uplifting place.
