Could I Go Over the Top?

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.

Sunlight Illumination

You have to think about sunlight to appreciate its impact on your life as it is, and has been. We know that exposure to light is a necessary component of life and that people act more graciously and are less dour on sunny days.  I know I am less of a curmudgeon.  But these are aspects of light we normally just accept as givens. Given the choice, we want sun, and when it’s obscured behind gray clouds for days on end, as it often is around here, we pine for its return.

Grain Stacks

My very first conscious memory is of sunlight illuminating the shingled roof of a house next door, which my new eyes could see out my nursery window. I was about two years old.  The details of the roof have faded (I was peering out through the rails of my crib, after all), but one thing I very much remember was that the sky that day was not blue, but white.  All these years later, I feel I am reliving a moment in my infancy on those days — usually very hot or bright — when the sky is white with thin clouds that only barely screen the sun.  On such days, I find myself transported back to that moment in my crib as I tried to make sense of the world beyond myself.

From these and similar experiences, I’ve concluded that filed away in my subconscious mind — and perhaps in yours, as well — are memories that are like templates of days. These templates form in our earliest years, and are composed of elemental senses, and they stay with us.  The effect is eerie yet also pleasant: every day is different from the last, of course, but some days jog our memory bank until it locates the identical day template from a prior (most likely much earlier) experience.  Sunlight seems to dominate the memory fragment, more than sound or smell.  We all vividly recall the particular circumstances of certain days, such as especially fun vacation days, or the dampness of a rainy spring afternoon.   What I am attempting to explain is something more basic: revisiting a certain set of circumstances that we experienced very early in life that is suddenly floods into our consciousness.  These circumstances, I believe, are most recalled as involving some  aspect of light, which is the first of the senses we have to grapple with.

I’m not talking about the well-known sense of deja vu that we all experience. Those moments are mind tricks that cause us to believe we are reliving prior events, usually a conversation or a chance encounter, when in fact we are not.  We have felt days before, going back early in our lives when light and shadow and colors were just sorting themselves out in our nascent minds.

Street Winter Sunlight and Snow

Thus, I invariably feel in the watery light of winter a cold Minnesota afternoon and the sting of snow on my chin as I fell face first from a sled.  In a similar way, crisp, sunny winter days are all brittle and snap, just like the day my father let me ride with him to the gas station — a huge concession on his part and a momentous event for me. Summer thunderstorms brewing in roiling pewter clouds looming behind shimmering green and silver leaves cause me to become fearful, just like the day, as a toddler, when I was left out in the front yard as everyone scampered for cover.  The light that at that moment, which I have seen many times since, was suffused in pink.

Which brings me to a consideration of the art of painting, and how accomplished painters are able to capture the visual depiction of light and also its visceral essence.  No matter their style or “school,” artists as varied as Constable and Diebenkorn, Van Gogh and Vermeer, all possess the uncanny ability to capture their own day templates for the world to see.

Sunday Morning

Edward Hopper’s “Sunday Morning,” for example, is surely not a study of deserted urban streetscape.  It’s about (to me, anyway) loneliness and isolation. In his evocation of a moment in time, Hopper portrays sadness as — masterfully — sunlight.

Other painters, especially Impressionists, use light (and shadow) to elevate our understanding of nature to the realm of revelation. Monet, for example, devoted a series of paintings of grain stacks as seen through different natural light settings.  His intention in these paintings was to portray how perception and emotion are conditioned by the external environment; how sunshine (or the intensity of light by season) alters both the perspective and the emotional resonance of the scene. These paintings, to me, are Monet’s day templates — visions of early life, when he first embraced sunlight.

Monet’s grain stack series points to another facet of the treatment of light in art. Painters deal with ambient light by the way it reflects off objects, and also by focusing on the effects of weather, clouds especially, on the strength and vividness of light.

Bulb Field

Van Gogh’s “Bulb Fields,” painted in 1883, focuses on a large field of flowers. The thing that catches my eye, and creates a shudder of recognition, is his treatment of thin, scudding clouds and the wan, diffused light that unifies the composition. In seeing it, I am recalling a day template from somewhere in my past.

The brilliant insight of artists like these is that light — and in particular, sunlight — is an emotional sense, and not only a physical one. The exceptional artists have, over the ages, rendered  light through the lens of emotion and memory. We’re the better for it, because when we come across a Pissaro pastoral scene or Winslow Homer landscape, our delight is two-fold.  We are looking at great art.  And we are seeing, again, a memory of a moment in our early life.

He Makes the Catch

The arrival of spring brings with it the return of blessed baseball, for my money still the best game to play and watch.  One of baseball’s many pleasures is its spatial symmetry, which is best appreciated from a seat in the upper deck where a full view of the infield diamond’s subtle dimensions are visible. Did you know (I did not) that the arc from first to third base is exactly equal to the distance from home plate to second?  The measurement is 127 ft., 3-3/8 inches, let the record show.

I also like baseball’s expanse beyond the diamond, a reminder of the game’s pastoral roots.  Outfields can be, and are, as big or as oddly laid out as the real estate “footprint” allows. It explains why parks are considered either hitter or pitcher friendly based upon how close in or far out the walls are positioned vis-a-vis the batter’s box.  The outfield is where foot speed is most valued, because of the absolute need to cover so much ground. Outfielders must be lightning fast to run down fly balls and line drives, and also sufficiently skilled to judge where to run to reach the right spot for the catch.

I played baseball as a kid, on a team named the “Red Rockets.”  No unis, but we all had dark blue (wool — this was 1956) baseball caps, upon which our moms had ironed two, bright red felt letter ‘Rs’ over the bill.  I played some right field but mostly first base because I am left-handed, and baseball lore had it that lefties had an advantage at first base.  I was a no-field, no-bat kind of player, but good for a laugh or two in the dugout.

What I most remembered was how big everything really was!  As an 11-year-old, running the bases from first to third required enormous effort and stamina because of the sheer amount of ground to be covered.  The outfield was even more vast an expanse. I was fairly fast and could reasonably judge most fly balls, but I was in constant fear of being unable to track down a line drive hit into the gap between center and right field.  If you didn’t get to the ball, and it rolled to the fence, chances were pretty good that the batter (faced with his own challenge of speed and distance) would be headed for home by the time you retrieved the ball and threw it back in to the infield. Then, because baseball moves at its own languid pace, you’d be left standing out there, alone, sheepishly digging at the grass with your spiked shoe and afraid to look up or at anyone.

Sportsman Park

One summer weekend, our team, coaches and some of our parents boarded a bus and traveled to St. Louis, then and now a real baseball town, to see the Cardinals play in Sportsman Park (long since torn down).  We sat in a group along the left field line, which put us in close proximity to the great Stan (“theMan”) Musial, a lumbering but graceful hero who was a prolific hitter and a graceful fielder.  A batter for the opposing Cubs hit a looping fly ball into left center and Musial, taking off at the crack of the bat, chased down the fly for a long out.  He had to run a long, long way, but the ball was always within his loping, easy reach.  I can still see Musial’s uniform jersey, number 6, loose and baggy, surging and receding like an ocean wave, as he galloped away towards the ball.

Now it is many years later, and I recently found myself standing in the outfield of a baseball field where my son’s team was limbering up to start its spring practice.  I figured no one taking BP was ever going to hit it to where I was.  I was reminded, standing there, that for many decades in the early years of baseball, some fields didn’t have fences.  In fact, at New York’s old Polo Grounds, where the Giants played before moving to San Francisco, the fans were the fences!  Long flies could literally disappear into the crowd and still be in play, until Major League Baseball mercifully changed the rules.

Interrupting my thoughts, one of the kids practicing his swing hit a long fly that appeared headed in my direction in a high, looping arc.  If I were to catch it (and of course, I had no choice because baseball instinct compelled me to try) I quickly calculated that I needed to start running backward and fast.  I took off, but within a few steps, I slowed as if tethered.  My legs were suddenly mush. I could not traverse the grass from where I was to where I thought the ball was headed.  Helplessly, I watched as the ball plopped into the ground about 20 yards away. I retrieved it slowly, walking to it, while the kids and coaches waited.  I threw the ball back in the general direction of the infield, but the ball went mostly sideways and down, and one of the new spring players came out to pick up the ball, like a birding retriever.

It was clear to me at that moment that those vast spaces of the baseball field had now, for an older me, become as unavailable as a distant galaxy. What I once could do — and did, many times — was no longer in my power.  Try as I might, I am past the time when I could conquer the space between me and the white baseball bounding along the green grass.