Leaning his head back, he sat against the base of a thickly gnarled elm away from the
others mulling around in camp. The heavy roots jutting up from the cool, reddish soil seemed welcoming, as if conjuring a place of
tranquil respite just for him. Staring blankly at nothing, he wished he could draw strength from the stoic old tree, perhaps gaining
its secrets on weathering life’s storms. As his head sagged to one side, he mindlessly focused on the thick lines of bark,
tracing them with his eyes, following the deeps grooves carved in its rough timeworn trunk. Seeing an old wound long since healed,
he wondered if he would prove as resilient as this longtime tenant of the deep Virginia wilderness.
Although quite removed from the others, he remained safely within the protective line of their pickets. He was alone yet, to him,
not alone enough. Tonight, he found his tent suffocating, the sides seeming to collapse in around him. The usually welcome comradery
of the others now simply scratched at his pain. Images only a few hours old played in his mind, dangled in front of
him by a malicious, unseen puppeteer. His struggle to slow, if not to altogether bury his thoughts, had thus far proved
fruitless. Though he told himself that he knew of the inevitability of this moment, he had not anticipated the unbearable,
suffocating
anxiety that now smothered him.
The government’s impassioned calls for men had eventually drawn him in. It seemed to him that the whole town had signed up.
If not everyone, then at least most with whom he had spent his childhood had committed to fight. Sure, he shared
their sense of the Union’s importance. He shared their patriotism. After all, he loved the land of his family’s birth.
However, unlike the others dreaming of adventure and glory, he dreaded what enlisting would eventually mean, what
fighting would require of him. He had naively assumed that he could anticipate and thus prepare for the trials of battle.
He believed he could cope, considering himself an insightful thinker.
The realization that he could not have predicted the unexpected
intensity of this painfully intolerable burden mocked his former
confidence.
Although only a few hours had passed, it seemed lifetimes ago that his regiment settled in for the approaching spring night.
Men in scattered groups
cooked over a sprinkling of fires while talking of the likely events to come. Having spent the entirety of his short army
career guarding Lincoln's precious Capitol, he had wondered how he might face his first test in the field.
On his mind's canvas, he painted orderly lines of men arrayed for battle, led by their Colonel as commanded by their Generals.
The army would march, move, stand, and fight as a proud, disciplined unit, advance as needed, and withdraw if compelled. They
would follow their officers' leads and force an end to this secessionist madness. Life could then continue as it had.
This idyllic fantasy surrendered to a grimmer reality when the men camped to their right came crashing through their ranks
in a perfect, unexplained panic. Something had gone terribly wrong. Understanding immediately what this portended, their
experienced Colonel, in his thick German accent, ordered the men to form ranks, shift to the right, load, and fire.
Despite his foreign tongue, his bearing commanded respect. They instantly understood and quickly obeyed. The enemy was
almost upon them. This proved however, their last attempt at organized movement that day. Their gallant Colonel, leading
his men from in front, collapsed to the ground the first casualty of the sudden storm. Others began to fall as minie balls
swarmed like hornets in the breezy evening air. After some fretful uncertainty, eyes casting about, the men broke in harried
unmilitary disarray. A few fired first. Most simply ran.
Although he had initially looked to his right and left to see who might stand with him, he too ran. Dense shrubs and forest
debris proved no obstacle in his pursuit of safer ground. Running with his still loaded musket, a voice inside chided him about
his forsaken duty to fight honorably. Crashing through the brush, running to save his life, he could hear the Rebels
close behind him letting loose their spine chilling demonic screams. Jumping into a slight depression, he turned to gage
the distance from his gray clad pursuers. A particularly energetic Johnny raced towards him, some yards in front of even their
color bearer. Perhaps now had not been a good time to stop. As the Johnny began to swing his musket towards him, instinctively, and
for the first time, he lowered his own rifle, aimed at the man in gray, and fired.
As if appalled by a sudden, egregious violation, time suspend its energies on this now execrably christened field. All motion
seemed to slow. His southern pursuer stopped suddenly, a look of shocked disbelief and resigned comprehension painfully etched
in his young southern face. His expression bespoke no anger, no resentment, no accusation,
only stunned disbelief gradually consumed by
a longing, silent plea for help. The eyes of this man, startlingly more human than any into which he had looked before, fell
as the gray clad soldier’s body hit the unforgiving ground. The growing stain on his loose cotton shirt spoke of this
man’s inevitable fate. Staring transfixed at the man in mystified horror, some sense of self-preservation shocked him back
into awareness, reminding him of the present approaching danger. With the now enraged Rebels closing quickly, he threw his musket
aside and, lightened of its burden, once again fled.
Time rejoined the drama, seeming to push him on his way as if to make up for its delinquencies of the past few seconds. Filled
with the energy of fright fed hysteria, he easily outpaced his yelling pursuers. Branches, twigs, and undergrowth crunched
under the steady pounding of his quickly moving feet, blending with the crackling sounds of musketry and the booming thundering
accompaniment of dueling artillery. After a time and with perhaps a mile of ground behind him, he joined the reforming blue lines
as night mercifully closed on the carnage. Now, he sat near camp, tormented by the lingering images of this terrible day.
He had never killed a man, nor had he seen one die. He could only think of the Johnny as a man
now, not as a Reb, a traitor, or the
enemy. Alone on the cold dead ground, his victim was only a man like him, minus the unique gift of the precious breath of life.
His soul ached with the pain that his victim no longer felt. He thought that perhaps an angry God had taken from him the
serenity that both men could have held earlier today. The admonishment "Thou Shalt Not Kill" broke
with repeated
force into his tortured thoughts. "He would have surely killed me or at least tried," he feebly argued in
defense. He rubbed his rough dirty hands hard over his suddenly older face, trying to erase the pain. He could not bear this.
"I did my duty!" his inner voice defiantly screamed in response to the agony that savaged his conscience. "I
did what I had to do!"
Perhaps with time he might convince himself that he had violated no moral laws. Perhaps with time, the pain would subside.
But for now, although far from that place, the imploring pleading eyes of that man remained with him, staring back at him.
He could still see his eyes and, to his horror, could almost see through them. He envisioned the man’s family, perhaps the
children who would never again run to him, and the wife he would never hold. He saw his parents, children, and friends,
wracked with an intense, bitter grief over a loss they could do nothing to undo, a loss caused by his hand.
The evening winds gently swayed the treetops and, as if to provide a merciful distraction, the old elm dropped a few twigs
to the ground nearby. Snatching one within reach, he mindlessly peeled the bark into short strips. He thought of his
father, a hard working farmer who had taught him the craft of slaughtering and butchering livestock. "This is hard for
me Papa," he recalled saying to the older man, trying to hold back the tears after reluctantly killing his first
lamb. His father's words rang clearly in his ears, pushing from the fore the eyes which threatened to consume him.
"Son, when this becomes easy, you need to look at who you’ve become."
It was not cold, yet he tossed aside his twig and pulled his blanket tightly around him, wishing for the innocence of the
safer childhood he mournfully recalled and for his father’s practical strength. He stared into the darkness, searching for
the eyes that he could no longer see, fearing that he would see them again and also that he might not. "What had he
become?" he wondered. "What would he do tomorrow?"
Although he laid down a mile away, he felt somehow that he shared the same ground as that where his personal casualty now
rested. Though he yet lived, had emerged from the fight physically unscathed, he wondered how he would survive what he had done.
"This is what this is all about," he thought, to a degree chastising himself. "To engage in war you must kill,
one person at a time. No matter how the illustrated papers say it, announcing the hundreds or thousands of dead, it happens
with one man killing one other, one at a time."
Wrapped in his blanket, he tossed about on the rough ground as if
wrestling with some unseen foe. His mind raced through a haze of
images from both this day and his past. The lessons of his parents,
his schooling, and his church all danced furiously, colliding
violently with today's incongruous events. For a while, the
directionless mental conflagration continued. Then suddenly, the storm
passed. His mind cleared. Resolve filled his eyes.
That night, he slipped quietly through the picket line, leaving the
trappings of war behind, and walked trustingly into the darkness, away
from someone he could not become. As he traveled through the
night-shrouded woodland, he gazed upward through the swaying trees
towards the stars above and offered an earnest quiet prayer for the
man whose life he had taken, asking for peace for them both and for us
all.
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These stories may not be reproduced in any manner, in part or in their entirety, without the expressed, written permission
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