Oh What a Lovely War!

Picking and Choosing Among Memories

1865—Lee’s exit from Appomattox Court House

A quick inquiry on the internet will reveal that, since the dawn of humanity, 1.645 billion people, give or take, have died in wars. That leaves warfare as a long-distant second to infectious diseases (1.68 billion in the 20th century alone). Even so, it's clear that organized mass conflict is a central theme of human society, and will probably continue as such into the future.

1944—American lament at Malmedy

Not all wars are created equal, of course. Hardly anyone would draw an equivalence between the horrific Mongol Conquests and the American Revolution, or the German depredations of World War II and the French defense of their 1793 Revolution. The only monument we've seen to the German SS was erected in the Dutch-speaking Flemish village of Zedelgem in western Belgium, but within a few outraged months, it was torn down again. Independence movements tend to get better press from historians, even when their costs, as in Kenya, Algeria, and Vietnam, prove horrendous.

1836—Remembering the Alamo at dawn in San Antonio

Normally, the victors have a huge say in how conflicts are remembered, but not universally and not forever. The Mongols memorialized their victories in stacks of skulls that have long since disintegrated in the Central Asian deserts. Hardly anyone today frets either way over the Greco-Persian Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC) or the Roman Siege of Carthage (146 BC). And some of the greatest victories in history—among them Austerlitz, Jena, and Poitiers—are barely commemorated, because they were fought on the losing side's lands.

Perhaps Might does make Right, but as time passes and the victors follow the defeated into the mists of history, balance and amnesia have a way of asserting themselves.

1346—The English longbow reinvents warfare at Crécy-en-Ponthieu

The Battle of Crécy (August 26, 1346) is a case in point. This was one of those historical watersheds where the technological edge of English longbows over French crossbows changed the course of human conflict. But the spot where the English King Edward III watched the future unfold for his hugely popular son, the Black Prince, is marked by nothing more than a large, leafy bush on a dirt track. We spent a day in the countryside around this tiny French village, armed with GPS and a handful of ancient maps, before we finally pinpointed the King's lookout. Which goes to show that no one seems to care anymore what happened here.

1863—Stonewall Jackson’s last command at Charlottesville

In the forests around Charlottesville, Virginia, one of the most important events of the US Civil War, the shooting of General Stonewall Jackson on May 2, 1863, is already lost to history. As in Crécy, we spent a day consulting GPS, Park Rangers, and a handful of old maps, looking for the precise spot where Jackson's own sentries mistook him for the enemy and shot off his arm. But the battle and its field were so chaotic, that we still aren't entirely convinced we got it right.

1781—Dawn over the British breastworks at Yorktown

Yet for good or ill, Jackson's shooting is an anomaly in current American historiography and especially in the Commonwealth of Virginia. There are no more beautifully tended places on the face of the Earth than the siege lines at Yorktown or Henry House Hill at Manassas National Battlefield.

In the first rays of dawn, with the dew sparkling in the grass and the sun peeking sleepy-eyed over the horizon, you'll swear you can hear the cries of the ghosts who struggled and died here. Even in our glib and superficial age, the redoubt where Lord Cornwallis gave up his colors and the tree line where Stonewall Jackson's troops invented his nickname remain vivid reminders of what those conflicts and combatants stood for.

1916—Sunset on the Somme

And so, in a different way, do the more than 175,000 war memorials erected all over France to the soldiers of World War I. You can't cross a French city, town, or village without circling one of these monuments in the main square. The smaller communes even list the individual inhabitants—18 here, 122 there, 47 there—huge numbers proportionately—who went off to the Marne and Verdun and never came home again.

There's a certain uniformity in the gray, concrete sculptures—a poilu's helmet, a few flags, and a goddess—that fits with the colorless, industrial-scale war that ended their lives. Most of the monuments sport occasional garlands of flowers, but does that mean people are still angry?

Or have people accepted that there are events in human history over which we have next to no control?

1861—Dawn over Henry House Hill at Manassas

In 1991, the US Congress established the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission to study the preservation of the 10,500 conflict sites (among them, 384 major battles, with 122 just in Virginia) from that war. The CWSAC reported two years later:

"The nation's Civil War heritage is in grave danger. It is being demolished and bulldozed at an alarming pace. It is disappearing under new buildings, parking lots, and highways. Especially impacted are the battlefields because of their relatively large size, generally open character, and frequent proximity to today's expanding population centers. The nation needs a solution to this problem."

But do we? Battlefields might make for spectacular photography, and there is no more effective way of educating your children than a walk through one of these sites. But do we really want to keep reliving and reviving the arguments from this part of our history?

1815—The British Lion with paw on the globe at Waterloo

It's a good question with no easy answers. One of the more glib and popular responses from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana goes, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Yet, when it comes to warfare, we humans might be condemned to repeat our mistakes, no matter what we recall.

1864—Appomattox and the other face of warfare