Full transcript
0:00You were 19 years old, walking a plow
0:02behind two horses on your father's farm,
0:052 miles east of a small Pennsylvania
0:07town called Gettysburg.
0:09It is April 1861. The town has 10 roads
0:13leading into it, a courthouse, a
0:15college, and about 2,400 people. And you
0:18know most of them by name.
0:20You have ordinary plans.
0:22Get the weed in by July.
0:24Buy the 40 acres that border your
0:26father's land. Marry Sarah [music] Diel
0:28from the next farm over, who has been
0:31beating you at spelling bees since you
0:32were both nine. Nothing heroic, nothing
0:35complicated. Your best friend is not
0:37here anymore.
0:38>> [music]
0:38>> Caleb moved to Virginia 5 years ago,
0:41apprenticed to a carriage maker in
0:43Winchester. And the two of you did what
0:45boys do when they cannot say what they
0:47mean. You traded jackknives.
0:50His is in your pocket right now, worn
0:52smooth at the hinge. Yours is in his.
0:55"Trade back the next time we go up the
0:57hill," he said.
0:59Meaning the wooded hill behind his
1:00grandmother's [music]
1:01farm, where you hunted squirrels every
1:03autumn of your childhood, where your
1:05initials are carved side by side in the
1:07bark of an oak.
1:09He writes twice a year.
1:11His letters say Virginia is green, and
1:13the work is good. His last one ends with
1:16a strange sentence. He says, "Whatever
1:18happens, we [music] traded fair." On the
1:2012th of April, cannons fire on a fort in
1:23South Carolina, 700 miles away.
1:27You have never heard of Fort Sumter.
1:29By Sunday, every church bell in town is
1:32ringing, and not for services.
1:35The square fills with men and boys,
1:38shouting for war, the way they shout for
1:40a horse race.
1:42A company is forming, raised from your
1:44own county.
1:45Farmers and carpenters and teachers.
1:48More than half of them under 21. The
1:51recruiter says the whole thing will be
1:52over in 90 days. Standing in that crowd,
1:56you do the arithmetic every young man in
1:58America is doing that week. 90 days is
2:01June, July at the latest. You can put
2:04down the rebellion and still get the
2:06weed in.
2:07You sign your name.
2:09Your brother Thomas is 16 and he signs,
2:12too.
2:13Until your mother walks into the square,
2:15takes the pen out of his hand in front
2:17of everyone and walks him home by the
2:19collar.
2:21He does not forgive her for 2 years. She
2:24never once apologizes. On the morning
2:26you muster, Sarah gives you a housewife,
2:29a little folded sewing kit she stitched
2:31herself.
2:32Needles and buttons and thread wound
2:35tight.
2:35>> [music]
2:36>> The thread is the blue of her Sunday
2:37dress because she cut it from her Sunday
2:40dress. Bring it back empty, she says.
2:43Meaning, use it. Mend things. Come home.
2:46Home by harvest, you tell her.
2:49She looks at you the way smart people
2:51look at arithmetic they do not trust.
2:54Caleb's knife stays in your pocket.
2:57It will stay there through four summers,
3:00two winters underground in winter
3:02quarters, and one long walk back to the
3:05exact hill where the trade was supposed
3:08to end. [music] The army teaches you to
3:09march, to load a rifled musket in nine
3:12steps,
3:13to fire three rounds a minute,
3:16to sleep on the ground and rise in the
3:18dark.
3:19Camp is mud, drill, bad coffee, and
3:23boredom deep enough to drown in. That is
3:26where Corporal Daniel Hollis takes
3:27charge of your mess.
3:29He is 31, a school teacher, and words
3:33are his whole kit. He reads the men's
3:35letters aloud for the ones who cannot
3:37read
3:38and writes their answers for the ones
3:40who cannot write.
3:42And he corrects the spelling of every
3:44man in the company, whether they ask or
3:46not. At night, the veterans of nothing
3:49sit around the fire and talk about
3:51seeing the elephant. That is the phrase
3:53for it.
3:55Combat. The thing itself.
3:57Nobody who says it has seen it.
4:00A boy from the next fire says he hopes
4:02the war does not end before he gets his
4:04look.
4:06Hollis stares into the flames and says
4:08nothing.
4:09And you notice that, and you do not
4:11understand it yet. The army feeds you
4:13crackers called hardtack, baked so hard
4:16the men stamp dates on them as jokes.
4:191810, 1776.
4:22And you learn to soak them in coffee
4:24until the weevils float. And to skim the
4:27weevils without comment, because comment
4:29changes nothing. Coffee is the true
4:32currency of the war.
4:34Men who will not share a blanket will
4:36share a fire for coffee.
4:38And twice a week there is mail call,
4:41which is church. Grown men who marched
4:44through rain without a word will stand
4:46like schoolboys with their hats off when
4:49the letters come out of the sack. In her
4:51first letter, Sarah asks you a question
4:53five words long. How is it out there?
4:56You will spend four years failing to
4:58answer it.
5:00So will everyone. In July, they march
5:02you toward a creek in Virginia called
5:04Bull Run.
5:06And half of Washington rides out behind
5:08the army in carriages with picnic
5:10baskets and champagne to watch the
5:13rebellion end in an afternoon. You see a
5:15congressman in a stovepipe hat spreading
5:18a blanket on a hill like it is a county
5:20fair.
5:21Then the guns begin,
5:23and the day comes apart in your hands.
5:25Smoke swallows the field so completely
5:28that you fire at flashes and colors, not
5:30men. The noise is not sound anymore. It
5:33is pressure. It is a hand pressing on
5:35your chest. Somewhere before evening,
5:38the army simply breaks.
5:40Not retreats.
5:41Breaks. Regiments dissolve into boys
5:44running through the wreckage of picnics,
5:46past overturned carriages, past a
5:48congressman running in his shirt
5:49sleeves.
5:51You run with them. You run past a man
5:53sitting in the grass holding his own
5:55stomach together with the calm of the
5:57badly hurt.
5:59And you keep running.
6:00And that is the first thing the war
6:02teaches you.
6:03Your legs decide before you do.
6:05That night, in a rain that soaks the
6:07whole beaten army, the boy who hoped the
6:10war would not end too soon sits with his
6:13back to a wagon wheel staring at
6:15nothing. Somebody asks if he saw the
6:17elephant.
6:19He does not answer.
6:20You all saw it.
6:22And you learn the second thing, which
6:24nobody told you around the fires.
6:27The elephant cannot be described. That
6:29is the whole trick of it.
6:31The men who have seen it stop talking,
6:33and the men who have not seen it fill
6:35the silence with noise.
6:3890 days dies quietly that summer. Nobody
6:41announces it. The wheat comes in at home
6:43without you.
6:44Sarah writes that the harvest was good.
6:47You read the letter four times, and it
6:49is the word harvest that hurts.
6:52What the recruiting posters never
6:54mentioned is that the war does most of
6:56its killing without powder. In winter
6:58camp, the measles come through like a
7:00low fire.
7:01Then the typhoid, then the dysentery.
7:04For every man in your company who will
7:06die in battle, two will die in a cot,
7:09>> [music]
7:09>> in a tent, in their own filth
7:11holding the hand of whoever is on duty.
7:14Farm boys who never sickened a day in
7:16their lives go down in a week.
7:19Hollis sits with them.
7:21He writes the letters no one should have
7:23to write, and he writes them one at a
7:25time, carefully, in a fine
7:27schoolmaster's hand
7:29because he says a family keeps this page
7:31forever.
7:32So the page ought to be worthy of the
7:34boy. You hold the candle for him some
7:36[music] nights. You watch him ask a
7:38dying 17-year-old what he wants said,
7:41and then make it true and [music] gentle
7:43at the same time.
7:45The war kills two men in their beds for
7:48every one it kills standing up.
7:50Nobody carves that on the monuments.
7:53You fight through the summer of 1862 on
7:56the Virginia Peninsula in swamps that
7:59swallow boots and weeks.
8:02You write to Sarah and to your mother
8:04and you remove every true sentence.
8:07The food is bad. The captain is fair.
8:10The country is handsome. You do not
8:12write about the elephant.
8:14The housewife empties slowly, needle by
8:16needle, button by button and every
8:19stitch [music] of blue thread going into
8:21your coat feels like a letter you do not
8:23have to lie in.
8:25In September in Maryland, the army meets
8:28Lee's army along a creek called
8:30Antietam. And in one day, the war spends
8:34more American lives than any day before
8:36or since.
8:38Your part of it is a cornfield.
8:40You go in at dawn with the stalks head
8:42high and ripe. And the fire that comes
8:45through that corn [music]
8:46cuts it down like an invisible scythe,
8:49cob and stalk and men all at the same
8:52height.
8:53You come out the far side without
8:55knowing how.
8:56Hollis does not. You find him at the
8:58edge of the corn with his back against a
9:00rail fence and there is nothing to be
9:03done. And he knows it with the same calm
9:05he brings to grammar.
9:07His pen is in his breast pocket. A good
9:10brass nibbed pen and a letter to his
9:12wife begun the night before, one
9:14sentence. My dear Ann, the men are
9:17calling this a great battle.
9:20He asks you to finish it.
9:22You say you would not know what to
9:23write.
9:24He looks at you a long moment, the
9:27schoolmaster deciding a boy is ready
9:29whether the boy agrees or not. Write
9:31[music] them true, he says. That is the
9:34whole instruction. That is the
9:36inheritance. You carry the pen out of
9:38Maryland and from that week on you are
9:40the one who writes for the company.
9:42And you learn what it costs to make a
9:44page worthy of a boy.
9:47A month later a photographer's gallery
9:49in New York hangs an exhibition called
9:52The Dead of Antietam.
9:54Crowds line up down the block to look at
9:56what you walked through.
9:58For the first time in the history of the
10:00world [music] the dead do not stay at
10:02the front.
10:03They come home in perfect focus to the
10:06parlors of the living. A newspaper
10:08writes that if the photographer had not
10:10brought the bodies and laid them in our
10:12door yards he has done something very
10:14like it.
10:16You hear about this from Sarah's letter.
10:18You do not write back what you are
10:20thinking which is that the pictures are
10:22silent and the field was not.
10:25That autumn Thomas turns 18 and your
10:28mother cannot take the pen from his hand
10:29a second time.
10:31He arrives with the replacements in a
10:33uniform still creased from the crate
10:36>> [music]
10:36>> and he looks so exactly like what you
10:38were 18 months ago that the company goes
10:40quiet when he walks in.
10:42Same face. Same eagerness.
10:46He asks you what the elephant is like.
10:48You hear yourself say stay close to me
10:51and do [music] what I do.
10:53Which is not an answer. And he is too
10:55young to notice.
10:57Your mother's letter arrives three days
10:59behind him.
11:01It is one line longer than her usual.
11:03And the line says
11:05you brought yourself into this war.
11:08So I am telling you not asking you
11:11bring your brother out of it. You fold
11:13the letter into the housewife
11:15>> [music]
11:15>> with the needles and the last of the
11:17blue thread.
11:18Some promises you keep on your person.
11:21Thomas sees his elephant in December at
11:23Fredericksburg on a freezing plane below
11:26a stone wall that the army is fed on to
11:29one brigade at a a
11:31Your division is spared the worst of it,
11:33and still it is the worst thing he has
11:35ever seen.
11:37And you spend the whole action doing
11:39something no soldier is supposed to do,
11:41watching him instead of the enemy. He
11:44goes to ground when you go to ground. He
11:47rises when you rise. That night he sits
11:49by the fire with the wagon wheel stare.
11:52And you hand him coffee and say nothing.
11:55Because now he knows why there [music]
11:57is nothing to say.
11:59He never asks you about the elephant
12:01again.
12:02In the morning [music]
12:03he takes out paper to write home.
12:06And you watch your little brother sit
12:07for a long time over the page.
12:10And then write that the food is bad and
12:12the country is handsome.
12:14He has learned the other soldier's
12:16skill.
12:17The one nobody drills you in.
12:19You feel proud of him and sick that you
12:22feel proud, both at once.
12:24And you are getting used to feelings
12:25arriving in pairs like that. The war
12:28grinds on through the winter and [music]
12:30through Chancellorsville in the spring.
12:32And you keep Thomas beside you through
12:34all of it.
12:35And you write the letters.
12:37And the company that marched out 110
12:39strong is down to fewer than half.
12:44Then, in June of 1863,
12:47the rumors turn strange. [music]
12:49Lee is not defending Virginia anymore.
12:52Lee is moving north.
12:54The army swings up through Maryland in
12:56heat that kills men on the march. 30
12:59miles some days. Dust so thick the
13:02columns look like men made of clay.
13:04>> [music]
13:05>> And somewhere on those roads you
13:07understand what the maps are saying
13:09before the officers say it.
13:11The war is walking toward Pennsylvania.
13:15The elephant is going to see your home.
13:19On the 1st of July you hear it before
13:21anyone tells you.
13:23A low grumble on the northwest horizon.
13:26In the exact direction your feet have
13:28known [music] since childhood.
13:30Cannon at Gettysburg.
13:33Men from other states say the name
13:35[music] flat. One more crossroads town.
13:39You say nothing.
13:41You could not make a sound if you tried.
13:44Your company reaches the field on the
13:462nd of July.
13:47And the road the army marches you down
13:49is a road you have driven a wagon on a
13:51hundred times.
13:53You pass the church where you were
13:55baptized.
13:56The blinds of the town are drawn and the
13:59streets are empty and the cellars are
14:01full.
14:02Because everyone you have ever known is
14:04underground listening.
14:07A woman risks the shell fire to hand
14:09bread to the column.
14:11And she looks straight at a man from
14:12your company.
14:13At his beard and his burnt skin and his
14:16dust. And does not know him.
14:19And he has to say
14:21mother
14:22twice before she does.
14:24Two years of war have made him a
14:26stranger at her own gate.
14:29You do not stop.
14:31There is no leave granted to defend your
14:33own county.
14:34There is only the line.
14:36And the line is south of town.
14:38On hills whose names the army is
14:40learning from maps.
14:42Cemetery Hill.
14:44Little Round Top.
14:46You did not learn them from maps.
14:48You learn them hunting squirrels and
14:50hauling apples.
14:52The army calls it taking up positions.
14:56Your body calls it standing in the
14:57dooryard. At 4:00 the officers come down
15:01the line and tell you to get ready.
15:03The Confederates have broken through
15:05[music] a peach orchard and a wheat
15:06field beyond the far ridge.
15:09And your brigade is going to charge into
15:11the wreck of it.
15:13You come over the crest with the whole
15:14valley below you.
15:16And you see it in one terrible glance.
15:19The marsh at Plum Run. the smoke, the
15:22falling men,
15:24and beyond them, a field of wheat, dead
15:27ripe,
15:28>> [music]
15:28>> uncut, trampled gold.
15:31It is harvest season.
15:33It is exactly, precisely harvest season.
15:38You were promised home by harvest.
15:41And here is the harvest. And here is
15:43home.
15:44And here are you.
15:46Coming down the slope at a run with your
15:48bayonet [music] fixed.
15:50The charge carries the valley.
15:52You fight in wheat like your father's
15:54wheat.
15:552 miles from your father's wheat.
15:58And afterward, [music]
15:59no man in your company ever uses the
16:01word harvest carelessly again. You hold.
16:05The line holds.
16:07Night comes down on a valley of
16:08stretcher parties and lantern light. And
16:11off to the east, on the far side of
16:13town, the fighting keeps rattling in the
16:15dark on a wooded hill.
16:17Sound carries at night.
16:20You lie on your arms in the trampled
16:21grass and listen to musketry rolling off
16:24that hill for hours. And you know that
16:26ground so well, you can see the fight
16:29through your closed eyes, oak by oak,
16:31rock by rock.
16:33You do not know and will not know for
16:35days that Caleb is on that hill.
16:38He came north with a Virginia regiment
16:41back to the town that raised him. And he
16:43is fighting in the dark on the same
16:45slope where two boys once traded knives.
16:48He falls within a mile of his
16:49grandmother's kitchen.
16:51The oak with your initials in it stands
16:53200 paces from where they bury him.
16:56You learn it in the wreckage of the week
16:58after, when the armies are gone and your
17:01town is left holding what they dropped.
17:0321,000 wounded men and a county to nurse
17:06them with.
17:08Every church is a hospital. Every barn
17:10is a hospital.
17:12Sarah's family has nine wounded men in
17:14the parlor, four of them wearing gray.
17:18You are granted one day at home
17:20>> [music]
17:20>> and you spend it hauling water and
17:22holding men down for the surgeons. And
17:24in the courthouse full of wounded, a
17:26Virginia sergeant asks the room
17:29in a voice worn down to sand
17:32whether anyone knows a family 2 miles
17:34east because he is carrying something
17:36for a [music] man who is not able to
17:38deliver it.
17:39He does not have to finish.
17:41You know before you cross the floor.
17:43[music]
17:44He puts a jackknife in your hand, your
17:46knife, the one you traded away in 1856,
17:50worn smooth at the hinge in a dead man's
17:52pocket. And he says "Caleb carried it
17:55every day and talked about the hill
17:58and said that if the war was ever mad
18:00enough to bring him here, someone should
18:02trade it back."
18:04Now you have both knives.
18:06That was never how the pact was supposed
18:08to end.
18:09You walk out behind the courthouse and
18:11stand in the alley by the rain barrel.
18:14And you are 21 years old and you cry the
18:17way men in your family cry, which is
18:19silently
18:20>> [music]
18:20>> facing a wall.
18:22In November, they dedicate a cemetery on
18:24the hill by the town for the Union dead
18:27who are still being gathered out of the
18:28fields.
18:30There is a famous orator who speaks for
18:322 [music] hours.
18:33Then the president stands up, a tall
18:35exhausted man in black, and speaks for 2
18:38minutes and sits down before half the
18:41crowd realizes he has begun.
18:43271
18:45words.
18:46You are in that crowd in a mended
18:48uniform with a pen in one pocket and two
18:52knives in the other.
18:54He says "The world will little note nor
18:56long remember what we say here." [music]
18:59He is wrong about that and right about
19:01everything else.
19:03What stays with you is not the poetry.
19:06It is one plain phrase
19:08that these dead shall not have died in
19:10vain.
19:11You think of Hollis against the rail
19:13fence, deciding a page ought to be
19:15worthy of a boy.
19:172 minutes and every word true.
19:20It is the finest letter you ever heard
19:22read aloud.
19:24The war does not end there.
19:26It grinds on through 1864,
19:29through the Wilderness and Spotsylvania,
19:31places where the fighting loses even the
19:33shape of battles and becomes something
19:35older and worse.
19:37You write the letters. You keep Thomas
19:40close.
19:41Twice you are certain you have failed
19:43your mother, and twice the boy stands up
19:45out of the smoke.
19:47When your enlistment ends, the company
19:49that marched off the square 110 strong
19:52marches back [music] with 24.
19:55The town turns out anyway and cheers the
19:58remnant like a multitude.
20:00Your mother does not cheer.
20:02She counts.
20:03Two of hers went in,
20:05two came out.
20:06She stands on the edge of the crowd
20:08doing that arithmetic over and over,
20:11like a woman checking a sum too good to
20:13trust.
20:14You come home to the farm in time for
20:16the harvest of 1864,
20:18>> [music]
20:19>> three harvests late.
20:21Sarah meets you at the gate. She does
20:23not run, and you understand why when you
20:26reach her.
20:27She is looking at your face the way the
20:28woman at the shell fire looked at her
20:30own son, checking whether the man
20:33matches the memory.
20:35Whatever she finds there, she takes it.
20:38"How was it out there?" she asked you
20:39[music] once in her first letter, and
20:42you never answered.
20:44Standing at the gate, she asks nothing
20:46at all.
20:47She has nursed wounded men from both
20:49armies in her father's parlor.
20:52She is one of the few people in America
20:54who does not need the question answered
20:55anymore.
20:57The housewife goes back into her hands
20:59empty, every needle used, every inch of
21:02blue thread gone into the shoulders and
21:05elbows of a coat [music] that is more
21:07her dress now than army cloth.
21:09You were married in October
21:11>> [music]
21:11>> in the church you were baptized in,
21:13which smells faintly of carbolic under
21:16the candle wax and will for years
21:19because some things soak into wood.
21:22At night, some autumns, when the dry
21:24corn stands in the field and the wind
21:27moves through it, you have to stop and
21:29hold the fence rail until the sound goes
21:31back to being corn.
21:3350 years pass the way 50 years do.
21:36The farm prospers. Children, then
21:39grandchildren.
21:40Thomas farms the 40 acres you once meant
21:42to buy
21:43and the two of you never speak of the
21:45wilderness and never need to.
21:48And in July of 1913, the government
21:51builds a city of tents on the field
21:53south of town [music]
21:54and invites the war back, gently, one
21:57last time.
21:59More than 50,000 veterans come, Union
22:02and Confederate, average age 74.
22:05They come on canes and in wheelchairs,
22:08wearing blue and wearing gray,
22:10and they walk [music] the field slowly,
22:12like men looking for something they
22:14buried.
22:15You are 71 years old and you walk out on
22:19the third day to the stone wall on
22:21Cemetery Ridge, where [music] Pickett's
22:23men broke 50 years before.
22:26The old Virginians form up on one side
22:28of the wall, the old Union men on the
22:30other,
22:31and the Virginians come across the field
22:33one more time, slowly, some helped along
22:37by boy scouts.
22:38And at the wall, the two lines reach out
22:41and shake hands,
22:42thousands of hands.
22:44Men who fired at each other across this
22:47exact stone now holding on to each other
22:50so neither falls. Nobody planned what
22:52happened next,
22:54which is that a great many old men
22:56simply stood there [music] and wept in
22:59front of everybody,
23:00the way they could not weep when they
23:02were young. [music]
23:04You find them at last.
23:06A knot of white-bearded Virginians from
23:08the Shenandoah, from carriage shop
23:10towns, from Winchester.
23:13You say Caleb's name.
23:15Two of them knew him.
23:16One of them, it turns out, buried him.
23:20And standing there in the July heat at
23:22the age of 71,
23:25you finally ask the question [music]
23:26you could never ask a dead man.
23:29Was he sorry at the end to be fighting
23:32his own town?
23:35The old Virginian thinks about it
23:36honestly, the way you owe an honest
23:39question honest thought.
23:42"No," he says at [music] last.
23:45He was sorry about all of it.
23:47Same as us.
23:50On the last morning, you climb the
23:52wooded hill east of town [music] through
23:54the oaks on legs that take the slope
23:56slower than they used to.
23:59The hill is quiet. The rocks are the
24:01same rocks.
24:03And the oak is still there, [music]
24:05thicker, older, with two sets of
24:07initials grown high and dark in the
24:10bark,
24:11carved by two boys in 1855,
24:14when the worst thing in the world was
24:16the end of squirrel [music] season.
24:19You take Caleb's knife from your pocket,
24:21the one you have carried for 57 years,
24:25and you set it deep in the hollow
24:26between the roots, [music]
24:28where the leaves will cover it by
24:29October.
24:31You keep your own.
24:33That is a fair trade at last.
24:35Each knife home, each boy accounted for.
24:40Somewhere below in the town, the church
24:42bells ring the hour,
24:44the same bells that rang wild for war
24:47when you were 19,
24:48and rang for nothing all that terrible
24:51July.
24:52They just [music] ring the hour now.
24:55Your grandson is waiting at the bottom
24:57of the hill.
24:59He asks what you went up there for.
25:02And you find you can finally answer
25:04questions like that.
25:06You went up to finish a trade, you tell
25:08him.
25:10Then you take his hand,
25:11>> [music]
25:11>> and the two of you walk down through the
25:13oaks toward the wagon.
25:15And the leaves are green, and the
25:17harvest is coming.
25:19And you are home for it.