The war had come down to a routine rigorously followed as if it had some value of its own and was not expected to produce any lasting effect.-Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat, In Letters of Blood, "Servants of the Guns", 223.
During the Vietnam War era I watched an episode of Star Trek with my family that made an instant impression on me then, and a lasting one since, following me in my work in criminal law and my amateur readings in history and philosophy. The Enterprise landed on a "strange new world" where there was a war going on, but a strange kind of war. Capt. Kirk and company were slow to figure it out, they didn't see much destruction yet there were these daily reports of x-number of people being killed on this side and the next day x-number of people killed on the other. It was a bipolar world much as our world was in the 1960's and 1970's. Kirk, et al came to understand that the two poles had been warring for hundreds of years and after a while of almost destroying their entire planet they decided to maintain the "balance of power" by selecting or drafting a set number of beings to be that day's victims of the war and sparing the planet and its infrastructure the damage. It was the neutron bomb philosophy of war. Capt. Kirk goes nuts on the two leaders in the end scene. You cannot drain war of the horror, you have to feel it was his point--in order to avoid it, stop it. Otherwise you have "perpetual war" as this planet's tribes did.
The state of things on Planet-A was the result of an undeniable logic, a philosophy, as was Morris Island in America's Civil War. I had never heard of Morris Island, had you? Battery Wagner? Me neither.
Morris Island in 1863 became the deadliest sandspit on earth...lying at the end of one of those insane chains of war-time logic in which men step from one undeniable truth to another and so come at last to a land of crippling nonsense. Like Planet-A in Star Trek.
The logic that brought the war to Morris Island was above reproach.
The war had begun at Charleston. To win the war the Federal power must take Charleston. It could reach the city only by water...to do that its ships must pass Fort Sumter...Therefore Fort Sumter...had to be destroyed. To destroy Fort Sumter...it was necessary for the Federals to plant powerful siege guns on the nearest dry land, which of course was Morris Island. But the Confederates had already built a stout fort on Morris Island...known as Battery Wagner...Therefore--to win the war the Federals must capture Battery Wagner. (original emphasis)
All of this had logical coherence, and yet it ended in sound and fury [signifying nothing]. ...when all...had been done the Federals found that they were no closer to victory than when they began. Ibid 217-18.
Morris Island-Battery Wagner was logical and stupid at once.
This idea of killing without feeling emotion has troubled me all of my adult life. In my career, on one hand heightened premeditated killing is the most serious crime in Western societies. On the other, "heightened premeditation" is an aggravating circumstance for the death penalty by the state, a sentence that is carried out with the highest premeditation and by formula, with no attendant emotion. I can't square those two.
The gunners aboard New Ironsides,
...let off one gun at a time...as if [they] felt that they had all the time in the world. (223)
...
There was a breathing spell for two or three weeks...and then there were a few days of almost casual firing...after which there were three additional weeks of idleness. (224)
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s (who was an asshole; more below) Massachusetts friend and man-crush Henry Livermore Abbott (who was an asshole), and my great-great grandfather's commanding general at Fredericksburg, Andrew Atkinson Humphreys (who also was an asshole), had this casual tendency to lead men into battle twirling one's sword on one's finger (Abbott) and leading a charge of "forlorn hope" waving one's hat in the air as if he was being feted at a parade.
...as if to use the big guns...had become an end in itself. (225)
Morris Island-Battery Wagner,
...showed how war had hardened men's emotions, so that things that would have been horrifying in ordinary times horrified no longer. The idea of throwing Greek fire [incindiary weapons, napalm as example]...into homes where women and children slept did not seem dreadful at all. Good men even rejoiced in it. ...
When good men could talk so they consented to terror. (226)
In philosophy I read early on Descartes: "mind in a vat." I have long discarded that to the trash heap in these pages and have only to repeat that imo it is emotion that most separates human kind from other kinds, cite: Catton, Bruce. Never Call Retreat (226)
In history, I am of two minds about the Gettysburg reunions. Were they exemplars of American reconciliation, "with malice toward none, with justice for all," or were they unprincipled? I read Holmes today in the law library, "The Path of the Law." Holmes of course fought in the Civil War and was wounded at least twice. He went to war as a one-time bodyguard for abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; his father, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., was an abolitionist. But early on in his soldierly career (after being wounded at Ball's Bluff, however) Holmes came to think neither the Union nor slavery was worth dying for (Holmes was a pragmatist), that men and women should look at the "other side" of these questions. Forced union Holmes thought impossible; slavery--cue Louis CK "Of course, but maybe." We have the later Supreme Court Justice Holmes' opinion in Buck v Bell, the forced sterilization case, to look to for "clues." Holmes and Abbott were asshole elitists and if the best and the brightest of society, which included him Justice Holmes reasoned in Buck, are forced to sacrifice their bodies and their lives surely it is the state's right to force-sterilize those who contribute little. "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." We can look to Holmes' famous Memorial Day address: the pro-slavery soldier believed as fervently and fought as desperately for the peculiar institution as did abolitionists to abolish it. If one believes earnestly it mattered not what the earnest belief was in. They had Holmes' respect. So, those Gettysburg reunions always gave me an icky feeling. I don't remember seeing any Black veterans arm and arm with Confederate vets at those reunions, maybe there were and I just missed them; I thought rather that those old geezers probably thought the Black man wasn't worth their lives just as Holmes did. On the one hand, the original purpose of the war was just to restore the Union; on the other...Why again did we want reunion with slaveholders? Doesn't seem our values are completely simpatico.
I was already eighteen pages into Chapter Four, In Letters of Blood, four pages into sub-chapter three, "Servants of the Guns," and was still smarting from the paltry 10.5 pages devoted to Gettysburg when I wrote on the top of page 220 "-Bad-". I have crossed "-Bad-" out. "Servants of the Guns" is philosophy. It is Bruce Catton at his most transcendent.
