From BATTLEFIELD

 

  "Again, that reminder or remainder of humanity wafted on the air, and it startled me. I thought I might be going mad. 

  Having respect for the dead means that future generations don't pave over cemeteries for parking lots. Cemeteries are paved over, on occasion, but it is the exception rather than the rule. There is no law, however, that says cemeteries can't be tourist attractions. A headstone, plain or fancy, reminds onlookers that so-and-so existed within the confines of two dates. If the carved numerals are decipherable, a moment of mental arithmetic ensues, a calculation of how old so-and-so lived to be. 

  In Harrisonburg there are more than 250 Confederate graves in a quadrant of the oldest cemetery. Each small marble marker reads like a word in a chilling sentence, or a sentence in a numbing chapter. The regularity with which the markers are placed, row upon row like a marching battalion, suggests an orderliness, a solidarity of purpose. The Southern Cause is given shape and substance. I know it is an act of practicality, the organizing of corpses in a limited space, but still the geometry of the graves disturbs me. Death for any cause, lost or won, is not quite so cut and dried as a cemetery layout."

Peter Svenson

  We just got back from the casino. Frankie and I are about to make more pumpkin muffins from Shannen O'Lantern. I froze some. 

Happy Thanksgiving! 🍂

From Battlefield:

 "The thing I sensed was that people had been here before, en masse. At times, I have noted a comparable intimation after a public auction, when the last item of furniture has been carted off and the last pickup truck has driven away. The grass is patterned with tire tracks and footprints. The buzz of the crowd, the auctioneer's warble still echo in my ears. A whiff of humanity lingers, a subtle indefinable something, but it is not an olfactory sensation. It, too, is an echo, a reverberation of the auction-goers who were convened an hour earlier. A similar presence lingered in these pastures a hundred and twenty-three years after the battle. After that length of time, I would not have thought it possible to stand at the heart of a battlefield and pick up its living pulse." Peter Svenson

From BATTLEFIELD by Peter Svenson

 

"The rebel yell, a bloodcurdling scream of fear and fearlessness, was a Confederate soldier's personal talisman against the odds. Soldiers from both sides yelled as they advanced upon each other (as soldiers have always done), but the rebel yell was different. It was a combination of baying at the moon and cussing without words: a white man's war whoop. To my mind the rebel yell signaled the obsolescence of those eightteenth-century tactics in that it functioned not only as a war cry, but also as an expression of pure terror, a soulful reaction to the deadly science of gunnery. To maintain courage in a hail of lead that pierced the body with holes the size of a dime and exited with holes the size of a fist, to maintain courage against the pressure of canister shot that clipped huge gaps in battle lines- to keep one's mind amid the din and smoke of the carnage- it was necessary to scream at the top of the lungs. It had nothing to do with valor." 

"Like the general in Dr. Strangelove who rode an A-bomb out the open hatch, combatants will continue to yell the rebel yell, or something that approximates it, but nobody will be listening. Technology does not have ears or a soul."