Courtesy of Steve King’s Today in Literature e-newsletter, I learned that today was the birthday (1831) of journalist Rebecca Harding Davis.
Without further comment, I offer you here an excerpt of Harding Davis’s writing, looking back on the Civil War.
I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done in my cherry-tree when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders debouching in the misty fields.
[…]Yet with all this fever of preparation we never quite believed that there was war until, one day, a rough wooden box was sent down from the mountains. A young officer had been killed by a sharpshooter, and his body was forwarded that it might be cared for and sent to his friends. He was a very handsome boy, and the men in the town went to look at him and at the little purple spot on his white breast, and came away dull and sick at heart. They did not ask whether he had been loyal or a rebel.
“He was so young! He might have done so much!” they said. “But this is war — war!”
I remember that in that same year I crossed the Pennsylvania mountains coming to Philadelphia. It was a dull, sunless day. The train halted at a little way station among the hills. Nobody was in sight but a poor, thin country girl, in a faded calico gown and sun-bonnet. She stood alone on the platform, waiting. A child was playing beside her.
When we stopped the men took out from the freight car a rough, unplaned pine box and laid it down, baring their heads for a minute. Then the train steamed away. She sat down on the ground and put her arms around the box and leaned her head on it. The child went on playing. So we left her. I never have seen so dramatic or significant a figure.
When we hear of thousands of men killed in battle it means nothing to us. We forget it in an hour. It is these little things that come home to us. When we remember them we say: —
“That is war!”
For more on Harding Davis, see the Wikipedia article linked above (as well as the various references cited therein). For more examples of her writing, check this page.
