Visiting a historic battlefield is a deeply moving experience. Although nature often reclaims the land, a battle leaves a potent and somber residue. This feeling is expressed by those left behind in dignified statues and memorials that stand as a witness to the devotion universally rendered to the fallen. Though each field tells its own story and has buried its own dead, they share an apartness from everyday life. They lie silently as weighty reminders to subsequent generations of the duty owed to the nation that sustains them, and the men who have died for it. The visitor cannot help but be drawn out of himself to recognize that the men who died here, strangers though they are, lay claim to his loyalty.
War sparks uniting feelings in a people. They are often framed as revelation points of an overarching destiny that gives shape to where a nation came from and where it’s going. In our imaginations, these conflicts are points that anchor history’s course; there is a sense that all things prior led to them, and all things after point us back to them. This gives a narrative structure to a people’s identity, serving as a type of force that holds them together. In other words, to truly remember our dead and the cause they died for cultivates a deep sense of patriotism, loyalty, and belonging.
The cultivation of these feelings is central to the conservative’s aim. The tradition we protect is not built up of theory, of a succession of one idea to the next. Rather, it is found in the wholeness of what we’ve received and is honored by improving the best of what’s been given us. Our commemoration of war and battle inculcates an intimate awareness of this duty not only through the eyes of history, but through encountering, tangibly and individually, the personhood of those who gave their lives.
A battlefield witnesses brutal ruptures of the human sympathy and civility that marks the peaceful tempo of our daily lives. Through this tear, belligerence in all its primal energy breaks through. The ground that witnessed this explosion of violence, and that received the bodies of its victims, retains a sacredness in our history. It is a place of human loss and victory. Here the range of our greatness and depravity unfolds in the distilled onslaught of man against man.
Our tradition has the wisdom to convey clearly that the undertaking of a battle is not merely a matter of national policy or of empire straining against its limits. It is the pouring out of the individual. The Iliad, one of the seminal works of the Western Canon, draws the reader into the brutality of what in history books can often become mere abstraction. Homer weaves the story of the ten-year battle fought over Helen, the beautiful wife of Sparta’s King Menelaus. She eloped with Paris, a prince of Troy, and so sparked the Greek struggle to right the injured honor of the offended king.
For the modern reader, Homer’s descriptions can be jarring. He is not satisfied with discreet portrayals of a soldier’s end, but vividly paints his destruction. The reader is drawn into the bloody conflict, where “white bones splintered” and “teeth were shaken.” But perhaps more striking than these gruesome details is the tenderness with which Homer often portrays the fallen. Very few are left anonymous. The dying man is embedded in his people and lineage, called by the given names that his father would come to lament:
Now Diomedes went after the two sons of Phainops, Xanthos and Thoon, full grown both, but Phainops was stricken in sorrowful old age nor could breed another son to leave among his possessions. There he killed these two and took away the dear life from them both, leaving to their father lamentation and sorrowful affliction, since he was not to welcome them home from the fighting alive still.
The Homeric soldier was not left unmourned. The poet could not countenance condemning those who faced their demise on the battlefield to obscurity. Instead, he ponders the tragedy that accompanies the loss of each and every life and invites the reader to grieve with him.
The Iliad compels you to confront what a call to arms entails. This understanding serves as a guide when one steps from the pages of a book onto the battlefield. It is not merely the scene of a transformative moment recounted in books. It is also hallowed land, made sacred by the blood of those who died there.
The ground itself bears within it the remnants of the sacrifices rendered in battle. Walt Whitman, who was forever haunted by his experience of the American Civil War, reflected on the transformation that man’s death works in nature:
The land entire saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw.
When we enter the landscape, we are not merely viewing the struggle from the outside, as though it were a distant event from which to derive useful knowledge. We are situating ourselves quite literally in the throes of both our countrymen and the enemy. In opening our hearts to contemplating the field’s significance, we can be drawn out of the self-interestedness bred of a society centered on self-promotion. It causes us to consider what we owe our people and our nation—generations dead, living, and unborn—and particularly to those whose remains now build up the very soil we stand on.
The deeply personal nature of the battlefield reminds us of how drastically separated we are from a soldier’s experience. Who can imagine the fear he felt as he ran towards enemy fire? What must it have been like to traverse the open field through which he charged at the enemy line? While our imagination can engender empathy, it inevitably fills us with the humble acknowledgement that most of us cannot fathom the intensity of that sheer terror or the necessary courage mustered to continue on.
The soldier faces death, his own and that of his fellow, and as Homer so clearly illustrates, he does so as an individual. The testimony of those who fight bear witness to the fact that the experience of a battle is as varied as those who engage in it. While the great Roman Horace’s held that “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s homeland,” thousands of years later, many soldiers in the First World War conveyed a very different feeling. The Great War unleashed a horror in which few seemed to find redemption. The transcendent glory that was promised through the call to arms was for many transformed into destitute hopelessness throughout its wretched unfolding.
The flame of patriotism that could carry a soldier through was dimmed by vivid displays of mechanized human brutality. Through the contortions of post-war art and seething literary repudiation, those who did not fight encountered visceral depictions of the war in its misery. Horace was met 2,000 years later with Wilfred Owen’s counter that he tasted no such sweetness in the face of a gas attack:
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
Yet, we also have witness that war’s brutality can be felt as meaningful if its purpose gives fuel to a man’s spirit. James McPherson, a renowned scholar of the American Civil War, discovered that despite unimaginable hardship, the nobility of the cause sustained the spirit of the men, even as brother fought against brother. Unlike the experience many had in WWI, the Civil War soldier was often grounded in the clear sense that he was engaged in a fight for home and country, for his place of belonging. Both the North and the South felt a sense of righteousness, that their lives were not lost in vain and that their cause, tied to the American founding, was worth their sacrifice.
While literature and witness inform and challenge our imaginations, a battlefield confronts us with the knowledge that we can never truly know the individual man who died his lonely death in the fray. In humility, we are compelled to recognize that we cannot impose upon the deceased some conception of what it may have been like. We are simply meant to stand and mourn those soldiers whose own hearts and minds are now shrouded in death.
Perhaps they experienced the helpless desolation that Owen described. Perhaps they found strength because, despite their suffering, the clear purpose of their undertaking sustained them. We cannot say with certainty. What we do know is that each man undertook the weight of the ultimate sacrifice and gave his life, with no promise of remembrance or recognition, for something beyond himself.
Their dispositions will remain a mystery, but the battlefield lays out for us our proper course. It implicates our efforts today by tying them to the flesh and blood of those who came before us. It grounds us, not only in overarching gifts and achievements of our heritage, but also in the legacy of the very people who lived within it and died for it.
The spirit of this duty is captured perhaps most profoundly in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He understood that through the particular lives given at that fateful battle, those of us left behind are called into deeper participation in the cultivation of our homeland. Our war dead pass onto us an obligation:
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.
Here we are challenged with the daunting task of carrying forward their sacrifice and integrating what they stood for into what we stand for. As the famous educator Leon Kass notes, this address charges that “the proper way to honor the sacrifice of the dead … is not by speech, but by action … by resolving that we will guarantee by our deeds, that they will not have died in vain.” This is no easy feat, particularly in the face of the abject suffering, fear, and even despair that many of us have no personal knowledge of. But to honor their deaths and to carry forth their lives in our efforts is, nonetheless, our sacred duty.
The battlefield places this duty before us. It does not allow us to abstract, to turn our history into a chess game. Instead, these are the encounters that awaken within us what Lincoln called the “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart.” These “mystic chords” that bind us in duty and love are a reminder that accomplishing our aim is not achieved merely through the grand vision of the intellectual ideal. Instead, our task is to act in continuum with the individuals who built and peopled our past. Our tradition is sustained in the steady course of giving our due to those who gave their all.
