My father was not a veteran. Before I was born, he had called the trouble with Spain “Mr. Hearst’s War” and five years after the Gettysburg Reunion he would call the trouble in Europe “Mr. Wilson’s War.” By then I would be in high school, with my classmates chafing to enlist and show the Hun a thing or two, but by then I shared my father’s sentiments; I had seen enough of war’s legacy.
But in the late spring and early summer of 1913 I would have given anything to join those veterans in Gettysburg, to hear the speeches and see the battle flags and crouch in the Devil’s Den and watch those old men reenact Pickett’s Charge one last time.
And then the opportunity arrived.
Since my birthday in February I had been a Boy Scout. The Scouts were a relatively new idea then—the first groups in the United States had been formed only three years earlier—but in the spring of 1913 every boy I knew was either a Boy Scout or waiting to become one.
The Reverend Hodges had formed the first Troop in Chestnut Hill, our little town outside of Philadelphia, now a suburb. The Reverend allowed only boys of good character and strong moral fiber to join: Presbyterian boys. I had sung in the Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Boys’ Choir for three years and, in spite of my frailness and total inability to tie a knot, I was allowed to become a Boy Scout three days after my tenth birthday.
My father was not totally pleased. Our Scout uniforms might have been castoffs from the returning Roughriders’ army. From hobnailed boots to puttees to campaign hats we were little troopers, drowning in yards of khaki and great draughts of military virtue. The Reverend Hodges had us on the high school football field each Tuesday and Thursday afternoon from four to six and every Saturday morning from seven until ten, practicing close-order drill and applying field dressings to one another until our Troop resembled nothing so much as a band of mummies with swatches of khaki showing through our bandages. On Wednesday evening we met in the church basement to learn Morse Code—what the Reverend called General Service Code—and to practice our semaphore signals.
My father asked me if we were training to fight the Boer War over again. I ignored his irony, sweated into my khaki woolens through those warming weeks of May, and loved every minute of it.
When the Reverend Hodges came by our house in early June to inform my parents that the Commonwealth had requested all Boy Scout Troops in Pennsylvania to send representatives to Gettysburg to help with the Great Reunion, I knew that it had been Divine Intervention which would allow me to join the Reverend, thirteen-year-old Billy Stargill (who would later die in the Argonne), and a pimply-faced overweight boy whose name I cannot recall on the five-day visit to Gettysburg.
My father was noncommittal but my mother agreed at once that it was a unique honor, so on the morning of June 30 I posed in front of Mr. Everett’s ice wagon for a photograph taken by Dr. Lowell, Chestnut Hill’s undertaker and official photographer, and at a little after two p.m. on that same day I joined the Reverend and my two comrades-in-arms for the three-hour train ride to Gettysburg.
As a part of the official celebration, we paid the veterans’ travel rate of one cent a mile. The train ride cost me $1.21. I had never been to Gettysburg. I had never been away from home overnight.
We arrived late in the afternoon; I was tired, hot, thirsty, and desperately needing to relieve myself since I had been too shy to use the lavatory aboard the train. The small town of Gettysburg was a mass of crowds, confusion, noise, horses, automobiles, and old men whose heavy uniforms smelled of camphor. We stumbled after Reverend Hodges through muddy lanes between buildings draped in flags and bunting. Men outnumbered women ten to one and most of the main streets were a sea of straw boaters and khaki caps. As the Reverend checked in the lobby of the Eagle Hotel for word from his Scouting superiors, I slipped down a side hall and found a public restroom.
Half an hour later we dragged our duffel bags into the back of a small motor carriage for the ride out southwest of town to the Reunion tent city. A dozen boys and their Scoutmasters were crowded into the three benches as the vehicle labored its way through heavy traffic down Franklin Street, past a temporary Red Cross Hospital on the east side of the street and a score of Ambulance Corps wagons parked on the west side, and then right onto a road marked Long Lane and into a sea of tents which seemed to stretch on forever.
It was past seven o’clock and the rich evening light illuminated thousands of canvas pyramids covering hundreds of acres of open farmland. I craned to make out which of the distant hills was Cemetery Ridge, which heap of rocks the Little Round Top. We passed State Policemen on horseback, Army wagons pulled by Army mules, huge heaps of firewood, and clusters of portable field bakeries where the aroma of fresh-baked bread still lingered.
Reverend Hodges turned in his seat. “Afraid we missed the evening chow lines, boys,” he said. “But we weren’t hungry, were we?”
I shook my head despite the fact my stomach was cramping with hunger. My mother had packed me a dinner of fried chicken and biscuits for the train, but the Reverend had eaten the drumstick and the fat boy had begged the rest. I had been too excited to eat.
We turned right onto East Avenue, a broad dirt road between neat rows of tents. I looked in vain for the Great Tent I had read about—a huge bigtop with room for 13,000 chairs where President Wilson was scheduled to speak in four days, on Friday, the Fourth of July. Now the sun was low and red in the haze to the west, the air thick with dust and the scent of trampled grass and sun-warmed canvas. I was starving and I had dirt in my hair and grit between my teeth. I do not remember ever being happier.
Our Boy Scout Station was at the west end of East Avenue, a hundred yards past a row of portable kitchens set in the middle of the Pennsylvania veterans’ tent area. Reverend Hodges showed us to our tents and commanded us to hurry back to the station for our next day’s assignments.
I set my duffel on a cot in a tent not far from the latrines. I was slow setting out my bedroll and belongings and when I looked up the fat boy was asleep on another cot and Billy was gone. A train roared by on the Gettysburg and Harrisburg tracks not fifty feet away. Suddenly breathless with the panic of being left behind, I ran back to the Scoutmasters’ tent to receive my orders.
Reverend Hodges and Billy were nowhere to be seen but a fat man with a blond mustache, thick spectacles, and an ill-fitting Scoutmaster’s uniform snapped, “You there, Scout!”
“Yessir?”
“Have you received your assignment?”
“No, sir.”
The fat man grunted and pawed through a stack of yellow cardboard tags lying on a board he was using as a desk. He pulled one from the stack, glanced at it, and tied it to the brass button on my left breast pocket. I craned my neck to read it. Faint blue, typewritten letters said: MONT-GOMERY, P.D., Capt., 20th N.C. Reg., SECT. 27, SITE 3424, North Carolina Veterans.
“Well, go, boy!” snapped the Scoutmaster.
“Yessir,” I said and ran toward the tent entrance. I paused. “Sir?”
“What is it?” The Scoutmaster was already tying another ticket on another Scout’s blouse.
“Where am I to go, sir?”
The fat man flicked his fingers as if brushing an insect away. “To find the veteran you are assigned to, of course.”
I squinted at the ticket. “Captain Montgomery?”
“Yes, yes. If that is what it says.”
I took a breath. “Where do I find him, sir?”
The fat man scowled, took four angry steps toward me, and glared at the ticket through his thick glasses. “20th North Carolina … Section 27 … up there.” He swept his arm in a gesture that took in the railroad tracks, a distant stream lined with trees, the setting sun, and another tent city on a hill where hundreds of pyramid tents glowed redly in the twilight.
“Pardon me, sir, but what do I do when I find Captain Montgomery?” I asked the Scoutmaster’s retreating back.
The man stopped and glowered at me over his shoulder with a thinly veiled disgust that I h
ad never guessed an adult would show toward someone my age. “You do whatever he wants, you young fool,” snapped the man. “Now go.”
I turned and ran toward the distant camp of the Confederates.
Lanterns were being lighted as I made my way through long rows of tents. Old men by the hundreds, many in heavy gray uniforms and long whiskers, sat on campstools and cots, benches and wooden stumps, smoking and talking and spitting into the early evening gloom. Twice I lost my way and twice I was given directions in slow, Southern drawls that might as well have been German for all I understood them.
Finally I found the North Carolina contingent sandwiched in between the Alabama and Missouri camps, just a short walk from the West Virginians. In the years since, I have found myself wondering why they put the Union-loyal West Virginian veterans in the midst of the rebel encampment.
Section 27 was the last row on the east side of the North Carolina camp and Site 3424 was the last tent in the row. The tent was dark.
“Captain Montgomery?” My voice was little more than a whisper. Hearing no answer from the darkened tent, I ducked my head inside to confirm that the veteran was not home. It was not my fault, I reasoned, that the old gentleman was not here when I called. I would find him in the morning, escort him to the breakfast tent, run the necessary errands for him, help him to find the latrine or his old comrades-in-arms, or whatever. In the morning. Right now I thought I would run all the way back to the Boy Scout Station, find Billy and Reverend Hodges, and see if anyone had any cookies in their duffel bags.
“I been waitin’ for you, Boy.”
I froze. The voice had come from the darkness in the depths of the tent. It was a voice from the South but sharp as cinders and brittle with age. It was a voice that I imagined the Dead might use to command those still beyond the grave.
“Come in here, Johnny. Step lively!”
I moved into the hot, canvas-scented interior and blinked. For a second my breath would not come.
The old man who lay on the cot was propped on his elbows so that his shoulders looked like sharp wings in the dim light, predatory pinions rising above an otherwise indistinct bundle of gray cloth, gray skin, staring eyes, and faded braid. He was wearing a shapeless hat which had once boasted a brim and crown but which now served only to cast his face into deeper shadow. A beak of a nose jutted into the dim light above wisps of white beard, thin purplish lips, and a few sharp teeth gleaming in a black hole of a mouth. For the first time in my life I realized that a human mouth was really an opening into a skull. The old man’s eye sockets were darker pits of shadow beneath brows still black, the cheeks hollowed and knife-edged. Huge, liver-spotted hands, misshapen with age and arthritis, glowed with a preternatural whiteness in the gloom and I saw that while one leg ended in the black gleam of a high boot, the other terminated abruptly below the knee. I could see the rolled trouser leg pulled above pale, scarred skin wrapped tautly around the bone of the stump.
“Goddamnit, boy, did you bring the wagon?”
“Pardon me, sir?” My voice was a cicada’s frightened chirp.
“The wagon, goddamnit, Johnny. We need a wagon. You should be knowin’ that, boy.” The old man sat up, swung his leg and his stump over the edge of the cot, and began fumbling in his loose coat.
“I’m sorry, Captain Montgomery … uh … you are Captain Montgomery, aren’t you, sir?”
The old man grunted.
“Well, Captain Montgomery, sir, my name’s not Johnny, it’s …”
“Goddamnit, boy!” bellowed the old man. “Would you quit makin’ noise and go get the goddamned wagon! We need to get up there to the Pits before that bastard Iverson beats us to it.”
I started to reply and then found myself with no wind with which to speak as Captain Montgomery removed a pistol from the folds of his coat. The gun was huge and gray and smelled of oil and I was certain that the crazy old man was going to kill me with it in that instant. I stood there with the wind knocked out of me as certainly as if the old Confederate had struck me in the solar plexus with the barrel of that formidable weapon.
The old man laid the revolver on the cot and reached into the shadows beneath it, pulling out an awkward arrangement of straps, buckles, and mahogany which I recognized as a crude wooden leg. “Come on now, Johnny,” he mumbled, bending over to strap the cruel thing in place, “I’ve waited long enough for you. Go get the wagon, that’s a good lad. I’ll be ready and waitin’ when you get back.”
“Yessir,” I managed, and turned, and escaped.
I have no rational explanation for my next actions. All I had to do was the natural thing, the thing that every fiber of my frightened body urged me to do—run back to the Boy Scout Station, find Reverend Hodges, inform him that my veteran was a raving madman armed with a pistol, and get a good night’s sleep while the grownups sorted things out. But I was not a totally rational creature at this point. (How many ten-year-old boys are, I wonder?) I was tired, hungry, and already homesick after less than seven hours away from home, disoriented in space and time, and—perhaps most pertinent—not used to disobeying orders. And yet I am sure to this day that I would have run the entire way back to the Boy Scout Station and not thought twice about it if my parting glance of the old man had not been of him painfully strapping on that terrible wooden leg. The thought of him standing in the deepening twilight on that awful pegleg, trustingly awaiting a wagon which would never arrive was more than I could bear.
As fate arranged it, there was a wagon and untended team less than a hundred yards from Captain Montgomery’s tent. The back of the slat-sided thing was half-filled with blankets, but the driver and deliverers were nowhere in sight. The team was a matched set of grays, aged and sway-backed but docile enough as I grabbed their bridles and clumsily turned them around and tugged them back up the hill with me.
I had never ridden a horse or driven a team. Even in 1913, I was used to riding in automobiles. Chestnut Hill still saw buggies and wagons on the street occasionally, but already they were considered quaint. Mr. Everett, our iceman, did not allow boys to ride on his wagon and his horse had the habit of biting any child who came in range.
Gingerly, trying to keep my knuckles away from the grays’ teeth, I led the team up the hill. The thought that I was stealing the wagon never crossed my mind. Captain Montgomery needed a wagon. It was my job to deliver it.
“Good boy, Johnny. Well done.” Outside, in the light, the old man was only slightly less formidable. The long gray coat hung in folds and wrinkles and although there was no sight of the pistol, I was sure that it was tucked somewhere close to hand. A heavy canvas bag hung from a strap over his right shoulder. For the first time I noticed a faded insignia on the front of his hat and three small medals on his coat. The ribbons were so faded that I could not make out their colors. The Captain’s bare neck reminded me of the thick tangle of ropes dangling into the dark maw of the old well behind our house.
“Come on, Boy. We have to move smartly if we’re to beat that son-of-a-bitch Iverson.” The old man heaved himself up to the seat with a wide swing of his wooden leg and seized the reins in fists that looked like clusters of gnarled roots. With no hesitation I ran to the left side of the wagon and jumped to the seat beside him.
Gettysburg was filled with lights and activity that last, late evening in June, but the night seemed especially dark and empty as we passed through town on our way north. The house and hotel lights felt so distant to our purpose—whatever that purpose was—that the lights appeared pale and cold to me, the fading glow of fireflies dying in a jar.
In a few minutes we were beyond the last buildings on the north end of town and turning northwest on what I later learned was Mummasburg Road. Just before we passed behind a dark curtain of trees, I swiveled in my seat and caught a last glimpse of Gettysburg and the Great Reunion Camp beyond it. Where the lights of the city seemed pale and paltry, the flames of the hundreds of campfires and bonfires in the Tent City blazed in the night. I looked at the c
onstellations of fires and realized that there were more old veterans huddling around them that night than there were young men in many nations’ armies. I wondered if this is what Cemetery Ridge and Culp’s Hill had looked like to the arriving Confederate armies fifty years earlier.
Suddenly I had the chilling thought that fifty years ago Death had given a grand party and 140,000 revelers had arrived in their burial clothes. My father had told me that the soldiers going into battle had often pinned small scraps of paper to their uniforms so that their bodies could be identified after the killing was finished. I glanced to my right as if half-expecting to see a yellowed scrap of paper pinned to the old man’s chest, his name, rank, and home town scrawled on it. Then I realized with a start that I was wearing the tag.
I looked back at the lights and marveled that fifty years after Death’s dark festival, 50,000 of the survivors had returned for a second celebration.
We passed deeper into the forest and I could see no more of the fires of the Reunion Camp. The only light came from the fading glow of the summer sky through limbs above us and the sporadic winking of fireflies along the road.
“You don’t remember Iverson, do you, Boy?”
“No, sir.”
“Here.” He thrust something into my hands. Leaning closer, squinting, I understood that it was an old tintype, cracked at the edges. I was able to make out a pale square of face, shadows which might have been mustaches. Captain Montgomery grabbed it back. “He’s not registered at the goddamn reunion,” he muttered. “Spent the goddamn day lookin’. Never arrived. Didn’t expect him to. Newspaper in Atlanta two years ago said he died. Goddamn lie.”