The quiet and the loss

 GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- The Run wears its Sunday best now, here in these last bursting days of May. Down the way, a few steps from this footbridge, a mop of lilypads sprawls across the narrow reach from bank to bank; bushes and trees crowd close; tiny marsh flowers so cover the dark water that, even swollen with recent rains, you can hardly see its modest trickle.

Late spring at Gettysburg National Military Park, and there is new life everywhere. Everything is one shade of green or another, and the air is soft, and the only sound is the sound of birdsong.

I hear it now, standing on this footbridge watching the Run lollygag beneath my feet. That's shorthand for Plum Run, and along its banks, years and years ago, human beings shot and stabbed and murdered one another. 

Men bled and fell and gasped away their lives. Their bodies swelled and stiffened in grotesque postures in the July heat, And this lovely trickle became an obscene thing, its very name a synonym for the worst we can do to each other.

A few insignificant yards behind me, I know, a squad of desperate soldiers drew a bead in the fading light on a man with flowing white hair on horseback. This was Confederate general William Barksdale, and he died later that night with five bullets in him, and the Mississippians he led ran out of steam right about where he fell. 

They fled back through the fields they'd come howling across an hour or so before, the air thick with dusk and smoke now.  And their bodies would carpet the ground they crossed to mark the way.

Somewhere in front of me and to my left, meanwhile, a man named Freeman McGilvery would place a line of cannon and blast away at other advancing Mississippians, and more men and pieces of men would fall. And way down there to the south and east, where Plum Run meanders sluggishly at the foot of a pile of rock the locals called Devil's Den, yet more lives would violently end.

Later a lot of the mortal remains would be collected and buried atop Cemetery Hill, and today that is a green place, too, and quiet. White headstones spread out in a neat geometry that belies the chaos that placed them here, and tourists walk among them with a reverence generally reserved for cathedrals and holy shrines.

That's because everything that happened along Plum Run, and in places with names like Belleau Wood and Iwo Jima and the Ia Drang Valley, is about both madness and sacrifice, and this weekend we honor the latter. It's Memorial Day, and it's reserved for all those headstones, all the men and women who came to places of which most had never heard, and who never left -- men and women who, yes, died to preserve what we have and often take for granted, but who mostly died for the human beings to the right or left of them.

Me?

I prefer to think about that footbridge across Plum Run, and the life and peace there now, and the death that paid for it. Those three days in July all those years ago preserved the Union,  ultimately. And if it remains a sometimes tragically imperfect union, it's up to us to make it less so -- if not for our sakes, then for the sake of  Bayard Wilkeson and Samuel Zook and Edward Cross and Strong Vincent, and all the others who died here. 

Died so I could find it almost impossible to imagine that, on the late afternoon of July 2, 1863, I would have had a life expectancy of about two minutes standing where I stand on this day. 

Died, so everything around me is now one shade of green or another, and the air is soft, and the only sound is the sound of birdsong.