'Be Prepared to Witness Anything'

I watched embarrassing quantities of television as a kid, most of it forgotten before I left the room, but one show remains fresh in memory: The Twilight Zone. Some episodes were shoddy and cheap, and there was much recycling of plots and themes. But the best ones had a concision about them, a pared-down, tightly plotted, O. Henry quality, that leave some episodes still vivid after more than half a century.

One from the final season I can replay in my head – “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” based on the story by Ambrose Bierce. It was a French production purchased by The Twilight Zone and first broadcast in the U.S. in February 1964. This was during the centennial of the Civil War, which I avidly followed. I read Fletcher Pratt and Bruce Catton, collected Civil War cards and visited Gettysburg for the first time with my family. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” shocked me. I was the right age.

I thought of that episode while reading Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman (Kent State University Press, 2007). Lyman (1833-1897) was a Boston Brahmin, a natural scientist who studied under Louis Agassiz at Harvard and went on to serve as aide-de-camp to Major General George G. Meade. Lyman could write. Like Agassiz, he paid attention to detail. This is from his entry for Dec. 16, 1864:

“There were hanged three men of the 1^st Div. 2d Corps, for desertion to the enemy. Think it well to be prepared to witness anything, so made a point to ride over & see it.”

I admire Lyman’s attitude, one I learned to adopt as a newspaper reporter. Don’t turn away from reality. Stare at it. Study it. Draw conclusions. Don’t avert your gaze. Lyman’s scientific training may account for his willingness to “witness anything.” He continues:

“A portion of the division was under arms, round a high gallows. At the stated time the three men were brought, in an ambulance, preceded by the band playing a dead march, and followed by a waggon [sic] carrying their coffins. The condemned each had a white cap on; two were in rebel uniform, and one in our own.”

According to the Encyclopedia Virginia: “More soldiers were executed during the American Civil War (1861–1865) than in all other American wars combined. Approximately 500 men, representing both North and South, were shot or hanged during the four-year conflict, two-thirds of them for desertion.”

Lyman goes on: “On the scaffold a clergyman decorously read a service and the men kneeled to pray. This took some time, and there was a good deal of delay in putting on the ropes and tying the culprits; but, at last, the caps being pulled down, they were all thrown off at once, and hung so many bundles of clothes twisting round & round! The most painful part of the spectacle was when the ambulance passed, carrying them to execution.”