'If There's a Deity, It's Mars'

Time and ignorance wring the meaning out of holidays. When I was a boy, Memorial Day meant a parade ending at a small nearby cemetery, the one where my mother now is buried. Prayers, speeches, wreathes, the firing of a three-gun salute by Marines in dress uniforms. It was a day off from school, a preview of the coming summer, but we went through the motions of patriotism and remembrance. Not much of that today. As the weekend approaches, people talk of gasoline prices. In his epilogue to the third volume of The Civil War: A Narrative, Shelby Foote writes:

 

“Observed throughout the North on May 30, Memorial Day hopscotched the calendar in the South, where individual states made their choices between April 26, May 10, and June 3. In any case, whenever it came, this day belonged to the veterans and their fallen comrades, and they made the most of it, beginning with their choice of a speaker, always with the hope that he would rival the ‘few appropriate remarks’ Lincoln had uttered at Gettysburg on a similar occasion.”

 

Foote recounts a speech delivered on Memorial Day 1884, at Keene, N.H., by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935). As a Union army captain during the Civil War, Holmes had been wounded three times. In 1864, when Lincoln stood on a parapet at Fort Stevens, Holmes is supposed to have yelled, “Get down, you damn fool!” Twenty years later, speaking to fellow Civil War veterans, Holmes said Memorial Day was “the most sacred of the year,” and would always be observed by Americans. He continued:

 

“But even if I am wrong, even if those who are to come after us are to forget all that we hold dear, and the future is to teach and kindle its children in ways as yet unrevealed, it is enough for us that to us this day is dear and sacred . . . For one hour, twice a year at least – at the regimental dinner, where the ghosts sit at table more numerous than the living, and on this day when we decorate their graves – the dead come back and live with us. I see them now, more than I can number, as I saw them on this earth.”

 

Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841-1906) was a student of the Swiss-born zoologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard when the Civil War started. He graduated summa cum laude in 1862 and returned to his native Kentucky. There he was commissioned to raise the Fifth Kentucky Battery on the Union side, despite coming from a slave-owning family. He detested the Republican Party and many of his Kentucky friends had already joined the Confederate cause, but Shaler believed in the principle of the Union, which he called “a most useful convenience for uniting like states for protection and interchange.”

 

Shaler served for two years until illness forced his resignation. For almost forty years he taught geology and paleontology at Harvard, and late in life wrote the poems, written in sturdy blank verse, collected in From Old Fields: Poems of the Civil War. It was published by Shaler’s wife shortly after his death. Try to find a copy of Selected Civil War Poems of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (Scienter Press, 2004), edited by R.L. Barth. Included is an excerpt from “The Great Raid,” including these lines which describe the symptoms of what we have learned to call PTSD:

 

“He who hath known of war has memories

Of sorry deeds that startle him in nights,

And make him creep back to this blessed day

With wonder what he was when they were done

At bidding of hard duty.”

 

A Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, Barth says of the passage: “Even here, however, notice the emphasis on duty; the memories are part of the price a soldier pays.” Barth’s epigram “De Bello” is collected Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone Books, 2021):

 

“The troops deploy. Above, the stars

Wheel over mankind’s little wars.

If there’s a deity, it’s Mars.”