'Congealed Violence'

"If architecture is frozen music (and I think it is), then fortifications are congealed violence. That is to say they are the best sort of violence, silent, thoughtful, passive, only to be unleashed by an aggressive enemy. I rather like them. They are, in a way, a form of just war. There is much to be learned from them.” 

In “A Piffling Show,” a blog post on The Lamp website, Peter Hitchens uses Goethe’s well-known description of architecture to recall his own childhood fascination with “Palmerston’s Follies,” the Victorian-era fortifications built near his home in Portsmouth, England. “[T]he fear they embodied,” he writes, “and the strength of the power they were built to resist, were thrilling.”

 

Boys love “playing army,” a harmless opportunity to run around and bloodlessly defeat the enemy – in my younger years, Germans and “Japs.” Children inherit the mythology of their fathers’ wars. In suburban Cleveland, we had no military fortifications. No one, I assume, thought Parma Heights worth defending. A former chicken coop belonging to my long-dead paternal grandmother stood down the hill behind our house. It was always known as “the shanty,” and we used it as a sort of Alamo – one set of boys outside throwing rocks, crabapples and Osage oranges (“monkey balls”) and another inside, trying not to get brained.

 

Hitchens’ essay reminded me of August 1963. While on a family vacation, my brother and I visited Gettysburg a month after the battle’s centenary with one goal in mind: to locate Devil’s Den, famously photographed by Timothy O’Sullivan with a dead Confederate sniper and his rifle conveniently lying in front of a stone wall – what passed for a fortification. We had seen the photograph, known as “Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter,” in a magazine, probably National Geographic. I was almost eleven, Ken was eight. Nothing else mattered, not even the scene of Pickett’s charge, as recalled by William Faulkner in Intruder in the Dust: “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863 . . .” Of course, we were staunch Union sympathizers.

 

We searched all afternoon in the August heat for that scene without success. We looked for that wall of stones between two boulders. We were disappointed but not as seriously as we would have been had we known that the photo was staged by O’Sullivan. The same corpse was photographed at several sites around the battlefield. The rifle is not one used by sharpshooters and it appears in photographs taken at other locations. Scholars debate the identity of the dead soldier but he remains anonymous.