Excerpts from The Transatlantic Disputations

8/2/2019 Excerpts from The Transatlantic Disputations

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(Excerpts from)

The

Transatlantic

Disputations:

Essays and Meditations

MarkhamShaw PyleGMW Wemyss


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From the introduction:[ ] Mr Wemyss essays in this volume are marked by three

crowns; Mr Pyles, by three stars.

These essays are just that: as casual as any of Lambs or

Montaignes. They range widely, and are inevitably personal in

nature. Nevertheless, they are as scholarly as the form allows. Any

learned corrections shall be gratefully received.

The authors are men who cannot bring themselves not to talk

about land and nature, baseball and cricket, shooting and angling,

history and the craft of writing. If any of these things at all

interests you, they trust that the following musings1may repay

your time in the reading of them.

1 And mullings. Although if youaremulling, it is better to mull claret or cider, or ale

than Madeira.


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Terrain

and

Terroir


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Southern is captured in its eternal moment, celebrating the early

summertide of the South (were one to accept all that was implicit

in the Southerns advertising, one had expected languid caballeros

strumming guitars in Bournemouth or a souk in Brighton); the

GWR hurtles unrelentingly towards a gilded West preserved as in

amber.

Some things emerge. Terriers beseeching one to take ones dog

along; whimsical elephants advising that one may and ought to

send ones (wait for it) trunks ahead; East Coast Follies; East Coast

Types (from donkey boys to Scottish fishwives): every appeal is

made. Herne Bay and Epping Forest figure in numerous posters as

desirable destinations: it is a measure of my own mind that my

immediate reaction to seeing the name of either place is

criminological. (For those of purer mind and life, I should note that

Herne Bay was famously or infamously the site of the first

Brides in the Bath murder committed by George Joseph Smith,

and Epping Forest, notorious for murders: including the 1970

Babes in the Wood murders.) Themes emerge: the regions of

England, of Scotland, and of Ireland (less so, those of Wales);

cathedral cities; Rabbie Burns Country (when the traditional

regions palled), Sir Walter Scotts Country, Shakespeares

Country, Sir Francis Drakes Country, the painterly Constable

Country. There are race day specials, Cup Final specials, exhibition

specials (poultry and pigeons). Ruins with poetic, Romantic, and


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abbatial associations are celebrated. Nor are the up trains

forgotten: London is depicted in all its pomp and splendour,

monarchs and lords mayor, the Thames and St Pauls iconic upon

the skyline.

The art and artistry and the artfulness is astounding. The

LMS in particular was partial to showing its engines being built or

its permanent way being completed, and the best of these by,

Terence Cuneo, say, are brilliant genre paintings that leave Ford

Madox Ford standing. Equally impressive is the bold, pure colour

of Tom Purvis, which defied the conventions of the medium. For

make no mistake, the railway poster was a medium with certain

conventions of its own, so much so that at the dictates of

technology it is not always possible at first glance to distinguish

Frank Newbould from, let us say, Leslie Carr, or even Norman

Wilkinson.

Within and preciselynotin despite of that convention,

great art came forth. Cuneo, Wilkinson, Badmin, Newbould, and

Frank Henry Mason were, simply, great artists. Some of the

paintings that became railway posters: the series of paintings that

were used for series of adverts Service to Industry, Havens and

Harbours, Wilkinsons paintings of minor public schools for the

LMS (Fettes, Oundle, that placed named for an agricultural

implement ah! Yes, Harrow, thats it one doesnt see ones

own school, or WinCo), the history paintings for such destinations


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as Carlisle and Ely stand out like Canalettos amidst chocolate

boxes. And, after all, it was in Newboulds work for the railways

that his justly famous Your Britain fight for it now war posters

of after years were implicit: Alfriston Fair, the South Downs, and a

cathedral scene I find (said he, archly) remarkably familiar.

And yet . This was art, ultimately, in the service of

Mammon. It was selling something; and it was a sell. In the 1920s,

Norman Wilkinson painted St Pauls for a railways advert:

London, the seat of Empire by the grace of God. And then one

turns to two posters by Mason: London once more. The first

both were done for the Great Western, the artistic connexions of

which included, after all, Frith and Turner dates to 1938 and

shows more aptly than Mason knew London as night fell: the

Tower, the Thames, the bridge and beyond. The second, from

1946, is entitled London Pride, and shows London River and the

gleaming dome of St Pauls in cloudless day. It is beautiful; and,

showing as it does none of the still-present scars of the war, it is

profoundly false. A sell.

In this were the seeds of the grim future. The urgent post-War

attempts of the Big Four to survive by trading on nostalgia rang

false. In the Twenties and early Thirties, one neednt have been

John Betjeman to indulge such propositions as Surreys being

Londons Highlands, or to respond to promises of thatch and

packhorse bridges and old coaching inns. The Big Fours Betjemanic


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attempts to recapture that innocence, and still more the more

febrile attempts at it by the nationalised British Railways, failed;

and what cane after was unbearable. There were the 1960s and

1970s graphical monstrosities, deliberately ugly,faux-primitif.

There was ultimately the final BR logo, the Arrow of Indecision,

resembling nothing so much as a particularly nasty derailment. At

the last came the final indignity: Jimmy Savile in his ghastly

trackies, the overt appeals to use the train for your dirty weekends,

and the 1975 InterCity poster consisting simply of a Page Three

girl, wearing a shirt and a hat and nothing else, bra-less (and this is

clamantly,pokinglyevident), and the slogan, Want to see a friend

this weekend?: a (wait for it) naked appeal to what would

nowadays be called, simply, the booty-call market.

You may, as your temperament dictates, regard this as progress

towards a sterner honesty, the end of a period of slick, commercial

deception; or as symptomatic of national decay. I can only say,

How the mighty are fallen: and I am far from rejoicing in their fall.


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The Natural Occupation: The Arsenal of Garden)Warfare

But war is the natural occupation of man! War and

gardening.

Winston Churchill, as First Lord, to Robert Graves, ca

1916.

It is generally acknowledged that azaleas can be finicky. It is almost

a truism amongst the knowledgeable that very old, well-rooted

azaleas cannot be transplanted with any hope of real success, let

alone twice in a lustrum (Lone Oak to the Lake, the Lake toTallowood). That was certainly the conventional wisdom when,


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after both my paternal grandparents had died, my father and my

uncle determined to uproot, divide between them, and transplant

Grammys beloved, trademark, and locally famous azaleas from the

Old Home Place. As it happens, however, no one in my family

recognizes the existence of an impossibility. (Were not specially

courageous, were just bullheaded as all get-out, and the whole lot

of us as independent as a hog on ice. Every last one of us would

argue with a wooden cigar-store Indian.)

However, this success is not due solely to bullheadedness. Its

due to a comprehension of soil.

This [written in October, 2002] is certainly an appropriate

weekend for me to be in autumnal mood: that season, you will

recall, of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Besides the other seasonal

matters and holidays-and-observances now upon us, today is

National Farmers Day (and the Aggies beat the tar out of Baylor

yesterday, appropriately enough. Fight, Farmers, fight!). More to

the point, the first real norther of the year is blowing through. Its

an appropriate time to be thinking about redding up the garden for

next year, and its an appropriate day for me to stay snug, here at

the PC. (I love cool weather. I do. But it is a fortunate thing that I

do my best work with a slight head-cold, which, predictably, I now

am coming down with. Remember, folks, the wages of sin is death,

but the wages of overwork and mulish refusal to quit and rest

usually starts with post-nasal drip and goes on from there).


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Down here on the Gulf Coast, we have to deal with clayey,

gumbo soils that are the very devil to work with, and with the

prospect that on any given day in January, it can feel enough like

spring to fool the plants. That is why, by the way, nobody round

here should regard this cold-snap as a signal to start pruning

anything, least of all azaleas, roses, and crape myrtles (the trinity of

tutelary garden plants hereabouts, our very sign and totem). We

always have to bear in mind that winter, in Houston, generally

consists of a dank afternoon in February. (By ancient tradition, we

do our pruning of our crape myrtles as well as of our roses on

Valentines Day, unless of course its sleeting. Azaleas we dont

trim before late March or early April, only after the blooming

season; and then no more than a third of the plant. Late / repeat

bloomers such as the new Encores get trimmed even later.)

It is soil that is the most fundamental of these fundamental

facts. Soil, and the process of amending it.

Now, as it happens, I come of a notoriously greenhanded

family. My paternal grandparents had a simple division of labor:

Grammy took care of the roses and azaleas and such; Pop kept a

hellish half-acre or so under the plow in vegetables, next the horse

pasture. By this time of year, his enthusiasm for planting crops, and

Grammys grim determination to freeze what she could and can all

the rest, would have, in their living days, resulted in increased

quarterly earnings for the Mason jar people. Both understood the


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importance of soil, and of improving it. (Sometimes they went a tad

overboard. I recall nay, I shall never forget one summer I spent

with them, as I spent most summers with them: this, the Summer

of the Eggplant. Pop had been a mite too lavish with the planting,

and Nature2revenged herself with a bumper crop that exceeded all

capacity to handle it. We ate eggplant stewed. We ate it fried. We

ate it every way we could think of, short of barbecuing it or

slathering it with cream gravy. We did our dead level best to pickle

it, as a last resort, and still it flooded in. The tenants / neighbors

were given some. Then given more. Then they stopped answering

the door and flat hid under the porch as Pop relentlessly left paper

sacks full of eggplant at every door within miles. The very

compost, that year, was largely comprised of unused eggplant, by

the time all was said and done.)

At any rate, when it came to soil amendments, all else gave way

to Grammys consuming passion for azaleas, with old roses a distant

but still obsessive second. (She grew them. Then she arranged

them. Then she sat down at her easel and painted a canvas from

them. Then she went to check the garden for the next batch.)

In such soil as ours, of course, that meant souring it, making it

more acidic. (There was at least one daughter-in-law of hers who

would have suggested Gram could do that simply by addressing a

2 You will recall Horaces observation, which I here translate for those of you who have

no Latin (modern academics, for instance), that You may drive Nature out with a

pitchfork, yet shall she come back in. Pushy old broad, Dame Nature


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few mildly cutting remarks to it. I come by my caustic tongue, my

snark and my sarcasm,3by true descent from the Shaw side of the

family.) By and large, our local soils possess adequate resources

(iron, for instance); what they do not always possess is a pH level

sufficient to unlock those nutrients for the plants use. (Let your

soil get too alkaline, and you could scrap a battleship on the

flowerbed and the plants would remain iron deficient.)

Those of you who live in less nutrient-favored soils will need to

begin, in the immediate term, with an Azalea-Camellia-

Rhododendron Food that has an NPK series of 30-10-10, and after

getting your pH to acceptable levels (under 6.0 or so; Gram swore

by about 5.6 pH), follow up with a 16-2-3 or a 15-4-5.)

For us, a 16-2-3 NPK fertilizer was plenty, as it still is. You want

an azalea food thats rapidly absorbed, easy to work into a bedding

soil that has been even marginally improved (with our gumbo, you

have to dosomethingfirst to amend it, as in larding in some

compost and some cottonseed meal, or youll be using a mattock4to

break it up); and of course, synthetics by nature are uniform and

readily monitored for efficacy. Moreover, if as it ought to be it

is also an acidifier, it does double duty not only for your camellias,

but for the Glories of the Southland, the revered magnolia and the

beloved dogwood.

3 As it happens, October is also, I believe, National Sarcasm Month.Howexciting.

4 Somewhere we still have our ancestral mattock, a heavy, somehow Teutonic-looking

tool I have named Otto. (The author, smirking, waits for the penny to drop.)


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allergies.) As it happens, pine needles and duff, as a mulch, help

maintain an acidic soil pH to begin with (shrewd is the Creator,

and above all things wise), as well as helping keep moisture in the

soil. That is fundamental in the heat we so revel in down here.5

Azaleas need watering, the equivalent of an inch or so of rain

every seven to ten days, but they donotneed to sit about with wet

feet: well-drained soils are essential. (Theyll catch this blamed

head-cold I have, otherwise.) A mulch is thus essential, both to

keep them from dehydrating and to wick away excess moisture,

and you may as well use a pine mulch.

Operating on that assumption, then, the proper application of

azalea food is to sprinkle it evenly on slightly damp soil throughout

the bed, under the branch zone (the shade-shadow) of the plants,

and then to cover with pine needle mulch and water it in. Properly

and regularly used, the results are uniformly excellent, even by

synthetic standards; and many synthetics, to give due credit, do

seem anecdotally at least to live up to claims of timed and steady

release and absorption, a factor more commonly associated, at very

slow speeds, with organics.

And be sure to check out the Aggie Horticulture pages and

links on the Web, and those of the River Oaks Garden Club, for

more learning about your azaleas. The latter knows its onions

about azaleas, and the former, well, any bunch of good ol boys

5 Yep. Still sarcasm month.


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who can develop a maroon bluebonnet constitute a force to be

reckoned with.

On balance pH balance (thats a joke, son) acidophil

synthetics are a godsend, and the results in our family, as regards

generations of classic Southern azaleas: Southern Charm, Duc de

Rohan, Coral Bells, Judge Solomon, Formosa, Dixie Beauty, have

been reliably good.

In these miserable times, it is well to cultivate ones garden.


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Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

The late American golfing coach and writer, Harvey Penick, held

that any who played golf was his friend in the politer sense of

Arcadesambo,I gather.

I myself hold with Honest Izaak that there is and that I am a

member of a communion of, if not saints, at least anglers and very

honest men, some now with God and others of us yet upon the

quiet waters. There are untold numbers of persons who follow

young Mr Tom Felton on Twitter: some are fans, others, fen,

others yet, one gathers, and of both sexes, are struck with abobbysoxers calf-love: I suspect that I am one of at most a score of


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those who give him a follow as a gesture of solidarity amongst

anglers.

Note that: a gesture of solidarity amongst anglers. We are a

broad church, and a rather stuffy old dry-fly man such as am I yet

feels a kinship with even a coarse fisher. Yet naturally, men of

similar interest and passion most congregate together. And just

now, within my own fraternity of devotees of the chalk stream and

the well-tied fly, the same questions are asked wherever we

foregather or chance to meet, in person, down the local, or online:

What sort of hatch of mayfly have you where you are? and, Are

you able to spend much time on the water?

To both of these questions, alas, my answer just now is the

same: Not As Much As Id Like.[Written in Springtide 2011]

Partly this is because, for all my undeserved good fortune in this

life, I also, even I, am unable to devoteallmy hours to the

contemplative mans calling. Ive a very good stretch of water quite

near. I am blessed in not being required to plan and shift things and

travel for hours to reach Arcadia. Yet my rural idyll has the defects

of its qualities; and if the season of ovine obstetrics is now past,

that of bovine obstetrics is not, quite, and I have to put it with as

much delicacy as may obtain been, as every Springtide, up to my

elbows in it. (When young, there were certain places I never

imagined my hand as going. Some hopes, that innocence.)

Yet it is when I look at my arable that I am confronted also


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with the shadow of ill-fortune for my fishing: for the land would

tell me what the river has to say even were I never to look at the

river. We are dry, damnably dry. Father Wylye is very low; the

Chitterne Brook at the Codfords is gasping for breath; even in the

Deverills, the diving rill is brought low, even unto the dust. We are

just barely above the lowest levels of normality, and an anxious

survey of the skies promises little relief.

I do not propose to enter into the whys and wherefores of this:

it devolves all too readily, that sort of thing, into a political quarrel

of the most squalid intellectual dishonesty. I but state the fact.

And yet anglingis,after all, the contemplative mans repose

and refreshment. It is vexing, in its way, to find ones river low

and, from the anglers point of view, ailing. Compensations,

however, for the true angler, remain.

There are always, for the true angler, compensations. When

winter rages without, there are flies to tie, and memories to record,

and books to read and perhaps to write. Farming, gardening,

angling, and apiculture have, I think one may fairly say, fathered

more great literature than anything save, perhaps, war, from

Hesiod and Vergil and Columella to Adrian Bell and Haig Brown.

And with the invocation of that great name, I may begin to

note the compensations of even such times as these upon a river.

To know a river is a wondrous thing, and the study of a lifetime. It

has its own georgics and pastorals, and they are read perhaps the


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more easily when the palimpsest of ranunculus-crowfoot and cool,

clear water ceases to overwrite them. In such times as these upon

the river, it is next seasons sport that one may study, learning the

complex, subtle life of the river, flow and deposition: for as the

American or, rather, resolutely Texan writer, John Graves, has

noted (many and wonderful are the books about rivers), a river is

its course and bed and sources, its complex history and hydrology,

and all the plants and animals and people who live and have ever

lived in and on and beside it.6

And although there is that in us that thrills with satisfaction,

indeed, with satiety, to the full and glorious amplitude of such

seasons as Mole and Ratty knew, when (many and wonderful are

the books about rivers) the river is

a sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling,

gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a

laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook

themselves free, and were caught and held again

and tells to us, confidingly,

a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent

from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the

insatiable sea;

and when in its season

the pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along,

6 Mr Wemyss notes that knowing Mr Pylehashad its compensations.


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unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded each other

in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early,

shaking luxuriant tangled locks along the edge of the

mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willow-

herb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset cloud, was not

slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the

white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last

one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped

delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music

had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a

gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the

company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the

nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at

the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping

summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet,

debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to

his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin;

there is also reward, we know, whenSummers lease hath all

too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,and,

in a drought or in the iron of winters soul,

Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to

have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all

hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for

exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and


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their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to

overlook their shabby poverty for a while, till they could

riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him

with the old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet

cheering even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the

country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He

had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine

and strong and simple. He did not want the warm clover

and the play of seeding grasses; the screens of quickset, the

billowy drapery of beech and elm seemed best away .

Old Father Wylye is today diminished to the casual eye: at

Brixton Deverill, but 0.18 metres in depth, at Norton Bavant, but

0.13, at South Newton a mere 0.21; Sweet Mother Nadder has

sunk exhausted to a mere trickle even at Tisbury, at 0.55 metres in

depth. Gammer Avon at Upavon flows at a mere 0.08 metres, and,

at Amesbury, but 0.22 metres. Gaffer Bourne at Idmiston is low

also, in metres 0.03 alone.

Shall I abandon my rivers? Should God forget His people?

Super flumina,let us even in sorrow sing; and let my rod-hand

forget her cunning if I forget these, my earthly Sion.

Rather, let us to the rivers as they are, and get wisdom. I do not

expect much fishing this year; yet I expect a catch in abundance,

multiplying like the loaves and fishes in the feeding of the

multitudes. I expect to land the Salmon of Wisdom. The rivers and


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chalk streams of my care and cure are diminished only to the casual

eye; there is much to read in them just now for them that have

eyes to see. Let us to the rivers and get wisdom: this is an

opportunity, to study and to learn, to read, mark, learn, and

inwardly digest: to study their secret ways and processes, the silver

and shadowed swift-flashing world wherein our quarry live and

move and have their being. We are in some degree doctors of

physic to our rivers; we are not their masters and we are assuredly

not their creator. It well behoves us to learn their ways and health

and structure, and we have been given a cunningly-disguised

blessing of grace in which to do just that.

For to the true angler, who would know his river, all seasons

are apt, all knowledge precious, and all things work together for

good. It was not by chance that Our Saviour sought his first

disciples amongst fishermen. And I remember, also, a kinsman of

mine in centuries past, a good honest Churchman and an angler, a

physician in Hants, who when the family were divided took the

part of the King rather than that of Parliament, and aided Honest

Izaak in the recovery of the Lesser George for the King, and

Colonel Blagues escape from the Tower and over the water, with

the Roundheads pounding after him: for angling is an honest,

ingenuous, quiet, and harmless art, and honest anglers artful and

apt to any honest service.

And if we are, as indeed we are, silver links (many of us more


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than a trifle tarnished) in a great chain of being, we must also

recognise that there are great natural cycles in which we are a part,

and a part only: we are in some degree doctors of physic to our

rivers; we are not their masters and we are assuredly not their

creator: and there are fasts that the rivers and all nature keep for

their better health. We may learn of them in fast as on feasts and

ferial days.

The man is a mere brute, and no true angler, whose sport is

measured only in fish caught and boasted of. For what purpose do

we impose on ourselves limits and conventions if not to make sport

of a mere mechanical harvest of protein? The true angler can

welcome even a low river and a dry year, and learn of it, and be

the better for it, in mind and in spirit. So, No: the hatch is not all

that it might be, for if it is warm enough and early with it, it is also

in a time of drought; and, No: I dont get to the river as often as I

should wish. But these things do not make this a poor year: they

are an unlooked-for opportunity to delve yet deeper into the secrets

of the river, and grow wise.

Rejoice, then, in all seasons, ye fishers.The world the river is;

both you and I, And all mankind, are either fish or fry.We must

view it with judicious looks, and get wisdom whilst we may. And

to all honest anglers, then, I wish, as our master Izaak wished us

long ago, a rainy evening to read this following Discourse; and that

if he be an honest Angler, the east wind may never blow when he


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goes a-fishing.


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Sursum Corda: Lift Up Your Hearts February 2000)If T. S. Eliot had stayed in St Louis, he would never have held that

April was the cruelest month. Well, unless he was a Browns fan.

At this moment, in the ragged middle of February, it begins:

beneath the snow, roots quicken. In the Deep South, already trees

begin to bud. And all over the land indeed, all over the world, in

Japan, in the Caribbean, in Australia a certain class of mammal,

fubsy, amiable, sweet-natured, begins to twitch and wake from

hibernation: the baseball fan. Is it the lengthening of the days? Is it

some subtle signal that causes them to begin to emerge from a

stupor only lightly disturbed by meetings of the Hot Stove League?

Naw. It is the magic phrase, pitchers and catchers to report .


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(Good news: the Commissioner did not see his shadow on

Groundball Day. Spring training will begin as scheduled.)

The winter of our discontent is about to be made glorious

summer by this sun of baseball. (And the people rejoiced.) This

means things more wondrous than tongue can tell unless, of

course, you were deprived as a child and somehow failed to become

a fan. The non-fans know by now that spouses, children, business

contacts, or friends will once again drag them to the ballpark. This

guide is for those unhappy souls.

Let me say at once that my years in Virginia and my deep

devotion to the Orioles as my junior circuit team of choice

notwithstanding this primer is addressed to the pure, the true,

the blissful game that is National League ball. Much of it will

apply to the unfortunates of the junior circuit, or to interleague

play, but not all.

The first consideration for the neophyte is, Where is the game

being played? If it is in a covered stadium, bring a light jacket no

matter what the weather outdoors. If it is under Gods good sun,

on the grass, then bring a slicker or a brolly, a hat, some sunscreen,

a jacket at the beginning and end of the season (Wrigley comes to

mind here).

The type of stadium dictates more than climate and comfort

concerns, I hasten to add. Domed stadia meant Astroturf, an

artificial playing surface. This in turn did funny things to chops and


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other grounders, and made incalculable differences to bunts and

infield hits. The fan under those circumstances had to pay special

attention to the middle infield.

Further to the subject of comfort, the newbie should be aware

that beer and soft drinks at the ballpark are what underwrites a

goodly chunk of those ungodly salaries. The newbie ought also to

be aware that a game may last hours upon end. This dictates the

drinking of lots of water before hand. As an Anglican I am

anything but a teetotaler; however, in open-air parks, especially

from May through the All-Star Break to the pennant stretch,

dehydration is a fact of life. Go easy on the beer, then, and drink

plenty of water.

Some stadia have of late gone utterly mad. Back in 1999, I took

my father to the game as my treat. Instead of my usual seat, we

had seats in the section immediately behind the third-base-line

dugout (the visitors dugout), where things are catered. This being

the Dome in 1999, it made perfect sense that barbecue was

available in addition to the traditional dogs and such. What

shocked my father unutterably was the sight of people in the row

ahead of us. He felt, as I did, that white wine and a cheese and

melon tray are about as out of place at a ball game as earrings on a

steer. I heard him humming when he was not making invidious

comparisons between todays players and Musial, Williams, and

DiMag something about Buy me some brie and some


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Chardonnay / I dont care if the team doesnt play .

In fact, ballpark food is notoriously overpriced and even at its

best none so good. You can spend your hard-earned money on

chow at the park, or you can feed the crew in advance (OK, so

they deserve some peanuts in the middle innings: Im big on

tradition) and use the money for good seats.

And what, you may ask, is a good seat? That depends in part

on who is playing. Teams have different styles and strengths. If a

Star Hitter is in town, outfield seats become premium: everyone

but we few purists, the High Church Party in the Church of

Baseball, is more interested in snagging a long-ball than watching

the actual game. But as a rule, this is not the case.

Where you want to sit is determined by what you want to see.

My own general rule is dictated by my own preferences for

baseball, and by what the home team is good at. One of the things

I most miss about the Dome is my point seat: a single seat where

two aisles come together into one, about ten or so rows back, with

an unobstructed view of the plate and the field looking straight

down the 3B line.

The point is this. Obviously, the closer you are to the playing

field, the better. Beyond that, in NL parks at least, the dictates of

NL strategy the eschewal of that Commie innovation the DH,

[to which for nakedly sleazy reasons the Astros are now to be

subjected] and little-ball, suggest you want a seat behind the


30/68

dugouts or otherwise along the foul lines. (The third or first

question is up to you. In either event, for Gods sake stay alert for

fouls and flying bats.)

Unless you are a scout or a pitching connoisseur, being directly

behind the plate is not as good.

Why? Well, because of what you should be looking for. From

the side, you can see the rhythm of the pitcher. You can possibly

learn to steal the catchers signs, and the coaches. You can see the

subtle shifts that are entailed in guarding the lines, setting up a

wheel, bringing the fielders in or out for a batter on a particular

count. You can note the tantalizing bluffs between the runner

especially on first and the battery. And you have a heck of a

viewpoint for all varieties of the double-play, including the strike-

out-throw-out, than which there is no sweeter DP.

And by the time you have seen these things up close and

personal over the course of a few games, you will no longer need

this advice, for you will be a fan.

One final note for newbies and vets alike. Part of the charm of

this greatest of games is its tradition, its evocation of times gone by.

(It is the only inherently timeless game, after all: in theory, a

ballgame, once tied, could go on forever.) That being said, allow me

to renew as I do every year a plea for civility. Boo-birds are not

native to Houston, for example. Drunken louts in the stands should

be removed and possibly shot by firing squad. People who jump to


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their feet and block the view of grandmothers who are unsteady on

their pins and have to stay seated are almost as bad. Foul language

in the stands, in front of women and children and the elderly, is

contemptible; and every stadium has people to enforce the rules

against these vices. Make use of them.

Then we can all have fun; we can all succumb to what the

mystery writer John Dickson Carr called baseball dust, headier and

more addictive than cocaine; and we can all learn what is conveyed

in that great line of Mr Cubs, Its a great day for baseball lets

play two.


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War and History


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Fields of Battle, I: Manassas, First and Second: To DieHere and Conquer

Manassas NBP strikes a superb, rare balance between preserving

the all-important terrain and making it accessible. It is also

moderately well-marked and contextualized: certainly better than

most.

Many words have been spilt already, like soldiers blood, on the

battlegrounds of North America. Few, to date, have proceeded

from military historians looking at the ground as terrain. I aim to

address that lacuna.

The Battle of First Manassas is, naturally, full of interest evento the most casual reviewer. It is where the Stonewall Brigade and


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its commander, an eccentric former VMI professor named Thomas

J Jackson, earned that immortal nickname; it was the first battle in

history in which the transportation of reinforcements by rail at a

critical moment occurred; it served notice to both sides that the

war was not going to be over in a fortnight though it remains

arguable that had Stonewall and the Brigade been allowed to lead a

pursuit of McDowells fleeing levies, they could have taken

Washington, DC.

Second Manassas, by contrast, is one of the classic battles of the

Army of Northern Virginia at its zenith, perhaps more so even

than are Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville.

To begin with, it was the validation of the Seven Days victories

down on the Peninsula, by which Lee took command with

Richmond on the verge of falling and transformed the operational

situation such that, within two months, it was the Confederacy

that was on the offensive in the hinterland of Washington City

rather than the Union that was driving into the suburbs of

Richmond.

Secondly, it is the template of the way in which Lee best liked

to use II Corps Jacksons men and I Corps, under Longstreet:

the anvil and the hammer, respectively.

And thirdly, it is a set-piece battle, a classic of the military art:

Old Blue Light and II Corps holding a defensive position on an

unfinished railroad cut, Popes bluecoats being fed heedlessly into


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frontal assaults, and when the Union is too engaged to extricate

itself Old Pete and I Corps appearing on the Union left flank,

scything the Federals with a mass artillery barrage, then pouring in

in a flank assault led by Hoods Texans, smashing the US Army of

Virginia to fleeing remnants salvaged only by a desperate

rearguard action. It is as classic a battle as Chancellorsville itself.

And like most battles, each of the Manassas actions was

dictated by the land itself.

The Manassas NBP, naturally enough, comprises portions of

both these battlespaces, which, indeed, slightly overlap, though not

thank God to the extent those of the Peninsula do (on the

Virginia Peninsula, around Yorktown, you can hardly tell the

Revolutionary works from those added to them in 1861, when

indeed Yanks and Confederates alike reused and extended the

crumbling traces of Washingtons and Cornwallis field

fortifications). The hinge, as it were, between the two is the

intersection of what was, in 1861 and 1862, the Warrenton

Turnpike (now US 29, the Lee Highway) with the Sudley Road

(Virginia 234), northwest of the Henry House Hill.

That was the hinge on which the doors of fate swung at First

Manassas as well. But a hinge is not a door; and more must be said,

first, to explain what happened here.

If the levies on both sides at First Manassas were raw all

green together, on both sides, as Mr Lincoln pointed out to


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General McDowell so were the commanders. P. G. T.

Beauregard and Irvin McDowell each hit upon the same overall

battle plan: attack the enemys left. On a flat map, the collision of

such plans would have interacted to create, simply, a waltz, with

both armies rights swinging around a central position. What

changed things, of course, is that Manassas is not a flat map. It is

broken ground, ridges and fords and runs (a Virginianism for what

we Americans call creeks, freshwater rivulets not to be confused

with creeks in the British sense).

What set the whole thing up, in turn, was the preliminary

skirmish it was no more than that, though in those innocent days

it seemed big and gaudy enough to merit the title of battle the

Battle of Blackburns Ford. (If Jackson made his name at First

Manassas, Longstreet made his at the Ford.) The Ford is outside

the present confines of the Manassas NBP, being east and a little

south of the park; the Bull Run Regional Park encompasses the

Blackburns Ford site. The reason, in turn, that Federal forces

driving south from Centreville attempted to force the ford was

that to its south, in turn, was the strategically important rail

junction at Manassas Junction. Railways, of course, follow the

contours of topography, as indeed do the human settlements and

commercial depots they serve; so once again, the land and its very

shape are master here.

The Confederate success in holding off the Federals at


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Blackburns Ford, in turn, brought McDowells army out to try to

flank and overwhelm the Fords defenders, swinging to their left

and enveloping them. This entirely predictable threat, and the

strategic value of Manassas Junction as part of the rail net, in its

own turn drew Beauregards and Joe Johnstons armies to the

banks of Bull Run, the rill that Blackburn forded.

The Confederates were on the strategic defensive in most

regards: while the mere secession of Virginia meant that

Confederate armies were operating on the very outskirts of the

Northern capital, the immediate strategic objectives that fed the

armies into the grinder at this place and at this time were the

Southern defense or Union capture of the rail node at Manassas

Junction. Tactically, neither force was squarely on the tactical

defensive, in that Beauregards plan, to which J. E. Johnston,

arriving later, assented (although Johnston ranked Old Borey, he

declined overall command in favor of letting the man who planned

the action be the man to execute it), was to engage in offensive

operations against the Union left in the service of the overall

strategic defensive goals.

To recap: McDowells overall purpose was to get around the

Confederates and flank and defeat them, so that he could proceed

to Manassas Junction. Beauregards overall purpose was to spin the

Union left facing his right yet further away from that

objective. Thus the mirrored plans of attack on the enemy left.


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The Manassas NBP, dotted though it is with monuments, so

preserves the ground as to make this clear with the merest sweep

of the eye from the Henry House Hill Visitors Center. Facing

ENE from the Henrys farmstead, one looks down on the same axis

as the road to Centreville and Washington, DC. The ground falls

away to Bull Run, and the inflowing of the confluent tributaries of

Holkums Branch and Youngs Branch. Bull Run is fordable (the

Lewis and Ball Fords) on the right as you look ENE from the

Henry House, and it is spanned by a stone bridge that carried the

Warrenton Turnpike of the day across the Run upstream of those

fords, to your left. The topography funnels any frontal or even

mildly oblique assault straight towards this key position on the

Henry House hilltop. Behind this cardinal position is the Sudley

Road; immediately to your left is its intersection with the

Warrenton Turnpike, now Virginia 234, at the Stone House.

The Confederates from the start possessed a secured defensive

position, then, the literal high ground, and interior lines of

communication. The Union response was to mount a diversionary

assault across the Stone Bridge that spanned Bull Run and carried

the Turnpike, pinning the Confederates down while the bulk of

McDowells forces snuck around the Confederate left, northwest

towards Sudley Springs and then down the Sudley Road and onto

the ENE / WSW running high ground formed by Matthews Hill,

Buck Hill, and Dogan Ridge.


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Manassas NBP succeeds as only a few battlegrounds do in

making these operational considerations immediately clear to view.

From here where the Stonewall BDE was to hold its ground, it is

manifest that this is the key to the position, just as it is evident

from the other side of the bridge, as it was to McDowell, that the

only possible choices are to flank the Confederate left by coming

south down the Sudley Road, or to carry the Henry House Hill by

assault.

Thus, the overarching duty in getting a sense of what happened

here in the baking summer of 1861, at First Manassas, is to begin

with the Henry House Hill walking tour. It is the ground on which

the culminating scene of the drama played out. The Union right

had not rolled up the Confederate left with its flanking manuvre

(a device Jackson could use with hardened troops at

Chancellorsville, in after years, but sheer folly to ask of green

troops under such commanders as Burnside and Willcox and

Heintzelman, and even those under a yet-untried Sherman); but

neither had the Confederate right been able to advance upon the

Union left flank.

Inevitably, the key position of the Henrys farmhouse, now

scarred by shot and shell, had to be carried, and the Confederates

and their artillery, Imbodens in particular driven from this high

ground that, so long as the Southerners held it, left the Federal

troops hopelessly exposed in their progress towards it. Weight of


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numbers and poor generalship Beauregard was incapable of

adjusting his now-unworkable plan in the face of events had

forced the Confederates in upon themselves. Brigadier General

Barnard Bee, of South Carolina, had seen the central importance of

the Henry House Hill position, and chosen it as the rallying point

for his rattled troops: There stands Jackson like a stone wall! Let

us rally behind the Virginians! It was his last command.

The Walking Tour around the Henry House Hill shows the

sudden unfolding of the event:

the Union artillery positions (Ricketts being the

exemplar) and their Confederate counterparts, where the

cannon dueled and sharpshooters tried to tip the balance

by picking off artillerymen and artillery horses;

the Confederate forward positions and artillery

batteries placed to sweep Matthews Hill across the road in

the event of just such a flanking movement as McDowell

intended, emplacements abandoned as the blue tide rushed

onwards with mounting hope;

the rally points in the interim, and Wade Hamptons

desperate bid to buy time with his Legion of Carolinians,

there at Robinsons Lane, and again in a deadly open field

where Johnston and Beauregard led from the front,

Johnston personally taking command of the shot-to-hell 4th

Alabama;


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and then, on the duke of Wellingtons beloved reverse

slope, waiting with a deadly patience just over the crest of

the hill, Jackson, and the position held by the brigade that

would ever after be known as the Stonewall Brigade. The

Union wave came on, and like a wave dashed against a

rock, or a stone wall, broke, recoiled, and ebbed.

The 33d Virginia counter-attacked the Union artillery under

Griffin, and slaughtered the crews with a point blank volley. New

York Zouaves mounted a final counter-effort, and failed. The last,

wavering remnants of the original Federal flanking movement that

was now relegated to a supporting role, the diversionary frontal

assault having with wars mad logic become the main effort: Maine

and Vermont troops under O. O. Howard, a pious New Englander

better at praying than command: emerged on Chinn Ridge, behind

the Henry House and to the west of the Sudley Road, and were

shot to rag dolls by Confederate gunnery. They broke, and the

whole Union Army broke with them. It was the turning point.

The broader context is afforded by the Stone Bridge Walking

Tour, which begins at the point where Shanks Evans, with Rob

Wheats Louisiana Tigers, Sloans 4th South Carolina, and

Alexanders and Terrys Troops, 30th Virginia CAV the latter

Troop being Old Boreys scouts, to the extent he had any

suddenly saw the Union diversionary assault for what it was, and

headed, as the Walking Tour then heads, up to where the Sudley


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Road crosses the juncture of Matthews Hill and Dogans Ridge.

There he was able to hold and check the advance units of the

Federal flanking movement which is how the diversionary assault

on the Confederate center, there at the Henry farmhouse, became

the main assault, and the grand plan McDowell had formulated to

flank Beauregard right out of his boots came to nothing. Man

proposes. The trail then continues down the Sudley Road to the

Henry House hill, and down its killing-ground slope back to the

Stone Bridge.

The Henry House Hill walking tour is about a mile in length,

the Stone Bridge tour is some five miles worth. Self-guided, the

tours generally rely upon interpretive signs with push-activated

recordings, quite well done, that tell what happened at given spots.

The Henry House tour loop may also be walked with a ranger-

historian guide at scheduled intervals, taking about half an hour [as

of 2002].

The Second Manassas portion of the 5,000 acre park is

considerably less compact, as was the battle itself. In the brutal

heat of a late Virginia August, Old Jack opened the ball by

ambushing one of John Popes columns at Brawners Farm, west

and a little south of the earlier battlefield, as the falsely secure

Yanks slogged down the Warrenton Pike towards an expected

concentration at Centreville. Once again, the warlike Calvinist

deacon had mystified, misled, and surprised his enemy, and Lees


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orders to suppress the miscreant Pope were coming to fruition.

Pope as usual, with his headquarters where his hindquarters

ought have been took the bait, and hastened reinforcements to

Groveton hamlet.

The whole course of the battle was implicit in this opening

move. Gibbons Iron Brigade was amongst those engaged on 28

August. Gibbons rashly assumed that his men were being subjected

to minor harassment by cavalry and horse artillery, nothing more,

and ordered a flanking movement by the 2nd Wisconsin. They

proved the hard way that this was no skirmish when they came

face to face with Stonewalls waiting infantry. The rest of the Iron

Brigade was sent into line, and then simply left there without

orders; and Private George Fairfield of the 7th Wisconsin came to

an unpleasant realization:

My God, what a slaughter. No one seemed to know the object

of the fight .

That, in microcosm, was what befell the ill-led Federals for the

next three days.

Why were the armies here yet again? Because of Federal

mistakes, a whole series of them, many induced by Marse Robert

and Old Jack. In brief, McClellan and his Army of the Potomac

had been paralyzed and this was partly self-induced on the

Peninsula. Pope had been given the makeshift, thrown-together

Army of Virginia with which to at least threaten the overland


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route towards Richmond, Little Macs amphibious end-run having

so spectacularly failed. Then both men were superseded by Henry

Halleck, nicknamed, in a burst of Homeric irony, Old Brains. It

was Hallecks intention to unite the Potomac and Virginia armies

south of DC, threatening the Gordonsville rail node, and

protecting Washington by at least seeming to be ready for an

overland campaign due south against Richmond.

Lees typically audacious response was to send Stonewall his

reputation needing burnishing after the Seven Days, when he had

not performed to the standard hed set himself through his

textbook campaigns in the Shenandoah Valley in the springtime

to buffalo Pope before Pope and McClellan could unite. This was a

clear signal of faith in II Corps and its commander, and Jackson had

failings to avenge. It was an audacious plan, requiring a commander

who was at his best when on the longest possible leash, and there

was no more independent or audacious subordinate in all Lees

army than Thomas J Jackson.

He flanked Pope, got between Pope and Washington, astride

his supply lines, plundered and burnt millions of dollars worth of

supplies and rations, and got Pope to chase after him with no

regard to common sense. The Federals as a whole reacted to

borrow an acid phrase of Mr Lincolns, speaking of Heintzelman in

Tennessee the next year like a stunned duck. This included Mr

Lincoln, his cabinet, his War Department, Halleck, Pope, and


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McClellan.

Thus the return to Manassas, where Jackson suckered Pope

into attacking him.

The next morning, 29 August 1862, Jacksons II Corps (not yet

formally thus named, but here so called for convenience),

Stonewalls old Valley Army now augmented and in the best

shape of its storied history, took up a defensive position along an

unfinished railroad line, a graded cut that was a defensive

earthwork made to order. (Mr Sewards irrepressible conflict had

managed, however inevitable it was, to catch most of the country

by surprise: here, as at Gettysburg, and at numerous other battles,

warfighters found themselves deployed along unfinished

commercial projects that were interrupted by a war the captains of

industry had never imagined would actually come.)

Arrayed against them, concentrated in the NW quadrant

marked off by the Sudley Road / Warrenton Turnpike

intersection, anchored on Dogan Ridge, were Popes men, whose

Order of Battle was already beginning to sound like a roll-call of

commanders whom Jackson and Lee had already beaten and

humiliated on other fields: Sigel, Milroy, Commissary Banks, and

other victims of Old Jacks Valley campaign; Porter and

McDowell.

Jackson was riding high. The Stonewall Brigade was in the II

Corps line of battle, Branch and Dorsey Pender and Gregg and


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Early commanded hardened troops (although Taliaferro and Ewell

had both been wounded the preceding evening), Willie Pegram

was there with his cannoneers, Fitz Lee and W. H. F. Lee had their

horsemen at the ready, the Gallant Pelhams horse artillery dashed

into position, raining iron upon the Yankees, and Jeb Stuart, who

had sat his horse with the same lan at First Manassas as CO of

the 1st Virginia Cavalry, now lorded it splendidly as commander of

the whole Cavalry Division, roaring fighting songs through his

cinnamon beard, with his personal mounted banjo player, Sweeney,

at his side. This was the II Corps-to-be, Jacksons Wing, at the

height of its power, the Platonic ideal of Jacksons command made

flesh, the subject of a hundred paintings.

Incredibly, yet characteristically, the bombastic John Pope

obstinately threw uncoordinated frontal assault after

uncoordinated frontal assault, piecemeal, against the hard-bitten II

Corps in their dug-in positions. He also left his left flank in the air,

just east of Groveton. He could see only Jackson to his front, the

bait and even in itself, the poisoned bait, itself dealing death to

his men in the trap.

By the afternoon of the 29th, that trap was in place. I Corps (as

it would become) under Dutch Longstreet, with R. E. Lee keeping

a close eye on his most dilatory commander, had poured through

Thoroughfare Gap and had deployed on Jacksons right, the Union

left, effectively able to pivot upon command at right angles to the


47/68

line II Corps had maintained. I Corps was in a position now, from

Stuarts Hill and the Cundiff area, the southwest corner of todays

Park, to roll the Federals up. Popes Army of Virginia was now

about to be enfiladed, with Lees Army of Northern Virginia

forming a V inside which and against only one stroke of which

Pope was directing his troops or, rather, his victims.

Typically, Longstreet wasted the remainder of the light fussing

about, getting his troops disposed just so, and leaving II Corps to

bear the galling, if doomed, Federal attacks, still being delivered in

spasms. (Jacksons ammunition was low, but his men knew that

they were expected required to continue fighting, if it came to

nothing but rocks, fists, and bayonets hand to hand: as in places it

did, to A. P. Hills incoherent fury with Longstreet and Jackson

both.)

Typically also, Lee suggested that Longstreet get a move on,

but declined to give a positive order to that effect.

And typically again, Pope was oblivious: elements of Morells

Division, the 1st Division of V Corps (FitzJohn Porters), early

arrivals without McClellan from the recently-beaten Army of

the Potomac, were engaged as early as 1100 on 29 August by D. R.

Joness division of I Corps, ANV (Andersons, Toombs /

Bennings, and Draytons Brigades, Georgians and one South

Carolina regiment), and other units of V Corps under Porter were

engaged all day in fitful clashes. At sunset, remarkably yet again,


48/68

typically Hood even seized the moment for a devastating twilight

flank attack against elements of Porters Corps. Pope nonetheless

refused to believe that the rest of Lees army had arrived, and

concentrated blindly on Jackson. He got nowhere.

The situation, then, on the 30th was thus. II Corps, bloodied

but unbowed, grimly awaited the Federals from positions along the

unfinished rail track, their backs braced against Stony Ridge. Part

of II Corps line primarily Starkes Division (now under Stafford,

Starke having taken over for the wounded Taliaferro), the Fourth

Brigade of Jacksons old division, consisting of the 1st, 2d, 9th, 10th,

and 15th Louisiana and Coppens Louisiana Battalion occupied

the Deep Cut portion of the railway grade, an entrenchment that

would have done credit to the Western Front in 1916.

I Corps was in place: since before noon on the 29th, it had been

in position, Hoods Texans first and foremost, on either side of the

ENE-trending Warrenton Pike, just east of Pageland Lane, today

the westernmost boundary of the Park; with Cadmus Wilcoxs

Alabamians echeloned to his left rear and Kempers Virginians

echeloned to Hoods right and rear, extending the line south of the

present day Park bounds. Joness Georgians, who had clawed

Porters V Corps severely the preceding afternoon, extended the

line still further to the south, on Kempers right, straddling the

Manassas Gap Railway that runs a kilometer and more outside the

southern limits of todays Park. Beverly Robertsons Virginian


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cavalry (the 2d, 6th, 7th, 12th, and 17th), sent by Stuart for the

purpose from II Corps, screened towards Manassas itself.

At 1830 hours or so on 29 August, Hatchs 1st Division, III

Corps of the Federal Army of Virginia (poor old Irvin

McDowells, he being back at the scene of his earlier martyrdom),

another detachment from McClellans Potomac Army, had

engaged Hoods Texans, only to be raked with artillery fire from I

Corps gunners. They had fallen back unsupported, and at that

very moment, Porter was ordered by Pope, still willfully blind to

Longstreets presence (and unwilling to listen to Porters reports of

it), to move to Groveton for a final grand assault, the next

morning, on what Pope somehow saw as a beaten and retreating

Stonewall Jackson.

This unfathomable idiocy finally freed even the cautious

Longstreet from any restraints.

At 1200 high and fatal noon on 30 August, 1862, the Union

troops began to move to their jump-off positions for the attack on

Jackson. Reynolds Pennsylvania Reserves (III Corps under

McDowell: these included the brigade of one George Gordon

Meade, whom destiny awaited elsewhere) were shifted to Chinn

Ridge, which extends on a NE / SW axis from the SW corner of

the intersection of the Turnpike and the Sudley Road. Facing it to

the east across Sudley Road was the wreckage of the Henry

farmhouse, where Jackson had made his name and the Confederacy


50/68

had won its battle the year before.

Three hours later, at 1500, the grand assault on Jackson line

began, all along the railway cut. Butterfields 3d Brigade, from

Porters V Corps the 12th, 17th, and 44th New York, the 16th

Michigan, and the 83d Pennsylvania and Hatchs 1st Division,

from McDowells III Corps, composed of Sullivans, Doubledays,

and Marsena Patricks New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, the 2d

US Sharpshooters, and Gibbons dread Iron Brigade, the 2d, 6th,

and 7th Wisconsin and the 19th Indiana (Westerners grimly

determined to show the Eastern troops how it was done), fought

their way forward to Jacksons front, with Sykes 2d Division the

Regular Army regiments from Porters V Corps in support: only

to be torn to shreds by enfilading artillery fire from their left, the

southwards: Longstreets artillery.

Porters whole V Corps is at risk; Pope pulls Reynolds off the

high ground of Chinns Ridge to support Porter. This leaves only

Warrens New Yorkers out of Sykes Division and a brigade of

Reynolds Pennsylvania Reserves as the only Federal troops south

of the Pike.

The Yanks are committed now, their flank in the air and

nothing but tissue paper south of the Warrenton Turnpike. At

1530, Longstreet finally lets slip his dogs of war. Hoods Texans

advance along the axis of the Turnpike, and all I Corps pivots off

of the joinder with Jacksons right: the door is slamming shut, the


51/68

trap is sprung. Hoods Division (or Evans: Shanks Evans, too, is

revisiting certain glimpses of the moon this day) as a whole is the

Texas Brigade: 1st, 4th, and 5th Texas, 18th Georgia, and

Hamptons Legion; Whitings (or Laws) Brigade: 4th Alabama,

6th North Carolina, 2d Mississippi; and 11th Mississippi; Evans

Brigade under Stevens: 17th, 18th, 22d, and 23d South Carolina,

and Holcombes Legion.

The rest of I Corps swings round in a great sickle-cut, a

scything motion to the NNE that reaps a harvest of Federal dead:

these are:

Wilcoxs Division: Wilcoxs Brigade of the 8th, 9th, 10th, and

11th Alabama, Pryors Floridians (the 2d, 5th, and 8th Florida with

the 3d Virginia and 14th Alabama), Featherstons Mississippians,

the 2d, 12th, 16th, and 19th;

Kempers Division: his brigade, under Montgomery D. Corse,

the 1st, 7th, 11th, 17th, and 24th Virginia, and his Sharpshooters,

Jenkins Brigade, the 1st, 2nd, 5th, and 6th South Carolina and the

Palmetto Sharpshooters, Picketts Brigade under Eppa Hunton, the

8th, 18th, 19th, 28th, and 56th Virginia;

D. R. Joness Division: Andersons Brigade: 1st, 7th, 8th, 9th,

and 11th Georgia,

Toombs Brigade under Benning: the 2d, 15th, 17th, and 20th

Georgia; and Draytons Brigade, the 15th South Carolina and 50th

and 51st Georgia; and


52/68

The division of Dick Anderson, Lees choice, later in the war,

after Jacksons death, to succeed him should the worst happen:

Extra Billy Mahones Brigade, the 6th, 12th, 16th, and 41st

Virginia, Wrights Brigade, 3d, 22d, and 48th Georgia and the 44th

Alabama; Armisteads Brigade, 9th, 14th, 38th, 53d, and 57th

Virginia, and the 5th Virginia Battalion.

This is what was bearing down on the Federals, rolling up their

flank. Within half an hour, Warrens position has been wholly

overrun. Pope desperately shifts Ricketts 2d Division of

McDowells III Corps (Army of Virginia) New Yorkers under

Duryea and Tower, Pennsylvanians, Massachusetts men, Indiana

troops and (West) Virginians under Stiles and Thoburn to

Chinn Ridge, where Schurzs and Schencks hapless Germans of

Sigels I Corps join them. Sykes and Reynolds try to make a stand

on the Henry House Hill, while Heintzelmans III Corps (Army of

the Potomac another rich source of fatal battlefield confusion)

and Renos IX Corps try to stave off Jacksons surge forward from

his positions, north of the Pike. They are facing too much, no

matter the beating Old Jacks men have taken for two days now:

Ewells Division under Lawton is there, Earlys Virginians,

Lawtons own Georgians under Douglass, Hays Louisiana Brigade,

Trimbles Georgians, Carolinians, and 15th Alabama, and Powell

Hills whole Light Division, with Branchs Tarheels, Greggs South

Carolinians, Penders Tarheels, Archers Tennesseeans, Thomas


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Georgians, Campbells and Taliaferros Virginians, Staffords

Brigade of Louisianans, and the Stonewall Brigade itself.

It has not been easy: Taliaferro and Ewell wounded, Baylor and

Botts dead, Neff dead, Dabney and Goldsborough wounded,

Spencer killed, Forbes wounded, Field wounded, McGrady

wounded, two successive commanders of the 1st SC Rifles (Orrs)

under Gregg killed (Marshall and Ledbetter), Edwards and

McGowan both down, Trimble and Forno wounded, Fulton dead

and these are merely field-grade and general officers. But their

men are if anything the hotter, now, to avenge them.

Eleven regiments of Jebs Virginia cavalry are running riot, too:

Fitzhugh Lee is on the loose, and Bev Robertson could almost be

foxhunting back home. By 1800 hours, the Union positions on

Chinn Ridge have fallen and the Union is in dire straits on the

Henry House Hill. Sykes and Reynolds hold, just, until Stevens

Division, from Renos IX Corps, relieves them. The light fails, and

what is left of Popes army escapes, blood-boltered, towards

Centreville and Washington.

Of some 75,696 Union troops engaged, 1,724 have been killed,

8,372 wounded and 5,968 have simply melted away, missing.

Confederate casualties, of the 48,527 engaged, are about even to the

Federal toll in killed and wounded: 1,481 and 7,627, respectively.

Only 89 are missing as the smoke clears, though: a significant

pointer to how the day has gone. The Federals are in retreat, many


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have flown, and the Confederates are masters of the field.

The Second Manassas Walking Tour, and its Deep Cut

extension, about even in length with the First Manassas Stone

Bridge tour, takes in:

Brawners Farm,

the Railroad Grade and the Deep Cut,

the Stone House whence Pope watched Nemesis stoop upon

him and where the wounded and dying were piteously brought,

Groveton and its Confederate Cemetery,

the New York Monuments on Chinn Ridge, where the 5th and

10th New York were wrecked, the 5th losing 123 men in 5 minutes

the worst single-engagement infantry losses on either side in the

whole War and the Chinn House, site of a doomed last stand

that did buy time for some other, fleeing Federals,

Chinn Ridge, and

the Henry House hill. The 12-mile self-guided driving tour takes

in the same spots.

You may now have some idea of what those sites mean.

Finally, though, if you can, you ought see the whole of both

battlefields as Jeb saw it, or FitzJohn Porter, or Buford, or Lee

himself: the better part of the Park is accessible by a horseback trail

that takes in all these fateful spots and more besides.

Manassas NBP is open during daylight hours every day. The

Museum is closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas, but otherwise


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open from 0830 to 1700 daily, with extended hours in the summer.

The Henry Hill Visitor Center, which contains the quite decent

museum, also provides a quarter-hour or so orientation film every

half hour that may well be worth your time, and the bookstore is

occasionally worthwhile; the other Visitor Center, at Stuart Hill,

is open on summer weekends only. A three-day pass to the park is

$3.00, but theres little point in not investing in a Parks Pass for the

whole country if youre going to visit National Parks and

Monuments at all.

But then you may ask, Why? Why bother with this place at

all, and its history? Or if one bothers, why here and not elsewhere?

Partly, I would reply, because two very different events

occurred here, and both their common and their distinguishing

characteristics are significant. And because what happened here,

irrespective of the quotidian particulars, implicates some universal

things. Here occurred events of the greatest moment: honor and

dishonor, mercy and violence, genius and folly, gallantry and

bravery and fear and cowardice, too, which is a wholly different

thing and sacrifice. Here great issues were joined, and great men

named and nameless fought, and many died.

But why here? Even if these things matter, why does this place

matter? Leave aside the historical chances. Think only this. The

Texas writer John Graves has wisely said that the land shapes us,

and goes on shaping the hell out of us who are left. It shapes


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events as well. The men who joined battle here were shaped by

their respective lands, and the battles themselves were shaped and

influenced by the insuperable constraints of terrain. And the

Manassas NBP does one of the finest jobs of any such site in

preserving and making self-evident to all the influence of terrain,

while balancing the dictates of accessibility for those who wish to

learn more. That is Why Here. Go and see.


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MCMXLIV:Nos a Gulielmo victi victoris patriamliberavimus:6 June 2011

On this day a phrase that calls up immediately, and without

ones consciously willing it, Churchills Action This Day

memoranda: aptly on this day, then, seven-and-sixty years gone,

the narrow seas and the Norman coast were the balance in which

the world was weighed.

In that weighing and meting, the distant heirs of Brennus threw

a sword upon the scales to balance them.

Between Ouistreham and St-Aubin-sur-Mer, in Calvados, the

East Riding sent its sons to fight as they had fought at Blenheim; to

fight now beside the sons of South Lancs, the Excellers of Gallipoli,


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Clem Attlees old regiment, and beside the Suffolks garlanded with

the laurels and roses of Minden.

The Lincolnshires were at Sword Beach also, not yet the Royal

Lincolnshires, yet bearing battle honours from Malplaquet to

Bunkers Hill, from Noseys campaign in the Peninsula to Arras,

from Norway and Dunkirk and Italy. They were brigaded with the

KOSB, a Minden Regiment, with its memories of Killiecrankie and

Culloden, Chitral and Mons; and with the wolfhounds of the

Royal Ulster Rifles, who had answered to Wellington at Badajoz.

Warwickshire, Norfolk, and Salop the KSLI were there, the

Midlands and East Anglia and the Welsh Marches shoulder to

shoulder, and honours between that reached back to the Boyne and

Salamanca, Sevastopol and Cambrai and Dunkirk.

There were Sappers and Gunners and Hussars, and Lord Lovat

and Piper Millin and the Commandos, including Kieffers French

beside HM Jollies, the Royal Marines.

The pattern was repeated at Gold: DLI from the County

Palatine of Durham, Green Howards, East Yorks, Devons and

Hants and Dorsets together, the South Wales Borderers and the

Glosters already Glorious if not yet so named, brigaded with the

men of Essex; Royal Marine Commandos, Dragoon Guards,

Lancers and Sappers and the KRRC, Sherwood Rangers, Beds and

Herts and elements of the Border Regiment.

Between Sword and Gold was Juno, where 3rd Canadian


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Infantry Division and the Royal Marines showed their mettle:

Highlanders from Ottawa and Ontario, the Fort Garry Horse, the

Royal Winnipeg Rifles and the Qubcois Rgiment de la

Chaudire and all the manhood of Canada from the Atlantic

provinces to the great West.... It was to be the Canadians who

penetrated the furthest towards objective when the day had ended.

Every regiment, like every college and every university, every

parish and every communion, has its particular ethos. The

Americans did not admit that they possessed a regimental system

on the British model; yet they did. Their 29th Division, at Omaha

Beach, was drawn from National Guard units the Americans

Territorials from states that had been on opposing sides in the

American Civil War. Pennsylvanian units could boast battle

honours from First and Second Bull Run, or Antietam; their

Virginian counterparts in the Division had the same honours, yet

for First and Second Manassas and for Sharpsburg. The 116th

Infantry Regiment, the regiment of the Bedford Boys, was at

Omaha; 3rd Battalion had roots in the colonial militia of the Old

Dominion, yet its service to the United States had not been

uninterrupted, not least between 1861 and 1865. Its lineage was

that of the Stonewall Brigade, II Corps, Army of Northern

Virginia, and the spirit of its great commander seemed to hover

over it even upon a strand in France.

Such stories could be repeated of every Allied formation upon


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that memorable day, from the USAAF and RAF and the Naval

contingent, to the Poles waiting to aid in exploiting the coming

breakout; from private soldiers in the US 8th and 12th Regiments

of Infantry, to 4th Divisions second in command at Utah Beach,

Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jnr.

Bombardier JA Hill, 4th Airlanding Anti-Tank Bty, RA, from

Walsall, died that day.

Major AM Onions, 101st Bty, 20thAnti-Tank Regiment, RA,

never returned to Moseley, Birmingham.

The studious Captain JH White, South Lancs, attached to 5th

Bn, the East Yorkshire Regiment, was killed in action.

L/Cpl John Dickinson, 1st Bn Kings Own Scottish Borderers,

was 28 years in age when he died upon D-Day, leaving his wife

Nellie a widow.

Pte HR Crosswell, 2d Bn the Glosters, also left a widow new-

made upon that day.

Major Richard Gough Talbot Baines of the Hampshires died at

the age of thirty years, and sleeps in Bayeux War Cemetery with

over sixty of his fellow officers and men who fell that day, from a

lieutenant whod won the MC to a nineteen-year-old private

soldier who should never see twenty.

And the roll could be called over forever and we not sufficing

in honouring these men.

What we can do, and must do, is to remember.


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They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;

They fell with their faces to the foe.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.


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Aphorisms &

Observations


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For four centuries now, the American people have resigned

themselves to natural disasters and acts of God: floods, prairie fires,

blizzards, tornados, hurricanes, dust bowls, epidemics, academics,

lawyers, and politicians.

Only a very few things in this world do not yield themselves to

rational economic analysis: war, the vices, courage and the other

virtues, music, religion, love, patriotism, and, most significantly,

cricket. Naturally, these are the things that most matter:

particularly cricket. Its really quite vexing.

This side of the Kingdom of God upon Earth, it is a melancholy

human fact that those who beat their swords into plowshares end

up doing the plowing for those who kept their swords.


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It is a pity that fagging is done away with (being four years Mr

Camerons senior, I tend to meditate upon the world of good it

should have done him), and a greater pity that National Service is

a thing of the past, for it means that we have those who seek to

rule who have never know what it is first to serve.

As a 1928 Prayer Book Anglican, a conservative Democrat, and a

slightly schismatic Austrian with heretically monetarist leanings,

Im not overly fond of social conservatives though I dont go so

far as Wemyss does in calling that an oxymoron. (Vegetarian

chili, nowthatsan oxymoron.) But when I hear people yapping

about how the religious Right has never been right and never

accomplished anything good, I do tend to mention the abolition of

slavery.

The C of E has gone from being the Tory party at prayer to being


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the outreach department of NuLabour and whatever likeminded

socialists it can round up.

But violence never solvedanything. The hell it hasnt. It wasnt

Wedgwoods pottery that stopped the slave trade: it was the

opened gunports of the Royal Navy. No speeches not even

Lincolns preserved the Union and ended slavery in America.

The application of violence on a mass scale did that, just as the

application of violence on a mass scale gave the colonies their

independence. And Britain and America didnt liberate Dachau,

Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald with pamphlets and diplomatic

pressure.

Race is, in America, what class is in Britain.

Class is to the British what race is to the Americans: the dirty little

secret that mustnt be mentioned, and must be spoken of


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obsessively.

Poverty is relative. My relatives can attest to mine.

Never trust a man whom ones Clumbers disapprove.

Public life in this country is too damn dominated by people whod

read more if only their lips didnt get so tired.

A preference for local and organic provender which I share is

notmeant to be a substitute religion.

People, you dont get extra credit for doing what its your duty to


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do in the first place.

An intellectual is someone who bangs on about Congreve and

Wycherley and Udall and Wilde ... and refuses to admit that

Morecambe and Wise, Ken Dodd, Tommy Cooper, and Frankie

Howerd were bloody funny.

An academic is someone who writes and lectures aboutwhy

Wilde and Sheridan and Shaw were funny ... but doesnt get the

joke when its Humph or Horne or Marsden or Kenneth Williams.

Of all Americas natural resources, its richest is an inexhaustible

vein of irony.

nd of this sampler


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Excerpts from The Transatlantic Disputations

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Transcript of Excerpts from The Transatlantic Disputations