Sunset on Barlow’s Knoll
Yesterday I arrived in Gettysburg ahead of the rededication later today of the flagpole on Barlow’s Knoll – the flagpole erected by the veterans of the 17th CVI to mark the spot where Lt. Colonel Fowler was killed on the first day at Gettysburg. I spent a little time driving around the fields, relatively amazed at how busy it was on Steinwehr Avenue – the restaurants, the ice cream shops, the souvenir shops. I don’t usually come here at this time of year because it is so busy.
Watching the crowds, it reminded me of this passage that Richard Rubin wrote in his excellent book Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends and Ghosts to Count. This is a World War I book, a companion piece to his earlier (and also excellent) The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War. What Rubin wrote about France seemed to be appropriate here as well.
“I cannot deny it: War tourism can be a strange pursuit. No: By definition, it is a strange pursuit. If you can dash through trenches, poke in and out of bunkers, swing down to blockhouses on a vine, you must as a matter of course possess the ability to momentarily blot from your mind the knowledge that men died and killed in those places—horribly, gruesomely and far too young. That ability enables you to delight in the discovery of a shell that could have once—could still—blow you to pieces; or a bullet, even though it may have passed through someone else’s body before coming to rest in the dirt; or a button, even though it may have fallen off the tunic of a 28-year-old father of three who breathed his last on that very spot. Or it enables you to feel blasé about spotting a bottle that some teenager may have swigged from five minutes before a red-hot piece of shrapnel tore through his heart, because it’s the seventeenth bottle you’ve seen that day. It’s not your fault. You are alive; these things happened a hundred years ago.
But you are a human being. At some point, that ability will probably desert you, even momentarily, and you will experience a sense of—well, maybe not guilt; but obligation. You may walk slowly through cemeteries, peruse each marker you pass. You may scrutinize memorials—village, individual—and read the names out loud. You may make connections: between naval guns and deported families, pigs’ feet and the destruction of a continent. And you will, just as certainly, be unable to. Sooner or later, you will come to that understanding. All you can do, for certain, is look at things.”
Sunset found me at my favorite spot on the field – Barlow’s Knoll. Usually there are only a few people there at any time of the day, doing the 25 MPH drive-by, brake hard, read the tablet, drive off to the next one. Usually no one is there at this time of the day. Standing in the approaching darkness, then, quite alone except for thousands of rising fireflies, contemplating the maelstrom that occurred at this spot 155 years earlier, I had plenty of time to reflect on that passage by Rubin. We can look at things, for certain. We can look at the monuments, look at the tablets, look at the cannon, and sure, even look at the fireflies. But there is that overwhelming sense of obligation as well – if nothing else, an obligation to remember.