1. A story in two voices begins on 'one of the lovliest mornings that ever dawned upon New England Shores'

Neither Cutler Edson nor Eldad Rhodes lasted a year and a half with the 5th New Hampshire Volunteers, but they were among the regiment’s best diarists. Their diaries and letters convey what soldiers’ lives were like during the early days of the Civil War.

Cutler Edson

Edson was 41 when he enlisted as a company bugler. A Vermonter by birth, he lived and worked as a brick mason in Enfield, a western New Hampshire town notable for its thriving Shaker village. Rhodes, who joined the regiment three months after Edson, came from the New Hampshire North Country. He was born in Northumberland and was living in Lancaster when he enlisted at the age of 20. Lancaster was the seat of Coos County, the state’s northernmost, and had been the boyhood home of Edward E. Cross, colonel of the 5th New Hampshire.

The paths of Edson and Rhodes crossed in meaningful ways during and after the Civil War.

On Sept. 17, 1862, the 5th New Hampshire crossed Antietam Creek from its camp near the Pry house and marched to battle in the Sunken Road, now also known as Bloody Lane. Rhodes, a sergeant, was shot through the right lung there. Musicians like Edson often did double duty, burying the dead and tending to the wounded. After helping Rhodes from the battlefield to the Pry barn, Edson nursed him for weeks.

Though grateful to Edson, Rhodes had also been wounded at Malvern Hill 2½ months earlier and held surgeons in contempt. In hindsight, perhaps at Antietam their failure to probe his wound with a dirty scalpel saved his life. Eventually Edson took him to a military hospital in nearby Frederick, Md., where Rhodes’s brother Freedom, a captain in the 14th New Hampshire Volunteers, found him. Five months after the battle, Eldad was discharged. He went home to live northern New Hampshire but later moved to Claremont.

Edson stayed with the 5th but fell ill. In January 1863, he was discharged at the age of 43 and also wound up in Claremont.

On the surface at least, the two veterans’ postwar connection was a happy one. In 1882 the farmer Eldad Rhodes, then 41, married 26-year-old Abigail Edson, one of the five children of Cutler and Louisa Hoyt Edson. Cutler had died the previous year, but most likely this union would have pleased him. Edson was a Methodist Episcopalian, Rhodes a Congregationalist. Unlike most northerners who volunteered for the war, both men were also abolitionists. Cutler had been especially religious and often wrote in his diary of his love of God and his hope for the destruction of slavery, which he considered a national evil.

Eldad Rhodes (postwar photo), possibly on his wedding day.

Today the diaries and letters of these two soldiers are in the hands of their descendant, Fred Goodwin of Nampa, Idaho. He lent them to me, and I told the story of the Rhodes brothers, Eldad and Freedom, in Our War. The back-story of that chapter is here.

Together, the Edson-Rhodes papers follow the 5th New Hampshire’s fortunes from its formation in Concord in 1861 through early 1863. This includes the regiment’s role in Gen. George B. McClellan’s Peninsula campaign – the trip by steamer to Fortress Monroe, the siege of Yorktown, the building of the Grapevine Bridge over the Chickahominy River, the battle of Fair Oaks and the Seven Days battles. Edson and Rhodes were both at Antietam, of course, though not at Fredericksburg with the rest of the 5th.

I have arranged the material chronologically. These posts will not include every diary entry and the letters will be excerpted, but all that is substantive is here. Without omitting the flavor of camp life or its quotidian nature, I have cut repetitive material. I have added or fixed punctuation in some cases for clarity but otherwise left the papers as the Rhodes-Edson descendants transcribed them. I have written contextual material and personal identifications where I thought them helpful, but my purpose is to leave it to Edson and Rhodes to tell the story.

The account begins in Concord, New Hampshire’s capital, as the 5th New Hampshire, 1,000-plus men strong, prepares to cross the Merrimack River from its training camp on Concord Heights to downtown Concord. There they will board a train south. Col. Cross, a hardcore Democrat, had thumbed his nose at the Republican establishment by naming their first encampment Camp Jackson, after Andrew Jackson.

From Cutler Edson’s diary:

Sunday, Oct. 27: this has bin a very buisy day in camp. it has not seemed like Sunday. this evening went in to the Chaplins* tent and had plenty of singing and he offered prayer. it was realy reviving. probably the last that we shal here on this encampment. I yet feel it good to trust in God.

[*Elijah R. Wilkins of Lisbon, N.H., was the 5th’s chaplain.]

Monday Oct. 28: at about 5 oc A.M. we left Camp Jackson for Concord Citty where we ware quartered for the knight, Some in one place and some in another. it was my lot with about 20 others to be quartered in the mayors office in the citty hall where we had a very comfortable place and got a very little sleep.

Tuesday Oct. 29: arose at 4 oc and made preparations for a start. every thing being put to rights, we ware marched to the Depot where we ware comfortably seeted in the cars and in the midst of Thousands of Spectators who wished us all success and prosperity and asked the blessing of God upon us. it was one of the lovliest mornings that ever dawned upon New England Shores. about ¼ before 8 we started with all our luggage horses waggons and all in the whole making between 30 and 40 cars. the most of our boys were in good spirits but there ware some that ware sorry they had enlisted. We went as far as Atkins point in Coneticut in the cars where we took a steam boat and went threw long I. sound.

We pased N.Y. Citty to our right and landed at Jersey Citty a little after sunris.

Lithograph of the Cooper Shop in Philadelphia

Wednesday the 30: We left this place about 10 oc in the cars and arrived at Philidelphia about 6 where we had the grandest reseption that we rec’d in all our journey. They have an institution here called the Cooper Shop institution* where they feed all the soldiers that go threw here whether to or from the war. we were provided with plenty of Bred cold meat pickels and coffee which we rec’d with thankfulness. I never shal forget the kindness that we rec’d there and the sympathy they seamed for us.

we ware in the citty till about 12 oc befor we got our luggage re-loaded and redy for a start and there ware thousands in the streats at that late houre, men women and children bidding us Gods spead, the women taking us by the hand and cautioning us to be carefull of our selves, and the kisses we rec’d from little girls maid me think of those I left behind. the people of Philidelphia seam to realise for what we have left our quiet homes and come off down here.

[*William M, Cooper, a Philadelphia merchant, conceived of this friendly way-station for soldiers. It opened on May 26, 1861, at Cooper’s storefront on Ostego Street. Its formal name was the Cooper Shop Volunteer Refreshment Saloon. Cooper ran it throughout the war.]

Thursday, Oct. 31: we got into Baltimore about 8 oc this morning. saw the bullet holes in the roof of the Depot where the Mass Boys shot at the rebels when they pas threw.* there is now a gard stationed in the depot to protect our troops and likewise there is picket guards placed all along the rail rode from there to Washington and troops also for our protection. We arrived at Bladensburg Md about dark, where 6 miles this side of Washington on the same ground where the NH 2nd were drilled here.

we left the cars and marched on to the ground and commanded to halt and make our selves comfortable as we could for the knight without any supper with out any covering but the Blue sky and nothing beneath but the Cold earth. but in this I complaned not for it was the best accomedations  we could have under the circumstances.

we found 3 Regiments stationed here, 1 from R.I., one from Michigan, 1 from Wisconsin. the R.I. boys made us some coffee and gave us what Bread they had left for there suppers which cheared us up and maid our boys feel more recconciled to there lot. we then spred down our blankets and laid down for the knight.

[*On April 19, 1861, in a skirmish with an antiwar, pro-Southern mob, the 6th Massachusetts Volunteers lost four men killed, the first casualties in hostile action of the Civil War. The incident became a flashpoint for regiments passing through Baltimore.]

Next: Camp Casey 

New project and the 300 club

A group of 4th New Hampshire veterans at a reunion at the Weirs on Lake Winnipesaukee

I have begun work on a string of blogposts from the diaries and letters of two Civil War soldiers with both wartime and postwar connections. It's an exciting project because by placing their diaries and letters in chronological order, I can let them tell the story of the first 15 months of the existence of my favorite regiment: the 5th New Hampshire Volunteers.

Meanwhile, I'll post when I can about a range of subjects. Recent posts about World War I have gained wide readership, including one on the list below -- What was Thomas Hardy like? -- based on the observations of two major figures from World War I.

In the past I periodically posted the 25 most popular posts on this blog on the basis of pageviews. This list is slightly different. There are now more than 300 posts, and the pageview count is approaching 80,000. So here are all the posts -- 40 of them -- with more than 300 pageviews. The No. 1 post has had 1,357 pageviews, and the numbers scale down from there.

Thanks so much for your continued readership,

1. Killing the Southerners with kindness (1)

2. The long American tradition of racist speech (2)

3. A Gettysburg veteran who knew the battlefield by heart (4)

4. Did Abraham Lincoln really free the slaves? (6)

5. Why couldn’t Franklin Pierce just keep his mouth shut? (5)

6. Urgent! Telegram from Gettysburg (3)

7. The rise and fall of James Willis Patterson (10)

8. One school’s proud Civil War heritage (9)

9. Farewell, my teacher (7)

10. Faces of Fort Wagner, Olustee and Andersonville (13)

11. The Civil War: ‘It was not my fault,’ Buchanan insisted (15)

12. Exeter’s Civil War general (8)

13. A Gettysburg journal (part 3) (10)

14. A Gettysburg photo album (16)

15. Elias Nason’s diary (1863): Bloody fields of conflict (25 tie) 

16. Unpacking the new ‘Gettysburg’ (11) 

17. The soldier’s story behind the love story, Part I (14)

18.  Gallery: Faces ofthe Fighting Fifth (part one) (19t) 

19. The Civil War created a boom for Yankee’s circus (21)

20 (tie). ‘The reputation of a regiment if always made bythe worst men in it’ (22t) 

20 (tie). Gallery: Old soldiers (2), a New England brigade (18)

22. A Confederate captain’s war diary, part 3 (25t)

23. What was Thomas Hardy like? (new to list)

24. A Gettysburg Journal, part 4 (22t) 

25. The soldier’s story behind the love story, Part II  (19) 

26. A nasty scrap with Cross’s brother (new to list)

27. Standing proudly before a fate unknown (21t)

28. A mother’s dying wish, a son’s destiny (new to list)

29. Together again: They rode with Cross at Gettysburg (25t)

30. How Napoleon B. Perkins lost his leg (new to list)

31. Elias Nason’s diary (1861): The war changed everything but life went on (new to list)

32. Gallery: What the rebels won at Gettysburg (25t)

33. Gallery: Faces of the Fighting Fifth, two (new to list)

34. A gift from the heart (24)

35. Captain Gordon’s war: ‘More fighting to bedone, and many lives will be lost’ (new to list)

36. From Fredericksburg to the Crater, Pvt. Don E. Scott thought God was by his side (new to list) 

37. Carleton at Gettysburg: ‘It would be a pleasure to linger here a while’ (new to list)

38. The monument is wholly like any other on the ground (new to list)

39. Richard Ager, storyteller (new to list)

40. A souvenir from Harpers Ferry (new to list)

What was Thomas Hardy like? Two post-WWI sketches

The poet Robert Graves introduced T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) to Thomas Hardy. From a nearby Tank Corps camp, Lawrence visited Hardy several times in Dorcester during the summer of 1923. He wrote Graves: “T.H. is an experience that a man must keep to himself.”

Thomas Hardy portrait, 1923

Fortunately neither Graves nor Hardy followed this dictum. Both left portraits of the venerable Hardy, who was 80 when Graves met him and 83 when Lawrence wrote his letter.

During World War I Graves survived a wound so severe that his commander confidently wrote his parents that he had died in transit to the hospital. The war office confirmed his death in a telegram. Graves also suffered from shell-shock (post-traumatic stress disorder) but was kept out of further fighting because his wound had damaged a lung. He attended Oxford after the war and lived nearby with his wife, Nancy Nicholson, and their two small children.

In 1920 the couple took a bicycle trip. They packed up a few things and pedaled across Salisbury Plain by moonlight. As Graves wrote later from notes he made at the time, they saw Stonehenge and a more recent, if less durable, landmark: deserted wartime army camps vast enough to quarter a million men.

When they realized they were near Dorcester, they veered off to visit Hardy. The old poet lived with his second wife, Florence, at Max Gate. Hardy was the son of a stonemason and had been an architect early in life. He had designed the house and written several novels and much of his poetry there.

Max Gate, Thomas Hardy's home on the outskirts of Dorcester.

Graves knew many poets of his own generation. He had saved Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow officer, from the consequences of an antiwar manifesto Saasoon wrote and allowed to be published in 1917. He had met and corresponded with Wilfred Owen. Near Oxford he shared a neighborhood with Edmund Blunden, John Masefield and others.

When Hardy came to Oxford to receive an honorary degree in 1920, Graves found him confused in speech and thought. Now, at Max Gate, Hardy was welcoming, engaging and charming.

“We took tea in the drawing-room, which, like the rest of the house, was cluttered with furniture and ornaments,” he wrote in his 1929 memoir, Goodbye to All That. “Hardy had an affection for accumulated possessions, and Mrs Hardy loved him too well to suggest that anything should be removed.”

Robert Graves, an officer and a poet

In the garden after tea, Hardy asked to see some of Graves’s poems. When Graves showed him one, Hardy suggested he remove the cliché “the scent of thyme.” Graves declined, saying Hardy and his generation of poets had so thoroughly banished the cliché from their work that it was no longer a cliché.

Hardy inquired about Graves’s writing habits. Graves replied that the poem he had given him was in its sixth draft and would be finished in two more, Hardy replied: “Why! I have never in my life taken more than three, perhaps four, drafts for a poem. I am afraid it would lose its freshness.”

Hardy told Graves he could write novels methodically but preferred poetry because it “always came by accident.” He had enjoyed writing certain chapters of his novels but in general disliked them.

Once, while pruning a tree, Hardy had conceived a novel in his head but had nothing to write the idea down on. When he finally went in, the idea had vanished. He advised Graves always to carry pencil and paper and added: “Even if I remembered that story now, I couldn’t write it. I’m past novel-writing. But I often wonder what it can have been.”

When Hardy complained about “autograph fiends,” Graves told him: “A mythical secretary should reply offering his autograph at one or two guineas, the amount to be sent to a hospital – ‘Swanage Children’s Hospital,’ he put in – which would forward a receipt.” Hardy liked the idea.

Graves could not help him with his other complaint. “He regarded professional critics as parasites, no less noxious than autograph hunters, wished the world rid of them, and also regretted having listened to them as a young man,” Graves wrote. At the critics’ behest Hardy had stopped using dialect that lacked good English equivalents in his early poems, but the critics had not let up. When he wrote, “he smalled in the distance,” a critic complained about it. What else could he have written? Hardy asked Graves.

To avoid the stigma of coining words, he had taken to looking them up in the dictionary, but even that could be problematic. He had lived long enough that sometimes he would find that an odd usage was sanctioned but on reading further discover that the “sole authority” for it was his own use of it in a long-ago novel.

Three years later, D.E. Lawrence wrote Graves a letter about his visits with Hardy, contrasting the sage of Max Gate with the raucous life in the Tank Corps camp where Lawrence then served as an officer.

T.E. Lawrence, a/k/a Lawrence of Arabia, 1918.

“Hardy is so pale, so quiet, so refined into an essence: and camp is such a hurly-burly. When I come back I feel as if I’d woken up from a sleep: not an exciting sleep, but a restful one. There is an unbelievable dignity and ripeness about Hardy: he is waiting so tranquilly for death, without a desire or ambition left in his spirit, as far as I can feel it: and yet he entertains so many illusions, and hopes for the world, things which I, in my disillusioned middle-age, feel to be illusory. They used to call this man a pessimist. While really he is full of fancy expectations.

“Then he is so far-away. Napoleon is a real man to him, and the country of Dorsetshire echoes the name everywhere in Hardy’s ears. He lives in his period, and thinks of it as the great war: whereas to me that nightmare through the fringe of which I passed has dwarfed all memories of other wars, so that they seem trivial, half-amusing incidents. . . .

“And the standards of the man! He feels interest in everyone, and veneration for no-one. I've not found in him any bowing-down, moral or material or spiritual. . . .

“He takes me as soberly as he would take John Milton (how sober that name is), considers me as carefully, is as interested in me: for to him every person starts scratch in the life-race, and Hardy has no preferences: and I think no dislikes, except for the people who betray his confidence and publish him to the world.

“Perhaps that’s partly the secret of that strange house hidden behind its thicket of trees. It’s because there are no strangers there. Anyone who does pierce through is accepted by Hardy and Mrs. Hardy as one whom they have known always and from whom nothing need be hid.

“For the ticket which gained me access to T.H. I’m grateful to you – probably will be grateful always. Max Gate is a place apart: and I feel it all the more poignantly for the contrast of life in this squalid camp. It is strange to pass from the noise and thoughtlessness of sergeants’ company into a peace so secure that in it not even Mrs. Hardy’s tea-cups rattle on the tray: and from a barrack of hollow senseless bustle to the cheerful calm of T.H. thinking aloud about life to two or three of us. If I were in his place I would never wish to die: or even to wish other men dead. The peace which passeth all understanding: but it can be felt, and is nearly unbearable. How envious such an old age is.”

Sources: Graves: Goodbye to All That; Lawrence: letters online at T.E. Lawrence studies. 

Armed with horn and drums, a father and sons go to war

Nathan W. Gove

Music filled the air as the 3rd New Hampshire Volunteers marched to the train station in Concord. The regimental band “was considered particularly fine, and had German silver, bell-back instrument.”

One of the tunes it played was “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” which thereafter became the standard for departing regiments. When a town band played “Auld Lang Syne” as the train prepared to pull out of the station, the 3rd New Hampshire’s horn players responded with “Sweet Home.”

Among the departing musicians was Nathan Webster Gove, a Concord man older than most of the volunteers – old enough at 44, in fact, to have brought his two young sons along as drummer boys.

The younger boy, Nathan Marcel Gove, was 11, and played his drum with the regimental band. The older, Charles, who was about to turn 14, served as a company drummer boy. Both had been born in Derry.

Nathan M. Gove

I could find almost nothing about the girl these musical soldiers left behind them. Nathan W. Gove, born in Chester, taught handwriting and worked as an accountant in Concord. He had married Mary C. Fisk, a girl from a large Concord family, in 1839 when he was 22 and she was 19.

Had they argued about whether such young boys should be exposed to the dangers of war? Had they considered the compromise of his taking one and leaving the other? It’s hard to imagine they hadn’t. Had he fully considered the burden he was placing on her? And what did she feel about the separation? Pride perhaps, but certainly also dread.

The 3rd was the first regiment whose men received a $10 bonus from the state for volunteering. Its training camp, named after the new governor, Nathaniel S. Berry, was set up across the Merrimack River below a plateau known as the Dark Plains (now Concord Heights). It was near the river nor far from the bridge in the south of town.

The officers had wall tents, but the men’s A-tents dominated the company streets. Their uniforms were gray, trimmed with blue. They wore gray caps with visors front and back, bore Enfield rifles and carried gray backpacks.

Three members of the regimental band would make names for themselves as chroniclers of the war: the reporter John W. Odlin, a correspondent from the front; John C. Linehan, whose Granite Monthly articles told the story of the men from Penacook (then Fisherville), a village in Concord; and Henry S. Hamilton, a native Englishman whose sprightly memoir has been the subject of earlier posts on this blog (here, here, here and here).

Moore's photo of the 3rd NH band. Nathan M. Gove (above and below) straddles his drum front and center. 

The regiment camped across the river for only a few weeks before it took the train south on Sept. 3, 1861. Two months later it was present at the taking, mostly by naval bombardment, of Port Royal, S.C. It spent much of the next year camped at Hilton Head. It was there that Henry P. Moore, a Concord photographer, set up shop in 1862 and made many pictures of the men, including the band.

On July 16, the 3rd first fought on James Island, in what was known as the battle of Secessionville. It lost 105 killed, wounded and missing. The bandsmen played a role, going onto the battlefield to collect the rifles of the killed and gravely wounded.

At around the time of this battle Congress ordered Union regiments to shed their regimental bands. In August Nathan M. Gove, the drummer in the band, fell ill with malaria. On Sept. 2, a year less a day since their departure from Concord, he and the other band members boarded the Star of the South, for the return voyage.

Much as most of the musicians hated to leave their comrades, they were also glad to be headed home. They were less pleased with their sleeping quarters, a smelly hold whose previous occupants had been horses. They worried about the sick Gove and did what they could to ease his journey.

Nathan M. Gove's drum (courtesy, N.H. Historical Society).

Both Nathan W. and Nathan M. Gove returned to wartime service. The father, then 47, went south in 1864 as principal musician of the 18th New Hampshire, the last regiment raised by the state. Its colonel was less than half Gove’s age. He was Thomas L. Livermore, who had served under Edward E. Cross of the 5th New Hampshire and risen to a staff position by Gettysburg, where he was head of the ambulance corps. Nathan M. Gove returned to the 3rd New Hampshire as a drummer in 1863 and served out the war. He was 15 years old when it ended.

Charles H. Gove remained with the 3rd throughout the war. Afterward he married, lived near Concord and was active in the Grand Army of Republic, the chief veterans’ organization. He died in 1917 and is buried in the Soucook Cemetery.

After the war Nathan W. Gove served as deputy secretary of state under Walter Harriman, colonel of the 11th New Hampshire during the war and later governor of the state. Gove was promoted to secretary of state but died on Aug. 8, 1871, at the age of 54.

Gravestone at Soldiers' Home Cemetery, Grand Rapids

Nathan M., his son, married Margaret Lewis in 1873. They lived in Concord but later moved to Detroit. Nathan joined the navy with the hope that a life at sea would improve his health, which had never recovered after his wartime bout with malaria. He applied for a pension in 1891, when he was 41 years old.

“Entering the army at 11 years of age as drummer my service for nearly four years cost me my health and education and changed the whole current of my life,” he wrote. “I have never been well since.”

He entered the Soldiers’ Home in Grand Rapids in 1912 and died there 10 years later.

One woman's war and resurrection

Vera Brittain, World War I nurse and memoirist.

Diplomacy collapsed. Hubris reigned. Blithe patriotism seized the day. War came. Because of technology, mainly the machine gun, wholesale murder in the mud masqueraded as battle. Life was cheap, gains were few. Statesmen and generals resisted plain facts, and war went on and on.

Perhaps the only good that came of World War I was the vast literature it unleashed. During the Vietnam War that literature came back into vogue, and I couldn’t get enough of it. (If you’re inclined to embark on a similar literary journey, start with Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.) Later, my wife Monique and I visited many battlefields of the Western Front, including the Somme, Ypres and Verdun.

Now, during the centenary of this war, we are reading and rereading a few of its classics. One of my favorites is the postwar memoir of Vera Brittain. She was a feminist and a war nurse. Like thousands upon thousands of young women of her time, she suffered devastating personal losses during the war. In 1933, using her copious diary, she wrote a heartbreaking book called Testament of Youth. (The diary itself, published as Chronicle of Youth, is also excellent.)

A war of machine guns and gas masks.

Testament of Youth tells the story of Vera Brittain’s war and her painful resurrection from its sorrows. While rereading it, I was tempted again and again to share excerpts in this blog. In the end I chose these four brief ones.

The horrors of war. In 1917, during the now-forgotten Cambrai offensive, casualties became heavy. The field hospital where Brittain worked had to wake patients in the middle of the night and turn them out of their beds to sleep on the floor in order to make room for new masses of badly wounded men. At this stage of the war, a new and terrible weapon was in common use. Brittain wrote in her diary:

“We have heaps of gassed cases at present who came in a day or two ago; there are 10 in this ward alone. I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy War, and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the War lasts and what it may mean, could see a case – to say nothing of 10 cases – of mustard gas in its early stages – could see the poor things burnt and blistered all over with mustard-coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes – sometimes temporally (sic), sometimes permanently – all stick and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke. The only thing one can say is that such severe cases don’t last long; either they die soon or else improve – usually the former; they certainly never reach England in the state we have them here and yet people persist in saying that God made the War, when there are such inventions of the Devil about.”

Wartime jokes: As in all wars, black humor was common. Brittain recorded this example of the wry logic of trench warfare:

Three men in Vera Brittain's life: Edward Brittain, her brother, Roland
Leighton, her fiance, and Victor Richardson, her friend.

“When you are a soldier you are one of two things, either at the front or behind the lines. If you are behind the lines you need not worry. If you are at the front you are one of two things. You are either in a danger zone or in a zone which is not dangerous. If you are in a zone which is not dangerous you need not worry. If you are in a danger zone you are one of two things; either you are wounded or you are not. If you are not wounded you need not worry. If you are wounded you are one of two things, either seriously wounded or slightly wounded. If you are slightly wounded you need not worry. If you are seriously wounded one of two things is certain – either you get well or you die. If you get well you need not worry. If you die you cannot worry, so there is no need to worry about anything at all.”

The “lost” cause: Brittain often raises the central questions whose answers became less and less clear as World War I ground on, becoming a gruesome tragedy with a life of its own. Why are we fighting? Why can’t we stop? The best answer, she suggested, may have come in a British marching song sung to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.”

“We’re here because

we’re here because

we’re here because

we’re here.”

Beautiful writing. Because Brittain quotes often from the diary and wartime letters, the book is long, but she often expresses a thought with startling clarity. Here is the view from 15 years after the war:

“Whenever I think of the War to-day, it is not as summer but always as winter; always as cold and darkness and discomfort; and an intermittent warmth of exhilarating excitement which made us irrationally exult in all three. Its permanent symbol, for me, is a candle stuck in the neck of a bottle, the tiny flame flickering in an ice-cold draught, yet creating a miniature illusion of light against an opaque infinity of blackness.”

A singular death at Cold Harbor

When the dawn came up on June 4, 1864, the men of the 13th New Hampshire Volunteers found themselves 500 feet from the enemy lines at Cold Harbor. For three days the piney sand where they lay had been a slaughter ground, especially for the Union army. The 13th would remember this day for the death of a single officer, Lt. Aaron K. Blake of Brookfield, N.H.

The 13th New Hampshire's tattered flags.

If you go to Cold Harbor today, you can see remnants of the trenches the soldiers dug to shield themselves from withering fire from trenches across the way. The warfare there was a harbinger of World War I, although the Cold Harbor trenches, like those that remain at Spotsylvania, are much closer to each other than those at Ypres, the Somme and Verdun.

The 13th arrived at its new position after dark, too late to dig proper trenches. Some of them lay in small pits left by the pickets who had been there before them. In the pitch-black night they enlarged the holes with bayonets and spoons. In front of the holes they stacked a few logs and the bodies of dead soldiers – their own and the enemy’s – “anything to keep the rebel bullets back,” as the regimental historian S. Millet Thompson wrote. They solidified these barricades with sand.

From first light, the 13th’s colors, planted in the ground, became an easy and popular target for rebel marksmen. When a bullet split the staff of the national colors, David Bodge, the color sergeant, fixed it with barrel staves and a strap from his knapsack. Years later, he wrote that this repaired staff could still be seen with the regimental colors at the New Hampshire State House.

The regiment was under fire most of the day, even during the afternoon rain showers. Six men were wounded, and only Lt. Blake was killed.

Private William B. Luey of Columbia, N.H., who was attached to the 13th and had himself been wounded on June 1 at Cold Harbor, wrote the details in his diary:

“Aaron K. Blake, of A, is shot through the upper part of his head to-day, a rebel bullet entering and exposing the brain. He is laid near the Pine at first, close to the north side of it, and breathes almost all day. He is utterly unconscious, making no sign when spoken to or touched – every effort being made to revive him – and can suffer no possible pain; yet he is strangely nervous, breathing more quickly when a shell strikes the tree, or near him, or the noise of the firing increases. Later in the day he is moved to the covert way, a few feet to the south of the Pine, where about 5 p.m. he quietly ceases to breathe; and dies without showing any sign of consciousness or of suffering from the time when he was struck.”

Blake’s 21-year-old cousin, Pvt. George P. Blake, also of Brookfield, served in the 13th’s Company F. After two weeks of constant fighting, it was he who wrote to his aunt and uncle, Aaron’s parents, to share the details of their son’s death.

Here is his letter:

June 19, 1864

Dear Uncle & Aunt,

I wrote to father the sad news of Aarons death, the particulars of which I could not at the time enumerate. His company and regiment were in the advance holding a line of rifle pits in close proximity to the enemy. Watching carefully the doings of the enemy, he advanced bravely to the line and having seen that there was a sharpshooter whose unerring eye had picked off many of our boys, brought his rifle to bear on him and fired. After firing he remain[ed] to[o] long to watch the effect and another sharpshooter fire[d] his rifle, the fatal bullet of which caused the death of one of our country’s bravest sons, who through all the privations of a soldiers life was never heard to grumble and whose sense of duty was highly commendable.

He was much liked in his company both as an officer and as a companion, always endeavoring to cheer the hearts of those who were weary of a soldier’s life and had forgotten their duty to their country. His fate has been like that of many others in winning for the 13th N. H. Regt. laurels which it will ever be proud of, and a name as unperishable as has ever been gained since this cruel war commenced. He was noted for cleanliness, never being seen in a filthy condition, even when under great adversities. His place in the ranks has been but very seldom vacant. In fact he was a perfect soldier, being admired by both officers and men. It hardly seems possible to me that he is dead, for whenever I visited the regiment, he was sure to call me, and whenever I had any news from home he took great delight in telling me of it.

His effect[s] were taking care of a part of which I have in my own possession and will send to you at the first opportunity. Lt. [Charles B.] Gafney* has his watch and one or two other trinkets which he will send you. He was buried near Coal Harbor by the side of many of his regiment and a slab was erected to denote his final resting place.

The loss of him is I am well aware a very severe blow to the heart of his parents and the fact of his being so watchful to promote your ever[y] interest seems to hold his memory more dear. He never [k]new what hit him, being senseless from the first. George G. Ricker watched by him until he was dead and then marked his place of burial. George Ricker is reported killed.**

Your affliction is I am well aware more grievous than I can imagine and you have my heartfelt sympathies in enabling you to be up against this dire misfortune.

But he is dead and his grave which is all that is left remains for future generations to look upon as an altar upon which was slain one whose many bright hopes are blasted and who is I trust in that place of rest where wars and rumours of wars can never disturb his holy slumbers. My love to all and may the Almighty in his infinite goodness enable you to bear with Christian fortitude your affliction and assist you in this time of earthly woe.

Adiew and may God Bless You

Your Nephew,

Geo. P. Blake

*Gafney, 21, Of Ossipee, N.H., had enlisted as a private but was promoted to second lieutenant in September 1862. He was severely wounded on June 15, 1864, at Petersburg, but later made captain, served out the war with the 13^th, and lived in Rochester.

**Ricker was a private from Brookfield, the Blakes’ hometown. He was killed the same day Gaffney was wounded, in an action known as Battery Five.

A father writes home from the war

In honor of Fathers Day, here is an excerpt from one of the best New Hampshire Civil War soldier letters I ever found. It was written by Lt. James Larkin to his wife Jenny. They had two small children, Bubby and Belle, and the lieutenant was thinking about the burden his absence placed on his wife.

James B. Larkin

Larkin had been an ornamental painter in Concord before the war. He and his family lived in a small house that I drove past often during my years as an editor in Concord. As he relates in the letter, one reason he took a commission in 1861 was that he was struggling to support the family. 

Larkin wrote to Jenny from the Virginia Peninsula just before the 5th New Hampshire Regiment’s first battle, at Fair Oaks on June 1, 1862. Here is what he had to say:

“As the contending armies seem now to be on the eve of a fierce battle, and many a brave form will be layed silent in Death, and Thousands of homes will be called to mourn for loved ones slain, it is not unreasonable to supose that I may be among the number who shall fall on that day. Still I have no fears. On the contrary I feel I shall come out safe & be restored to your loving embraces once more.

“But if it is ordered otherwise I feel that I should leave some advise and a consoling word for I am not unmindful of the greate responsibility which rests upon you in bringing up those Darling little ones. Many is the hour I have lain and thought of these things in the stillness of night before and since I left you.

“It was a greate sacrifice for me to leave you, & you thought it could not be possible I could do it, thinking so much of my children as I did. But the greate love I bore them, & you, was one of the principal reasons which led me to leave you. For in connection with the duty I felt I owed my country I felt I owed as greate a duty to my family.

“Times were hard. I thought if I could save a few hundred dollars to enjoy with my family hereafter, benefit my health, & at the same time serve my country, I should be discharging a solemn duty to my family and my country. But you will say you would prefer poverty with me, to riches without me. But I am to proud to see you and my children want for anything which I could possibly get.

“If I fall you will come in possession of ($1500) fifteen hundred dollars by my life insurance, & with what other property you have will with carefull use & investing it at good advantage enable you to suport yourself & Children & educate them respectfully. 

"But above all things Dear Jenny be watchful of their moral training that there may never be a blot on their dear name or character. Oh with what ceaseless vigilance should you watch over little Bell that she may grow up to womanhood as spotless and pure as she is now. I can see her now, the same little pure Angle that she was the first time I pressed my lips to her sweet mouth. You may think I am partial to her, but I love darling buby just as well. But a boy can make his way through the world easier than a girl. But I would not have you be less careful with his morals.

“The little dears will never know their father, but Jenny, if such a thing is possable, after leaving this earth I shall ever be with you & them to assist your trying and lonley journy through this short life until we meet where partings will be no more.”

A few minutes before crossing the Chickahominy River for battle, Larkin signed his letter: “Good by Dear ones. Yours in Death and Life.”

Maybe he really did believe, as he wrote in his opening paragraph, that he would survive the battle; maybe he just said it to soothe his wife’s fears. But in fact he lived through the battle and several more and rose to be lieutenant colonel of the 5th. The war took a severe toll on his body, as his pension record shows, but after three years he came home to his Jenny, Bubby and Belle.

In 1868, he led Concord’s first Memorial Day parade on Main Street.