In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

 27 Tearing It Up T h e M a rc h to t h e S e a , t h e Fa l l o f S ava nn a h , a n d t h e C a ro l in a s C a mpa i g n , N ov e mb e r 1 8 6 4 – Ap r i l 1 8 6 5 “The Blue Juniata” So the story went, one evening deep in the Georgia interior, with his army arrayed around him, General Sherman sat at the fire in front of his tent. His ear caught the music of a song known to everyone in that day and he was mesmerized; so much so, that he let his famous cigar go out. When the music stopped, Sherman sent an orderly to locate the band and to tell them to play the tune again. Before long, the voices of half the army were sending the “The Blue Juniata” into the November night. The lyrics were the lament of an Indian maiden for her lost warrior. She sang as she floated along a river called the Blue Juniata. The last verse seemed just right for this time and place: “Fleeting years have borne away / The voice of Alfarata; / Still sweeps the river on— / Blue Juniata!”1 There was a longing expressed in the song for things that had passed beyond reach, so the soldiers’ song might have been an expression of homesickness in this faraway place or of loneliness for friends who had been lost. They were out here destroying a distinctive way of life—evil in the minds of many, yes, but an undertaking uniquely and importantly American for better or for worse, and when they were done with their work, memories would be all that was left of it. The song might also have been a grieving for the loss of this whole grand experience of war. They had not gotten there yet, but some already had begun to sense that they would miss it. The war had been terrible, but every soldier would find something in it to keep him longing for its equivalent for the rest of his life: the friendships forged from dependence on each other when the chips were down, the shared experiences of misery and exultation, the being a part of something so gigantic and purposeful. Folded in the back of the last volume of the Parmater diary is a four-page essay in his handwriting titled “Torn from the diary of a Veteran Volunteer of Co. E 29th Ohio . . . The March Through Georgia.” Parmater wrote it down some time after the war. He borrowed some phrases, including those reporting the singing of this particular song on that particular occasion, from a book about Sherman by a popular writer of mass-produced biographies named Rev. Phineas Camp Headley.2 This is not to say that Parmater had not sung “The Blue Juniata” that night along with the tens of thousands of others, nor does it mean that he had not witnessed the other scenes he described in his montage. The Reverend Headley’s words simply did a better job of capturing the feeling of it. The rest of Parmater’s essay is made of words that were his own. There is a cinematographic quality to Parmater’s word pictures, scenes that flash onto the screen of memory and fade out, with another image coming into focus, such as food from barns and gardens 354 Tearing It Up spitted on bayonets and carried off despite the pleading of women that they would starve without it. At the noonday halt for dinner: soldiers laying siege to houses and standing in the doorways grinning, with honey dripping into their beards; arms full of silver plate, bedding, and whatever else appealed to them. The day-to-day work of burning depots, tearing up track, and bending the rails over the fires. Lurid scenes most of them, and disturbing. Reflected firelight, and the nature of the work they were doing, turning boys’ faces into those of leering savages, which was the transformation that had pained John Marsh’s soul. Then, the army’s evenings around its campfires: card playing, storytelling, and mass singing of songs of melancholy like “The Blue Juniata.” It took them about a month to cover the ground between Atlanta and Savannah. When they started none of the Boys knew Savannah was their destination. They pushed off around Thanksgiving and arrived...

Share