Writing Battle History: The Challenge of Memory

Soon after the Army of the Potomac's bloody defeat at Fredericksburg, a soldier in the 27th Connecticut Infantry gave up in his effort to describe his first battle to those back home, admitting, "You cannot describe it satisfactorily to yourself or others. To march steadily up to the mouths of a hundred cannon while they pour out fire and smoke, shot and shell, in a storm that mows the men like grass is horrible beyond description."¹ In their diary entries, personal letters, and other contemporaneous accounts, Civil War soldiers often admitted to this feeling of inadequacy when it came to detailing the complexity and chaos of the combat they had just survived. For some, such reticence held purpose; their Victorian sensibilities demanded they protect noncombatants from the brutality of war. Others simply believed that words alone could not get across the horrors of battle to those who had not experienced it themselves. Nonetheless, Civil War military historians writing operational history should not dismiss as entirely unhelpful those soldier writings that lack detailed and insightful battle narratives. If nothing else, these sources provide a necessary reminder to proceed with caution. The emergence of the study of personal and collective memory in its many forms requires students of military history to ponder this Connecticut soldier's frustrated admission, for it offers both lessons and warnings about the challenges of writing combat history.

To appreciate this soldier's plight, historians first must appreciate the vagaries of human memory. For each soldier, combat represents a traumatic event. Historians have drawn upon the work of sociologists, psychologists, even physiologists to learn more about the way in which the stress of combat affects memory processes. We now understand that when adrenaline runs its highest, survival instincts overwhelm rational thought. Thus, after the fighting ends and the heightened emotions of the life-and-death struggle wane, soldiers simply cannot recall all they did or all they saw in the heat of battle. Moreover, as historian Richard Holmes has explained, most people live their lives on a "great gray level plane" of existence, and after a period of high excitement such as combat inspires, only the experience's most exceptional moments—the towering peaks or deepest spikes that extend above or below that plane—may remain in a soldier's memory after the smoke of battle dissipates. However, even the recollection of those surviving memories cannot be likened to a VCR tape that can reproduce the same scenes exactly each time one thinks to push a mental "play" button. As Holmes added, since only these random "clips of experience" survive, they rarely respect chronology or preserve the whole context of the event they recall.² Thus, from the start, each soldier's chaotic recollections forged in the heat of battle are likely to be preserved both incompletely and inaccurately.

At the 1889 dedication of their regimental monument at Gettysburg, the former major of the 24th Michigan Infantry described the process to his audience, even then challenging his comrades:

Recall, if you can, any engagement of the war and positively state, of your own knowledge, that you passed through some particular field (a wheat field, for instance) when you were ordered forward to charge the enemy's position. You did pass through the open, so much you remember, but the nature of the field you never once considered. You took a strip of woodland, as a bit of shelter from the scurrying shot, but the character of the fruit or forest trees did not impress itself upon your memory. Some hill or ridge was near . . . but how it sloped or what were its surroundings, you had not time to note. You charged the enemy or were charged by them; but how you advanced or how you met them, you were too busy [to note in one's] mental memorandum book.

His conclusions about the entire body of written history that described the seemingly well-documented Battle of Gettysburg easily extends to any other Civil War battle: "The whole story has not been told."³

The wise Michigander's words should alert...