“Go to Your Gawd Like a Soldier”: Transnational Reflections on Veteranhood

At its most basic level, combat creates two classes of individuals: those who perish in war and those who survive the experience. Even the seemingly simple categorization of victors and losers frustrates—witness the burgeoning field of work on the memory of the American Civil War. Even for the maimed, whether in body or soul, the line between life and death marks a stark and simple contrast. However, for soldiers who serve as direct participants in war, suffering unites the dead and the living—and if there is another recent theme in Civil War studies, it is the importance of pain and trauma to any complete understanding of the war and its legacy.¹ Recent scholarly work on veterans thus tends to focus on the importance of suffering, and one can hardly dispute the significance of the phenomena, considering how such literature marshals a wide ranging evidentiary base of woe. In many ways, such work joins Drew Faust’s Republic of Suffering as welcome responses to Edward Ayers’s now sixteen-year-old call for a less triumphalist interpretation of the Civil War than the relatively positive post–World War II consensus interpretation that reached its peak of prominence in Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary and James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.² Ayers rightly called on historians to embrace a more complex and refined view of the war than Burns’ relatively rosy interpretation. In In the Presence of Mine Enemies, Ayers embraced the complexity of the war in the Valley and all its Woodwardian ironies.³ Unfortunately, some aspects of this new wave of Civil War revisionism with its focus on “dark history” runs the real risk of replacing an overly triumphalist and emancipationist narrative with one fixated on waste and folly.⁴ Such an interpretive key resonates more strongly with the sensibilities of modern academics, as opposed to the American Civil War’s own historical actors.

So miserable and unredeemable do some historians portray Civil War military service that at times the field implies Civil War soldiers stood and fought and died contrary to reason, humanity, and self-interest. For example, Drew Gilpin Faust, both a historian of the American Civil War and the leading tribune of the historical profession from her post at the head of Harvard University, has highlighted the importance of cultural narratives glorifying war and publicly cautioned against the power of “tales of glory, honor, manhood and sacrifice [that] enhance war’s attraction and mobilize men and armies.” Faust clearly sympathizes with the veterans of the western front who later saw such tales as “a betrayal.”⁵ Furthermore, an exclusive fixation on soldiers’ suffering raises larger questions of the persistence of war into our own era, and its obvious prevalence in the nineteenth century. For example, veterans of the Taiping Civil War (1850–64) in China may not have been able to draw on the ideological and legal protections embedded in American views of citizen-soldiers, but simple coercion cannot completely explain the scale of mobilization seen in a conflict whose butcher bill far exceeded that of the American sectional conflict.⁶ Nineteenth-century Americans also looked back at Europe’s Napoleonic wars, whose combination of wartime devastation with nationalist mobilization did not create a cultural sea change against war similar to post-Vietnam America. Perhaps by virtue of their distance from Europe, Americans had been insulated from that European conflict’s costs, but the sons of the Continental soldiers who fought the wars of the French Revolution seemed more than willing to continue to fight and die on sundry battlefields ranging from the Crimea to Italy to the Franco-German frontier. The modern academic’s reply, of course, is that he or she knows dirty secrets of war unknown to a past raised on fables of glory and deceit.

Such views strike me as morally questionable, because they too easily fit into shibboleths about the fundamentally pacific nature of human behavior that blame war on jingoistic propagandists and malignant politicians. More importantly, such a perspective fails to explain how military life in...