War dead

I have mentioned that one of my successes-of-intuition (I call it that, but I feel it within me more as a liberating triumph) was to drive to Mississippi as a reaction/personal solution to 9/11. There my bearings were my own, in the dizzying delight that comes from finding oneself in a place where no one knows your name (Shamrock Texas, Mount Tamalpais, the second deck of an RER train leaving Paris) and I could breathe the air of Clarksdale and Strayhorn, Savage, Sarah, Sledge, Falcon, Darling, Jackson, Tupelo, Hattiesburg, and Greenville indifferent to the ways in which the state was declared repulsive by outlanders, and immune to the ways in which the Civil War was wrung bloodless with sentimentality.

In the Great War, The Battle of Verdun resulted in a quarter-million deaths, with perhaps another 200,000 “missing.” At The Battle of the Somme, also in 1916, on the first day, 19,000 British soldiers were killed. The Battle cost well over 300,000 British German and French lives. There were three engagements at Ypres, a small Belgian town near the coast, the third of which included the Battle of Passchendaele; 600,000 men died.
There are today 137 British cemeteries in the Ypres vicinity.
Beyond these interments, 90,000 bodies were never found.

Ezra Cornell’s brother was a Union soldier. I visited the ravine in Vicksburg he had described. Earlier, in Ithaca, he had fished in the gorges that formed the southern and northern boundaries of his brother’s farm, that is to say, Cornell University, where, one hundred years later, Pynchon, Farina, and Nabokov acted out theatrical exuberances or chased butterflies.

Daniel wrote:
"I received my wound on the 19th of May at the first charge on the works in the rear of Vicksburg, our Brigade charged on what was called Fort Hill. my position was colour bearer and I had to go down a small ravine which was in the hillside. I was struck directly under and about 3/4 of an inch from my left eye --I did not fall, nor did the colours go down. I then went and lay down behind a fallen tree expecting to bleed to death. the ball had apparently struck the limb of a tree and was comeing diagonaly down as it passed through my hat rim over my left temple, it passed through the roof of my mouth cutting an ugly gash on the inside of my right cheek and lodged at the angle of my jaw shattering it severely."

In addition to Thoreau's "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them" the thousands of war dead - boys, mostly, inexperienced, never in love, stillborn, and jetsam - lead to the inevitable conclusion that some persons require long lives to tell their whole story, but many hundreds of thousands of them dying young had no story or song at all, and long life would only have rewritten many times over their epitaph as a neglected wage-slave and brute, loved by no one save their family, which in many cases, was in name only.