Set Apart

I am going to disappoint Your Majesty in this chapter, and I had rather say so at the beginning.

I was present when the Prime Minister spoke at Gettysburg. I stood perhaps forty yards from him, among the officers of the Army, on a cold bright afternoon, and I heard every word he said; and I cannot give Your Majesty one of them. I have tried. I have sat at this table with the pen in my hand and tried to set them down, and what comes back to me is not the words but the length of them, which was very short, and the silence after them, which was very long. I have read since, in a good many places, what men say he said. I do not recognise it, any more than I recognised the accounts of the battle on the heights, and I have made it a rule in this account not to give Your Majesty words I cannot swear to. So I will tell you everything about that day except the thing that everybody asks me, and I will tell you why I cannot tell you that, and you must judge whether the reason is a good one.

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I came home from Charles Town in South Carolina on the Saturday, the seventh of November, and went up to Gettysburg eleven days later.

I have said that I never asked the Colonel why he had named me to stand there, and that he never said. He told me only, on the evening before I went, that he would not be there himself, because his duty was on the works; and then he said, “You will tell me about it, Mr Ashton,” and I said that I would, and I have. But I have never told him the Prime Minister’s words either, and he has never asked me for them.

I went up on the Wednesday by the railway, through Baltimore and north into Pennsylvania, in a train so full that men stood in the aisles and on the platforms between the cars all the way, and some of them, I think, had stood since the capital. They were going to see the ground where their sons were. A great many of them were in black. An old man beside me in the aisle, a farmer from somewhere in the west of the Province, told me without my asking that his boy was in the ground there, or was going to be, the letter had not said which; and when he learned that I was an officer he asked me whether I knew how the graves were to be laid out, and whether a man could find one particular grave in a field of so many. I told him that they were being laid out in rows by polity, and by regiment within the polity, and that every grave would have a board with the name on it where the name was known. He said, “Where the name is known,” and looked out of the window, and did not ask me anything else.

The town was full when we came into it at dusk. It is a small town, at a meeting of roads among farms and orchards and low ridges with stone fences on them, and it had been fought through in July and was still mending; there were shot holes in the brick of the houses in the main street, and new glass in some of the windows and none in others, and every room in every house and every tavern and every barn had been let three times over. I slept on the floor of a printer’s shop, with six other officers and a chaplain, under the press.

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In the morning I went out to look at the ground before anybody else was there.

It was on a hill at the edge of the town, beside the town’s own burying ground, where the land rose high enough to see the whole field: the ridges running away south, and the woods, and the fences, and the farms with their orchards, and the long slopes between them where the lines had been. The new ground had been laid out over the top of the hill in rows, curved to follow the rise, and divided by polity, as I had told the old man in the train, with a space left at the centre for whatever monument would be put there afterwards. I looked at it as an engineer looks at a piece of ground, because I did not know how else to look at it. It was well laid out. Whoever had done it had understood the slope and the drainage, and the rows ran with the ground and not against it, and I did no better myself, the next year, on the Colonel’s lawn.

It was not finished. That is the thing I most want Your Majesty to know about it. The dead of July were still being brought in from where they had first been buried, in the fields and the orchards and along the fences, in the heat, by whoever had been there to do it; and the burial parties were still at work, that morning, with their wagons and their coffins, at the far end of the rows, where the graves stood open in lines with the earth heaped beside them. They did not stop for the ceremony. I do not think anybody had told them to, and I do not think they would have if anybody had. There were more of the dead still out in the fields than there were in the ground, I was told, and the winter was coming.

I asked one of the men at the open graves, a corporal of a Pennsylvania regiment, where the rebel dead were. He looked at me for a moment as though he did not understand the question. Then he said that he did not know, that he had not been told anything about rebels one way or the other, and went back to his work. I did not ask anybody else. I set it down because I asked, and because I had stood at the stakes on the heights fourteen months before and watched the rebel parties bury theirs, and the question was in my mouth before I had thought about it.

A man in the crowd, later in the morning, a civilian who had a carriage and was showing visitors the field for money, offered to take me to the place where Jackson had fallen. He said that he knew it exactly, that he had seen it himself, and that it was marked. I thanked him and said no. I have heard since of four places on that field where Jackson fell, from four men who had seen it themselves, and I do not believe any of them, and I did not want to stand on a fifth.

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The procession came out from the town at about eleven, with bands and soldiers and carriages and a great many men on horseback, and a crowd that I would not try to number, all coming up the road together to the hill; and the platform had been built at the edge of the new ground, facing the field, and the great men took their places on it, and the officers of the Army were drawn up below and to one side, and the crowd stood round as far as I could see.

I had never seen the Governor-General near to. He was a tall old man, very upright, sixty-nine years old that year, in black, with a broad pale face and white hair brushed back, and he looked, I thought, a great deal older than his age, as everybody who had read the lists every day for two years looked older than their age. He had lost his wife in the summer of 1859, and a son since. I had heard it said in the capital that he read the lists of the dead every morning at Government House before he read anything else, and remembered the names, and that it was making him ill; and seeing him on the platform, I believed it. The Prime Minister sat beside him. He looked as he had looked in the Commons, very long and very thin, folded on a chair that was too small for him, with his hat on his knee.

Mr Everett spoke for two hours.

I am not going to try to give Your Majesty the oration, because I could not do it justice and because it was not mine. I will tell you what was in it, because I listened to all of it, standing, in the cold, and so did everybody else on that hill, and nobody went away. He had it by heart. He did not look at a paper once. He told the whole story of the war, from the beginning, as an advocate tells a case: how it had come, and why, and who had made it, and what it had cost, and what the men in the ground below him had done in the three days of July, and in what order, and where. He remembered the dead. He spoke of them as men with names and families, and I was told afterwards that he had a great many of their names by heart as well, and I believe it. And he argued, at length and very learnedly, from the history of every nation he had ever read about, that the Union was not a thing that a rebellion could dissolve, because it was not a bargain that either side could walk away from but an order that all of them were inside; and that the men in the ground had died defending it unbroken, and had not died for nothing.

And then, near the end, when the sun had gone round and the cold was coming up off the field, he said a thing that I had not expected from him, or from anybody on that platform. He said that the Union could not survive this war as it had been before it. He said that its survival must enlarge liberty in it, or it would not have been worth the men in the ground. And he said that victory could not mean only a return to the old silence about slavery: the silence of the founding, that had been kept so that the Union could be made at all, and had been kept ever since, by everybody, for eighty years.

I had been taught that silence at the Point. I have told Your Majesty so, at the beginning of this account: the professor who taught us the Charter called it the founding’s honest silence, and he meant it kindly. I stood below the platform in the cold and heard an old man who had kept that silence himself for most of his life, and had been blamed for it, say in front of all those people that it was finished, that it could not be kept any longer; and I thought of the box with my commissions in it, and the bond, and the paper with twenty-six names, and I did not hear the next several sentences of the oration at all. I record that because it is true, and because it is the beginning of my difficulty with what came next.

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The Prime Minister spoke a few minutes after the Governor-General sat down.

I have said that I cannot give his words. Let me tell Your Majesty exactly how that came about, so far as I understand it myself.

When he stood up I was looking at him. He took a paper out of his coat, or perhaps two, and he held it, but I do not think he read from it. He stood quite still, as he had stood in the Commons, and began to speak in the high plain voice I had heard there, and I heard the first sentence. And then, at the far end of the new rows, beyond the edge of the crowd, the burial party that had been working all morning at the open graves lowered a coffin into the ground.

I saw it over the heads of the crowd. Four men, with ropes. They did not know that anybody was watching them. They lowered it very carefully, as men do who have done it a great many times and still mind doing it, and then one of them took off his cap and stood there a moment, and then they picked up their spades. I watched them. I do not know why. I think it was because they were the only people on that hill who were doing the thing that the rest of us had come there to talk about. And when I looked back at the platform the Prime Minister was sitting down.

That is the whole of it. I heard his voice the whole time. I could tell Your Majesty what it sounded like, and that it did not once rise, and that there was a sentence near the end that went up a little and stopped, as a man’s voice does when he has said the last thing he has to say. I could not tell you what the sentence was. The words went past me while I was watching four men bury a soldier whose name I shall never know, at the edge of a field I had not fought on, and when they were gone they were gone.

There was a silence after he sat down. It was not long, I suppose, by a watch; it seemed long. There was some applause then, scattered, not very much, as though the crowd were not sure that he had finished, or not sure that it was the kind of thing that was applauded. And I saw the Governor-General turn in his chair and look at the Prime Minister for a moment, and then lean across and say something to him, which I could not hear, and the Prime Minister answered him with a few words, and the Governor-General nodded, slowly, twice. I have often wondered what he said. I believe that I know the sense of it, from what I saw in his face, which was the face of a man who has been doing a thing for two hours and has watched another man do it in a few minutes, and knows it, and does not mind. But I did not hear it, and I will not invent it.

I have been told since that I was not the only man on that hill who could not afterwards repeat what the Prime Minister said, and that a good many of those who were there went home and told their families that the Governor-General had spoken beautifully and the Prime Minister had said a few words. I do not know whether that is true. I know that I have heard men repeat them since, many times, and with feeling, who were not there; and I know that I was there, and cannot.

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I should have gone back to the capital that evening, but there was no room on any train, and so I was in the town that night, and I saw the Governor-General again.

The Colonel had given me a letter for him, a note of a few lines, folded and sealed, that he had asked me to deliver into the Governor-General’s own hand if I could and to his secretary if I could not. I did not know what was in it and I did not ask. I took it to the house in the main square where Mr Everett was lodged, at about eight, and gave my name and the Colonel’s at the door, and expected to give it to a secretary; and after a while the secretary came down and said that His Excellency would see me, and took me up.

He was in a small parlour on the first floor, by a fire, in a dressing gown, with a rug over his knees and a cup of something hot beside him, and he looked very tired. He read the Colonel’s note, holding it close to the lamp. Then he folded it and put it in his pocket and asked me to sit down, and I sat.

He asked me about the Colonel first, and about the works, and about the Colonel’s health, and listened to the answers with great attention, as I had been told he listened to everybody. Then he said that the Colonel had written that I had been in London in the summer of 1861, at the legation, when the petition came; and that I had been presented at the levee at St James’s; and that I had seen the King.

I said that I had.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Tell me what he was like.”

I told him. I told him about the long room at St James’s, and the King standing at the end of it, perfectly still, in his scarlet coat with the blue riband, and the men going up the room one at a time to be presented; and how the King had seemed to hear every movement in the room, and every paper; and the one sentence the King had said to me, about the paces from the door. Mr Everett listened to it all without moving, with his hands folded on the rug. When I told him the sentence, he closed his eyes for a moment.

Then he said, “And he said nothing of America.”

I said that he had said nothing of America.

He said, “No. He never has.” And then he explained it to me.

I will not give Your Majesty his words, any more than I gave you the Prime Minister’s; but for a different reason. I remember these very well. But they were said to me in a private room, by an old man in a dressing gown who was very tired and had perhaps said more than he meant to, and they were about you; and I think that if he had wished them to reach you he would have sent them himself. I will give you the sense, because I told you at the beginning of this account that it had been explained to me. He said that the King’s silence was the most useful thing that anybody had done in the whole of the war. He said that if the King had spoken for the Union, he would have taken a side in one of his realms while he reigned from another, which is the one thing a King in his position must never do, and that if he had spoken against it, there would have been no Union left, and very likely no Crown. And he said that if the King had answered the rebels at all, even to refuse them, he would have made them into a party that could be answered; and that by saying nothing he had left them exactly what they were, which was nothing, and that they had found it out, and that it was killing them. He said that he did not suppose the King had chosen it for those reasons, or for any reasons that anybody would ever know. He said that it did not matter. He said that it was the most important thing that had been said in the whole of the war, and that it had been said by a man who had not said anything, and that he had been trying to say something nearly as useful all afternoon, for two hours, and had not managed it, and that the Prime Minister had managed it in a few minutes.

I said that I believed him.

He looked at me for a long time, by the lamp. Then he said, “You are a Virginian, Major.” I said that I was. He asked whether my family had gone with the Province. I said that my mother and my brother had, and that my brother was a prisoner in the north, taken at the ditch on the heights. He said that he was sorry. He asked my brother’s name, and I gave it, and he repeated it, once, as though he were writing it down somewhere behind his eyes; and I understood then what I had been told about him and the lists.

He said that I should go and get some sleep, and that he was obliged to me, and that I was to give the Colonel his compliments and tell him that he had read his note. I stood up. At the door he said one more thing, and I will give Your Majesty that, because it was not about you. He said, “It was a very good burying ground, Major. Did you think so?” I said that I thought it was very well laid out. He said, “Yes. I could see you looking at it,” and turned back to the fire.

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I came home on the Friday, on a train as full as the one I had gone up on, standing.

I have believed what Mr Everett told me about the King’s silence ever since, and I believe it now. I have told Your Majesty so, at the beginning of this account, and I meant it. But I have to set down beside it what I had seen that morning at the open graves, and at the stakes on the heights, and on the floor of a corridor on the Axis, and in the chamber at Charles Town; because those were the places where the silence was felt, and Mr Everett, who explained it so well, had been in none of them. I do not say that to his discredit. He had his own places, God knows, and his own lists. I say it because I have found that a thing can be the most useful thing done in a war and also be what it was in the places where it was done, and that the one does not cancel the other, and that this is very nearly the whole of what I have learned.

I gave the Colonel the Governor-General’s compliments, and told him that he had read his note. He said, “Thank you, Mr Ashton,” and asked me how the ground had been laid out, and I told him, at length, and he listened to all of it. He did not ask me what the Prime Minister had said.