July 4 marks not only the day that Americans celebrate their nation's 18th Century separation from Great Britain, but also the day that, in 1863, Union forces prevailed against the breakaway Confederacy at both Vicksburg and Gettysburg.
Abraham Lincoln's November 19, 1863 speech dedicating a Pennyslvania cemetery to the remains of the slain of Gettysburg is probably the most famous single address by any American president, and its text is chiseled into the south wall of the faux Temple of Zeus that is the Lincoln Memorial.
In 1962 the writer James Jones, briefly visting the US from France, journeyed to Washington DC with his friend, the writer William Styron, who had arranged for the two men to visit first several Civil War battlefields, then the Lincoln Memorial, and finally the Kennedy White House.
Styron was not all prepared for Jones' reaction to the Doric cenotaph's recital of the Gettysburg words of the martyred Lincoln. A reaction which consisted of helpless, bottomless fury, born of bottomless, helpless grief.
To put it bluntly, Jones thought Lincoln full of shit.
Although Jones never wrote about the Civil War, in 1962 he was one of the few people in the world not a librarian to possess the one-hundred-plus-volume official US government history of the conflict. Jones was not a Civil War "buff" in the usual sense of the word: he was not much interested in tactics, technology, strategy. He was, instead, as Styron put it, interested in "try[ing] to plumb the mystery and the folly of war itself."
At the time of Jones' return to the US in 1962, he had never visited a Civil War battlefield. Styron arranged for Jones to walk the grounds of Antietam, of "Bloody Lane." What Jones felt there rocked him.
As Styron later wrote:
A rather innocuous-looking place now, he said, a mere declivity in the landscape, sheltered by a few trees. But there, almost exactly a century before, some of the most horrible carnage in the history of warfare had taken place, thousands of men on both sides dead within a few hours. The awful shambles was serene now, but the ghosts were still there, swarming; it had shaken him up.
Styron next moved the subdued Jones to the Lincoln Memorial. There, like all visitors to the titanic temple, Jones read the words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
James Jones had fought as a soldier for the United States of America in the South Pacific in World War II. He had killed a Japanese soldier in hand-to-hand combat. He had returned from that encounter to inform his CO that he would fight no more. He was shortly thereafter wounded, and shipped back to the states. He refused after his recovery to return to the war, and went on to write some of the most painful and moving combat fiction in all literature. At the time that he gazed upon the words of the Gettysburg Address, inscribed upon the Lincoln Memorial, he had recently completed The Thin Red Line, in which he had written this, from the point of view of a soldier crawling through Japanese artillery fire:
When the others came up, he crawled on whistling over to himself a song called I Am An Automaton to the tune of God Bless America.
They thought they were men. They all thought they were real people. They really did. How funny. They thought they made decisions and ran their own lives, and proudly called themselves free individual human beings. The truth was they were here, and they were gonna stay here, until the state through some other automaton told them to go someplace else, and then they'd go. But they'd go freely, of their own free choice and will, because they were free individual human beings. Well, well.
In words privately addressed to his publisher, Jones had written that he wished to speak for the dead. For:
The dead, frozen like flies in plastic, realized--at the moment of death when of course they stopped--that humanity must grow to feeling, to empathy, or become extinct. But the dead cannot speak.
Standing in 1962 before the Lincoln Memorial, reading the words of the Gettysburg Address, recorded by his friend William Styron, this is what James Jones said:
Jim's face was set like a slab, his expression murky and aggrieved, as we stood on the marble reading the Gettysburg Address engraved against one lofty wall, slowly scanning those words of supreme magnanimity and conciliation and brotherhood dreamed by the fellow Illinoisian whom Jim had venerated, as almost everyone does, for transcendetal reasons that needed not to be analyzed or explained in such a sacred hall. I suppose I was expecting the conventional response from Jim, the pious hum. But his reaction, soft-spoken, was loaded with savage bitterness, and for an instant it was hard to absorb. "It's just beautiful bullshit," he blurted. "They all died in vain. They all died in vain. And they always will!"
Later Styron and Jones completed their journey, meeting with people in the Kennedy White House. The significance of the juxtaposition of the visits to Antietam, the Lincoln Memorial, and the White House, did not strike Styron until some years later, by which time Jones was dead:
Many years went by before I happened to reflect on that day, and to consider this: that in the secret cellars of the White House, in whose corridors we were soon being shepherded around pleasantly, the ancient mischief was newly germinating. There were doubtless all sorts of precursory activities taking place which someday would confirm Jim's fierce prophecy: heavy cable traffic to Saigon, directives beefing up advisory and support groups, ominous memos on Diem and the Nhus, orders to units of the Green Berets. The shadow of Antietam, and of all those other blind upheavals, was falling on our own times. James Jones would be the last to be surprised.
In the years since 1962, of course, "the secret cellars of the White House" have brought forth many, many more conflicts in which "they all died in vain": Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Grenada, Lebanon, Iraq, Iraq again, Afghanistan, and, now, soon, with "heavy cable traffic . . . directives beefing up advisory and support groups, ominous memos . . . orders to units of the Green Berets," Iran.
Styron writes that it is well that Jones "did not live to witness Rambo, or our high-level infatuation with military violence. It would have brought out the assassin in him."
In an inside-out turn of time, Styron himself provided a sort of coda to Jones' 1962 outburst at the Lincoln Memorial, in his 1952 novella The Long March. This work is autobiographical; drawn from Styron's experience when called up as a reserve for the "police action" in Korea. During maneuvers in the Carolinas, artillery rounds that had been allowed to rust in the rain since the cessation of WWII "fall short" onto a group of soldiers gathered in line for chow. Three officers arrive to assess the damage: a martinet colonel, a Lieutenant Culver, and a Captain Mannix:
One boy's eyes lay gently closed, and his long dark lashes were washed in tears, as though he had cried himself to sleep. As they bent over him they saw that he was very young, and a breeze came up from the edges of the swamp, bearing with it a scorched odor of smoke and powder, and touched the edges of his hair. A lock fell across his brow with a sort of gawky, tousled grace, as if preserving even in that blank and mindless repose some gesture proper to his years, a callow charm. Around his curly head grasshoppers darted among the weeds. Below, beneath the slumbering eyes, his face had been blasted out of sight. Culver looked up and met Mannix's gaze. The Captain was sobbing helplessly. He cast an agonized look toward the Colonel, standing across the field, then down again at the boy, then at Culver. "Won't they ever let us alone, the sons of bitches," he murmered, weeping. "Won't they ever let us alone?"