I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (32 page)

Through the spindly, rain-smeared pines I could see bearded men in unusual hats milling around what must once have been a fire. Looking at them, my thoughts turned to the rival period events I might have pursued, and the indoor component that united most. Even the least appealing of these now sprang attractively to mind: a long weekend in the cells beneath Lincoln Castle, enjoying a little old-school rehabilitation with the Victorian Prison Re-Enactment Group, perhaps, or a country-house party organised by the Victorian Re-Enactment Society, driven abroad after their unnamed activities 'fell foul of British "hunt-the-perv" hysteria'.

Instead, I had signed up for five early-spring days in what the organisers' website had described as 'an isolated and historically relevant region virtually devoid of modern intrusion'. An academic spoke more evocatively of 'a sprawling, swampy tangle', and a published account of what I was here to recreate came burdened with the regrettably captivating title,
Through the Howling Wilderness
. A rival history of the event lay beside me on the passenger seat:
One Damn Blunder From Beginning to End – the Red River Campaign of 1864
.

I was here because this was where it started. No student of living history can afford to ignore the laboured rhyming maxim I'm about to make up: you just can't ignore the US Civil War. In re-enactment terms, it's the daddy. The 1961 Civil War centenary was marked with a series of pioneering large-scale battle re-enactments, often featuring a thousand or more combatants. Veterans from these events cringingly recall waddling towards the enemy in dyed scout uniforms and wellington boots, but what they lacked in sartorial authenticity they made up for in the weaponry department: most carried original Civil War rifles, then so plentiful and ill-venerated they could be picked up for $50. At any rate, the impression on spectators and combatants alike was evidently profound: the huge popularity of these centenary re-enactments kick-started a phenomenon, a school of re-enactment that by most sensible estimates has attracted more pupils than all others combined. Thirty years on, US Civil War groups were sufficiently well established to mount full-scale re-runs of major battles: with 41,000 participants pretending to kill each other, the 1998 reinterpretation of Gettysburg remains the largest re-enactment ever seen.

Reading up on the Civil War, I came to understand the almost desperate enthusiasm that has inspired an estimated half a million Americans to participate in related recreations. Some are expressing a fascination with the most compelling chapter in their young nation's history. Others are paying tribute to the conflict's 623,000 military victims – more American soldiers died in the Civil War than in every subsequent war combined. The Battle of Antietam in 1862 remains by some distance the bloodiest twenty-four hours in the nation's history, accounting for more than twice as many Americans as D-Day.

The confusing, unsettling reality for so many is that all these Americans were killed by other Americans, and that this happened so recently. The last Union widow died in 2003 – outlasted by her Confederate counterpart, Alberta Martin, who at the age of twenty-one married eighty-one-year-old veteran William Martin, bore him a son before he passed away, married William's grandson from a former marriage two months later, and finally pegged out in 2004 at the age of ninety-seven, leaving the South in mourning and a very messy family tree.

Quite simply, large swathes of the nation are still struggling to come to terms with this traumatic, divisive and horribly bloody conflict. Naturally enough, the ones who pick away at the scab most compulsively are those who feel cheated by the outcome. A lot of water had passed under the bridge, but some still saw a river tainted with the blood of martyrs. Over there through the trees, they might feasibly have found its source: thirty or forty men, and not a single blue uniform.

History is written by the winners, but re-enactment gives the losers a belated chance to scribble in the margins. In a precise inversion of the original proportions, across the US, Confederate re-enactors outnumber Unionists by two to one, and it was no surprise to see this ratio stretched to snapping point out here: the 1864 Red River Campaign was fought deep into Confederate territory, and is commonly encapsulated as one of the Union's last defeats.

One Damn Blunder From Beginning To End
described a fiasco loosely orchestrated by the former newspaper editor and Massachusetts governor Nathaniel Banks, a 'political general' whose appointment by Lincoln – not a man I'd previously thought of as a ruthless schemer – was little more than a crude bribe to keep a potential rival out of the forthcoming presidential election. After a string of crushing Union victories, by the spring of 1864 the war seemed all but over, and most in the North had one eye on winning the peace. With the North's economically vital cotton mills running desperately short of raw materials, and the South a spent force, there seemed no harm in putting a military novice in charge of 40,000 troops and the bulk of the Union fleet, and sending him off to plant the Union flag in Texas, en route snaffling up 100,000 cotton bales from the riverside warehouses of Louisiana.

A two-month parade of tactical ignominy ensued: the fleet ran aground in a swamp, the Union armies got lost in the woods and ran out of water. Most deadly of the damn blunders was the failure of intelligence that encouraged a reckless assault on the Confederate lines at Mansfield, which in half a day cost 3,200 overwhelmed Union troops their lives. The Red River event came gloatingly headlined with the shambolic campaign's dismal last act: Banks's Grand Retreat.

'I'm not sure that BGR is the best event for you,' began an email response I'd received many months previously. 'It takes place over a five-day period, and will be a strenuous exercise involving a forty-mile march living with whatever you can carry on your back. There will be skirmishes, entrenchment building and so forth. Therefore a good knowledge of Civil War infantry drill, field tactics and how to live as a soldier will be essential even if you have the stamina to keep up. Thirdly and finally, the authenticity requirements for all kit will be of the very highest.'

The reply eloquently explained what had first attracted me to this biannual event, an almost mystical gathering of hardcore re-enactors in the wooded depths of Louisiana. Online comments described BGR in tones of breathless reverence: no public to show off before, no after-hours downtime, just five days of relentless and uncompromising immersion with reenactment's seasoned elite. 'Nothing comes close,' was the simple judgement of one of the select band of veterans. 'This isn't an event, it's an adventure.' An adventure whose 2007 motto, emblazoned across the organisers' sepia-type-faced website and available on a T-shirt that I now wish I'd bought, succinctly encaspulated the defining ethos: 'No Whiners, No Shirkers, No Weaklings'.

Given the Banks-like depth of my relevant experience, it was no particular surprise to find my email enquiries to the listed admissions officer entirely ignored. Unusually, though, I found myself in no mood to give up without a fight, or at least a whine. If the US Civil War was re-enactment's wellspring, then the Red River was its purest source: the ultimate expression of living history. Kentwell's linguistic authenticity, Haut-Koenigsbourg's attention to culinary and aesthetic detail, the fear and hardships endured at all other points along the way – at BGR I'd find the lot, wrapped up in one muddy bundle.

I was acclimatised; I was ready. Bring it on. It was an Englishman who suggested a way in. Patrick Reardon was head of the Lazy Jacks, a group inspired by the thousand-odd Brits who fought for the Confederate cause, in a quest for adventure or their interpretation of social justice. He was taking a dozen men to BGR, and having swiftly dashed any hopes that I might join their ranks, tentatively proposed a suitable character: a war reporter dispatched by a London newspaper. The more I thought through this suggestion, the more it appealed. I'd be free to roam the battlefield on my own terms, asking both sides awkward and – my prerogative as a foreigner – stupidly ill-informed questions, before retiring to a pavilion stocked with provisions and comforts befitting the golden age of Fleet Street expenses, therein to compose my dispatches, wearing a long silk paisley dressing gown and one of those little tasselled caps. These local cheroots make a damnably poor smoke, I'd think, though for sport I might just have a box sent to that old prig Johnson on the foreign desk back home.

Cursory research revealed that the first roving war correspondents as we understand them today were sent out to the Crimean War, and of the 500-odd journalists who covered the US Civil War five years later, a significant minority were doing so on behalf of foreign newspapers. William Howard Russell of
The Times
, easily the most prominent of these, saw his brief in very contemporary terms: to provide British readers with 'unvarnished and unedited first impressions of food, fashions, inns, streets, culture, fighting men, issues and politicians'.

Perhaps unfairly, to me this marked him out as the prototype for those vainglorious charlatans later parodied by Evelyn Waugh, spooling out reams of fanciful 'colour' without ever leaving their hotel rooms/cheroot-hazed pavilions. Poncifying his byline with a middle name did nothing to dilute that impression. Yet if all this should have diminished Russell in my eyes, I have to report that it did not. Already seduced by the prospect of emulating the fecklessly duplicitous lifestyle I had invented for him, I struggled to purge all trace of related frivolity in my reply to Patrick. Being brief and rather stern, his response suggested I had failed. 'Note that you would require civilian clothing of the period as well as appropriate items of baggage, etc. You would also be required to do a fair bit of research, as a good knowledge of the campaign, the personalities and the general period would be essential for first-person interpretation as, for much of the time, we hope to leave the twenty-first century and enter the nineteenth.'

Patrick finished off by explaining it was not within his power to invite me; he could promise only to 'seek the agreement of our hosts'. At this point, I went away to 1775 and forgot all about him, his kind offer, and the nineteenth century in general. By the time I very belatedly remembered, with BGR no more than a couple of months away, it was apparently too late; the website bluntly stated that admission to the event was now closed, and my emails to Patrick fell upon stony ground. At which point, with a trundling, clomping creak, a big blue wagon rolled up to the rescue.

I'm still not sure why or when Gerry Barker decided to grace the event with his appearance – Kentucky to Louisiana was an awfully long drive, even without four oxen in the boot – but the minute he offered to sponsor my own attendance, doors were flung open with dramatic haste. It was as if I'd been vainly trying to wheedle my way into some star-studded premiere, when suddenly Clint Eastwood pitches up, scoops me on to his shoulders and strides wordlessly past the awestruck bouncers, giving them one of his quizzical glares.

Gerry had promised me an outfit, and bagged me a berth at the civilian camp. This forest car park – the military's principal muster point – was our arranged rendezvous; Gerry's stock trailer and his big old pick-up dominated a puddled corner, but both were conspicuously empty. While waiting for the boys and their blue burden to rumble up out of the rain-fogged trees, I delved out the crumpled cribsheets that were my Patrick-ordained character primers.

I'd selected
The Times
– which I would soon learn to call the
London Times
– as my employer, partly due to Russell's celebrity, and partly to an editorial stance which, being solidly onside with the secessionist Confederacy, would endear me to those most likely to turn nasty. Britain was officially neutral in the Civil War, but as the mouthpiece of the landed Establishment,
The Times
aligned itself firmly with conservatives confused and alarmed by concepts such as democracy and republicanism. And who had yet to forgive their own government's stance on slavery, finally abolished only in 1833 – much to the irritation of the Bishop of Exeter, despite the £12,700 compensation paid out for the loss of his 665 slaves.

The Times
viciously despised President Lincoln, holding him responsible for 'horrible massacres of white women and children', and predicting he would be remembered 'among that catalogue of monsters, the wholesale assassins and butchers of their kind'. Yet such was the paper's global clout that Lincoln felt obliged to welcome its fêted correspondent, William Howard Russell, with a eulogy that must have been delivered with that lantern jaw set in a rictus grimace: 'Mr Russell, I am very glad to make your acquaintance, and to see you in this country. The
London Times
is one of the greatest powers in the world – in fact, I don't know anything which has much more power – except perhaps the Mississippi.' I'd just read it again, imagining Abe flicking the Vs under the presidential desk as he spoke, when the car shook slightly, and a familiar cry called something loud and heavy to a slushy halt.

Just as before, Gerry greeted me with studied nonchalance. He'd had his Riff Raff locks hacked down to a buzz-cut, which along with his filth-slathered bare feet and careworn attire gave him the look of a grizzled convict on the run. The boys, the wagon and everything inside it were precisely as they had been in 1775: as I'd discovered with my 2,000-year-old linen bag – once more by my side – the tools and trappings of everyday life evolved with almost glacial sloth in the pre-industrial age.

The clothes Gerry had brought along for me were in the pick-up: I got changed, and very wet, behind the stock trailer. From the ground up: a pair of extravagantly weathered black leather brogans, handmade by and for Butch and two sizes too big; thick blue trousers with a fat, smudgy pinstripe; one of Gerry's sack-like waggoning smocks, concealed with a satin-backed black waistcoat and a heavy black-wool
OK Corral
frock coat; a dusty brown neckerchief, tied in a floppy bow. Tramp-shoes aside I felt almost disappointingly normal, until Gerry frisbeed over the pièce de résistance: a high-crowned black felt hat with a prominently upturned brim. A Derby, Gerry called it, but I can most usefully describe it as a bowler hat with all the silly bits made sillier.