The Last Full Measure (25 page)

There was, of course, as there always has been, the stripping of corpses—the “peeling,” as they called it. And sometimes the dead continued their beneficence long after their demise. A Confederate, R. H. Peck, happened to pass over the ground of a particularly hard-fought engagement of nine months earlier: “He would always remember crossing a field where the Yankees had delivered a determined charge. It was only with difficulty that he could keep from stepping on bones still wrapped in torn bits of blue uniform.… While crossing the ghastly little field, Peck noticed a man from his regiment who had been a dentist before
the war. Busy examining the skulls to see if they contained any gold fillings, he had already extracted quite a number and had his haversack completely full of teeth.”
¹²⁴

In other ways, too, the ripple of economic benefit radiated from the killed. They provided a rich feeding ground for energetic entrepreneurs. There were search agencies like the official-sounding U.S. Army Agency (in fact a private company located on Bleecker Street in Manhattan) that for a share of the deceased’s back pay or the widow’s pension would locate the body of a loved one.
¹²⁵
Embalmers such as Thomas Holmes (who processed four thousand bodies at one hundred dollars each during the war), and the manufacturers of metallic coffins—“Warranted Air-Tight”—that could “be placed in the Parlour without fear of any odor escaping therefrom” (fifty dollars each), literally and metaphorically cleaned up.
¹²⁶

Bodies were utilized in other, less physical ways: as agents of propaganda. Confederate surgeon John Wyeth describes how after Chickamauga, “most of the Confederate dead had been gathered in long trenches and buried; but the Union dead were still lying where they fell. For its effect on the survivors it was the policy of the victor to hide his own losses and let those of the other side be seen.”
¹²⁷
A Union soldier, Daniel Crotty, describes how one could “read” the facial expressions of the dead as justification of the righteousness of the cause: “The dead of both friend and foe lie side by side, but it is remarked by all that the pleasant smile on the patriot’s face contrasts strangely with the horrid stare of the rebel dead.”
¹²⁸
However, another Union soldier, Frank Wilkeson, dismissed the whole fanciful and self-serving notion: “I do not believe that the face of a dead soldier, lying on a battle-field, ever truthfully indicates the mental or physical anguish, or peacefulness of mind, which he suffered or enjoyed before his death.” Wilkeson concludes bluntly, “It goes for nothing. One death was as painless as the other.”
¹²⁹

And long after the war, the “glorious dead” served yet another profitable function. The grim reality of their deaths was replaced by something altogether more palatable, more stirring … more
suitable
as a motivation for the next generation of warriors. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who after the war ascended to the Supreme Court, dramatically represents this transition. As a young officer he had been grievously wounded and almost died. He had been through the grinder and, in the process, lost his appetite for the rhetoric of patriotism: “He had grown weary of such words as ‘cowardice,’ ‘gallantry,’ and ‘chivalry.’ ” Disillusioned, he eventually resigned his commission. But by 1885 a complete transformation had taken place. Like some American samurai, he discovered a fervent belief in the mystical importance of a warrior’s unquestioning obedience unto death: “In the midst of doubt, the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt … and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he had no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.… It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine … our hearts were touched with fire.”
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I
F SOLDIERS HAVE
to die it should not be in warfare emptied of nobility. If fate so dictated their deaths, they would wish to give their lives on the high ground, rather than have them carelessly discarded in the scrubby wasteland of history. But in much colonial warfare the deaths of the invaders were denied a noble dimension. Writing in 1904 about the wars of the second half of the nineteenth century between the United States and the Plains Indians, Cyrus Townsend Brady described something of this erosion:

An exasperated US soldier of the Indian Wars put it this way: “I don’t care who does the fighting, I don’t want any more of it.… The boys out here have all come to the conclusion that fighting Indians is not what it is cracked up to be, especially when it is fighting on the open prarie [
sic
] against five to one, we always have to fight at such a disadvantage, we always have to shoot at them running, they wont stand and let a fellow shoot at them like a white man.”
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Brady identifies tactics as a reflection of moral worth. If indigenous enemies will not fight the white man’s way, he suggests, it robs the white warrior of the honor associated with a certain confrontational style of war making. In the early days of the English colonization of North America, the whites deplored the natives’ “skulking way of war” as underhanded and unfair. The Indians, on the other hand, marveled at the whites’ willingness to sacrifice their lives in slugfest confrontations. In the end, they learned from each other. The settlers began to incorporate more loose-order combat techniques, and the Indians learned that
“the traditional restraints which had limited deaths in aboriginal warfare were nothing more than liabilities in any serious conflict with the English colonists.”
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At the center of colonial confrontation was a disparity in weapons technology. It made conquest possible and winning probable. The arquebus and cannon of the conquistadores were much more effective at greater distance than the atlatl, bow, and spear of the Aztecs; the Martini-Henry rifle could kill a Zulu warrior at more than 800 yards (whereas the thrown assegai might be deadly only up to 25 yards), and Gatling and Maxim guns cut great swaths through indigenous armies.

This is not to say that native weaponry could not be effective against the European invaders. The atlatl, the dart-throwing “stick” of prehistoric origin, was much used by the Aztecs against the conquistadores, and Spanish sources claim that it was accurate up to 50 yards and its darts, tipped with obsidian, flint, copper, or fishbone, could pierce armor. The barbed version was particularly lethal because it had to be cut out of the wound, which greatly increased the risk of death from blood loss and infection.
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Bernal Diaz del Castillo particularly feared Aztec archery because arrows tipped with glasslike obsidian had an even greater tissue penetration than steel heads. He also feared the Aztec slingers armed with the
tematlatl
—a maguey-fiber sling that could hurl stones 200 yards to deadly effect. Aztec warriors used spears both for throwing and for stabbing, as well as war clubs. But almost unique among indigenous warriors, Aztec soldiers were armed with fearsome swords (
macuahuitl
), either single- or double-handed. The Spanish noted with awe that a blow from an obsidian-edged broadsword could decapitate a horse.

In the end, however, what was essentially Stone Age weaponry could not prevail against steel armor, Toledo blades, gunpowder, and mounted lancers: “Perhaps it is hard for modern deskbound scholars to understand the utter dread that existed in
the minds of those who were routinely sliced to pieces by Toledo steel, shredded by grapeshot, trampled by mailed knights, ripped to pieces by mastiffs [large dogs trained for combat], and had their limbs lacerated with impunity by musket balls and crossbow bolts.… Throughout contemporary oral Nahuatl and written Spanish accounts, there are dozens of grisly scenes of the dismemberment and disemboweling of Mesoamericans by Spanish steel and shot, accompanied by descriptions of the sheer terror that such mayhem invoked in indigenous populations.”
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However, most successful colonial wars (from the viewpoint of the invader, at least) were won through attrition. Native Americans, for example, were finally vanquished at the end of the nineteenth century not in glorious set-piece battles (although there were plenty of bloody clashes) but through the sheer doggedness and strength in depth of a vastly more powerful invader who could make an investment not only in matériel but also in soldiers’ deaths that would have bankrupted the much more fragile infrastructure of his enemy. As a defeated and starving Sioux chieftain said to the victorious General Nelson Miles in early 1877: “We are poor compared with you and your force. We cannot make a rifle, a round of ammunition, or a knife. In fact, we are at the mercy of those who are taking possession of our country. Your terms are harsh and cruel, but we are going to accept them, and place ourselves at your mercy.”
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Even in victory the costs to indigenous peoples could be crippling. When the Zulu king Cetshwayo inflicted a crushing defeat on a sizable British force at Isandlwana, annihilating six companies of the Second Warwickshires, a whole battalion of the Twenty-Fourth Regiment and other British units (about 670 men in all), as well as about 500 native auxiliaries, it was one of the most catastrophic defeats visited upon the British Army, but the cost in Zulu dead (something over 2,000) was so crippling that Cetshwayo described it as though an “assegai has been
thrust into the belly of the nation.”
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The British brought yet more forces, and shortly thereafter, at the battle of Ulundi (the first battle in which the British employed Gatling guns),
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the Zulus lost 1,500 killed (compared with 15 British). A British corporal of the Fifty-Eighth Regiment describes how the Zulu dead fell “as though they had been tipped out of carts.”
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It was the end of the Zulu nation as a military power.

The problem for military cultures based on the heroic model of mano-a-mano confrontation of (more or less) equals in pitched battle (what Victor Davis Hanson characterizes as “the Western way of war”) is that fighting an enemy who does not share that tradition robs the enterprise of its noble and glorious aura. And this is no small matter, because the idea of the heroic is not a disembodied Platonism floating beyond the blood and guts of human experience. On the contrary, it has been developed over millennia of human combat for a very specific practical purpose. It provides the narrative that encourages men to fight and allows them to come to terms with their possible, perhaps probable, death in battle. Colonial warfare against savages who did not fight by Western rules put stress on the received definition of the heroic.

Aboriginal cultures tended to devise tactics in order to minimize the loss of warriors (although this is not a universal truth. The Zulus of the nineteenth century were particularly profligate with their warriors’ lives both on and off the battlefield). Europeans of the colonial era looked on this “oblique” way of waging war as proof of the moral turpitude of the savage. A strategy based on avoidance of mass confrontation, of subterfuge, ambush, and picking off stragglers, of cutting off small groups to be massacred—the “skulking way of war”—did not conform to a heroic template of forthright confrontation.