(Excerpts from)

The Transatlantic Disputations:

Essays and Meditations

Markham Shaw Pyle GMW Wemyss

From the introduction:

[] Mr Wemyss essays in this volume are marked by three crowns; Mr Pyles, by three stars. These essays are just that: as casual as any of Lambs or Montaignes. They range widely, and are inevitably personal in nature. Nevertheless, they are as scholarly as the form allows. Any learned corrections shall be gratefully received. The authors are men who cannot bring themselves not to talk about land and nature, baseball and cricket, shooting and angling, history and the craft of writing. If any of these things at all interests you, they trust that the following musings 1 may repay your time in the reading of them.

And mullings. Although if you are mulling, it is better to mull claret or cider, or ale than Madeira.

Terrain and

Terroir

Pastoral, commercialisation, and vulgarity

A very dear friend of mine with whom I agree about practically nothing recently adverted me to the wonder that is MemoryPrints, a site owned by Cabinet UK Ltd, which is in a partnership with the V&A, the Railway Museum, the Courtauld Institute, and so on. In particular, my friend noted the vintage railways posters section, and, like the happy anorak I am, off I toddled. In many ways, of course, it was a visit with old friends: Sunny South Sam; the Jolly Fisherman (Skegness is, I should think, particularly bracing just now). The LNER is fixed forever in its classic form, advertising the east coast as the drier side; the

Southern is captured in its eternal moment, celebrating the early summertide of the South (were one to accept all that was implicit in the Southerns advertising, one had expected languid caballeros strumming guitars in Bournemouth or a souk in Brighton); the GWR hurtles unrelentingly towards a gilded West preserved as in amber. Some things emerge. Terriers beseeching one to take ones dog along; whimsical elephants advising that one may and ought to send ones (wait for it) trunks ahead; East Coast Follies; East Coast Types (from donkey boys to Scottish fishwives): every appeal is made. Herne Bay and Epping Forest figure in numerous posters as desirable destinations: it is a measure of my own mind that my immediate reaction to seeing the name of either place is criminological. (For those of purer mind and life, I should note that Herne Bay was famously or infamously the site of the first Brides in the Bath murder committed by George Joseph Smith, and Epping Forest, notorious for murders: including the 1970 Babes in the Wood murders.) Themes emerge: the regions of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland (less so, those of Wales); cathedral cities; Rabbie Burns Country (when the traditional regions palled), Sir Walter Scotts Country, Shakespeares Country, Sir Francis Drakes Country, the painterly Constable Country. There are race day specials, Cup Final specials, exhibition specials (poultry and pigeons). Ruins with poetic, Romantic, and

abbatial associations are celebrated. Nor are the up trains forgotten: London is depicted in all its pomp and splendour, monarchs and lords mayor, the Thames and St Pauls iconic upon the skyline. The art and artistry and the artfulness is astounding. The LMS in particular was partial to showing its engines being built or its permanent way being completed, and the best of these by, Terence Cuneo, say, are brilliant genre paintings that leave Ford Madox Ford standing. Equally impressive is the bold, pure colour of Tom Purvis, which defied the conventions of the medium. For make no mistake, the railway poster was a medium with certain conventions of its own, so much so that at the dictates of technology it is not always possible at first glance to distinguish Frank Newbould from, let us say, Leslie Carr, or even Norman Wilkinson. Within and precisely not in despite of that convention, great art came forth. Cuneo, Wilkinson, Badmin, Newbould, and Frank Henry Mason were, simply, great artists. Some of the paintings that became railway posters: the series of paintings that were used for series of adverts Service to Industry, Havens and Harbours, Wilkinsons paintings of minor public schools for the LMS (Fettes, Oundle, that placed named for an agricultural implement ah! Yes, Harrow, thats it one doesnt see ones own school, or WinCo), the history paintings for such destinations

as Carlisle and Ely stand out like Canalettos amidst chocolate boxes. And, after all, it was in Newboulds work for the railways that his justly famous Your Britain fight for it now war posters of after years were implicit: Alfriston Fair, the South Downs, and a cathedral scene I find (said he, archly) remarkably familiar. And yet. This was art, ultimately, in the service of Mammon. It was selling something; and it was a sell. In the 1920s, Norman Wilkinson painted St Pauls for a railways advert: London, the seat of Empire by the grace of God. And then one turns to two posters by Mason: London once more. The first both were done for the Great Western, the artistic connexions of which included, after all, Frith and Turner dates to 1938 and shows more aptly than Mason knew London as night fell: the Tower, the Thames, the bridge and beyond. The second, from 1946, is entitled London Pride, and shows London River and the gleaming dome of St Pauls in cloudless day. It is beautiful; and, showing as it does none of the still-present scars of the war, it is profoundly false. A sell. In this were the seeds of the grim future. The urgent post-War attempts of the Big Four to survive by trading on nostalgia rang false. In the Twenties and early Thirties, one neednt have been John Betjeman to indulge such propositions as Surreys being Londons Highlands, or to respond to promises of thatch and packhorse bridges and old coaching inns. The Big Fours Betjemanic

attempts to recapture that innocence, and still more the more febrile attempts at it by the nationalised British Railways, failed; and what cane after was unbearable. There were the 1960s and 1970s graphical monstrosities, deliberately ugly, faux-primitif. There was ultimately the final BR logo, the Arrow of Indecision, resembling nothing so much as a particularly nasty derailment. At the last came the final indignity: Jimmy Savile in his ghastly trackies, the overt appeals to use the train for your dirty weekends, and the 1975 InterCity poster consisting simply of a Page Three girl, wearing a shirt and a hat and nothing else, bra-less (and this is clamantly, pokingly evident), and the slogan, Want to see a friend this weekend?: a (wait for it) naked appeal to what would nowadays be called, simply, the booty-call market. You may, as your temperament dictates, regard this as progress towards a sterner honesty, the end of a period of slick, commercial deception; or as symptomatic of national decay. I can only say, How the mighty are fallen: and I am far from rejoicing in their fall.

The Natural Occupation: The Arsenal of (Garden) Warfare

But war is the natural occupation of man! War and

gardening.
Winston Churchill, as First Lord, to Robert Graves, ca 1916.

It is generally acknowledged that azaleas can be finicky. It is almost a truism amongst the knowledgeable that very old, well-rooted azaleas cannot be transplanted with any hope of real success, let alone twice in a lustrum (Lone Oak to the Lake, the Lake to Tallowood). That was certainly the conventional wisdom when,

after both my paternal grandparents had died, my father and my uncle determined to uproot, divide between them, and transplant Grammys beloved, trademark, and locally famous azaleas from the Old Home Place. As it happens, however, no one in my family recognizes the existence of an impossibility. (Were not specially courageous, were just bullheaded as all get-out, and the whole lot of us as independent as a hog on ice. Every last one of us would argue with a wooden cigar-store Indian.) However, this success is not due solely to bullheadedness. Its due to a comprehension of soil. This [written in October, 2002] is certainly an appropriate weekend for me to be in autumnal mood: that season, you will recall, of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Besides the other seasonal matters and holidays-and-observances now upon us, today is National Farmers Day (and the Aggies beat the tar out of Baylor yesterday, appropriately enough. Fight, Farmers, fight!). More to the point, the first real norther of the year is blowing through. Its an appropriate time to be thinking about redding up the garden for next year, and its an appropriate day for me to stay snug, here at the PC. (I love cool weather. I do. But it is a fortunate thing that I do my best work with a slight head-cold, which, predictably, I now am coming down with. Remember, folks, the wages of sin is death, but the wages of overwork and mulish refusal to quit and rest usually starts with post-nasal drip and goes on from there).

Down here on the Gulf Coast, we have to deal with clayey, gumbo soils that are the very devil to work with, and with the prospect that on any given day in January, it can feel enough like spring to fool the plants. That is why, by the way, nobody round here should regard this cold-snap as a signal to start pruning anything, least of all azaleas, roses, and crape myrtles (the trinity of tutelary garden plants hereabouts, our very sign and totem). We always have to bear in mind that winter, in Houston, generally consists of a dank afternoon in February. (By ancient tradition, we do our pruning of our crape myrtles as well as of our roses on Valentines Day, unless of course its sleeting. Azaleas we dont trim before late March or early April, only after the blooming season; and then no more than a third of the plant. Late / repeat bloomers such as the new Encores get trimmed even later.) It is soil that is the most fundamental of these fundamental facts. Soil, and the process of amending it. Now, as it happens, I come of a notoriously greenhanded family. My paternal grandparents had a simple division of labor: Grammy took care of the roses and azaleas and such; Pop kept a hellish half-acre or so under the plow in vegetables, next the horse pasture. By this time of year, his enthusiasm for planting crops, and Grammys grim determination to freeze what she could and can all the rest, would have, in their living days, resulted in increased quarterly earnings for the Mason jar people. Both understood the

importance of soil, and of improving it. (Sometimes they went a tad overboard. I recall nay, I shall never forget one summer I spent with them, as I spent most summers with them: this, the Summer of the Eggplant. Pop had been a mite too lavish with the planting, and Nature2 revenged herself with a bumper crop that exceeded all capacity to handle it. We ate eggplant stewed. We ate it fried. We ate it every way we could think of, short of barbecuing it or slathering it with cream gravy. We did our dead level best to pickle it, as a last resort, and still it flooded in. The tenants / neighbors were given some. Then given more. Then they stopped answering the door and flat hid under the porch as Pop relentlessly left paper sacks full of eggplant at every door within miles. The very compost, that year, was largely comprised of unused eggplant, by the time all was said and done.) At any rate, when it came to soil amendments, all else gave way to Grammys consuming passion for azaleas, with old roses a distant but still obsessive second. (She grew them. Then she arranged them. Then she sat down at her easel and painted a canvas from them. Then she went to check the garden for the next batch.) In such soil as ours, of course, that meant souring it, making it more acidic. (There was at least one daughter-in-law of hers who would have suggested Gram could do that simply by addressing a
2 You will recall Horaces observation, which I here translate for those of you who have no Latin (modern academics, for instance), that You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, yet shall she come back in. Pushy old broad, Dame Nature

few mildly cutting remarks to it. I come by my caustic tongue, my snark and my sarcasm,3 by true descent from the Shaw side of the family.) By and large, our local soils possess adequate resources (iron, for instance); what they do not always possess is a pH level sufficient to unlock those nutrients for the plants use. (Let your soil get too alkaline, and you could scrap a battleship on the flowerbed and the plants would remain iron deficient.) Those of you who live in less nutrient-favored soils will need to begin, in the immediate term, with an Azalea-CamelliaRhododendron Food that has an NPK series of 30-10-10, and after getting your pH to acceptable levels (under 6.0 or so; Gram swore by about 5.6 pH), follow up with a 16-2-3 or a 15-4-5.) For us, a 16-2-3 NPK fertilizer was plenty, as it still is. You want an azalea food thats rapidly absorbed, easy to work into a bedding soil that has been even marginally improved (with our gumbo, you have to do something first to amend it, as in larding in some compost and some cottonseed meal, or youll be using a mattock 4 to break it up); and of course, synthetics by nature are uniform and readily monitored for efficacy. Moreover, if as it ought to be it is also an acidifier, it does double duty not only for your camellias, but for the Glories of the Southland, the revered magnolia and the beloved dogwood.
3 4 As it happens, October is also, I believe, National Sarcasm Month. How exciting. Somewhere we still have our ancestral mattock, a heavy, somehow Teutonic-looking tool I have named Otto. (The author, smirking, waits for the penny to drop.)

It may be mere country superstition amongst my brethren of the ruddy neck, or perhaps a guilty nod to organic practices, but we always tended to follow up this application with a counteracting smattering of blood-and-bone meal as well, and I still do, as when I and others from the parish were fixing up a few houses for the poor-folks of the Fourth Ward the other year. Im useless at installing windows, but by God, that little old ladys roses and azaleas are going to thrive now that Im done. The general rule of green thumb down here is to feed the azaleas immediately after they bloom, then again six weeks later, then again six weeks after that with a systemic food containing Disyston (we have most of the ills plant-flesh is heir to, kicking around down here: in this case, spider mites). The agribusiness people recommend (purely coincidentally, Im sure, and with no intention of pushing sales it is still sarcasm month, right?) a fortnightly feeding schedule. My own advice is to err on the side of safety, feeding and fertilizing less dosage more often; in any event, monitor your pH and check your growth, and then use your own judgment. And some manure, of course. (Call your local stock yard, if all else fails. Or, of course, the Bar Association.) Partly, this will depend upon ambient factors, self-evidently. Azaleas need partial shade, of course, and they do superbly well under pine canopy. (If there is one thing we have around here, mind you, it is pine. And pollen. And in my case, miserable

allergies.) As it happens, pine needles and duff, as a mulch, help maintain an acidic soil pH to begin with (shrewd is the Creator, and above all things wise), as well as helping keep moisture in the soil. That is fundamental in the heat we so revel in down here. 5 Azaleas need watering, the equivalent of an inch or so of rain every seven to ten days, but they do not need to sit about with wet feet: well-drained soils are essential. (Theyll catch this blamed head-cold I have, otherwise.) A mulch is thus essential, both to keep them from dehydrating and to wick away excess moisture, and you may as well use a pine mulch. Operating on that assumption, then, the proper application of azalea food is to sprinkle it evenly on slightly damp soil throughout the bed, under the branch zone (the shade-shadow) of the plants, and then to cover with pine needle mulch and water it in. Properly and regularly used, the results are uniformly excellent, even by synthetic standards; and many synthetics, to give due credit, do seem anecdotally at least to live up to claims of timed and steady release and absorption, a factor more commonly associated, at very slow speeds, with organics. And be sure to check out the Aggie Horticulture pages and links on the Web, and those of the River Oaks Garden Club, for more learning about your azaleas. The latter knows its onions about azaleas, and the former, well, any bunch of good ol boys
5 Yep. Still sarcasm month.

who can develop a maroon bluebonnet constitute a force to be reckoned with. On balance pH balance (thats a joke, son) acidophil synthetics are a godsend, and the results in our family, as regards generations of classic Southern azaleas: Southern Charm, Duc de Rohan, Coral Bells, Judge Solomon, Formosa, Dixie Beauty, have been reliably good. In these miserable times, it is well to cultivate ones garden.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

The late American golfing coach and writer, Harvey Penick, held that any who played golf was his friend in the politer sense of

Arcades ambo, I gather.

I myself hold with Honest Izaak that there is and that I am a member of a communion of, if not saints, at least anglers and very honest men, some now with God and others of us yet upon the quiet waters. There are untold numbers of persons who follow young Mr Tom Felton on Twitter: some are fans, others, fen, others yet, one gathers, and of both sexes, are struck with a bobbysoxers calf-love: I suspect that I am one of at most a score of

those who give him a follow as a gesture of solidarity amongst anglers. Note that: a gesture of solidarity amongst anglers. We are a broad church, and a rather stuffy old dry-fly man such as am I yet feels a kinship with even a coarse fisher. Yet naturally, men of similar interest and passion most congregate together. And just now, within my own fraternity of devotees of the chalk stream and the well-tied fly, the same questions are asked wherever we foregather or chance to meet, in person, down the local, or online: What sort of hatch of mayfly have you where you are? and, Are you able to spend much time on the water? To both of these questions, alas, my answer just now is the same: Not As Much As Id Like. [Written in Springtide 2011] Partly this is because, for all my undeserved good fortune in this life, I also, even I, am unable to devote all my hours to the contemplative mans calling. Ive a very good stretch of water quite near. I am blessed in not being required to plan and shift things and travel for hours to reach Arcadia. Yet my rural idyll has the defects of its qualities; and if the season of ovine obstetrics is now past, that of bovine obstetrics is not, quite, and I have to put it with as much delicacy as may obtain been, as every Springtide, up to my elbows in it. (When young, there were certain places I never imagined my hand as going. Some hopes, that innocence.) Yet it is when I look at my arable that I am confronted also

with the shadow of ill-fortune for my fishing: for the land would tell me what the river has to say even were I never to look at the river. We are dry, damnably dry. Father Wylye is very low; the Chitterne Brook at the Codfords is gasping for breath; even in the Deverills, the diving rill is brought low, even unto the dust. We are just barely above the lowest levels of normality, and an anxious survey of the skies promises little relief. I do not propose to enter into the whys and wherefores of this: it devolves all too readily, that sort of thing, into a political quarrel of the most squalid intellectual dishonesty. I but state the fact. And yet angling is, after all, the contemplative mans repose and refreshment. It is vexing, in its way, to find ones river low and, from the anglers point of view, ailing. Compensations, however, for the true angler, remain. There are always, for the true angler, compensations. When winter rages without, there are flies to tie, and memories to record, and books to read and perhaps to write. Farming, gardening, angling, and apiculture have, I think one may fairly say, fathered more great literature than anything save, perhaps, war, from Hesiod and Vergil and Columella to Adrian Bell and Haig Brown. And with the invocation of that great name, I may begin to note the compensations of even such times as these upon a river. To know a river is a wondrous thing, and the study of a lifetime. It has its own georgics and pastorals, and they are read perhaps the

more easily when the palimpsest of ranunculus-crowfoot and cool, clear water ceases to overwrite them. In such times as these upon the river, it is next seasons sport that one may study, learning the complex, subtle life of the river, flow and deposition: for as the American or, rather, resolutely Texan writer, John Graves, has noted (many and wonderful are the books about rivers), a river is its course and bed and sources, its complex history and hydrology, and all the plants and animals and people who live and have ever lived in and on and beside it.6 And although there is that in us that thrills with satisfaction, indeed, with satiety, to the full and glorious amplitude of such seasons as Mole and Ratty knew, when (many and wonderful are the books about rivers) the river is a sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again and tells to us, confidingly, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea; and when in its season the pageant of the river bank had marched steadily along,
6 Mr Wemyss notes that knowing Mr Pyle has had its compensations.

unfolding itself in scene-pictures that succeeded each other in stately procession. Purple loosestrife arrived early, shaking luxuriant tangled locks along the edge of the mirror whence its own face laughed back at it. Willowherb, tender and wistful, like a pink sunset cloud, was not slow to follow. Comfrey, the purple hand-in-hand with the white, crept forth to take its place in the line; and at last one morning the diffident and delaying dog-rose stepped delicately on the stage, and one knew, as if string-music had announced it in stately chords that strayed into a gavotte, that June at last was here. One member of the company was still awaited; the shepherd-boy for the nymphs to woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleeping summer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet, debonair and odorous in amber jerkin, moved graciously to his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin; there is also reward, we know, when Summers lease hath all

too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and,
in a drought or in the iron of winters soul, Nature was deep in her annual slumber and seemed to have kicked the clothes off. Copses, dells, quarries and all hidden places, which had been mysterious mines for exploration in leafy summer, now exposed themselves and

their secrets pathetically, and seemed to ask him to overlook their shabby poverty for a while, till they could riot in rich masquerade as before, and trick and entice him with the old deceptions. It was pitiful in a way, and yet cheering even exhilarating. He was glad that he liked the country undecorated, hard, and stripped of its finery. He had got down to the bare bones of it, and they were fine and strong and simple. He did not want the warm clover and the play of seeding grasses; the screens of quickset, the billowy drapery of beech and elm seemed best away. Old Father Wylye is today diminished to the casual eye: at Brixton Deverill, but 0.18 metres in depth, at Norton Bavant, but 0.13, at South Newton a mere 0.21; Sweet Mother Nadder has sunk exhausted to a mere trickle even at Tisbury, at 0.55 metres in depth. Gammer Avon at Upavon flows at a mere 0.08 metres, and, at Amesbury, but 0.22 metres. Gaffer Bourne at Idmiston is low also, in metres 0.03 alone. Shall I abandon my rivers? Should God forget His people?

Super flumina, let us even in sorrow sing; and let my rod-hand

forget her cunning if I forget these, my earthly Sion. Rather, let us to the rivers as they are, and get wisdom. I do not expect much fishing this year; yet I expect a catch in abundance, multiplying like the loaves and fishes in the feeding of the multitudes. I expect to land the Salmon of Wisdom. The rivers and

chalk streams of my care and cure are diminished only to the casual eye; there is much to read in them just now for them that have eyes to see. Let us to the rivers and get wisdom: this is an opportunity, to study and to learn, to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest: to study their secret ways and processes, the silver and shadowed swift-flashing world wherein our quarry live and move and have their being. We are in some degree doctors of physic to our rivers; we are not their masters and we are assuredly not their creator. It well behoves us to learn their ways and health and structure, and we have been given a cunningly-disguised blessing of grace in which to do just that. For to the true angler, who would know his river, all seasons are apt, all knowledge precious, and all things work together for good. It was not by chance that Our Saviour sought his first disciples amongst fishermen. And I remember, also, a kinsman of mine in centuries past, a good honest Churchman and an angler, a physician in Hants, who when the family were divided took the part of the King rather than that of Parliament, and aided Honest Izaak in the recovery of the Lesser George for the King, and Colonel Blagues escape from the Tower and over the water, with the Roundheads pounding after him: for angling is an honest, ingenuous, quiet, and harmless art, and honest anglers artful and apt to any honest service. And if we are, as indeed we are, silver links (many of us more

than a trifle tarnished) in a great chain of being, we must also recognise that there are great natural cycles in which we are a part, and a part only: we are in some degree doctors of physic to our rivers; we are not their masters and we are assuredly not their creator: and there are fasts that the rivers and all nature keep for their better health. We may learn of them in fast as on feasts and ferial days. The man is a mere brute, and no true angler, whose sport is measured only in fish caught and boasted of. For what purpose do we impose on ourselves limits and conventions if not to make sport of a mere mechanical harvest of protein? The true angler can welcome even a low river and a dry year, and learn of it, and be the better for it, in mind and in spirit. So, No: the hatch is not all that it might be, for if it is warm enough and early with it, it is also in a time of drought; and, No: I dont get to the river as often as I should wish. But these things do not make this a poor year: they are an unlooked-for opportunity to delve yet deeper into the secrets of the river, and grow wise. Rejoice, then, in all seasons, ye fishers. The world the river is;

both you and I, And all mankind, are either fish or fry. We must
view it with judicious looks, and get wisdom whilst we may. And to all honest anglers, then, I wish, as our master Izaak wished us long ago, a rainy evening to read this following Discourse; and that if he be an honest Angler, the east wind may never blow when he

goes a-fishing.

Sursum Corda: Lift Up Your Hearts (February 2000)

If T. S. Eliot had stayed in St Louis, he would never have held that April was the cruelest month. Well, unless he was a Browns fan. At this moment, in the ragged middle of February, it begins: beneath the snow, roots quicken. In the Deep South, already trees begin to bud. And all over the land indeed, all over the world, in Japan, in the Caribbean, in Australia a certain class of mammal, fubsy, amiable, sweet-natured, begins to twitch and wake from hibernation: the baseball fan. Is it the lengthening of the days? Is it some subtle signal that causes them to begin to emerge from a stupor only lightly disturbed by meetings of the Hot Stove League? Naw. It is the magic phrase, pitchers and catchers to report .

(Good news: the Commissioner did not see his shadow on Groundball Day. Spring training will begin as scheduled.) The winter of our discontent is about to be made glorious summer by this sun of baseball. (And the people rejoiced.) This means things more wondrous than tongue can tell unless, of course, you were deprived as a child and somehow failed to become a fan. The non-fans know by now that spouses, children, business contacts, or friends will once again drag them to the ballpark. This guide is for those unhappy souls. Let me say at once that my years in Virginia and my deep devotion to the Orioles as my junior circuit team of choice notwithstanding this primer is addressed to the pure, the true, the blissful game that is National League ball. Much of it will apply to the unfortunates of the junior circuit, or to interleague play, but not all. The first consideration for the neophyte is, Where is the game being played? If it is in a covered stadium, bring a light jacket no matter what the weather outdoors. If it is under Gods good sun, on the grass, then bring a slicker or a brolly, a hat, some sunscreen, a jacket at the beginning and end of the season (Wrigley comes to mind here). The type of stadium dictates more than climate and comfort concerns, I hasten to add. Domed stadia meant Astroturf, an artificial playing surface. This in turn did funny things to chops and

other grounders, and made incalculable differences to bunts and infield hits. The fan under those circumstances had to pay special attention to the middle infield. Further to the subject of comfort, the newbie should be aware that beer and soft drinks at the ballpark are what underwrites a goodly chunk of those ungodly salaries. The newbie ought also to be aware that a game may last hours upon end. This dictates the drinking of lots of water before hand. As an Anglican I am anything but a teetotaler; however, in open-air parks, especially from May through the All-Star Break to the pennant stretch, dehydration is a fact of life. Go easy on the beer, then, and drink plenty of water. Some stadia have of late gone utterly mad. Back in 1999, I took my father to the game as my treat. Instead of my usual seat, we had seats in the section immediately behind the third-base-line dugout (the visitors dugout), where things are catered. This being the Dome in 1999, it made perfect sense that barbecue was available in addition to the traditional dogs and such. What shocked my father unutterably was the sight of people in the row ahead of us. He felt, as I did, that white wine and a cheese and melon tray are about as out of place at a ball game as earrings on a steer. I heard him humming when he was not making invidious comparisons between todays players and Musial, Williams, and DiMag something about Buy me some brie and some

Chardonnay / I dont care if the team doesnt play. In fact, ballpark food is notoriously overpriced and even at its best none so good. You can spend your hard-earned money on chow at the park, or you can feed the crew in advance (OK, so they deserve some peanuts in the middle innings: Im big on tradition) and use the money for good seats. And what, you may ask, is a good seat? That depends in part on who is playing. Teams have different styles and strengths. If a Star Hitter is in town, outfield seats become premium: everyone but we few purists, the High Church Party in the Church of Baseball, is more interested in snagging a long-ball than watching the actual game. But as a rule, this is not the case. Where you want to sit is determined by what you want to see. My own general rule is dictated by my own preferences for baseball, and by what the home team is good at. One of the things I most miss about the Dome is my point seat: a single seat where two aisles come together into one, about ten or so rows back, with an unobstructed view of the plate and the field looking straight down the 3B line. The point is this. Obviously, the closer you are to the playing field, the better. Beyond that, in NL parks at least, the dictates of NL strategy the eschewal of that Commie innovation the DH, [to which for nakedly sleazy reasons the Astros are now to be subjected] and little-ball, suggest you want a seat behind the

dugouts or otherwise along the foul lines. (The third or first question is up to you. In either event, for Gods sake stay alert for fouls and flying bats.) Unless you are a scout or a pitching connoisseur, being directly behind the plate is not as good. Why? Well, because of what you should be looking for. From the side, you can see the rhythm of the pitcher. You can possibly learn to steal the catchers signs, and the coaches. You can see the subtle shifts that are entailed in guarding the lines, setting up a wheel, bringing the fielders in or out for a batter on a particular count. You can note the tantalizing bluffs between the runner especially on first and the battery. And you have a heck of a viewpoint for all varieties of the double-play, including the strikeout-throw-out, than which there is no sweeter DP. And by the time you have seen these things up close and personal over the course of a few games, you will no longer need this advice, for you will be a fan. One final note for newbies and vets alike. Part of the charm of this greatest of games is its tradition, its evocation of times gone by. (It is the only inherently timeless game, after all: in theory, a ballgame, once tied, could go on forever.) That being said, allow me to renew as I do every year a plea for civility. Boo-birds are not native to Houston, for example. Drunken louts in the stands should be removed and possibly shot by firing squad. People who jump to

their feet and block the view of grandmothers who are unsteady on their pins and have to stay seated are almost as bad. Foul language in the stands, in front of women and children and the elderly, is contemptible; and every stadium has people to enforce the rules against these vices. Make use of them. Then we can all have fun; we can all succumb to what the mystery writer John Dickson Carr called baseball dust, headier and more addictive than cocaine; and we can all learn what is conveyed in that great line of Mr Cubs, Its a great day for baseball lets play two.

W ar and History

Fields of Battle, I: Manassas, First and Second: To Die Here and Conquer
Manassas NBP strikes a superb, rare balance between preserving the all-important terrain and making it accessible. It is also moderately well-marked and contextualized: certainly better than most.

Many words have been spilt already, like soldiers blood, on the battlegrounds of North America. Few, to date, have proceeded from military historians looking at the ground as terrain. I aim to address that lacuna.
The Battle of First Manassas is, naturally, full of interest even to the most casual reviewer. It is where the Stonewall Brigade and

its commander, an eccentric former VMI professor named Thomas J Jackson, earned that immortal nickname; it was the first battle in history in which the transportation of reinforcements by rail at a critical moment occurred; it served notice to both sides that the war was not going to be over in a fortnight though it remains arguable that had Stonewall and the Brigade been allowed to lead a pursuit of McDowells fleeing levies, they could have taken Washington, DC. Second Manassas, by contrast, is one of the classic battles of the Army of Northern Virginia at its zenith, perhaps more so even than are Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville. To begin with, it was the validation of the Seven Days victories down on the Peninsula, by which Lee took command with Richmond on the verge of falling and transformed the operational situation such that, within two months, it was the Confederacy that was on the offensive in the hinterland of Washington City rather than the Union that was driving into the suburbs of Richmond. Secondly, it is the template of the way in which Lee best liked to use II Corps Jacksons men and I Corps, under Longstreet: the anvil and the hammer, respectively. And thirdly, it is a set-piece battle, a classic of the military art: Old Blue Light and II Corps holding a defensive position on an unfinished railroad cut, Popes bluecoats being fed heedlessly into

frontal assaults, and when the Union is too engaged to extricate itself Old Pete and I Corps appearing on the Union left flank, scything the Federals with a mass artillery barrage, then pouring in in a flank assault led by Hoods Texans, smashing the US Army of Virginia to fleeing remnants salvaged only by a desperate rearguard action. It is as classic a battle as Chancellorsville itself. And like most battles, each of the Manassas actions was dictated by the land itself. The Manassas NBP, naturally enough, comprises portions of both these battlespaces, which, indeed, slightly overlap, though not thank God to the extent those of the Peninsula do (on the Virginia Peninsula, around Yorktown, you can hardly tell the Revolutionary works from those added to them in 1861, when indeed Yanks and Confederates alike reused and extended the crumbling traces of Washingtons and Cornwallis field

fortifications). The hinge, as it were, between the two is the intersection of what was, in 1861 and 1862, the Warrenton Turnpike (now US 29, the Lee Highway) with the Sudley Road (Virginia 234), northwest of the Henry House Hill. That was the hinge on which the doors of fate swung at First Manassas as well. But a hinge is not a door; and more must be said, first, to explain what happened here. If the levies on both sides at First Manassas were raw all green together, on both sides, as Mr Lincoln pointed out to

General McDowell so were the commanders. P. G. T. Beauregard and Irvin McDowell each hit upon the same overall battle plan: attack the enemys left. On a flat map, the collision of such plans would have interacted to create, simply, a waltz, with both armies rights swinging around a central position. What changed things, of course, is that Manassas is not a flat map. It is broken ground, ridges and fords and runs (a Virginianism for what we Americans call creeks, freshwater rivulets not to be confused with creeks in the British sense). What set the whole thing up, in turn, was the preliminary skirmish it was no more than that, though in those innocent days it seemed big and gaudy enough to merit the title of battle the Battle of Blackburns Ford. (If Jackson made his name at First Manassas, Longstreet made his at the Ford.) The Ford is outside the present confines of the Manassas NBP, being east and a little south of the park; the Bull Run Regional Park encompasses the Blackburns Ford site. The reason, in turn, that Federal forces driving south from Centreville attempted to force the ford was that to its south, in turn, was the strategically important rail junction at Manassas Junction. Railways, of course, follow the contours of topography, as indeed do the human settlements and commercial depots they serve; so once again, the land and its very shape are master here. The Confederate success in holding off the Federals at

Blackburns Ford, in turn, brought McDowells army out to try to flank and overwhelm the Fords defenders, swinging to their left and enveloping them. This entirely predictable threat, and the strategic value of Manassas Junction as part of the rail net, in its own turn drew Beauregards and Joe Johnstons armies to the banks of Bull Run, the rill that Blackburn forded. The Confederates were on the strategic defensive in most regards: while the mere secession of Virginia meant that Confederate armies were operating on the very outskirts of the Northern capital, the immediate strategic objectives that fed the armies into the grinder at this place and at this time were the Southern defense or Union capture of the rail node at Manassas Junction. Tactically, neither force was squarely on the tactical defensive, in that Beauregards plan, to which J. E. Johnston, arriving later, assented (although Johnston ranked Old Borey, he declined overall command in favor of letting the man who planned the action be the man to execute it), was to engage in offensive operations against the Union left in the service of the overall strategic defensive goals. To recap: McDowells overall purpose was to get around the Confederates and flank and defeat them, so that he could proceed to Manassas Junction. Beauregards overall purpose was to spin the Union left facing his right yet further away from that objective. Thus the mirrored plans of attack on the enemy left.

The Manassas NBP, dotted though it is with monuments, so preserves the ground as to make this clear with the merest sweep of the eye from the Henry House Hill Visitors Center. Facing ENE from the Henrys farmstead, one looks down on the same axis as the road to Centreville and Washington, DC. The ground falls away to Bull Run, and the inflowing of the confluent tributaries of Holkums Branch and Youngs Branch. Bull Run is fordable (the Lewis and Ball Fords) on the right as you look ENE from the Henry House, and it is spanned by a stone bridge that carried the Warrenton Turnpike of the day across the Run upstream of those fords, to your left. The topography funnels any frontal or even mildly oblique assault straight towards this key position on the Henry House hilltop. Behind this cardinal position is the Sudley Road; immediately to your left is its intersection with the Warrenton Turnpike, now Virginia 234, at the Stone House. The Confederates from the start possessed a secured defensive position, then, the literal high ground, and interior lines of communication. The Union response was to mount a diversionary assault across the Stone Bridge that spanned Bull Run and carried the Turnpike, pinning the Confederates down while the bulk of McDowells forces snuck around the Confederate left, northwest towards Sudley Springs and then down the Sudley Road and onto the ENE / WSW running high ground formed by Matthews Hill, Buck Hill, and Dogan Ridge.

Manassas NBP succeeds as only a few battlegrounds do in making these operational considerations immediately clear to view. From here where the Stonewall BDE was to hold its ground, it is manifest that this is the key to the position, just as it is evident from the other side of the bridge, as it was to McDowell, that the only possible choices are to flank the Confederate left by coming south down the Sudley Road, or to carry the Henry House Hill by assault. Thus, the overarching duty in getting a sense of what happened here in the baking summer of 1861, at First Manassas, is to begin with the Henry House Hill walking tour. It is the ground on which the culminating scene of the drama played out. The Union right had not rolled up the Confederate left with its flanking manuvre (a device Jackson could use with hardened troops at

Chancellorsville, in after years, but sheer folly to ask of green troops under such commanders as Burnside and Willcox and Heintzelman, and even those under a yet-untried Sherman); but neither had the Confederate right been able to advance upon the Union left flank. Inevitably, the key position of the Henrys farmhouse, now scarred by shot and shell, had to be carried, and the Confederates and their artillery, Imbodens in particular driven from this high ground that, so long as the Southerners held it, left the Federal troops hopelessly exposed in their progress towards it. Weight of

numbers and poor generalship Beauregard was incapable of adjusting his now-unworkable plan in the face of events had forced the Confederates in upon themselves. Brigadier General Barnard Bee, of South Carolina, had seen the central importance of the Henry House Hill position, and chosen it as the rallying point for his rattled troops: There stands Jackson like a stone wall! Let us rally behind the Virginians! It was his last command. The Walking Tour around the Henry House Hill shows the sudden unfolding of the event: the Union artillery positions (Ricketts being the exemplar) and their Confederate counterparts, where the cannon dueled and sharpshooters tried to tip the balance by picking off artillerymen and artillery horses; the Confederate forward positions and artillery batteries placed to sweep Matthews Hill across the road in the event of just such a flanking movement as McDowell intended, emplacements abandoned as the blue tide rushed onwards with mounting hope; the rally points in the interim, and Wade Hamptons desperate bid to buy time with his Legion of Carolinians, there at Robinsons Lane, and again in a deadly open field where Johnston and Beauregard led from the front, Johnston personally taking command of the shot-to-hell 4th Alabama;

and then, on the duke of Wellingtons beloved reverse slope, waiting with a deadly patience just over the crest of the hill, Jackson, and the position held by the brigade that would ever after be known as the Stonewall Brigade. The Union wave came on, and like a wave dashed against a rock, or a stone wall, broke, recoiled, and ebbed. The 33d Virginia counter-attacked the Union artillery under Griffin, and slaughtered the crews with a point blank volley. New York Zouaves mounted a final counter-effort, and failed. The last, wavering remnants of the original Federal flanking movement that was now relegated to a supporting role, the diversionary frontal assault having with wars mad logic become the main effort: Maine and Vermont troops under O. O. Howard, a pious New Englander better at praying than command: emerged on Chinn Ridge, behind the Henry House and to the west of the Sudley Road, and were shot to rag dolls by Confederate gunnery. They broke, and the whole Union Army broke with them. It was the turning point. The broader context is afforded by the Stone Bridge Walking Tour, which begins at the point where Shanks Evans, with Rob Wheats Louisiana Tigers, Sloans 4th South Carolina, and Alexanders and Terrys Troops, 30th Virginia CAV the latter Troop being Old Boreys scouts, to the extent he had any suddenly saw the Union diversionary assault for what it was, and headed, as the Walking Tour then heads, up to where the Sudley

Road crosses the juncture of Matthews Hill and Dogans Ridge. There he was able to hold and check the advance units of the Federal flanking movement which is how the diversionary assault on the Confederate center, there at the Henry farmhouse, became the main assault, and the grand plan McDowell had formulated to flank Beauregard right out of his boots came to nothing. Man proposes. The trail then continues down the Sudley Road to the Henry House hill, and down its killing-ground slope back to the Stone Bridge. The Henry House Hill walking tour is about a mile in length, the Stone Bridge tour is some five miles worth. Self-guided, the tours generally rely upon interpretive signs with push-activated recordings, quite well done, that tell what happened at given spots. The Henry House tour loop may also be walked with a rangerhistorian guide at scheduled intervals, taking about half an hour [as of 2002]. The Second Manassas portion of the 5,000 acre park is considerably less compact, as was the battle itself. In the brutal heat of a late Virginia August, Old Jack opened the ball by ambushing one of John Popes columns at Brawners Farm, west and a little south of the earlier battlefield, as the falsely secure Yanks slogged down the Warrenton Pike towards an expected concentration at Centreville. Once again, the warlike Calvinist deacon had mystified, misled, and surprised his enemy, and Lees

orders to suppress the miscreant Pope were coming to fruition. Pope as usual, with his headquarters where his hindquarters ought have been took the bait, and hastened reinforcements to Groveton hamlet. The whole course of the battle was implicit in this opening move. Gibbons Iron Brigade was amongst those engaged on 28 August. Gibbons rashly assumed that his men were being subjected to minor harassment by cavalry and horse artillery, nothing more, and ordered a flanking movement by the 2nd Wisconsin. They proved the hard way that this was no skirmish when they came face to face with Stonewalls waiting infantry. The rest of the Iron Brigade was sent into line, and then simply left there without orders; and Private George Fairfield of the 7th Wisconsin came to an unpleasant realization: My God, what a slaughter. No one seemed to know the object of the fight. That, in microcosm, was what befell the ill-led Federals for the next three days. Why were the armies here yet again? Because of Federal mistakes, a whole series of them, many induced by Marse Robert and Old Jack. In brief, McClellan and his Army of the Potomac had been paralyzed and this was partly self-induced on the Peninsula. Pope had been given the makeshift, thrown-together Army of Virginia with which to at least threaten the overland

route towards Richmond, Little Macs amphibious end-run having so spectacularly failed. Then both men were superseded by Henry Halleck, nicknamed, in a burst of Homeric irony, Old Brains. It was Hallecks intention to unite the Potomac and Virginia armies south of DC, threatening the Gordonsville rail node, and protecting Washington by at least seeming to be ready for an overland campaign due south against Richmond. Lees typically audacious response was to send Stonewall his reputation needing burnishing after the Seven Days, when he had not performed to the standard hed set himself through his textbook campaigns in the Shenandoah Valley in the springtime to buffalo Pope before Pope and McClellan could unite. This was a clear signal of faith in II Corps and its commander, and Jackson had failings to avenge. It was an audacious plan, requiring a commander who was at his best when on the longest possible leash, and there was no more independent or audacious subordinate in all Lees army than Thomas J Jackson. He flanked Pope, got between Pope and Washington, astride his supply lines, plundered and burnt millions of dollars worth of supplies and rations, and got Pope to chase after him with no regard to common sense. The Federals as a whole reacted to borrow an acid phrase of Mr Lincolns, speaking of Heintzelman in Tennessee the next year like a stunned duck. This included Mr Lincoln, his cabinet, his War Department, Halleck, Pope, and

McClellan. Thus the return to Manassas, where Jackson suckered Pope into attacking him. The next morning, 29 August 1862, Jacksons II Corps (not yet formally thus named, but here so called for convenience), Stonewalls old Valley Army now augmented and in the best shape of its storied history, took up a defensive position along an unfinished railroad line, a graded cut that was a defensive earthwork made to order. (Mr Sewards irrepressible conflict had managed, however inevitable it was, to catch most of the country by surprise: here, as at Gettysburg, and at numerous other battles, warfighters found themselves deployed along unfinished

commercial projects that were interrupted by a war the captains of industry had never imagined would actually come.) Arrayed against them, concentrated in the NW quadrant marked off by the Sudley Road / Warrenton Turnpike intersection, anchored on Dogan Ridge, were Popes men, whose Order of Battle was already beginning to sound like a roll-call of commanders whom Jackson and Lee had already beaten and humiliated on other fields: Sigel, Milroy, Commissary Banks, and other victims of Old Jacks Valley campaign; Porter and McDowell. Jackson was riding high. The Stonewall Brigade was in the II Corps line of battle, Branch and Dorsey Pender and Gregg and

Early commanded hardened troops (although Taliaferro and Ewell had both been wounded the preceding evening), Willie Pegram was there with his cannoneers, Fitz Lee and W. H. F. Lee had their horsemen at the ready, the Gallant Pelhams horse artillery dashed into position, raining iron upon the Yankees, and Jeb Stuart, who had sat his horse with the same lan at First Manassas as CO of the 1st Virginia Cavalry, now lorded it splendidly as commander of the whole Cavalry Division, roaring fighting songs through his cinnamon beard, with his personal mounted banjo player, Sweeney, at his side. This was the II Corps-to-be, Jacksons Wing, at the height of its power, the Platonic ideal of Jacksons command made flesh, the subject of a hundred paintings. Incredibly, yet characteristically, the bombastic John Pope obstinately threw uncoordinated frontal assault after

uncoordinated frontal assault, piecemeal, against the hard-bitten II Corps in their dug-in positions. He also left his left flank in the air, just east of Groveton. He could see only Jackson to his front, the bait and even in itself, the poisoned bait, itself dealing death to his men in the trap. By the afternoon of the 29th, that trap was in place. I Corps (as it would become) under Dutch Longstreet, with R. E. Lee keeping a close eye on his most dilatory commander, had poured through Thoroughfare Gap and had deployed on Jacksons right, the Union left, effectively able to pivot upon command at right angles to the

line II Corps had maintained. I Corps was in a position now, from Stuarts Hill and the Cundiff area, the southwest corner of todays Park, to roll the Federals up. Popes Army of Virginia was now about to be enfiladed, with Lees Army of Northern Virginia forming a V inside which and against only one stroke of which Pope was directing his troops or, rather, his victims. Typically, Longstreet wasted the remainder of the light fussing about, getting his troops disposed just so, and leaving II Corps to bear the galling, if doomed, Federal attacks, still being delivered in spasms. (Jacksons ammunition was low, but his men knew that they were expected required to continue fighting, if it came to nothing but rocks, fists, and bayonets hand to hand: as in places it did, to A. P. Hills incoherent fury with Longstreet and Jackson both.) Typically also, Lee suggested that Longstreet get a move on, but declined to give a positive order to that effect. And typically again, Pope was oblivious: elements of Morells Division, the 1st Division of V Corps (FitzJohn Porters), early arrivals without McClellan from the recently-beaten Army of the Potomac, were engaged as early as 1100 on 29 August by D. R. Joness division of I Corps, ANV (Andersons, Toombs / Bennings, and Draytons Brigades, Georgians and one South Carolina regiment), and other units of V Corps under Porter were engaged all day in fitful clashes. At sunset, remarkably yet again,

typically Hood even seized the moment for a devastating twilight flank attack against elements of Porters Corps. Pope nonetheless refused to believe that the rest of Lees army had arrived, and concentrated blindly on Jackson. He got nowhere. The situation, then, on the 30th was thus. II Corps, bloodied but unbowed, grimly awaited the Federals from positions along the unfinished rail track, their backs braced against Stony Ridge. Part of II Corps line primarily Starkes Division (now under Stafford, Starke having taken over for the wounded Taliaferro), the Fourth Brigade of Jacksons old division, consisting of the 1st, 2d, 9th, 10th, and 15th Louisiana and Coppens Louisiana Battalion occupied the Deep Cut portion of the railway grade, an entrenchment that would have done credit to the Western Front in 1916. I Corps was in place: since before noon on the 29th, it had been in position, Hoods Texans first and foremost, on either side of the ENE-trending Warrenton Pike, just east of Pageland Lane, today the westernmost boundary of the Park; with Cadmus Wilcoxs Alabamians echeloned to his left rear and Kempers Virginians echeloned to Hoods right and rear, extending the line south of the present day Park bounds. Joness Georgians, who had clawed Porters V Corps severely the preceding afternoon, extended the line still further to the south, on Kempers right, straddling the Manassas Gap Railway that runs a kilometer and more outside the southern limits of todays Park. Beverly Robertsons Virginian

cavalry (the 2d, 6th, 7th, 12th, and 17th), sent by Stuart for the purpose from II Corps, screened towards Manassas itself. At 1830 hours or so on 29 August, Hatchs 1st Division, III Corps of the Federal Army of Virginia (poor old Irvin McDowells, he being back at the scene of his earlier martyrdom), another detachment from McClellans Potomac Army, had engaged Hoods Texans, only to be raked with artillery fire from I Corps gunners. They had fallen back unsupported, and at that very moment, Porter was ordered by Pope, still willfully blind to Longstreets presence (and unwilling to listen to Porters reports of it), to move to Groveton for a final grand assault, the next morning, on what Pope somehow saw as a beaten and retreating Stonewall Jackson. This unfathomable idiocy finally freed even the cautious Longstreet from any restraints. At 1200 high and fatal noon on 30 August, 1862, the Union troops began to move to their jump-off positions for the attack on Jackson. Reynolds Pennsylvania Reserves (III Corps under McDowell: these included the brigade of one George Gordon Meade, whom destiny awaited elsewhere) were shifted to Chinn Ridge, which extends on a NE / SW axis from the SW corner of the intersection of the Turnpike and the Sudley Road. Facing it to the east across Sudley Road was the wreckage of the Henry farmhouse, where Jackson had made his name and the Confederacy

had won its battle the year before. Three hours later, at 1500, the grand assault on Jackson line began, all along the railway cut. Butterfields 3d Brigade, from Porters V Corps the 12th, 17th, and 44th New York, the 16th Michigan, and the 83d Pennsylvania and Hatchs 1st Division, from McDowells III Corps, composed of Sullivans, Doubledays, and Marsena Patricks New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, the 2d US Sharpshooters, and Gibbons dread Iron Brigade, the 2d, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin and the 19th Indiana (Westerners grimly determined to show the Eastern troops how it was done), fought their way forward to Jacksons front, with Sykes 2d Division the Regular Army regiments from Porters V Corps in support: only to be torn to shreds by enfilading artillery fire from their left, the southwards: Longstreets artillery.

Porters whole V Corps is at risk; Pope pulls Reynolds off the high ground of Chinns Ridge to support Porter. This leaves only Warrens New Yorkers out of Sykes Division and a brigade of Reynolds Pennsylvania Reserves as the only Federal troops south of the Pike.
The Yanks are committed now, their flank in the air and nothing but tissue paper south of the Warrenton Turnpike. At 1530, Longstreet finally lets slip his dogs of war. Hoods Texans advance along the axis of the Turnpike, and all I Corps pivots off of the joinder with Jacksons right: the door is slamming shut, the

trap is sprung. Hoods Division (or Evans: Shanks Evans, too, is revisiting certain glimpses of the moon this day) as a whole is the Texas Brigade: 1st, 4th, and 5th Texas, 18th Georgia, and Hamptons Legion; Whitings (or Laws) Brigade: 4th Alabama, 6th North Carolina, 2d Mississippi; and 11th Mississippi; Evans Brigade under Stevens: 17th, 18th, 22d, and 23d South Carolina, and Holcombes Legion. The rest of I Corps swings round in a great sickle-cut, a scything motion to the NNE that reaps a harvest of Federal dead: these are: Wilcoxs Division: Wilcoxs Brigade of the 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th Alabama, Pryors Floridians (the 2d, 5th, and 8th Florida with the 3d Virginia and 14th Alabama), Featherstons Mississippians, the 2d, 12th, 16th, and 19th; Kempers Division: his brigade, under Montgomery D. Corse, the 1st, 7th, 11th, 17th, and 24th Virginia, and his Sharpshooters, Jenkins Brigade, the 1st, 2nd, 5th, and 6th South Carolina and the Palmetto Sharpshooters, Picketts Brigade under Eppa Hunton, the 8th, 18th, 19th, 28th, and 56th Virginia; D. R. Joness Division: Andersons Brigade: 1st, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 11th Georgia, Toombs Brigade under Benning: the 2d, 15th, 17th, and 20th Georgia; and Draytons Brigade, the 15th South Carolina and 50th and 51st Georgia; and

The division of Dick Anderson, Lees choice, later in the war, after Jacksons death, to succeed him should the worst happen: Extra Billy Mahones Brigade, the 6th, 12th, 16th, and 41st Virginia, Wrights Brigade, 3d, 22d, and 48th Georgia and the 44th Alabama; Armisteads Brigade, 9th, 14th, 38th, 53d, and 57th Virginia, and the 5th Virginia Battalion. This is what was bearing down on the Federals, rolling up their flank. Within half an hour, Warrens position has been wholly overrun. Pope desperately shifts Ricketts 2d Division of McDowells III Corps (Army of Virginia) New Yorkers under Duryea and Tower, Pennsylvanians, Massachusetts men, Indiana troops and (West) Virginians under Stiles and Thoburn to Chinn Ridge, where Schurzs and Schencks hapless Germans of Sigels I Corps join them. Sykes and Reynolds try to make a stand on the Henry House Hill, while Heintzelmans III Corps (Army of the Potomac another rich source of fatal battlefield confusion) and Renos IX Corps try to stave off Jacksons surge forward from his positions, north of the Pike. They are facing too much, no matter the beating Old Jacks men have taken for two days now: Ewells Division under Lawton is there, Earlys Virginians, Lawtons own Georgians under Douglass, Hays Louisiana Brigade, Trimbles Georgians, Carolinians, and 15th Alabama, and Powell Hills whole Light Division, with Branchs Tarheels, Greggs South Carolinians, Penders Tarheels, Archers Tennesseeans, Thomas

Georgians, Campbells and Taliaferros Virginians, Staffords Brigade of Louisianans, and the Stonewall Brigade itself. It has not been easy: Taliaferro and Ewell wounded, Baylor and Botts dead, Neff dead, Dabney and Goldsborough wounded, Spencer killed, Forbes wounded, Field wounded, McGrady wounded, two successive commanders of the 1st SC Rifles (Orrs) under Gregg killed (Marshall and Ledbetter), Edwards and McGowan both down, Trimble and Forno wounded, Fulton dead and these are merely field-grade and general officers. But their men are if anything the hotter, now, to avenge them. Eleven regiments of Jebs Virginia cavalry are running riot, too: Fitzhugh Lee is on the loose, and Bev Robertson could almost be foxhunting back home. By 1800 hours, the Union positions on Chinn Ridge have fallen and the Union is in dire straits on the Henry House Hill. Sykes and Reynolds hold, just, until Stevens Division, from Renos IX Corps, relieves them. The light fails, and what is left of Popes army escapes, blood-boltered, towards Centreville and Washington. Of some 75,696 Union troops engaged, 1,724 have been killed, 8,372 wounded and 5,968 have simply melted away, missing. Confederate casualties, of the 48,527 engaged, are about even to the Federal toll in killed and wounded: 1,481 and 7,627, respectively. Only 89 are missing as the smoke clears, though: a significant pointer to how the day has gone. The Federals are in retreat, many

have flown, and the Confederates are masters of the field. The Second Manassas Walking Tour, and its Deep Cut extension, about even in length with the First Manassas Stone Bridge tour, takes in: Brawners Farm, the Railroad Grade and the Deep Cut, the Stone House whence Pope watched Nemesis stoop upon him and where the wounded and dying were piteously brought, Groveton and its Confederate Cemetery, the New York Monuments on Chinn Ridge, where the 5th and 10th New York were wrecked, the 5th losing 123 men in 5 minutes the worst single-engagement infantry losses on either side in the whole War and the Chinn House, site of a doomed last stand that did buy time for some other, fleeing Federals, Chinn Ridge, and the Henry House hill. The 12-mile self-guided driving tour takes in the same spots. You may now have some idea of what those sites mean. Finally, though, if you can, you ought see the whole of both battlefields as Jeb saw it, or FitzJohn Porter, or Buford, or Lee himself: the better part of the Park is accessible by a horseback trail that takes in all these fateful spots and more besides. Manassas NBP is open during daylight hours every day. The Museum is closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas, but otherwise

open from 0830 to 1700 daily, with extended hours in the summer. The Henry Hill Visitor Center, which contains the quite decent museum, also provides a quarter-hour or so orientation film every half hour that may well be worth your time, and the bookstore is occasionally worthwhile; the other Visitor Center, at Stuart Hill, is open on summer weekends only. A three-day pass to the park is $3.00, but theres little point in not investing in a Parks Pass for the whole country if youre going to visit National Parks and Monuments at all. But then you may ask, Why? Why bother with this place at all, and its history? Or if one bothers, why here and not elsewhere? Partly, I would reply, because two very different events occurred here, and both their common and their distinguishing characteristics are significant. And because what happened here, irrespective of the quotidian particulars, implicates some universal things. Here occurred events of the greatest moment: honor and dishonor, mercy and violence, genius and folly, gallantry and bravery and fear and cowardice, too, which is a wholly different thing and sacrifice. Here great issues were joined, and great men named and nameless fought, and many died. But why here? Even if these things matter, why does this place matter? Leave aside the historical chances. Think only this. The Texas writer John Graves has wisely said that the land shapes us, and goes on shaping the hell out of us who are left. It shapes

events as well. The men who joined battle here were shaped by their respective lands, and the battles themselves were shaped and influenced by the insuperable constraints of terrain. And the Manassas NBP does one of the finest jobs of any such site in preserving and making self-evident to all the influence of terrain, while balancing the dictates of accessibility for those who wish to learn more. That is Why Here. Go and see.

MCMXLIV: Nos a Gulielmo victi victoris patriam liberavimus: 6 June 2011

On this day a phrase that calls up immediately, and without ones consciously willing it, Churchills Action This Day memoranda: aptly on this day, then, seven-and-sixty years gone, the narrow seas and the Norman coast were the balance in which the world was weighed. In that weighing and meting, the distant heirs of Brennus threw a sword upon the scales to balance them. Between Ouistreham and St-Aubin-sur-Mer, in Calvados, the East Riding sent its sons to fight as they had fought at Blenheim; to fight now beside the sons of South Lancs, the Excellers of Gallipoli,

Clem Attlees old regiment, and beside the Suffolks garlanded with the laurels and roses of Minden. The Lincolnshires were at Sword Beach also, not yet the Royal Lincolnshires, yet bearing battle honours from Malplaquet to Bunkers Hill, from Noseys campaign in the Peninsula to Arras, from Norway and Dunkirk and Italy. They were brigaded with the KOSB, a Minden Regiment, with its memories of Killiecrankie and Culloden, Chitral and Mons; and with the wolfhounds of the Royal Ulster Rifles, who had answered to Wellington at Badajoz. Warwickshire, Norfolk, and Salop the KSLI were there, the Midlands and East Anglia and the Welsh Marches shoulder to shoulder, and honours between that reached back to the Boyne and Salamanca, Sevastopol and Cambrai and Dunkirk. There were Sappers and Gunners and Hussars, and Lord Lovat and Piper Millin and the Commandos, including Kieffers French beside HM Jollies, the Royal Marines. The pattern was repeated at Gold: DLI from the County Palatine of Durham, Green Howards, East Yorks, Devons and Hants and Dorsets together, the South Wales Borderers and the Glosters already Glorious if not yet so named, brigaded with the men of Essex; Royal Marine Commandos, Dragoon Guards, Lancers and Sappers and the KRRC, Sherwood Rangers, Beds and Herts and elements of the Border Regiment. Between Sword and Gold was Juno, where 3rd Canadian

Infantry Division and the Royal Marines showed their mettle: Highlanders from Ottawa and Ontario, the Fort Garry Horse, the Royal Winnipeg Rifles and the Qubcois Rgiment de la Chaudire and all the manhood of Canada from the Atlantic provinces to the great West.... It was to be the Canadians who penetrated the furthest towards objective when the day had ended. Every regiment, like every college and every university, every parish and every communion, has its particular ethos. The Americans did not admit that they possessed a regimental system on the British model; yet they did. Their 29th Division, at Omaha Beach, was drawn from National Guard units the Americans Territorials from states that had been on opposing sides in the American Civil War. Pennsylvanian units could boast battle honours from First and Second Bull Run, or Antietam; their Virginian counterparts in the Division had the same honours, yet for First and Second Manassas and for Sharpsburg. The 116th Infantry Regiment, the regiment of the Bedford Boys, was at Omaha; 3rd Battalion had roots in the colonial militia of the Old Dominion, yet its service to the United States had not been uninterrupted, not least between 1861 and 1865. Its lineage was that of the Stonewall Brigade, II Corps, Army of Northern Virginia, and the spirit of its great commander seemed to hover over it even upon a strand in France. Such stories could be repeated of every Allied formation upon

that memorable day, from the USAAF and RAF and the Naval contingent, to the Poles waiting to aid in exploiting the coming breakout; from private soldiers in the US 8th and 12th Regiments of Infantry, to 4th Divisions second in command at Utah Beach, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jnr. Bombardier JA Hill, 4th Airlanding Anti-Tank Bty, RA, from Walsall, died that day. Major AM Onions, 101st Bty, 20th Anti-Tank Regiment, RA, never returned to Moseley, Birmingham. The studious Captain JH White, South Lancs, attached to 5th Bn, the East Yorkshire Regiment, was killed in action. L/Cpl John Dickinson, 1st Bn Kings Own Scottish Borderers, was 28 years in age when he died upon D-Day, leaving his wife Nellie a widow. Pte HR Crosswell, 2d Bn the Glosters, also left a widow newmade upon that day. Major Richard Gough Talbot Baines of the Hampshires died at the age of thirty years, and sleeps in Bayeux War Cemetery with over sixty of his fellow officers and men who fell that day, from a lieutenant whod won the MC to a nineteen-year-old private soldier who should never see twenty. And the roll could be called over forever and we not sufficing in honouring these men. What we can do, and must do, is to remember.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; They fell with their faces to the foe.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.

Aphorisms & Observ ations

For four centuries now, the American people have resigned themselves to natural disasters and acts of God: floods, prairie fires, blizzards, tornados, hurricanes, dust bowls, epidemics, academics, lawyers, and politicians.

Only a very few things in this world do not yield themselves to rational economic analysis: war, the vices, courage and the other virtues, music, religion, love, patriotism, and, most significantly, cricket. Naturally, these are the things that most matter: particularly cricket. Its really quite vexing.

This side of the Kingdom of God upon Earth, it is a melancholy human fact that those who beat their swords into plowshares end up doing the plowing for those who kept their swords.

It is a pity that fagging is done away with (being four years Mr Camerons senior, I tend to meditate upon the world of good it should have done him), and a greater pity that National Service is a thing of the past, for it means that we have those who seek to rule who have never know what it is first to serve.

As a 1928 Prayer Book Anglican, a conservative Democrat, and a slightly schismatic Austrian with heretically monetarist leanings, Im not overly fond of social conservatives though I dont go so far as Wemyss does in calling that an oxymoron. (Vegetarian chili, now thats an oxymoron.) But when I hear people yapping about how the religious Right has never been right and never accomplished anything good, I do tend to mention the abolition of slavery.

The C of E has gone from being the Tory party at prayer to being

the outreach department of NuLabour and whatever likeminded socialists it can round up.

But violence never solved anything. The hell it hasnt. It wasnt Wedgwoods pottery that stopped the slave trade: it was the opened gunports of the Royal Navy. No speeches not even Lincolns preserved the Union and ended slavery in America. The application of violence on a mass scale did that, just as the application of violence on a mass scale gave the colonies their independence. And Britain and America didnt liberate Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald with pamphlets and diplomatic pressure.

Race is, in America, what class is in Britain.

Class is to the British what race is to the Americans: the dirty little secret that mustnt be mentioned, and must be spoken of

obsessively.

Poverty is relative. My relatives can attest to mine.

Never trust a man whom ones Clumbers disapprove.

Public life in this country is too damn dominated by people whod read more if only their lips didnt get so tired.

A preference for local and organic provender which I share is

not meant to be a substitute religion.

People, you dont get extra credit for doing what its your duty to

do in the first place.

An intellectual is someone who bangs on about Congreve and Wycherley and Udall and Wilde ... and refuses to admit that Morecambe and Wise, Ken Dodd, Tommy Cooper, and Frankie Howerd were bloody funny. An academic is someone who writes and lectures about why Wilde and Sheridan and Shaw were funny ... but doesnt get the joke when its Humph or Horne or Marsden or Kenneth Williams.

Of all Americas natural resources, its richest is an inexhaustible vein of irony.

End of this sampler