In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire
by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. [nb: an address delivered for
Memorial Day, 30 May 1884, before the John Sedgwick Post No. 4,
Grand Army of the Republic, at Keene, New Hampshire] [v: The
Essential Holmes: Selections From the Letters, Speeches, Judicial
Opinions, and Other Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
edited and introduced by Richard A. Posner, pp 80-87, University
of Chicago Press (1992)]
Not long ago I heard a young man ask why people still kept up
Memorial Day, and it set me thinking of the answer. Not the
answer that you and I should give to each other – not the
expression of those feelings that, so long as you live, will make
this day sacred to memories of love and grief and heroic youth
– but an answer which should command the assent of those
who do not share our memories, and in which we of the North and
our brethren of the South could join in perfect accord.
So far as this last is concerned, to be sure, there is no
trouble. The soldiers who were doing their best to kill one
another felt less of personal hostility, I am very certain, than
some who were not imperilled by their mutual endeavors. I have
heard more than one of those who had been gallant and
distinguished officers on the Confederate side say that they had
had no such feeling. I know that I and those whom I knew best had
not. We believed that it was most desirable that the North should
win; we believed in the principle that the Union is
indissoluable; we, or many of us at least, also believed that the
conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough.
But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just
as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we
respected them as every man with a heart must respect those who
give all for their belief. The experience of battle soon taught
its lesson even to those who came into the field more bitterly
disposed. You could not stand up day after day in those
indecisive contests where overwhelming victory was impossible
because neither side would run as they ought when beaten, without
getting at least something of the same brotherhood for the enemy
that the north pole of a magnet has for the south – each
working in an opposite sense to the other, but each unable to get
along without the other. As it was then , it is now. The soldiers
of the war need no explanations; they can join in commemorating a
soldier's death with feelings not different in kind, whether he
fell toward them or by their side.
But Memorial Day may and ought to have a meaning also for those
who do not share our memories. When men have instinctively agreed
to celebrate an anniversary, it will be found that there is some
thought of feeling behind it which is too large to be dependent
upon associations alone. The Fourth of July, for instance, has
still its serious aspect, although we no longer should think of
rejoicing like children that we have escaped from an outgrown
control, although we have achieved not only our national but our
moral independence and know it far too profoundly to make a talk
about it, and although an Englishman can join in the celebration
without a scruple. For, stripped of the temporary associations
which gives rise to it, it is now the moment when by common
consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to
rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of
us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in
return.
So to the indifferent inquirer who asks why Memorial Day is still
kept up we may answer, it celebrates and solemnly reaffirms from
year to year a national act of enthusiasm and faith. It embodies
in the most impressive form our belief that to act with enthusiam
and faith is the condition of acting greatly. To fight out a war,
you must believe something and want something with all your
might. So must you do to carry anything else to an end worth
reaching. More than that, you must be willing to commit yourself
to a course, perhpas a long and hard one, without being able to
foresee exactly where you will come out. All that is required of
you is that you should go somewhither as hard as ever you can.
The rest belongs to fate. One may fall – at the beginning
of the charge or at the top of the earthworks – but in no
other way can he reach the rewards of victory.
When it was felt so deeply as it was on both sides that a man
ought to take part in the war unless some conscientious scruple
or strong practical reason made it impossible, was that feeling
simply the requirement of a local majority that their neighbors
should agree with them? I think not: I think the feeling was
right – in the South as in the North. I think that, as life
is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should
share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged
not to have lived.
If this be so, the use of this day is obvious. It is true that I
cannot argue a man into a desire. If he says to me, Why should I
seek to know the secrets of philosophy? Why seek to decipher the
hidden laws of creation that are graven upon the tablets of the
rocks, or to unravel the history of civilization that is woven in
the tissue of our jurisprudence, or to do any great work, either
of speculation or of practical affairs? I cannot answer him; or
at least my answer is as little worth making for any effect it
will have upon his wishes if he asked why I should eat this, or
drink that. You must begin by wanting to. But although desire
cannot be imparted by argument, it can be by contagion. Feeling
begets feeling, and great feeling begets great feeling. We can
hardly share the emotions that make this day to us the most
sacred day of the year, and embody them in ceremonial pomp,
without in some degree imparting them to those who come after us.
I believe from the bottom of my heart that our memorial halls and
statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments gathered
in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of
chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred
years of peaceful life could be.
But even if I am wrong, even if those who come after us are to
forget all that we hold dear, and the future is to teach and
kindle its children in ways as yet unrevealed, it is enough for
us that this day is dear and sacred.
Accidents may call up the events of the war. You see a battery of
guns go by at a trot, and for a moment you are back at White Oak
Swamp, or Antietam, or on the Jerusalem Road. You hear a few
shots fired in the distance, and for an instant your heart stops
as you say to yourself, The skirmishers are at it, and
listen for the long roll of fire from the main line. You meet an
old comrade after many years of absence; he recalls the moment
that you were nearly surrounded by the enemy, and again there
comes up to you that swift and cunning thinking on which once
hung life and freedom – Shall I stand the best chance
if I try the pistol or the sabre on that man who means to stop
me? Will he get his carbine free before I reach him, or can I
kill him first? These and the thousand other events we have
known are called up, I say, by accident, and, apart from
accident, they lie forgotten.
But as surely as this day comes round we are in the presence of
the dead. For one hour, twice a year at least – at the
regimental dinner, where the ghosts sit at table more numerous
than the living, and on this day when we decorate their graves
– the dead come back and live with us.
I see them now, more than I can number, as once I saw them on
this earth. They are the same bright figures, or their
counterparts, that come also before your eyes; and when I speak
of those who were my brothers, the same words describe yours.
I see a fair-haired lad, a lieutenant, and a captain on whom life
had begun somewhat to tell, but still young, sitting by the long
mess-table in camp before the regiment left the State, and
wondering how many of those who gathered in our tent could hope
to see the end of what was then beginning. For neither of them
was that destiny reserved. I remember, as I awoke from my first
long stupor in the hospital after the battle of Ball's Bluff, I
heard the doctor say, "He was a beautiful boy"[1], and I knew that one of those two
speakers was no more. The other, after passing through all the
previous battles, went into Fredericksburg with a strange
premonition of the end, and there met his fate.[2]
I see another youthful lieutenant as I saw him in the Seven Days,
when I looked down the line at Glendale. The officers were at the
head of their companies. The advance was beginning. We caught
each other's eye and saluted. When next I looked, he was gone.[3]
I see the brother of the last – the flame of genius and
daring on his face – as he rode before us into the wood of
Antietam, out of which came only dead and deadly wounded men. So,
a little later, he rode to his death at the head of his cavalry
in the Valley.
In the portraits of some of those who fell in the civil wars of
England, Vandyke has fixed on canvas the type who stand before my
memory. Young and gracious faces, somewhat remote and proud, but
with a melancholy and sweet kindness. There is upon their faces
the shadow of approaching fate, and the glory of generous
acceptance of it. I may say of them , as I once heard it said of
two Frenchmen, relics of the ancien régime,
"They were very gentle. They cared nothing for their
lives." High breeding, romantic chivalry – we who have
seen these men can never believe that the power of money or the
enervation of pleasure has put an end to them. We know that life
may still be lifted into poetry and lit with spiritual charm.
But the men, not less, perhaps even more, characteristic of New
England, were the Puritans of our day. For the Puritan still
lives in New England – thank God! – and will live
there so long as New England lives and keeps her old renown. New
England is not dead yet. She still is mother of a race of
conquerors – stern men, little given to the expression of
their feelings, sometimes careless of their graces, but fertile,
tenacious, and knowing only duty. Each of you, as I do, thinks of
a hundred such that he has known. I see one – grandson of a
hard rider of the Revolution and bearer of his historic name[4] – who was with us at Fair
Oaks, and afterwards for five days and nights in front of the
enemy the only sleep that he would take was what he could snatch
sitting erect in his uniform and resting his back against a hut.
He fell at Gettysburg.
His brother[5], a surgeon, who
rode, as our surgeons so often did, wherever the troops would go,
I saw kneeling in ministration to a wounded man just in rear of
our line at Antietam, his horse's bridle round his arm –
the next moment his ministrations were ended. His senior
associate survived all the wounds and perils of the war, but, not
yet through with duty as he understood it, fell in helping the
helpless poor who were dying of cholera in a Western city.
I see another quiet figure, of virtuous life and quiet ways, not
much heard of until our left was turned at Petersburg. He[6] was in command of the regiment as
he saw our comrades driven in. He threw back our left wing, and
the advancing tide of defeat was shattered against his iron wall.
He saved an army corps from disaster, and then a round shot ended
all for him.
There is one who on this day is always present on my mind.[7] He entered the Army at nineteen, a
second lieutenant. In the Wilderness, already at the head of his
regiment, he fell, using the moment that was left him of life to
give all of his little fortune to his soldiers. I saw him in
camp, on the march, in action. I crossed debatable land with him
when we were rejoining the Army together. I observed him in every
kind of duty, and never in all the time I knew him did I see him
fail to choose that alternative of conduct which was most
disagreeable to himself. He was indeed a Puritan in all his
virtues, without the Puritan austerity; for, when duty was at an
end, he who had been the master and leader became the chosen
companion in every pleasure that a man might honestly enjoy. His
few surviving companions will never forget the awful spectacle of
his advance alone with his company in the streets of
Fredericksburg.[8] In less than
sixty seconds he would become the focus of a hidden and
annihilating fire from a semicircle of houses. His first platoon
had vanished under it in an instant, ten men falling dead by his
side. He had quietly turned back to where the other half of his
company was waiting, had given the order, "Second Platoon,
forward!" and was again moving on, in obedience to superior
command, to certain and useless death, when the order he was
obeying was countermanded. The end was distant only a few
seconds; but if you had seen him with his indifferent carriage,
and sword swinging from his finger like a cane, you would never
have suspected that he was doing more than conducting a company
drill on the camp parade ground. He was little more than a boy,
but the grizzled corps commanders knew and admired him; and for
us, who not only admired, but loved, his death seemed to end a
portion of our life also.
There is one grave and commanding presence that you all would
recognize, for his life has become a part of our common
history.[9] Who does not remember
the leader of the assault of the mine at Petersburg? The solitary
horseman in front of Port Hudson, whom a foeman worthy of him
bade his soldiers spare from love and admiration of such gallant
bearing? Who does not still hear the echo of those eloquent lips
after the war, teaching reconciliation and peace? I may not do
more than allude to his death, fit ending of his life. All that
the world has a right to know has been told by a beloved friend
in a book wherein friendship has found no need to exaggerate
facts that speak for themselves. I knew him ,and I may even say I
knew him well; yet, until that book appeared, I had not known the
governing motive of his soul. I had admired him as a hero. When I
read, I learned to revere him as a saint. His strength was not in
honor alone, but in religion; and those who do not share his
creed must see that it was on the wings of religious faith that
he mounted above even valiant deeds into an empyrean of ideal
life.
I have spoken of some of the men who were near to me among others
very near and dear, not because their lives have become historic,
but because their lives are the type of what every soldier has
known and seen in his own company. In the great democracy of
self-devotion, private and general stand side by side.
Unmarshalled, save by their own deeds, the army of the dead sweep
before us, "wearing their wounds like stars." It is not
because the men I have mentioned were my friends that I have
spoken of them, but, I repeat, because they are types. I speak of
those whom I have seen. But you all have known such; you, too,
remember!
It is not of the dead alone that we think on this day. There are
those still living whose sex forbade them to offer their lives,
but who gave instead their happiness. Which of us has not been
lifted above himself by the sight of one of those lovely, lonely
women, around whom the wand of sorrow has traced its excluding
circle – set apart, even when surrounded by loving friends
who would fain bring back joy to their lives? I think of one whom
the poor of a great city know as their benefactress and friend. I
think of one who has lived not less greatly in the midst of her
children, to whom she has taught such lessons as may not be heard
elsewhere from mortal lips. The story of these and her sisters we
must pass in reverent silence. All that may be said has been said
by one of their own sex –
But when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.
Then did I check the tears of useless passion,
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.
Comrades, some of the associations of this day are not only
triumphant, but joyful. Not all of those with whom we once stood
shoulder to shoulder – not all of those whom we once loved
and revered – are gone. On this day we still meet our
companions in the freezing winter bivouacs and in those dreadful
summer marches where every faculty of the soul seemed to depart
one after another, leaving only a dumb animal power to set the
teeth and to persist – a blind belief that somewhere and at
last there was bread and water. On this day, at least, we still
meet and rejoice in the closest tie which is possible between men
– a tie which suffering has made indissoluble for better,
for worse.
When we meet thus, when we do honor to the dead in terms that
must sometimes embrace the living, we do not deceive ourselves.
We attribute no special merit to a man for having served when all
were serving. We know that, if the armies of our war did anything
worth remembering, the credit belongs not mainly to the
individuals who did it, but to average human nature. We also know
very well that we cannot live in associations with the past
alone, and we admit that, if we would be worthy of the past, we
must find new fields for action or thought, and make for
ourselves new careers.
But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has
been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune,
in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to
us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate
thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference,
and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition,
we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields,
the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report
to those who come after us. But, above all, we have learned that
whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look
downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will
scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to
command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.
Such hearts – ah me, how many! – were stilled twenty
years ago; and to us who remain behind is left this day of
memories. Every year – in the full tide of spring, at the
height of the symphony of flowers and love and life – there
comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of
death. Year after year lovers wandering under the apple trees and
through the clover and deep grass are surprised with sudden tears
as they see black veiled figures stealing through the morning to
a soldier's grave. Year after year the comrades of the dead
follow, with public honor, procession and commemorative flags and
funeral march – honor and grief from us who stand almost
alone, and have seen the best and noblest of our generation pass
away.
But grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march
become a paean. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a
hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us
think of life, not death – of life to which in their youth
they lent the passion and joy of the spring. As I listen , the
great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful
orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and
evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and
will.
[1]: Lieutenant William L. Putnam,
20th Massachusetts Regiment.
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[2]: Captain Charles F. Cabot, 20th
Massachusetts Regiment.
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[3]: Lieutenant James J. Lowell,
20th Massachusetts Regiment.
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[4]: Colonel Paul Revere, Jr., 20th
Massachusetts Regiment.
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[5]: Edward H.R. Revere.
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[6]: Major Henry Patten, 20th
Massachusetts Regiment.
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[7]: Henry Abbott, 20th
Massachusetts Regiment.
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[8]: the legendary suicidal charge
of the 20th Massachusetts Regiment occurred on 11 December 1862.
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[9]: William Bartlett, 20th
Massachusetts Regiment.
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