Faith Naked At Gettysburg

I mentioned last week that I’m now writing the mid-novel chapter about the Battle of Gettysburg, and it’s a part of the book I really want to get right. It was the pivotal battle in the war and any future novel readers who know anything about Civil War history will quickly be put off if I mangle the facts about the most well-known battle of the war.

On a recent evening I did finish the first draft that covers most of the action of Captain McBee’s company of Texas infantry. I went to bed and let the draft simmer overnight. The next morning I reread it and made some corrections and “improvements.”  Then I dutifully e-mailed the draft to the five other writers in our local critiquing circle to have at it.

The circle met last Thursday in an upstairs room in the local library, during a rare thunder and rainstorm here in Lockhart.  And, boy, did my critiquing friends thunder and rain all over my draft. We’ve been doing this to each other’s manuscripts for going on two years now, and we have built up a pretty good level of trust in each other’s good will. Before we knew each other very well, we mainly provided helpful copy editing of misspellings and grammar problems. Having five smart writers comb through a newly written chapter, marking all the little things is a huge help.

More importantly, as time passed and we learned each other’s writing styles, we’ve come to point out things like gaps or inconsistencies in the story line, unnecessary sentences and paragraphs, shallow character development, and confusing or awkward phrasing. We’ve gone beyond “grading.” But it still gets my attention when I get home and see so many red pen marks  decorating a page of my manuscript that it looks like a Christmas tree.

One of the best criticisms about my new Gettysburg chapter was, “Where’s Faith and Levi? It’s like you are writing two novels, side by side. Somehow, even though it’s a battle, your other main characters, who we know aren’t soldiers, still need to be in this chapter, since you say it’s important.”

Got it. And I did it. I couldn’t put Faith in the battle line, but I could have her lover, Captain McBee, at least daydream about their romance, entertaining himself as he marched with thoughts of the steamy aspect of their hard-found relationship. That’s the Faith Naked part. (Have you noticed that in family magazines, newspapers, and blogs like mine, and even on TV, the term “steamy” has become a popular code word for R or X rated descriptions or portrayals of sex.)

I was washing yesterday’s dirty dishes just now, thinking about “Faith naked” in this blog post. Is mentioning a sexy part of my new novel appropriate to my blog? I could ask Nita, but she’s babysitting our grandson, and I wouldn’t ask her anyway because she’s more conservative about such things than I am. 

So here it is: I’m not in the military and I don’t do long marches, but even after four decades of marriage, I still pass the time on long drives home from military reenactments with “steamy” thoughts about Nita’s and my romance. Sometimes those mental images go way back to our twenties, and certainly include nakedness. I'm old, but not dead, after all. I don’t know about you lady readers, but I think a guy who claims he doesn’t daydream along those lines is either lying or senile, whether he’s twenty-something or sixty-something.

Having brought daydreams of Faith to Gettysburg as a pleasant mental diversion for John McBee on his way to the battle, I did find a way to physically put Levi into the Gettysburg action. It’s a way that fits the battle setting, fits his role as a McBee’s body-servant, and even is a good foreshadowing of things to come in this book, and in the final third book of the McBee saga.

Three other suggestions from my critiquing circle sent me back to the keyboard:

First, they said keep your main character in the middle of things. Don’t let events or the generals shove him aside. Keep the focus on the guy you’ve been grooming us to like, the guy who is the center of the story. Wow, there was a slap in the face, because I thought I was doing that, but if my writer circle companions didn’t see it that way, then I needed to look again. And reading with fresh eyes, I have to agree.

Second: Put more grit, more smells, more blood and guts in the battle. That one sort of surprised me, but the point is well taken, and certainly not hard to do.

Finally, they all said to not use the words “boulders,” stones, and “big rocks” so often. I looked up synonyms for “boulder” and only got rock, stone, and “sarsen” And who the hell knows the word “sarsen?” I didn’t and don’t plan to use it – unless a dozen blog readers write and say, “Heck, yeah, I say sarsen all the time when I’m driving through the Rockies. What’s wrong with you?”

The image at the top of this post is a drawing by Edgar Degas, the French painter who became famous in the second half of the 1800’s, and whose fictional brother is a secondary character in my first novel, “Whittled Away.”  Since Faith naked is the title of today’s post, I thought you’d enjoy the 1800’s drawing that was inspirational to me while writing both novels. Sometimes I’m easily inspired.

The Endless Deck & The Unclimbable Hill

Five days ago I started prying the thirty-five ten-foot long decking boards off the thirty-year-old deck frame at the back of our house. Then, with son Todd’s help, we pieced together a new wood frame of fresh 2x6 boards on top of our old cracked cement patio, adjacent to the old deck frame. Finally for the past three days, Todd, good neighbor Wayne, and I have set, sawn, and screwed on some sixty-eight brand new decking boards to create a new dance hall sized wooden deck that’s fifteen feet wide and twenty-five feet long. All that effort is to have the new giant deck finished in time for the late April wedding weekend of son Ben and his fiance Meredith.

You can see the nearly-finished product, and I confess I’m pleased with how it came out. It took longer and cost more, as all home projects do, and would have taken even much longer than anticipated, except for a hesitant question asked by sweet Nita. She was holding grandson Jackson and politely listening as I explained how every long board had to be measured, cut, and laid in place to get a sharp straight edge on both ends of the deck. I stressed how tedious and time consuming, but necessary, that sort of fine carpentry work was.

When I shut up, Nita asked, “I don’t understand why you are taking the time to measure and cut each board. Why not just set them, screw them in place, and go back later with a circular saw and cut off all the end pieces at once?”

Duh.  I know Jackson didn’t say it, but I still thought:  From the mouth of babes…

So that’s what we did from then on, and it more than halved the time needed to place and secure each board. I just finished sawing off all the end pieces at once, and it’s OK. Thank you, Nita.

The only other noteworthy point about the construction of the endless deck was carrying forty-six 16-ft-long boards one at a time from the garage, through the kitchen and breakfast room, and out the French doors to the construction site. We didn’t sideswipe a single glass on the countertop or break a single glass pane in the door.

Novel-wise, I have finally written the first draft of the great failed attack on Little Round Top at Gettysburg. In this chapter, Captain McBee and the Leon Hunters are in the maelstrom of the second day of the famous battle that kept the USA united and was the beginning of the end for the Confederacy.

In real life, the Fifth Texas Regiment was among the eight or so Confederate regiments that attacked at the critical point (the far left end of the Union "fishhook" position), at the critical time, or more correctly, an hour after the critical time. A successful attack across the aptly named “Valley of Death,” then up the slope of Little Round Top really might have won the battle, and changed the course of the Civil War. But we know, of course, that the attack faltered and failed.

Gettysburg is the first battle failure for McBee and his men, and it was a bloody affair for them. I’ve pulled out books of memoirs and the stack of old Gettysburg magazines I bought at the park back in the 1990’s.  I found four different detailed articles in the magazines focusing on different defending Union regiments that held the ridge and the Confederate units that were attacking. I’ve studied maps, and have thought back to my own four visits to Little Round Top to walk the ground. As a novelist whose characters are players in a very well known bit of military history, I want this chapter to be right.   

I’m also striving to make the Gettysburg chapter fast paced and personal, to show one critical slice of the battle through the eyes of a few men who I hope my readers have come to like. 

Finally I want the chapter to show just how close it was. Or maybe it wasn’t close at all. It depends on who is talking. Regardless, when people finish reading about Captain McBee and Company C at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, I want them to shut the book and say, “Damn, that was a horserace!”

 

 

Surrenders and A Missing Sword

Thursday of this week is the 150^th anniversary of the day that Confederate General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to United States General Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. I expect the national news media will have stories all week about the occasion.

The National Park Service is sponsoring a nationwide ringing of bells at precisely 3:15 PM, Virginia time, to mark the end of the meeting between Lee and Grant, the meeting at which the surrender specifics were agreed upon. I expect more bells will peal for four minutes (one minute for each year of the war) in the north than in the old south.

I vividly remember the opening speech in the 1970 movie Patton in which actor George C Scott tells his troops that Americans hate a loser, will not tolerate losing. I agree, and the likely dearth of church bell ringing across the old Confederate states on Thursday will reflect that national character trait.

Regardless of my American disdain for losing, I’m one of those southern guys who is truly glad the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the effort to secede finally quashed by four bloody, bumbling years of killing and destruction. I’m glad that our continent is not divided into many small nations like Europe is, prickly nations with fenced borders, nations that fought two massive wars in the past hundred years, each of a magnitude to make our Civil War seem piddling. I’m truly glad my home state of Texas is part of the United States of America. That’s my head talking.

Nonetheless, when reading and writing about the Civil War, my heart lies with the Confederacy, with Texas and Virginia, where my particular branch of the McBride family tree resided 150 years ago. And thinking about Patton’s speech again, I hate it that “we” lost the Civil War. I hate losing as much as any American does, and the “what-if’s” that might have changed the outcome of the Civil War come to mind over and over again.

As a Civil War reenactor, I took place in my first-ever mock Confederate soldier surrender program last weekend at a place called Fort Blakely, on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama. On the very same day, April 9, 1865, in northern Virginia, General Lee sat across a table from General Grant in the parlor of the McLean family home, agreeing to the surrender terms. Fifteen hundred miles away, at Fort Blakely, 4,000 still defiant Rebel soldiers were enduring a determined assault on their earthwork defenses by 16,000 still determined Union soldiers.

Some of the Union soldiers were US Colored Troops, including recently freed slaves, some were white men who had been in other battles. Some of the Reb soldiers were old men, too old to campaign, but not too old to shoot from a trench just outside of town. Grandfathers fought next to teenagers, grandsons too young to campaign, but tall enough to shoot from a trench. Among the fresh boys and old men, hardened veterans, gaunt and grim by this time, filled the trenches. 

We reenacted in a state park at one of the redoubts -small forts- along the line of earthwork defenses. On Saturday we did a sham battle for a good sized crowd. On Sunday morning, without spectators around, the Confederate reenactors marched out of the redoubt without their weapons, to be marched away to river boats that would take them to POW camps somewhere upriver. Remember, the real defenders at Fort Blakely didn’t yet know that Lee had surrendered.  The photo at the top is the surrender we reenacted.

It was an odd experience, an uncomfortable experience, to stand in the line of eighty reenactors who were there as Union soldiers, and study the sullen, angry faces of the thirty men who emerged from the earthworks. I didn’t much like it, but I’m glad I was there. Yes, it was a manufactured, sham surrender, play-acting. Yet, it was still a glimpse, a quick taste of the ending of the war from a soldier’s eyes.

A much larger surrender reenactment will occur in Virginia this coming weekend, near Appomattox Courthouse. Thousands of reenactors will do the same sort of thing we did in Virginia, including the “stacking of their arms,” that is, surrendering their muskets and battle flags.

As a curious sidebar to the Confederate soldiers surrendering their weapons, the officers were allowed to keep their swords. Many of those swords, being virtually all metal except for the handgrips, have survived and are much sought relics. I looked online yesterday to see that Confederate officer swords and scabbards, without a known connection to a particular officer, are selling for $10,000 to $15,000. A sword that can be linked to a specific Confederate officer sells for $25,000 and up.

That brings me to my ancestor, Captain John J McBride of the 5^th Texas Infantry Regiment, the man on whom my McBee novels are based. Captain McBride was at his mother’s home near Lexington, Virginia, when Lee surrendered. McBride was still recovering from the leg wounds he received at the Battle of the Wilderness the year before. Even though his active duty had ended, the captain signed an amnesty paper like any other Confederate officer, only he did it in Lexington five months after Appomattox. The photo is a scanned copy of Captain McBride’s parole document, gleaned off the internet.

I want his sword. At the prices Civil War swords are fetching, I couldn’t afford it if I found it for sale from a relic dealer, but I have to think it’s out there somewhere. I doubt his name was engraved in the metal of the blade as some were, but it’s possible. Granted, the sword might have been left on the field where he was wounded, and picked up by a Yank officer as a trophy. Or it might have been left unnoticed in the dirt and leaves.

Or perhaps, a diligent soldier in Captain McBride’s company of Confederates picked up the sword when the wounded captain was removed from the field. Since McBride was never a POW, he was not left to the Yankees as a wounded casualty at the Wilderness, so perhaps the captain himself clutched his sword to his chest as he was carried to the hospital tent. We don’t know.

I do know Captain McBride would have been gripping a sword when he was shot during the battle leading his men forward. The sword could now be in a private collection in Texas or Virginia or anywhere, or displayed in a small town museum in the north or the south, or be among the surplus relics in a large museum storeroom, or forgotten and lost in the back of a closet or attic in a private home. It could even be rusting under the leaves in northern Virginia. But, doggone, I want it.