Fredericksburg by dowcarpenter

In November 1862, in the second year of the American Civil War, General Ambrose Burnside began to lead the Army of the Potomac to Richmond, VA, with the intent of seizing the Confederate capital. As it happened, the army ended up stalled in the town Fredericksburg where they encountered General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, arrayed on Marye’s Heights, a rise of land to the west of the town. When Union troops attempted to take the heights, a hail of Confederate gunfire repulsed the charge, leaving the field strewn with dying men. Union Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain recalled the night after the battle in a memoir published in 1887:

But out of that silence from the battle’s crash and roar rose new sounds more appalling still; a strange ventriloquism of which you could not locate the source…as if a thousand discords were flowing together into a key note…and underneath, all the time, that deep, bass note from closed lips, too hopeless or too heroic to articulate their agony.

The following night, as Union troops dug graves for their fallen comrades, the Northern Lights appeared in the sky; Chamberlain recalled this too in his memoir:

As we bore [the dead] in dark and sad procession, their own loved North took up the escort and lifting her glorious lights, led the triumphal march over the bridge that spans the worlds...Who would not pass on as they did, dead for their country’s life, and lighted to burial by the meteor splendors of their native sky?

The horror of the loss of human life at Fredericksburg was perhaps best put by Lee himself: “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine:
Exaudi vocem meam
Fiant aures tuae intendentes
In vocem deprecationis meae

[Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord:
Hear my voice,
Let thy ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplication.]

– Psalm 129

Vigil strange I kept on the field one night:
When you, my son and my comrade, dropt at my side that day,
One look I but gave, which your dear eyes return’d,
with a look I shall never forget;
One touch of your hand to mine, O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground;
Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle.
Till late in the night again I made my way;
Found you in death so cold, dear comrade—found your body, son of responding kisses,
(never again on earth responding;)
Bared your face in the starlight—curious the scene—cool blew the night-wind;
Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battlefield spreading;
Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet, there in the fragrant silent night;
But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh—Long, long I gazed;
Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you, dearest comrade—
Not a tear, not a word;
Vigil of silence, love and death—vigil for you my son and my soldier,
As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole;
Vigil final for you, brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,
I faithfully loved you and cared for you living—
I think we shall surely meet again;)
Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,
My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,
And there and then by the rising sun, my son in his grave,
in his rude-dug grave I laid;
Ending my vigil strange with that—vigil of night and battlefield dim;
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding;)
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain—vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d,
I rose from the chill ground, folded my soldier well in his blanket,
And buried him where he fell.

– Walt Whitman

Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine,
Cum sanctis tuis in aeternum.

[Let eternal light shine on them Lord,
With thy saints in eternity.]

– Requiem mass

William Stone, bar.; Temple University Concert Choir & Chamber Orchestra; Alan Harler, cond.

Recorded Nov. 2007, Philadelphia, PA