Reveille at dark. Four a.m. Bugles call, far off and near. There are rows and rows, acres upon acres, of small tents, ghost-white under the stars. Dark blue figures are emerging. The Union blue uniforms make us nearly invisible to one another. We fade from view in just a few feet. We stand for roll call and then huddle by a small fire crowded with tin cups holding coffee.

“Tomorrow at dawn you march into the cornfield,“ we had been told. At the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, 8,000 men were killed or wounded in a battle in a cornfield in an hour and a half. The soldiers walked into corn taller than they were, and by battle’s end, not a stalk was left. We are here at the 135th anniversary of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history. Twenty-three thousand men were dead, wounded or missing, and both armies marched away to fight for another three years.

In a practice drill we had advanced into a cornfield, aiming our muskets. I grew up playing in and around cornfields. They were exciting mazes. But this, even though it is only a drill for a mock battle, has a small taste of terror, looking down a rifle into the green.

We fall in and march off in the dark, four abreast, our company joining the others until there are long lines of Union blue, rifles high, marching, halting, advancing again. Up and down the line, the officers shout commands: Orderrr! . . . Arrrms! In the distance, the battle flashes orange-red. The battle has begun, a thunderstorm close to the ground.

We march into a bean patch adjoining the cornfield. It’s smoky, misty, dark, mysterious. Cannons and muskets fire, flaring orange-red. The cannons shake the earth, smash into your ears. The cornfield can be seen in the smoke up a rise.

The Confederate gray blends into the low-lying fog and the gun smoke. Long gray lines of soldiers appear and disappear. We stand and fire, loading the black gunpowder into our musket barrels and shooting on command. The gray line across the field is lost at one moment, and then at the next is rapidly gaining definition. They are charging forward, the fog seeming to reform itself as men with rifles. Officers all about are shouting orders. Bugles are sounding orders. Officers are racing by on horseback. Preset ground explosions go off, scattering dirt. It is difficult to pick out your commanding officer’s voice. We fire and fire, fall back, wheel left, fire again and again. Fifty feet from us, I can read the eyes of a Confederate captain. His sword held high, he charges his men toward us. He is screaming. If he had live ammunition he would kill me. I take a hit and fall forward. The field is full of noise—cannon and musket, shouting, cheering, screaming. The noise moves through the ground and you at once. Here is noise to fill a Sunday morning.

A small crescent of the rising sun shows through the gun smoke and fog. The battle looks like those vast nineteenth-century panoramic battle paintings. It is as atmospheric as any of the great Romantic paintings, lacking only a few allegorical figures coming through center, touched by a few rays of light: Lady Liberty, attended by, say, Clio. This is one of the strangest scenes I have ever been in the middle of, and I think, whose dream is this? A field surgeon appears to dress my “wound.”

The whole scene comes at you like a dream and stays in your dreams for days afterward. The sounds and rhythms of that life linger. Not only the heat and noise of the battle, but the peace of camps. Field after field of tidy rows of white tents. The sounds of crickets at dusk, talking, horses whinnying, drums, bugles and fifes. There is always music. A haze of campfire smoke, the smell of coffee and chicken cooking. No cars or radios. There’s an experience of heightened spectacle and peace.

In all my dreams I’m marching to the drums. Long lines of Union blue stretch over a hill into the morning light. Long marching rows that take a half-hour to pass a spot. To stand shoulder to shoulder in a line of forty or so men and fire in unison, as thousands fire, to wheel and move as a unit, the whole spectacle stays with you.

Going to see the elephant. That is what many Union boys called going to war. They would see for themselves.

On this fine September weekend, some 15,000 men, women and children had come together here in this Maryland field to reenact Antietam. Some had come from as far away as England to fight this battle again. More than a few were fighting their third Antietam; some had been fighting the Civil War longer than the war itself had lasted. This is a show we put on for ourselves—for each other. Believe in it, have faith, attend to the details and we can build a better elephant.

Just what were we creating here in this field and why?

This is war without death, just what the peace movement always wanted. Many people find reenacting the Civil War disturbing, or silly, playing trick-or-treat on the graves of the solemn dead.

I had never intended to go to Antietam. I knew nothing of reenactors until I met the Sixth Regiment New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry.

On a rainy April Saturday they were holed up inside the G.A.R. hall in Peterborough. The G.A.R., the Grand Army of the Republic, was the Civil War veterans’ organization. (Other veterans have since taken their place and meet to play bingo.) The Sixth had only recently formed to portray the farm boys of Companies E and K who had marched off to the war from the small towns in sight of Mt. Monadnock. They had about two dozen members, of which only half made most of the thirty parades and events each year.

There were three or four guys in Civil War uniforms, and displays of old photos, guns, uniforms, and a recipe for making your own hardtack. They had set up some tents, duct-taped to the floor downstairs. A tripod of guns stood nearby, locked at the bayonets, the rifle butts duct-taped to the vinyl floor. A half-dozen visitors drifted around the hall.

Jim Sutherland, a shy postman from Goffstown, had joined the Sixth in the previous year. His ancestors served in the war, one as a surgeon’s assistant in the Eleventh New Hampshire.

Sutherland had already been to some big battle reenactments. He drove twenty-four hours to get to Shiloh in Tennessee. There were “10,000 boys” there ready for the show. They were routed by torrential rains. Streams ran through the tents. The red Tennessee clay stained his baby blue trousers a greenish tint. When the porta-johns flooded out, a general retreat was sounded.

He also fought his way through the heat at the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia. A freak April heat wave sent the temperature to 105 degrees, he says. There were “8,000 boys” in their Union and Confederate wool suits, and as Sutherland recalls, 149 fell to heat stroke, and 7 to heart attacks. “But no one died,” he tells me. A much better result than the first battle, I think to myself.

Reenacting seemed to be gently ironic: modern life breaking in with duct tape and porta-johns. “We did the Pheasant Lane Mall,” says a reenactor who is visiting from another regiment. “We’ve got the howitzer now; we’re doing Confederate. Plus we’ve got three flags.” He is talking shop with Mike Sebor.

Sebor had started the Sixth. He was a twelve-year veteran of reenacting and spoke with such enthusiasm that he drew a circle of listeners. With his crew cut and short stocky build, Sebor, age thirty-three, has a military bearing. He was standing by his tent in the basement, explaining an average soldier’s equipment and food.

“My unit is hard-core,” Sebor says. “We walk in with our knapsack and set up. Some guys from New York drive cars right on the field—it looks like hell.” They have big tents and big boxes of supplies, such as were not usually found outside the quartermaster’s supply in D.C., he says. Sebor works hard for accuracy.

He hands me a lead minié ball, the musket shot weighing more than one ounce. The shot feels substantial in the palm. He holds the lead to his wrist and explains, in part, the carnage of the war: lead at close range meeting flesh and bone.

“If you look at this—this is soft lead and when it hit, it even mushrooms out further. Picture it twice the size of that wrist. It would literally shatter your bone. Back then doctors couldn’t set that kind of fracture, so they’d amputate your arm.”

“These weapons were used in devastating company,” he says, a full regiment, a thousand men firing, accompanied at times by cannons. At close range the cannoneers could load “hell-can fire,” chunks of metal and balls in chicken wire, which would spray out like a huge shotgun shell. Men would march, shoulder to shoulder, flags held high, into this fire.

“It was the last Napoleonic war,” he says of the battle tactics, “and the first modern war.”

From a piece of lead, he draws a panorama. This is why he is standing here, on his free time, dressed up. He knows that some people think it foolish. Sometimes they are hostile. “We get the ignorant ones who walk by on the sidewalk and say, ‘Oh look at the little boys with their guns.’ We’re not out there just because we’ve got guns,” says Sebor, who as a policeman in Peterborough sees enough guns. “If they’d come up the steps they’d learn. The weapon—that’s just a piece of equipment—that’s not the focus. We do it to preserve the history that’s in each soldier, in each regiment, in each town,” he says.

Most often, people ask: Is that a real gun? Aren’t you hot in that uniform? If there’s a chicken cooking over a campfire, they ask: Is that a real chicken? If a reenactor has brought a baby along in period dress, they ask: Is that a real baby? These questions are so common that the Smoke & Fire News, a newspaper listing reenactments of many eras, has a regular feature, called “Tourists say. . . . ”

The questions reveal people’s confusion, not about history, but about what they are seeing. What they are really asking is: What kind of make believe is this? Is this play or history? Is this real or let’s pretend?

It’s both: It’s let’s pretend this is real. Let’s make believe and we’ll find our way back. It’s serious play; it’s work and leisure. This is war as play, war as homage, war as peace.

“Is that some kind of Hollywood, some kind of Disneyland?” a friend asks me after I return from Antietam.

“No,” I say, “It’s some kind of worship.”

(c) 2000 Howard Mansfield All rights reserved. ISBN: 1-58465-117-2