Cynthia Wachtell

Since this year marks Walt Whitman's 200th birthday, I decided to dip into Cynthia Wachtell's WAR NO MORE (2010), a scholarly examination of the anti-war writings of several prominent writers of the late 19th century, including Melville, Twain, Crane, DeForest, Hawthorne, William James and others. But it was Whitman who really piqued my interest, as I studied LEAVES OF GRASS in college, which, of course, included DRUM-TAPS and much of his other war poetry. But it had been a long time - more than fifty years - and I was especially surprised by the quotes Wachtell included from Whitman's letters home and diary entries from his years as a volunteer, tending the sick and wounded. For example -

"Mother, one's heart grows sick of war, after all, when you see what it really is - every once in a while I feel so horrified and disgusted - it seems to me like a great slaughter-house & the men mutually butchering each other ..."

Or this, regarding his first visit to a field hospital near Falmouth, Virginia, where he saw -

" ... 'a heap of feet, legs, arms, and human fragments, cut, bloody, black and blue, swelled and sickening ' that lay under a tree ..."

Whitman nevertheless felt, according to Wachtell, privileged to have been a part of the Civil War, but was profoundly troubled by it.

"He had walked among the bloated bodies of the war dead. He had witnessed the awful variety of ways in which combat maimed and unmanned soldiers."

Details like these were never part of Whitman's war poems, as he felt they would not be well received by the reading public, and could even hamper the war effort. Wachtell's explanations of the dichotomy between Whitman's private thoughts and his published work were real eye-openers.

It is very obvious, just from reading the Introduction, that Dr Wachtell has steeped herself in the literature of war, with her various connections from Owen and Sassoon, Thucydides, Henri Barbusse, and on up to Philip Caputo's classic Vietnam memoir, A RUMOR OF WAR. I will continue to sample from this thoughtful and thought-provoking tome from time to time, and will recommend it most highly to war lit buffs, historians and scholars.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the Cold War memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA… (mais)