Manassas

They brought picnic baskets, the gentlemen with opera glasses, starched shirts, carefully crafted mustaches, and the ladies ready with umbrellas against the July sun along the Potomac, their artfully cut sandwiches offered to their fellow wives, their hearts racing as if to see a derby run.

Then, shortly after ten, the first shots – theater, at last after all the weeks of newspaper chatter and excited whispers. Finally: the smell of gun smoke in the distance, here a command shouted across the field, a cry of surprise or pain, the beat of hooves, and the sudden confusion and nearness of the clashes.

At what point did they begin to suspect – or fear – or, what? – lose interest in any but their own self-preservation? Were they able to see through their lenses the actual minie balls hitting home, the cardinal froth in a dying man’s mouth, the fear and horror of a maimed horse looking wildly around it, not sure why its legs no longer held it upright?

Almost five thousand died that day – a pittance in the grand tragedy that was the civil war – but five thousand! They had all – picnickers and soldiers alike – thought that it would be a quick and relatively bloodless matter. They named this battle after the country stream nearby – Bull Run -- never dreaming it would be the first of two on this small field along this small creek, nor the first of nearly a hundred more that would finally claim close to a quarter million men, and nearly the same number of civilians as collateral damage of errant (or intended) cannon rounds, disease, starvation, madness.

They brought picnic baskets – the gentlemen and the ladies – never realizing they were lunching at the end of their world, never dreaming of the horrors they were all alike to bear witness to, the visceral reality of what hatred can make incarnate given the least encouragement and legitimacy.