Pickett’s Charge

I’m reading The Killer Angels again, Michael Shaara's deeply researched account of the Battle of Gettysburg, written with a storyteller's hand. It’s a book that probably could not have been written fifty years ago because it dares to be critical of General Lee, though this is not the book's focus. The battle made many images memorable, from Little Round Top and Devil’s Den to Cemetery Ridge. And it made many generals' names memorable as well, and none more so, in this battle, than General Pickett.

It could be argued that the mad futility of Pickett’s Charge broke the South. The unfolding events that orchestrated the charge should have never occurred but Fate had the upper hand and Reason found refuge in a foxhole. But was Pickett’s Charge the Worst Decision in Military History?

No. The whole of history is littered with dead bodies and tragedy.

Here is a familiar passage from Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse & hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

Similar sentiments can be found in Eric Bogle’s And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda drawn from recollections of the Battle of Gallipoli.

How well I remember that terrible day
How the blood stained the sand and the water
And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter
Johnny Turk he was ready, he primed himself well
He chased us with bullets, he rained us with shells
And in five minutes flat he'd blown us to hell
Nearly blew us right back to Australia

If you have ever been to the Gettysburg battlefield and seen the stretch of ground across which Pickett and his men had to traverse, you can’t help but ask, “What were they thinking?” Maybe it had something to do with the madness of crowds. “All or nothing” has permanent consequences when you put lives on the line. “Ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die,” seems a common theme for the common soldier. And when a soldier falters in fully embracing this attitude, his own personal consequences are dire.

One of my own personal film favorites, this one set in the trenches of World War I, is Paths of Glory, an early Kubrick masterpiece that tells it like it was, is and probably ever shall be. War is hell.