Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn!
I spend this Tuesday morning, absolutely beautiful outside with birds chirping and the Corning whistle summoning workers from their breakfast to the production line as it has for over a century now, trying to find something to discuss other than the trail of murder and rape left behind by that most undisciplined of military assemblies, the Russian Army. That they performed so ineptly in their primary function of making war should come as no real surprise--the wars they've won over the years have been with a glacial grind rather than the blitzkrieg they attempted here--and I suppose, upon reflection, their demonic behavior in retreat was true to form. Just ask the women and children of Berlin.
But Berlin was a victory of sorts for the Red Army, although most armchair generals fault them for sending armor into an urban area with grossly inadequate infantry support, a mistake they apparently made once again on the approaches to Kyiv. Does a losing army behave worse, feeling betrayed by circumstances and those around them as they lose friends and comrades in a lost cause?
I pondered this as I bumbled across a piece this morning recounting a low point in a very low military career of one of history's most buffoonish officers, General George Pickett.
West Point Class of 1846 (one always remarks at this point that he was last in his class, an adumbration of future calamities suffered by anyone unlucky enough to serve under him), Pickett is most remembered for the charge at Gettysburg that bears his name, an opportunity for 9,000 sons, fathers, and husbands to die in the space of roughly an hour or spend their last days freezing to death just down the road from here at the prison camp known as "Hellmira". One can't really blame Pickett for that calamity, however--it was Lee's idea, after all.
Those of us who've dabbled in the history of the Great Rebellion most of our lives also remember him for famously missing the Battle of Five Forks at the close of the war because he was attending a shad bake, some believe lubricated with a fair amount of brown water, while his division was destroyed by Grant's swarming ranks.
But interestingly, in all the lost cause nonsense in which I was raised, one rarely hears mention of the New Bern campaign of 1864, or its aftermath. For good reason, I imagine.
By 1864 the Confederacy was clearly losing the war, and running out of provisions to continue the insurrection. In an effort to capture vast stores of provisions stockpiled by the occupying Federal forces, Lee sent Pickett to attack New Bern, North Carolina, hoping to bring back enough supplies to feed and arm Lee's very hungry troops facing down the Army of the Potomac north of Richmond.
As was his pattern, Pickett failed to find success, being roundly beaten and repulsed by the Union troops guarding New Bern. But he did take a lot of prisoners, and among them discovered a large number of Union soldiers who'd been, perhaps a few months before, Confederate soldiers.
North Carolina was among the most ambivalent of Southern states with regard to its citizens' enthusiasm for the insurrection. Its men fought for both sides. The North State's Confederate units suffered increasing rates of desertion by the beginning of 1864, when the writing was on the wall. Many of these men had been involuntarily conscripted, taken from homes and farms to fight for the rights of their wealthy neighbors, most of whom had opted out of actual military service, to own other human beings. When they had the chance to disappear into the woods, apparently many did so.
And some of those volunteered to wear Federal blue. And some among that number were captured in the New Bern campaign.
Pickett decided to make an example, originally of any North Carolinians he found among the prisoners, but later focused on those who'd formerly been members of the Confederate 10th North Carolina Infantry, now members of the 2nd North Carolina Infantry of the United States Army. Pickett convened a court martial, threw the men into a dungeon in Kinston, North Carolina, and signaled the foregone conclusion of the proceedings by having his men begin building scaffolds before a verdict was reached.
The Union commander, General John Peck, frantically tried to forestall the inevitable, and in the course of a series of letters between him and Pickett, inadvertently sealed his men's fate. In seeking clemency for the former Confederates, a letter from Peck to Pickett actually named fifty-three of them, a remarkable mistake on his part.
In a note dripping with sarcasm, Pickett thanked Peck for helping him identify the "traitors" (an ironic label for him to bestow, given that he'd betrayed his oath to the Constitution, taken when he was commissioned as a lieutenant, the day he joined the rebellion):
“The list…which you have so kindly furnished me, and which will enable me to bring to justice many who have up to this time escaped their just deserts [sic]. I herewith return you the names of those who have been tried and convicted by court-martial for desertion from the Confederate service.…They have been duly executed according to law and the custom of war.”
Extending to you my thanks for your opportune list, I remain, very respectfully, your obedient servant.”
Indeed, Pickett hanged twenty-two of them, corn sacks over their heads, then stripped them naked and left them at the base of the scaffold for anguished wives and parents to drag away for burial.
And for all of that, Pickett was tried after the war and hanged as a war criminal.
No, wait. That didn't happen at all. It rarely does, you see.
Rather, the coward fled to Canada with his much younger wife, figuring he'd be next on the scaffold, when his life was spared by the intervention of none other than Ulysses S. Grant, an old West Point buddy who wrote to justify the mass executions as necessary because the Confederates had a manpower problem and needed to make an example of the men. F*****g remarkable.
At least he didn't die abed after a long, happy life. Returning to Virginia, Pickett found his ancestral home burned to the ground on the orders of General Benjamin Butler, himself a rather controversial figure. Pickett had trouble making a living in the postwar world, and ended up as an insurance salesman. He also drank a lot, apparently including while he was in command of Confederate soldiers, and died of liver failure at the ripe old age of 50. His widow, in her early 30s at the time, spent the rest of her life trying to burnish the legacy of her sh*tbird husband.
So here we are again, with the images of men lying dead with bags over their heads, hands bound, murdered in cold blood by an army apparently enraged that they weren't welcomed as liberators. Our president calls his Russian counterpart a war criminal, but no one expects to see that possum-faced little man swinging at the end of a rope. His troops slink back into the more secure corners of Ukraine where their Russian cousins live, spaces that will likely be absorbed by Russia as its own with little or no chance the civilized West will do anything about it. Soon enough, the craven Germans and the rest of western Europe will insist we move on, so they can mend fences with their dealer in that most precious drug, fossil fuel, and corporate America will trip over itself to let bygones be bygones. And the men who pushed those unarmed civilians to the ground and shot them in the head, and the men who ordered it, and the men who stood idly by and let it happen, will get their threescore and ten. No wonder we feel the need to create this myth of judgment in the afterlife, because there's sure as hell no justice on this mortal journey.
Meanwhile, the next murderous state actors watch and learn.
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