04 December 2009
 
Glory Road

(Major General J.E.B. Stuart, CSA)

Sic transit Gloria mundi.

"Thus passes the glory of the world," is the formal Latin translation, but it is subject to interpretation by people who know more than just what the words say, strung out in a line.
 
It can also be read, contextually, as "Worldly things are fleeting," possibly adapted from a 15th century work by Thomas à Kempis called “'The Imitation of Christ.” The language was pretty well dead by then, and  the creature only of the educated, who could say things like: "O quam cito transit gloria mundi" ("How quickly the glory of the world passes away")
 
I never learned enough of it from Ms Cannell back in high school to actually figure it out myself. We used cribs to avoid having to look everything up. The most popular of these was called “The War Commentaries of Caesar” (1960), translated by an Englishman named Rex Warner.
 
Rex was an erudite writer and translator who had the good fortune to be born just too late (1905) to have been sent to the trenches of World War One, and too old for the front lines in the bloody second act.
 
His highly-nuanced and idiomatic understanding of Great Caesar’s account of glory must have been incongruous, coming from our callow lips, and I am surprised Ms Cannell managed to keep her sanity.
 
The Commentaries should have been interesting enough to get our attention, even though it didn't, since the account of the subjugation of all Gaul has everything that contributed to the glory of Julius Caesar. It was part of the PR campaign that culminated in the crossing of the Rubicon, and made him the living God who ruled the greatest empire of all time.
 
Until the Senators murdered him, of course, which demonstrates the fleeting nature of glory in this world, which is a fiction for those who don’t get close enough to see it in all its raw and naked splendor.
 
I’ve been happy to keep a civil distance from anything glorious, which probably accounts for my fascination with those who have, and lived. I was moderately pleased that an assault on glory had been foiled by local activists just last month, without my ever knowing about the struggle.
 
I mentioned last week about the Buckland Races, the last cavalry victory by the glorious Cavalier of the South, J.E.B. Stuart. My God, he cut a figure in his day, saber and plumed slouch hat and tunic of gray. I have seen his boots, carefully preserved in a glass case at the museum in Richmond, more than knee-tall, rising almost to mid-thigh. They are rakish and romantic, which is the glorious image he cultivated.
 
The victory happened over eight miles of the Warrenton Turnpike, which is now US Route 29. It is the road that Thomas Jefferson used to travel from Washington to his stately home at Monticello, and in the War Between the States hundreds of thousands of soldiers marched it, and fought over most of it.
 
It is not the Via Appia, the mother road of ancient Rome, but for a new country in a wide continent, it has a claim to some glory.
 
At Buckland, the State was interested in expanding the four-lane bridge over Broad Run, the key to the heroics of General George Armstrong Custer that prevented the Buckland Races from becoming the Buckland Slaughter. The footing to the original bridge, the one Custer was inspecting when a Rebel cannonball exploded in the midst of his entourage.
 
Custer is the other great presence on this road, and he was the Yankee counterweight to the dashing Stuart. Rash and self-aggrandizing, he was a glory-hound. But he did cut a dashing figure, and he was at Yellow Tavern where JEB was shot by a dismounted Micigan trooper with a .44 pistol and entered into eternal glory.
 
We know about George Custer’s last glorius stand, and I have enven walked the ground there at the Greasy Grass. They say that the Sioux respected his foolish courage enough not to scalp him as he lay there on the field. Other accounts, including one by Sitting Bull himself, indicate they did not even recognize Custer when they killed him.
 
By the Glory Road in Buckland, the expanded bridge would have caused the old stone footing on the west side of the river to be destroyed. The local activists won out, and it looks, for the moment anyway, that the physical connection to the glory of two horseman will stay where it is.
 
You can’t see it, of course, since it is right next to the massive piers of the modern bridge, and it takes a bit of doing to get off the highway and trek along a quarter mile of the original Pike down the slope from the whizzing highway.
 
It is worth a visit, though.
 
That old stone bridge footing is just part of the story, though, and I will take you down past the Vint Hill road junction, which is where Stuart set his trap, and head down to the Grand Review, just a outside Warrenton.
 

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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