25 March 2007
Walking the Ground
I have wandered into the twilight land that humorist Dave Berry described trenchantly: “There is a fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.” I am not sure that I have not blundered across, but I will let you be the judge of that.
It was raining in Arlington, and it was early on a Saturday. I was showered and out of the house. It is the Viewing Season, the last chance to catch a vista from the hilltops around the county before the leaves fill everything in.
I could have been hunched next to the radio, fingers poised at the keyboard to see if there was word about the captured British sailors in Iran, and the latest in the crisis, or the results of the rigged elections in Hong Kong, or what the prospects might be for the Buckeyes and Bruins in the afternoon basketball games.
That would have been a different version of my particular brand of mental illness. Instead, I was seated in the kitchen of the noted historian's residence, looking out the glass window to the deck. We were going to walk the ground around his house. It is a special location, for a historian, since there is history right out his back door. A large mound of earth rises to the right hand side of it, and the deck looks down on a shallow depression that ran to the back of the lot line.
The house sits directly in the cross section of the parapet of the Fort. The slab is lad on fill where the moat once was, and the rampart was knocked down to provide a little clearance behind the windows. There is a little shelf, hard to determine, that might have been the platform for a cannon.
Nothing of importance happened here, not in 1861, nor in the subsequent war years to 1865. That is not to say that there has not been some hard back-breaking work on the site, Indeed there was, and it happened in two spurts in these modern times almost exactly a hundred years apart.
In 1861 they dragged a bunch of Ohioans up here, led by German engineers, and they spend months digging with picks and shovels, and felling trees to clear the sight lines down to the Four Mile Run.
In the mid-1960s they brought in the bulldozers and smoothed it all out again, a small crew doing the work of three battalions of infantry in a few days.
Progress.
For whatever reason, the developers left 191 feet of the rampart in place. The Historian purchased this particular house out of three that were available in the neighborhood a few years ago and began to fill it with books. An older Army Colonel lived next door, atop the where the western magazine of the old fort had been.
Bring in the business, the Colonel took the original 1861 engineering documents and oriented them to the existing plat for the development. It was quite remarkable. It gave you the ability to see the invisible.
The Hunter family once owned the snout of Arlington ridge that overlooked the Potomac on one side, and on the other the gentle valley where the Columbia Pike headed into the District. That is why the Union soldiers came to this place, to look down, and prepare.
Things were a little frantic at the beginning. At first, it seemed prudent to cross over into the Old Dominion of Virginia and occupy some of the high ground. Then there was the disaster at Manassas Junction, and the headlong flight of the Yankees back toward the capital. It seemed that this was going to be more complex than first thought.
The mound in the backyard was part of the response. Major George Bayard was entrusted with supervision of the digging, and he applied the scientific theories of West Point instructor Dennis Hart Mahan to a vast swath of Virginia's red dirt.
Mahan had studied the works built in the Peninsular War in Portugal and Spain to provide a comprehensive solution to defensive warfare. His impact on how land warfare might be conducted was profound to the conduct of the great madness that would follow, and spilled back over to Europe to be applied in the aftermath of the embarrassing French performance in the war against the Prussians.
When you consider that Mahan's son was the noted Naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, the two combined to provide the intellectual basis to land and sea combat that produced the tactics for the First and Second World Wars.
The historian and I ate bagels and took coffee in travel cups, and walked out his front door to the historical marker, holding copies of the Colonel's guide to the invisible world.
We followed the rampart along the back of his property, where the fence climbs the low mound, and the thirty yards of county land to where the rampart took the fishhook curl to the right. Abruptly, the parapet runs into the second floor of a pedestrian suburban ranch house.
We walked two houses down to where the chart showed the ramparts slewing back to the south, through the laundry room of another neatly-kept home. Squinting hard to see with other eyes, it was clear where the bulldozer had pushed the past before it to flatten and expand the building site to the top of the ravine where the guns peered down.
I don't know what the neighbors thought of us in the middle of the street, gesturing wildly at their prim dwellings, outlining where the barracks stood, and the drain had run down into the middle of a steep local street. We stopped in front of the white house where the Colonel had lived until his death. A man was loading his mini-van for the Saturday chores.
I almost asked if he knew that the remains of the magazine still lie under the slab beneath it. I refrained, suspecting that our particular form of mental illness might not be welcome on his weekend.
The man drove away. “You remember John Sumida?” asked the historian. I nodded. I had heard the Maryland professor of military history lecture at the War Hollege, and admired the fact that he had turned his mental illness into into a paying gig. “He has just completed the first thorough review of Clauswitz with modern rigor. His conclusions about what the old German really said about mass warfare has direct application to the situation in Iraq.”
“No kidding!” I said with wonder, relieved that I had Clauswitz wrong, again. Sumida once literally waded through ancient files headed for the landfill to find and save internal memoranda that undermined the official account of history.
I tried to imagine the delicious agony of it, attempting to live in two worlds simultaneously, one visible, and the other unseen. Worse, it is not even just a parallel world, but an infinite variation on all of the possibilities, filled equally with sufficient minutiae to make them fully equal in volume to the one we can see.
Completing the perimeter walk, we determined that that Southwest bastion had anchored the slope exactly where the current owner of a modest Cape Cod had planted daffodils.
I thanked the Historian for letting me walk his ground, and for his assistance in seeing the invisible. The past may ultimately unknowable, I thought, as I drove through where the barracks had fronted the rear palisade to the fort.
To understand it truly would be like watching a video surveillance tape without the capability to fast forward, attempting to take notes.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com