Hiking the Battlefield

I don’t understand war. I never have and likely never will. After this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week of war in Ukraine, I found myself drawn to the Manassas Battlefield. I don’t know what I sought—answers, perspective, hope. So, I walked among the cannons, the historical kiosks, the statues, the wide-open fields, and blue sky.

This is what battlefields are supposed to look like. Our Americanized perspective tells us that battles are waged on fields and across grassy knolls. Or jungles, or rugged mountains. They are not waged in neighborhoods and streets amid homes and schools and playgrounds and apartment buildings. The images coming across the television and the internet are sickening and scary and perplexing.

A few images have been heartening. The white-haired grandma learning how to aim a rifle. The couple who wed and spent their honeymoon keeping the Russians at bay. The woman in a trench coat dropping f-bombs and sunflower seeds at the feet of a Russian soldier. The open arms of Poland with welcome signs for the refugees at the train station. These stories distract us with that warm glow of hope, averting our eyes from the terror unfolding for a free people.

My boots crunched the winter-beaten grass of the battlefield as I crisscrossed the field. I visited the ruins of a home owned by a freedman who was caught in the crossfire. The man’s supplies were taken for feed for man and horse during the two battles waged here within thirteen months of each other. I passed the monuments to men who had exhibited great courage and lost their lives in the process. I read about the stories, legends, and body counts. I wondered where the monuments would one day be built in those Ukrainian cities for President Zelensky, who has stood with his country in the chaos, or the mother who shielded her child from the bombs falling from the sky.

Artists have long attempted to comprehend and explain the truths and devastations of war. Pablo Picasso with his mural “Guernica” or Hemmingway with his war-time tome For Whom The Bell Tolls or Edwin Star’s song “War What Is It Good For” or any number of Bob Dylan’s protest songs. Watching the coverage of Ukraine feels like a live-action version of e.e. cumming’s poem, “The Waste Land.” These artists all struggled to explain the insanity of war and its aftermath.

I wish someone could answer my question in some artful way: Is it possible to be patriotic, love your county, and honor those who fight for our freedoms and values while despising the costs (financial and emotional), the bloodshed, the fear? The lusty power grabs. The absurdity. I’ve found myself humming Marvin Gay’s song “What’s Going On” throughout this past week.

For most of my hike through the battlefield, I followed a father walking with his teenage son. I watched them consume the same history and facts that I consumed along our path. They talked some, walked silently for a while, pointed out a hawk that flew above us. I imagined I was watching love in action and the building of a legacy steeped in memories that would serve them both in the future. The building blocks of a relationship that would help explain the inexplicable that life offers. I hoped that teenage boy would never know the realities of war and always appreciate his freedom and whatever wisdom his father imparted on this battlefield. I hoped, and that felt sufficient.

We may always have a world where war exists, but I’d love to see a world with more fathers and sons (and mothers and daughters, aunts and uncles with nieces and nephews) sharing an afternoon, walking and talking and trying to make sense of the world. Is it an antidote to war? I have no idea. I only know that’s the world I want to live in.

How about you?