War, in movies or historical painting, can even look beautiful. The reality is very different, as we immediately see when we descend from heroic tales to the experiences of soldiers or civilians who find themselves involved in the carnage. In the case of the American Civil War (1861-1865), Drew Gilpin Faust, president emeritus of Harvard University, has rescued what it meant to die and kill during that conflict in This republic of suffering (Desperta Ferro, 2023).
It is an impressive book, exquisitely written, about how thousands of anonymous people lived through the tragedy of a war much deadlier than any of the preceding ones. The devastation forced them to reflect on their most important values as human beings, in an attempt to make understandable what was absurd. The rhetoric about the service to God or the country allowed to legitimize a violence of inconceivable levels.
People didn't just die in battle. Also in hospitals, where health services were completely overwhelmed. After the Battle of Perryville (1862), for example, Union surgeons went without washing their hands for two days. Not out of negligence, but because water at that time was a very scarce commodity. With this panorama, it is not surprising that gangrene became a frequent scourge.
The usual books tell us about the tactics and strategies of the armies, but not about what happens when the fight ends and thousands of dead cover the battlefield. In the United States, it was assumed that the responsibility for burying the dead rested with the victorious army, but military needs soon took precedence over humanitarian considerations.
The generals had neither the time nor the material means to give the dead an honorable burial. Hence, scenes took place that horrified contemporaries, horrified to see that human beings had just been thrown into mass graves as if they were animals. The soldiers were terrified that if they died, their remains might be fed to the beasts. Faced with the impossibility of acting according to established moral codes, it was argued that the needs of the living had priority.
The war confronted the population with the urgency of preparing for a death that could come at any moment. Under normal circumstances, individuals spiritually prepared to say goodbye to their loved ones. But what if they fell unexpectedly in combat or, worse still, if their body was disfigured? All of this challenged strongly held convictions, such as faith in the resurrection of bodies.
Meanwhile, faced with such a traumatic reality, the members of the different religious denominations ended up getting closer, with which a certain ecumenism flourished. As the author notes, "the carnage of the Civil War reduced theological differences between faiths."
On the other hand, the American civil strife presented the radical novelty of photography. Horrifying images of the fallen were broadcast, forcing civilians to face what it meant to succumb in combat. In turn, the dying clung to images of their relatives. Since they couldn't have them by their side in their last moments, at least they had the consolation that a graphic representation replaced their presence. In Gettysburg, for example, the corpse of a Yankee soldier was found imprisoning a photograph of his three children.
Without a doubt, the three little ones, like so many participants in the hostilities, were never the same again. That is another one of Drew Gilpin Faust's merits: he perfectly analyzes the tremendous psychological impact that the war had on the survivors. His study, in this facet as in others, is full of throbbing emotions. The reader is moved by the drama of so many broken dreams, of so many men reduced to the condition of killing machines. Texan Elijah Perry wrote to his wife that he and his companions were treated like robots: “We have no right to think. Others have taken on the responsibility of thinking for us.”
Despite the extent of the horror, however, certain limits were preserved. That's why snipers were so loathed: their actions seemed like cold-blooded murder, a display of cowardice, not the heroism expected of the military. Something like that couldn't be easily justified as an act of self-defense.
This republic of suffering tells many terrible things. It is by no means a comfortable book. However, strange as it may seem, its pages are extraordinarily beautiful. They return the concern and pain of countless anonymous people, those who tend to forget so many studies focused on political or military leaders. But at the same time we find acts of solidarity, like that of all those soldiers who agreed to, if one of them died, give the bad news to the family of the deceased and send them his personal belongings. Thus, the paradox arises that a book with so much death is, at the same time, full of so much life.
