Jan 2024. Blues Vol 40 No. 1

on a nearby slope. The other
army was too damaged and
ill-supplied to give chase, but
it did bury its dead. The United
States Army had over 3,100
troops killed outright with thousands
more missing or maimed
for life. The population of Gettysburg
in 1863 was about 2,400.
The Army buried its dead in the
local burial ground.
Four months later, the federal
government acquired the
cemetery and designated it as
a national cemetery. President
Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg
to make a “few appropriate
remarks.” The president, a selftaught
man of books, relied on
his memory of an ancient funeral
oration to flavor his speech.
The Greeks, thousands of years
before, wrote down the eulogy
of their greatest citizen, Pericles,
so people would remember him,
and by extension, them. Lincoln
remembered those Greeks as he
was awash in one of history’s
bloodiest seas. To bury the casualties
of one battle in a place
where the dead now outnumbered
the living must have been
a humbling experience, but he
dedicated himself and the suffering
nation to finish the task
they started.
When we were there, my
grandson and I participated in
the taps ceremony to honor the
hundreds of unknown soldiers
on the grounds. The officials visit
one soldier known but to God
each evening and invite Americans
to participate in this gesture
of ultimate patriotism. As
we walked over the sacred soil,
we observed a monument to
President Lincoln and his dedication
speech. We inspected
the monument and saw graves
behind it. The graves were American
soldiers, but they were
from December 1944. The Army
transported these heroes across
the sea from the town where
they fell, Bastogne in Belgium.
Then we saw others from Korea,
Vietnam, and any other place our
country put boots on the ground.
Time moves onward in an
unrelenting march. Every day,
historians find more evidence
from our distant past that often
puts forth more questions than
answers. Literacy, man’s greatest
invention, helps in our quest of
remembrance. Indeed, we etched
Lincoln’s speech in stone on his
memorial that by design appears
as a Greek temple.
I often wonder at our own
hubris in the quest to be remembered
for all time. In 1818, Percy
Bysshe Shelley published a sonnet
entitled “Ozymandias.” That
is the Greek word for Egypt’s
Pharaoh. The poem reflects on
man’s unattainable pursuit of
time’s commodity of immortality.
The desert traveler of the poem
happens upon Pharaoh’s statue
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