A Grave Concern: For a friend

Last night, a friend of mine passed away. She was on the trip to Ireland I took in 2009, and she was a follower of this blog. I didn’t have the opportunity to know her nearly as long or as well as many others, but I treasured the time I did have with her. I am reposting something I wrote last year about a place we both enjoyed visiting very much. Rest in peace, Mary.

While in Ireland last year, I visited Glendalough, the site of a medieval monastic settlement.

Glendalough, or “the valley of the two lakes,” is about an hour south of Dublin in County Wicklow. The monastery there was founded by St. Kevin in the 6th century. Kevin died in about 618 AD, but the monastery flourished until it was destroyed by English troops in 1398. The church continued to operate after the monastic settlement was disbanded. The buildings that remain in ruins date to the 1100s and 1200s.

I was anticipating seeing medieval buildings and maybe a few surviving grave slabs or monuments, which was exciting enough. But when we entered the gate, we found tombstones that date from well after 1398.

Glendalough, being a the final resting place of a saint, continued to be a popular place for burial, even as the buildings fell to ruins. Tombstones were everywhere. They were attached to the remaining stones walls that used to be chapels and churches.

Grave slabs and fallen tombstones lined the floor of the former cathedral.

Tombstones were interspersed with the buildings, right up against them, falling over themselves to squeeze as many as possible into the sacred ground.

Multiple generations of families would have a common marker, with new names added to the bottom until they ran out of family or ran out of space.

Glendalough feels both peaceful and isolated, an island of quiet where one can go to contemplate the spiritual surrounded by generations before who found the same tranquility so compelling that they chose to spend eternity there.

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A Grave Concern: Combatants 393 Non-casualty 53

For me, there is no monument that more simply conveys the utter devastation wreaked on the Army of Northern Virginia by undertaking Longstreet’s Assault (what most people think of as Pickett’s Charge) than the one to the 11th Mississippi Infantry Regiment on Confederate Avenue at Gettysburg.   The monument was just dedicated in 2000.

On this day in 1863 at the Battle of Gettysburg, Lt. General James Longstreet’s Division of the Army of Northern Virginia (commanded of course by General Robert E. Lee) marched across 3/4 of a mile of open farmland to attack the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge. The Confederate charge began with more than 12,000 soldiers and suffered over 50% casualties. As a young teenager, I walked Pickett’s Charge on a school trip – our group was assigned a Virginia regiment that I have long since forgotten. We learned to march in formation, and we each received a 3×5 index card with the name and a few details about a soldier of that regiment. I still recall very clearly that my soldier was William Norris, who did survive. As we marched across the field, the park ranger kept calling names where men fell – the student marching in the place of that soldier would fall out of line to walk behind the unit, and the rest of us would try to close ranks. Private Norris was one of the few to make it to the Union lines. I remember how very lonely it was to be one of the few still “charging,” and I was only playing pretend, not staring down the barrels of entrenched rifles and artillery.

The 11th Mississippi monument has a plaque that shows in stark, numeric terms the battle’s effect on them.  The regiment ended up being the left flank, exposing it to enfilade fire. 86% casualties (round down) – 86% of the soldiers who began the charge under their colors were no longer available for combat at the end – killed, wounded or captured.  77% of the soldiers in the regiment were killed or wounded – 27%  of the regiment killed outright or mortally wounded.  Company A, the University Greys who largely came from the University of Mississippi, earned particular distinction by suffering 100% casualties. No soldier of Company A present on July 3, 1863 would have been able to fight if the battle continued on July 4. It’s very nearly unimaginable – the numbers are staggering.

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