The Marchers, 1955

"The new motel at Americus was clean and comfortable, the bed smooth; still I could not sleep. Again I looked at my watch: a little after 4 A.M., so it would be hours before the February sun appeared. I got up and dressed. I drove into northeast blackness along that road grown so familiar-Georgia State Highway Number 49. The road brought me, eleven miles away, into a dark unpopulated valley where water trickled from a certain storied spring.

For a time I parked near that spring. Frogs were singing like birds along a tiny watercourse where new grasses tufted fresh as salad leaves. There was the thought of monuments looming, thought of a bareheaded boy made of bronze who stands, cap in hand and eternally youthful face uplifted amid a low forest of white marble slabs. But the graves were yonder, to the north. Now I did not wish to go there-I was heartily afraid to go, although I had gone many times before in daylight, and on occasion illegally in darkness. Regulations declare that a United States Military Cemetery may not be visited at night; yet on occasion I had sinned so, and had not felt myself a sinner; I'd felt that I belonged there. Almost I might wish to lie there eventually, could it be permitted. I felt that I was nearer to those dead than I was near to a breathing, sleeping world of mortal men and women.

About five o'clock I drove up the south slope of this valley and parked near the summit. Barely in gloom could I make out the few naked markers which approximate the position of the old Andersonville stockade. Actually I stood within the stockade area-the South Gate would have been over here, to the left; the gallows directly ahead, the raiders' pavilion ahead to the right. Still that constant spurting symphony of frog voices cried in the pretty ravine, the ravine I could scarcely distinguish in its mystery.

Clouds were thick, oppressive, blocking the light of even a single star. An owl spoke among underbrush masking the ancient Island. All fifty-odd thousand of you, I thought. Where do you drift now? Guards and prisoners alike-Henry Wirz with the rope mark on your dusty neck-sniveling child and hulking bully, serene martyr and master-of-the-hounds...I thought (in that intense awareness of one's own dream the egoistic concentration which impels one to to tell the story which he feels must be told)-Men and boys, I am here, waiting. Where have you gone?

I heard them coming. They twitched in a whispering rank from woods at the north, they rose up beyond statues and the superintendent's house; they came walking, massed and steady. Gently, they traveled through and over and under distant trees, came out into open ground where little circular fences protected the wells and tunnels they had dug-black pits drilled down though colored layers of clay. The marchers passed the fences easily, pacing nearer and nearer. There would be no resisting them.

I turned in panic, and stumbled back to my car, I flung myself into the front seat, heard the frightened slam of the car door go banging off through haunted distance. It was no illusion- I heard those soft footed thousands walking ever closer. Now their phalanx was pressing down the opposite slope, passing Providence Spring. I had summoned them, their reply was in their implacable approach.

Why was I afraid-I, who had called them brothers for so long in my mind, who dared to feel that I belonged in their misty column? It was not solely a fear of ghosts, a quailing away from the Dead. I had been close to death on a number of occasions in two wars, had walked within Buchenwald, had climbed into trucks loaded with dead, had tripped across their stiff outflung arms when they lay upon the ground. It was something more. In the next moment, as that unseen soft-treading horde pressed over the crest of the Sweetwater branch, I recognized the answer.

They had come to tell me that there must be no compromise, I had invoked their name and thought for nearly twenty-five years; they were thronging at last to force me to the task.

I was crying. I had not cried in many years, but now I was crying. Get out of the car, I said. You must show them that you have fear no longer, that you are ready to accept orders. My feet were on the grass, the door clicked shut behind me. I stood waiting. The wide rustling rank moved fairly in my face. Then they were touching me, they were all around me, brushing my face and hands, the hair of my head.

Rain.

A thin slow-speaking, slow-stepping rain had formed somewhere among miles and ages of darkness before dawn. So it had moved on many small feet from the direction of the cemeterey, had walked open glades, put its coolness on monuments, now it was touching me. I was glad to brushed by it, glad to feel it on my lips.

At this time I had written perhaps twenty-five thousand words on Andersonville, and knew that I must write at least three hundred thousand more. Often the recollection of that rain walking the late hours of a Georgia night came to prod or sustain me......

And the breath of these Andersonville people was especially compulsive; it came cooled by the ice of ninety years, ninety years to the minute.

The book was not written chronologically-few books of such scope could be written chronologically. Nevertheless, it was begun ninety years from the month when the stockade was first reared; and Providence Spring burst forth exactly ninety years from the week when Providence Spring did burst forth; and the last tattered relics were conveyed from the pen in May, 1865; and last word of this novel was written in May, 1955, and strangely the last word happened to be Andersonville."

Excerpts from The Marchers, 1955, page 308 in The Day I Met A Lion, by MacKinlay Kantor, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1968