Man o’ War

Over the last 50 years, like most enduring enterprises, Ed has diversified. This year alone he’s taken several hundred people on tours of Anzio and Messina in Italy, the Oregon Trail in Idaho and Nez Perce encampments in Montana, scenes from the Mississippi floods of 1927 and from Abraham Lincoln’s service in the Black Hawk War in the 1830s–on top of a schedule already filled with your basic Antietams, your Gettysburgs, your Shilohs and Chickamaugas and Spotsylvanias. He also found time to celebrate his 83rd birthday.

But Ed’s first and last love is for the Civil War, and this, along with his standing in the trade, gives an air of inevitability to the publication of Fields of Honor. Somebody was going to have to put out this book sooner or later. For the last several years members of the self-named Bearss Brigades–a particularly tenacious species of the genus Civil War Buff–have armed themselves with tape recorders and gone chasing after Ed as he charges over the battlefields, hoping to preserve for the ages his incomparable observations and narrative spiel. Dozens of volunteers have transcribed the hundreds of hours of tape into thousands of pages of prose, and from these, culled and whittled, have come the 13 chapters of the book, offering definitive commentary on engagements from Fort Sumter to Appomattox. The literature of the Civil War is vast, of course, and nearly limitless in its variety of literary forms; but even so, I don’t think there’s another book quite like Fields of Honor.

And the reason is–forgive me if I sound like a Bearss Brigadier for a moment–there’s never been a Civil War authority quite like Ed. Growing up on a ranch in Montana, he christened his favorite cows Antietam and Sharpsburg. His father was a Marine, and so was a cousin–“Hiking Hiram” Bearss, as the newspapers called him–who earned the Medal of Honor during the Philippines Insurrection and became, up to that time, the most decorated Marine in the history of the corps. Hearing their experiences led the boy to read every book he could get hold of about war. And when a real war made itself available, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Ed enlisted and became a Marine Raider. He was sent to the Pacific theater, moving from the Russell Islands to the Solomon Islands to the assault on New Britain. His fellow Marines remember him for his almost empty backpack, containing only a few grenades, extra ammunition, and a copy of the World Book of Knowledge.

On patrol in New Britain one January morning in 1944, he was nearly shot to pieces. Approaching a stream, he and another scout couldn’t see the Japanese pillboxes dug in just below the lip of the declivity leading to the creek bed. I asked him once what his own battlefield experience had taught him as a guide, and he said, with a small grin, “The importance of terrain.” And it’s true. Walking a battlefield with Ed, you’re struck by how intently he wants you to see the landscape as the combatants saw it: What ordinary soldiers could and couldn’t see from any given position often determined the course of battle.

In 1944, a trick of the terrain enabled the Japanese gunners to catch him by surprise. He took bullets in his ribs, heel, buttocks, right shoulder, and left elbow. Marines who came to fetch him were pinned flat themselves but managed, after several hours, to pull him from the line of fire–dragging him with their toes. He was two years in hospital. His left hand and arm don’t do him much good, other than to help balance the riding crop he uses as a pointer when he’s on a tour.

“I’m a man of the battlefields,” Ed likes to say–and a man of one battlefield in particular, in Gloucester Bay, New Britain. “I know how a battlefield feels, sounds, and smells.”

A sensitivity to terrain isn’t all that distinguishes Ed as guide and author. During his convalescence, and later as a student at Georgetown and Indiana universities, where the GI Bill treated him to an M.A. in history, he read everything on the Civil War and, from all appearances, forgot nothing. He denies he has a photographic memory, but he will say, “If I read something I’m interested in, it sticks in my mind.”

The breadth of what he knows is astonishing. In his account of any battle, an Olympian view of strategy and politics commingles with personal details picked up from the letters and diaries of common soldiers. And he’s never lost the grunt’s earthy irreverence for higher-ups. Here, for example, he sets the scene for a confrontation between generals Jubal Early and the uxorious Richard Ewell, nominally Early’s boss in the Army of Northern Virginia:

When he’s leading a tour, scattering such tidbits before his audience for hours at a time, Ed never consults a note. Fields of Honor captures his fluency, along with his learning, his offhand humor, and his facility in making a half-dozen narrative strands come out together at the end. But pleasing as it is, Fields of Honor is still just words on a page, and can’t really convey what makes a Bearss tour a singular experience.

I spent the day with him earlier this summer as he clomped through the tufted fields of Spotsylvania, where in 1864 the Army of the Potomac, newly commanded by Ulysses S. Grant, fought Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to a standstill that was notable, even by Civil War standards, for its sanguinary pointlessness. It was a bright, mild day, and Ed had a busload of buffs from Baltimore in train. Most were veterans of his tours, some even qualified as members of the Bearss Brigades, but you could tell that a few were new to the experience and unsure what to make of him.

Balding and stooped now with age, he wears his baggy cargo pants hitched high above the waist. His hiking boots are well-scuffed, and his T-shirt–the shirt this day said: “Once a Marine, always a Marine”–stretches taut over the muscular right side of his frame and hangs loose over the left. He wears a ball cap as protection from the sun, and a croupier’s pencil mustache for a sporty touch.

His face is in constant motion, eyebrows rising, lower lip pulled out, eyes shut so that, as he once said, “I can see it all happening, right here in front of me.” Then the eyes pop open and he takes off at a drill sergeant’s trot, hustling his followers across open fields and into dark woods and out the other side onto the ruts of old farm-to-market roads. No matter how far ahead he gets, you can always hear him. His lungs fill like a bellows and exhale into a basso profundo that would be impressive in a man half his age.

“Here we are with the Fifth Maine!” he shouted to us, breaking into a jog a quarter-mile from Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle. “Forward! Forward! We’re not under fire yet! See the dip in the land! The Third Georgia is just ahead, but they can’t see us yet!” Other sightseers, scattered along a road in groups of twos and threes, lifted their heads and stopped to stare. One shouted, “Semper Fi, Ed!”

At last, Ed slowed up by a hump of earthworks, at the apex of the Angle, where on the evening of May 12, 1864, hand-to-hand fighting raged for 15 hours in a typhoon rain. “Here’s what history will know as the Bloody Angle,” Ed called out, showing no loss of breath. The Baltimoreans wheezed up behind him, the last of the stragglers arriving two or three minutes late. Ed’s voice dropped almost to a purr: “Imagine what Johnny Reb sees.” He swept his riding crop toward the horizon. “It’s a big blob of blue coming his way, 40 ranks of men, and more still behind, a blob darker than hell.”

Ed hoisted himself up on the earthworks. These ditches were dug in a panic, he said, by frightened men with spoons and sticks. He scratched the earth with the riding crop. “The earthworks form what they call ‘mule pens,'” he says. “Tarheels and Alabamians crowd the pens. Yanks are atop the works. It will be man-to-man, hand-to-hand.”

The riding crop was suddenly lifted skyward. “The Yanks use their bayoneted rifles as javelins!” Ed brought the pointer down. “The Confederates reach up and grab the Yankees by their collars and pull them down into the ditches where the rain gathers in pools and they use their rifles as clubs and they simply . . . “–here he shrugged a kind of cosmic, fatalistic shrug–“beat . . . them . . . to . . . death. The pool turns red.”

“Oh dear,” said a Baltimore lady next to me. No one else said a word, for fear of disrupting Ed’s rhythm.

“The Yankees respond with kicks!” And Ed kicked down, first with one leg, then the other. “It is the most savage fighting of the war!” He kept kicking. “Nine thousand Union gone! Eight thousand Confederates! Read Grant’s memoirs about the fighting. He’s magnificent!”

I have read Grant’s memoirs. And he is magnificent. But it’s still just words on a page. When I think of Spotsylvania now, when I close my eyes and try to picture what it might possibly have been like, I prefer to think of Ed, towering over the earthworks, still kicking.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.