A Brief Rest in a Shallow Grave

Written by Matthew J. Ocasio

    Three of us died last night, and I was not fortunate enough to be among them.  I am and they were a part of the Twelfth Massachusetts Regiment, on march from Hyattstown, Maryland.  We once made jest that our official name was the Beautiful Twelfth, for so many of us were new to this war and still had the fresh faces and smiles that we wore at home in Boston or elsewhere.  I had seen men come back from fighting—men whose gaze was permanently affixed to the horizon, or boys with an arm or leg missing, aging sixty years in the span of three—and knew that our moniker was not to last.

    Rain had been falling on us for three days during our march, and on the fourth day, with the three ill and unable to continue on, we were forced to bivouac in a trench dug by a previous encampment.   We tried to keep them dry, give a chance at recovery, but every one of us knew that there was little hope.  The rain brought forth death.  

    As if to present the three dying boys a glimpse of their future, the rain thought it clever to churn up the corpses of three grown soldiers out from under us.  A glimpse at the two things those kids would never be.  The rain had made the soil so swampy that the bodies simply rose from under our feet.  Only one of them saw the ghastly sight, for he begged us to not bury him in the mud but to bring his body back home to his mother in Travilah.  We swore that we would.  We most certainly would not.

    I watched them expire, one by one, and envied their last breaths.  They died laying down in relative comfort, with folks attending them.  Sickness granted those three men warrant from ever having to encounter this loathsome war head-on.  This providential rain ensured that not a one of them felt the push of a bayonet or thump of shot, and each man died without ever meeting the sawbones.  Seeing them die, I thought momentarily about committing myself to an easy death as well.  Maybe I would fall onto my bayonet.  But on the moment all three had expired our commander pushed them into the deep mud with his saber and we marched again.  The war wouldn`t wait for us, he said, and dammit, we wouldn`t wait for the war.

    I looked backward and saw that the rain had already exhumed our men, washing them down the same dead river with the other bodies from before.  Perhaps it was again the rain`s humor, but all the dead flowed North while we marched further South.