Still Deaths
SOME of the more striking of these famous photo- graphs—McLellan posing with Lincoln, the dead at Gettysburg, the bridge across the Chicka- hominy—have often been reproduced. But the collection as a whole has not been published since 1866, and copies have long been collectors' items. And so they deserve to be. Gardner's work gives an extraordinarily realistic impression of the ingenuity of that war and its destructiveness, of the lumbering enormousness of the Army of the Potomac with its train of 6,000 wagons and of the immediacy of the single death seen in the face of a sharpshooter lying among the rocks of Little Round Top. It is hard for a layman to believe that such clarity and skill could be ob- tained so early. There is sometimes that slightly dry and dusty look to the landscape that now comes of overexposure, but that is all.
Gardner was only on the Virginia front and does not give a record of the war as a whole, quite apart from the fact that it was beyond the technical capacity of the time to record action. Scenes of carnage after a fight, weapons like the mortar Dictator, capable of throwing a 200 lb. shell nearly three miles, pontoon bridges and devastated junctions, views of the North Anna and the Rappahannock, and various shots of 'the intolerable lines of Petersburg' (very like the photographs of trench systems in the First World War) make up the bulk of the collection.
The new editor, E. F. Bleiler, has simply reproduced Gardner's book, text and all. There is much to be said for this, and Gardner is often interesting or judicious in a period style. He speaks of a rebel's 'young wife, whose rare beauty was only equalled by her spitefulness towards Federal officers.' With his photograph of Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the war, he mentions notice that stood there through the battle: 'All persons found using fire-arms in these grounds will be prosecuted with the utmost rigor of the law.' But the British reader will find the absence of some further comment a little baffling, and sometimes misleading, as with Gardner's quite imaginary account of the battle on the left flank at the Antietam, or his praise for his friend Pinkerton, probably the worst intelligence officer ever to mislead an army commander. But the photographs remain unmatched.
ROBERT CONQUEST
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