#chickamauga

[unteriors]

Sammons Drive, Chickamauga, Georgia.

[holycatsandrabbits]

Old Green Eyes

The U.S. Civil War's Strangest Ghost

On this day in 1863, the US Civil War's Battle of Chickamauga began. The two-day battle had nearly 35,000 casualties—the second-highest in the US Civil War, after Gettysburg. The Confederacy won the battle, but ultimately lost the war.

If ghosts are created by trauma and tragedy, then battlefields would make for heavy hauntings. Civil War battlefields are no exception—Chickamauga’s got the usual phantom sounds of canons and fighting, ghostly lanterns of grieving family members come to find their dead soldiers, and even a White Lady searching for her lover. But then there’s one guy that just doesn’t fit.

Old Green Eyes is pretty much just that—green eyes, floating in the woods. Sometimes he’s got a body, and sometimes that body is human-like, but most of the time, he’s just a pair of glowing eyes. And nobody seems to know what the guy is doing there. What on earth does he have to do with the Battle of Chickamauga? Or anything else?

Check out the blog post for the whole story and some ghostly writing prompts, such as:

The blood cries out. When you think about disembodied glowing eyes in the woods, a human ghost is not what first springs to mind. So perhaps the trauma at Chickamauga attracted something else to the blood-soaked woods: a demon. There are a lot of ways to use this idea in a story. Perhaps the demon is an active malevolent presence that threatens people who live nearby, or at least those who walk through the woods. Or perhaps he’s just doing his own thing, enjoying the 160-year-old battlefield and ignoring present-day folks. Or maybe over 160 years, he’s become sorrowful at what happened in those woods and now he’s protective of the locals.

DannyeChase.com ~ AO3 ~ Linktree ~ Weird Wednesday writing prompts blog ~ Resources for Writers

[kieranlee]

11/29/24

[tower-of-fan-babble]

Recontextualizing Something

Thoughts on Ambrose Bierce's Chickamauga

There is an actual point about the interesction of disability and media here, not just a trauma dump, but recontextualizing needs...well, context.

The Traumatic Personal Backstory:

So I just added onto a post about deafness, because my mother partially deafened me and I Had Thoughts. And those thoughts led to other thoughts, and I realized something.

The context for this thought is that I wasn't doing great at Hearing Game early on for abuse reasons, but I didn't really develop major hearing issues til about 10 or 11, and immediately started adapting like fuck through til about 17, which is the last time my mother struck me.

Of course I remember the last time, it was one of my very few Actual Fantasy Badass Moments.

Anyway, even into adulthood I basically lived in denial. I told people I was a little HoH cause I drove on the highway with the windows down, and learned to read lips because of a cool show and knew ASL fingerspelling cause I was paranoid as a kid and liked the captions on cause it helped clarify nuances...hell, on particularly exhausted days, I fell back on my then unconfirmed autism Dx to explain why I was staring fixedly at people's mouths.

Basically, I was in the camp that just because I couldn't hear people, lyrics, a wide spectrum of sounds, entire genres of music, watch half of movies in the theaters, or hear most of my phone alarms didn't mean I was deaf.

Yeah, trauma's a bitch.

Anyway.

Lit Crit Time!

When I was trying to get a higher degree in literature, I sat through part of a lit crit class. The professor was, in fairness, trying to represent multiple genres using literary examples

The assumed gulf of value between literary fiction and genre fiction is My Least Favorite Thing, but I'll at least give the man credit for Trying A Direction.

And one of the short stories he assigned was Ambrose Bierce's "Chickamauga."

Spoilers for a 136 year old story ahead.

If you've never read it, it's a chilling takedown of the horrors of war and the horrors of the romanticization of war from the lens of a 6 year old who wanders too far from home, gets lost in the woods, and subsequently wanders through the second worst battle of the Civil War.

And he's six, and his dad has told him stories about the glory of war. So he plays soldiers as he goes around curiously looking at the horrors of war with the understanding of a child young enough that the author explicitly states he gets startled by a sudden rabbit, but has only seen pictures of bears and vaguely thinks it'd be nice to meet a bear in the woods.

So he's simultaneously poking around an active battle/retreat and trying to orient and find his way back to somewhere he recognizes, while having a Generally Good Time now that there's something interesting going on, until he spots something burning, and takes off to go see.

He runs up to the fire, sees it's a house, and is still having a great time cause small child->fire cool. He actually zips about trying to find stuff to throw into the fire, but it's too hot to get close to.

That's where the story turns:

Shifting his position, his eyes fell upon some outbuildings which had an oddly familiar appearance, as if he had dreamed of them. He stood considering them with wonder, when suddenly the entire plantation, with its inclosing forest, seemed to turn as if upon a pivot. His little world swung half around; the points of the compass were reversed. He recognized the blazing building as his own home!

The paragraph after that is a shockingly brutal, graphic description of him finding his mother's dead body after she took a hit from a mortar shell.

100% nightmare fuel, based on Bierce's actual experiences at the Battle of Chickamauga. There is no description of a violently killed corpse quite like someone describing it from first hand experience.

Ain't putting that here.

And it's described as a small child seeing this immediately after realizing he's been playing in the battle and ruins of his home.

Six year old boy speedruns from fun war game inspired by his father's bedtime stories to "my house is a charcoal tomb, I am trapped in an actual battlefield alone, and my mother is a mangled corpse" in two paragraphs spanning less than sixty seconds of experience.

That's HorrorTM. That's brutal.

Death of innocence, the betrayal of his father's misty eyed beliefs about glory, the devastating loss of everything, the sudden crystal clear understanding that he's been seeing death and mutilation, the gut sucking void of being alone in the face of the simultaneous realization that he's in true mortal danger.

And if you know children, you know that kid's gonna spend the rest of his life questioning what could have been if he hadn't wandered away and gotten lost that day.

From a parental perspective, as an adult, you've been screaming ever louder in your head the whole time at the blithe, A.A. Milne, Kipling-esque description of the boy's day up to that point.

Because you know what's happening, and if you have or know small children, you are well aware they'll wander into highway traffic left unsupervised.

A six year old will jump from a two story building with a towel around their neck cause capes make you fly.

Preteens accidentally discharging firearms without understanding what they're holding is dangerous is one of the leading causes of accidental discharge deaths.

We still have to constantly protect small children from accidentally burning themselves and their houses down cause fire->cool.

It is absolutely believable that a six year old would casually think he's playing the Best Game Of Soldiers Ever because children don't necessarily or usually understand death.

And that punch, that violent snap as this boy goes from innocent to fully grasping War & Death & Loss, that moment when "his little world swung half around," that's the moment a parent is desperate to stop, to hold off, the one thing you want to keep at bay for as long as possible.

That's the moment a jaded adult has to confront what war looks like to someone who doesn't understand war.

Who doesn't understand death.

That's a deep, gnawing, visceral horror that sits in the back of your head and makes you wonder, "what are we doing? Why are we like this? When did I get used to this?"

How would I explain any of this to a child?

And you may, also, deep down, have that sudden chilling, gut churning recollection of That Bad Thing That Happened When You Were A Child and What If I'd Done Something Different?

Bravo, 100/10, this man has somehow managed to write his way past his far-too-casual mentions of slavery and plantation nightmare fuel--and all the lesser problems of being a Literary Author of his era--and rendered a truly legendary moment of horror onto the pa--

Oh, no, that's not the horror part, sorry. Nor, again, is the casual mention of the boy's family being plantation slave owners.

Nah.

This is the horror part

(RIDICULOUSLY ableist.)

The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries--something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey--a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute.

Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck.

Yeah, that's the penultimate and final lines of the story. That's the first and generally only time we get the idea the protagonist is anything but a take on Christopher Robin if he was written by Kipling at his Kiplingest.

The horror isn't any of that shit I said above.

The horror is, "imagine the horror of being deaf! Being deaf and not realizing bad things are happening cause you're deaf! And mute! You can't tell anyone or ask for help cause you're mute!"

So we're presented with this in class, and immediately the class discussion zips right on past the Absolute Devastation of All That Psychic Damage and goes for the disability porn of "oh my god, I can't imagine, the deafness, oh that's such a good twist, that makes so much sense.

"That's why all this is happening. Because he can't HEAR."

Totally deactivated any engagement with the other 700 words of pure, unmitigated nightmare in favor of "it's scary to be disabled" wank.

Professor knew I was Loudly Opinionated All The Time, and made a point to ask me for thoughts.

I bluntly said the "twist" ruined pretty much the whole thing. Compared it to a trope my (much better) writing professor called Tomato Surprise, wherein weird shit happens, and the twist is the protagonist looking in the mirror and seeing that actually, the shit isn't weird, they just didn't realize they were a tomato the whole time.

I confidently assumed, very wrongly, that the lesson was about critical thinking, about seeing the horror, about placing the author in his context as a war survivor who was there in this battle, about literally anything but "boy it sure would suck to be a deaf kid in a battle, huh?"

Oh, no.

No, my professor was so pleased about this twist. He genuinely felt that it conveyed the unique horror of the helplessness of sensory impairment.

This was Such Good Body Horror.

That it wasn't trite or callous or a diversion, it was groundbreaking for it's time, and should be respected as Good Horror About Being Disabled.

Assuming he was going devil's advocate, I took the tack that it was excellent visceral horror ruined by a sudden, unsignalled twist that ripped it off the rails and shoved it into a banal, unsupported direction of "disability scary, oooooo!"

He was.

Offended.

I dropped the class pretty shortly after that.

What I couldn't articulate at the time, and 13 years later can, is this:

What does that add?

What does this painful, stomach churning build to devastation gain by the revelation that the true horror is of the protagonists inability to perceive sound or speak?

With all that on the page, with 700 words building to a description of gore and a moment of realization so blindingly painful that Warhammer 40k's novelists might be asked by their editors to tone it down a bit...

How does suddenly diverting from that sharp, hard stop into "and he was deaf the whole time" actually do anything but provide a sharp relief valve?

Because it does.

I saw a post (in the way of the web, screenshotted on Facebook 😮‍💨, though I'll try and find it), talking about how people approaching dystopia or horror fantasy or even just weird fiction have a tendency to take refuge in It Was A Dream or Coma or Hallucination or Drugs, and that the poster's writing prof stated this was people creating something uncomfortable or fantastic and then needing to make it Palatable, to make it Not Real, or to connect it to the Real World.

This, I feel, is similar. That when the horror gets horrifying and real and intense, there's a tendency to dive into the "safety valve" of body horror.

Yeah, fascism is a grinding void of illogical terror, but this guy lost an arm! How would anyone cope with losing a whole arm!?

Yes, we have built a dystopia that murders children in the child murdering machine for the reality show Child Murder Tonight, but that kid is blind! Holy shit, how awful is that, being blind!?

And on.

And on.

Ad nauseaum.

The point, down here, is that, unconsciously 13 years ago, and consciously now, I am deeply annoyed and tired that people are far more scared-or would much prefer to be scared-of being deaf or HoH than of deep, existential fears.

That when punched in the face with a real, emergent, existential threat, people will pivot away from confronting an uncomfortable truth that they might actually benefit from to have the shivers about their imaginary idea of what being diasbled is like and how the true horror is in disability.

Like, guys.

Could we all, possibly maybe, agree that a six year old's first experience of death is the loss of everything and the mangled corpse of his mother is horrifying enough?

Do we really need to take that vast, comprehensible, tear jerking agony as a way of exploring how bad it is to be disabled? In a story that doesn't explore disability literally at all?

And more to the fucking point:

It's been 136 years.

Maybe abled people could stop fawning over the Horror Of Being Disabled as a go to?

Cause I'm fairly freaking deaf, that's only one of my disabilities, and I am really tired of slamming face first into the mindset that the Scariest Thing Ever is my daily experience.

Anyway, suck it Professor Springer, lit crit agrees with me and you're an ableist dick.

(⁠🌸 ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ⁠)⁠>⁠⌐⁠■⁠-⁠■

(⁠🌸 ⌐⁠■⁠-⁠■⁠)

(⁠🌸 👉⌐⁠■⁠-⁠■⁠)👉

[movark]

Some nice photos from Chickamauga 160th; Field music

Btw, wanting to put together a queer space for reenactors. DM me if you'd be interested

[creecreehoneybees]

Tower at Chickamauga Battlefield Park

[gmatt63]

Chickamauga Canons

14 March 2023: Chickamauga Battlefield, Georgia. 14 March 2023: Chickamauga Battlefield, Georgia. 14 March 2023: Chickamauga Battlefield, Georgia.

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[quicksiluers]

The small city of Chattanooga, with 2,500 inhabitants, lay on the banks of the Tennessee River where it cut through the Appalachian Mountains. It was the crossroads for four major railroads. President Abraham Lincoln knew that if his army could capture Chattanooga, vital Confederate supply lines would be severed, and the war would be closer to an end.

In the summer of 1863, the Confederate army was reeling from a string of losses in the Western Theater, while the success of the Tullahoma Campaign bolstered the confidence of Union Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans. Targeting Chattanooga, Rosecrans outmaneuvered the Rebel army and forced Confederate general Braxton Bragg to relinquish control of the critical transportation hub without a fight.

Rosecrans assumed that Braxton Bragg’s demoralized army would retreat further south into Rome, Georgia.  He divided his army into three corps and scattered them throughout Tennessee and Georgia. But Rosecrans made a mistake—Bragg had in fact concentrated his men at LaFayette, Georgia, where he was expecting reinforcements and was close to a vulnerable corps of Rosecrans’s army. When Bragg’s troops crossed Chickamauga Creek, the Federals had a fight on their hands.

Although Bragg’s original plan was the destruction of the Army of the Cumberland and the recapture of Chattanooga, the results of two days of bitter fighting at Chickamauga stalled him. He decided to occupy the heights surrounding Chattanooga and lay siege to the city instead.  Just two months later, the reinforced Federals drove the Army of Tennessee from their positions around Chattanooga, permanently securing Northern control of the city.  With that loss, the Southern victory at Chickamauga was turned into a strategic defeat.