Keep the Days by Stowe Steven M.;

Author:Stowe, Steven M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2018-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

MEN UNDER ORDERS

Love seemed to hold its own in war. It was there on the page, not a small thing. If a woman thought that love would bring a worthy man under her sway, war did not erase this thought. If she wanted excitement and decorum, they were there. It was thrilling to write love and keep it from war’s eviscerating power even when love took a sharp turn or faded away. The women discovered some elastic play in eros, and running to the far boundaries of love’s mannered ways and finding them still there—that was pleasure. Yet at the boundaries, diarists also found that war sent men who were not partners in the making of love. It turned up men who would have been, before the war, beneath notice—a good phrase from the diarists. War’s drastic move was to make these men unavoidable as men, plunk them down square in a lady’s path. White men, ordinary ones, arriving unannounced. Common men, on the loose in large numbers. Men: now driven by destructive forces that competed with a woman’s grace-note touch, her happy mission to approve a true man’s decorous ways. Men were under orders in war, under a new order. War showed that there were forces out there at least as powerful as the form and pleasure—the manners—accorded to eros, and that some men were driven by them. Yankees, but not only Yankees, possessed purposes and pleasures so alien that they were difficult even to write. We have seen how war’s sheer, crazy violence came up against the force field of manners, which in prewar times kept the unexpected from crowding in too close. In making love as in other things, privileged women and men lived their manners as proof that they were larger than life, and their peculiar arrogance was to believe that their ways and their choices marked the borders of the only world worth knowing. Men under orders threatened all this as they pushed their way onto the page.

Food served as one introduction. Hungry men on the move, refugees and soldiers, alone or in small groups, suddenly came close. Mary Chesnut, herself a refugee and traveling by train without a white man as a buffer, was approached by a soldier wanting to trade his hardtack for any food she might have. “Shaggy, scrubby, ill looking,” he stepped nearer to her than any working man should have dared, except an enslaved one. She watched as he “slowly unrolled a rag—filthy! as if it had laid six months in a gutter.” Inside was the hardtack he wanted to trade. Chesnut gave him her lunch, but “to touch his—oh no!” Lucy Buck was at home preparing for the next day’s cooking when, startlingly, “a drunken soldier came into the kitchen from out in the rain—represented himself as one Captain Carey of the Madison Artillery—commenced swearing.” She gave him something to eat. Earlier, “the long ‘Reed like Alabamian’ who was here yesterday and the little half demented Creole who got his luncheon here were both of them hanging around the house.

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