She has seen beauty change to desolation, trees shattered, fields trampled, walls broken, all her dear, familiar world turned to chaos; she has seen desolation grow again to beauty. These hills and streams were always lovely, now a nation has determined to keep them forever in the same loveliness. Here was a rocky, wooded field, destined by its owner to cultivation; it has been decreed that its rough picturesqueness shall endure forever. Here is a lowly farmhouse; upon it no hand of change shall be laid while the nation continues. Preserved, consecrated, hallowed are the woods and lanes in which Mary Bowman walked with the lover of her youth.
Broad avenues lead across the fields, marking the lines where by thousands Northerners and Southerners were killed. Big Round Top, to which one used to journey by a difficult path, is now accessible; Union and Confederate soldiers, returning, find their way with ease to old positions; lads from West Point are brought to see, spread out before them as on a map, that Union fish-hook, five miles long, inclosing that slightly curved Confederate line.
Monuments are here by hundreds, names by thousands, cast in bronze, as endurable as they can be made by man. All that can be done in remembrance of those who fought here has been done, all possible effort to identify the unknown has been made. For fifty years their little trinkets have been preserved, their pocket Testaments, their photographs, their letters—letters addressed to "My precious son," "My dear brother," "My beloved husband." Seeing them to-day, you will find them marked by a number. This stained scapular, this little housewife with its rusty scissors, this unsigned letter, dated in '63, belonged to him who lies now in Grave Number 20 or Number 3500.
There is almost an excess of tenderness for these dead, yet mixed with it is a strange feeling of remoteness. We mourn them, praise them, laud them, but we cannot understand them. To this generation war is strange, its sacrifices are uncomprehended, incomprehensible. It is especially so in these latter years, since those who came once to this field come now no more. Once the heroes of the war were familiar figures upon these streets; Meade with his serious, bearded face, Slocum with his quick, glancing eyes, Hancock with his distinguished air, Howard with his empty sleeve. They have gone hence, and with them have marched two thirds of Gettysburg's two hundred thousand.
Mary Bowman has seen them all, has heard them speak. Sitting on her little porch, she has watched most of the great men of the United States go by, Presidents, cabinet officials, ambassadors, army officers, and also famous visitors from other lands who know little of the United States, but to whom Gettysburg is as a familiar country. She has watched also that great, rapidly shrinking army of private soldiers in faded blue coats, who make pilgrimages to see the fields and hills upon which they fought. She has tried to make herself realize that her husband, if he had lived, would be like these old men, maimed, feeble, decrepit, but the thought possesses no reality for her. He is still young, still erect, he still goes forth in the pride of life and strength.
Mary Bowman will not talk about the battle. To each of her children and each of her grandchildren, she has told once, as one who performs a sacred duty, its many-sided story. She has told each one of wounds and suffering, but she has not omitted tales of heroic death, of promotion on the field, of stubborn fight for glory. By others than her own she will not be questioned. A young officer, recounting the rigors of the march, has written, "Forsan et hæc olim meminisse juvabit,"—"Perchance even these things it will be delightful to remember." To feel delight, remembering these things, Mary Bowman has never learned. Her neighbors who suffered with her, some just as cruelly, have recovered; their wounds have healed, as wounds do in the natural course of things. But Mary Bowman has remained mindful; she has been, for all these years, widowed indeed.
Her faithful friend and neighbor, Hannah Casey, is the great joy of visitors to the battle-field. She will talk incessantly, enthusiastically, with insane invention. The most morbid visitor will be satisfied with Hannah's wild account of a Valley of Death filled to the rim with dead bodies, of the trickling rivulet of Plum Creek swollen with blood to a roaring torrent. But Mary Bowman is different.
Her granddaughter, who lives with her, is curious about her emotions.
"Do you feel reconciled?" she will ask. "Do you feel reconciled to the sacrifice, grandmother? Do you think of the North and South as reunited, and are you glad you helped?"
Her grandmother answers with no words, but with a slow, tearful smile. She does not analyze her emotions. Perhaps it is too much to expect of one who has been a widow for fifty years, that she philosophize about it!