Page 20 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • May 14, 2014 How times have changed Later this month we will celebrate Memorial Day and honor the veterans who served in the armed forces, and the memories of those who served and did not come back. The holiday as celebrated today usually features a parade, a speech, and a three-day weekend with picnics and huge sales. Memorial Day was originally like a gigantic national funeral -- and not without good reason. Some months ago, Thomas Fleming, author of a number of controversial best-sellers, took on the causes and the casualties of the Civil War in “A Disease of the Public Mind.” Fleming pointed out in terms of casualties that the death toll of the war of 1861-1865 was probably about 850,000 rather than the official 618,222, based on the dis- appearance from the records of men who never recovered and died shortly after they returned home. The toll may ultimately have been close to a million people. More recently, Dr. Thomas Lowry, a physician and pro- fessor of medicine and a life-long student of the Civil War, shows what the process of death or very limited recov- ery looked like in “A Thousand Stories You Don’t Know about the Civil War.” Lowry, who had two members of ancestral families killed in the Union Army at Fredericks- burg, one at New Market, and a near-death at the horrific prison camp at Andersonville, deals in one chapter of his anthology with the career of Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, where he summarizes the Union cause and then leads the heroic defense of Little Round Top, a key to the three-day battle of Gettysburg. Chamberlain was clipped by a bullet that scratched his right ear and neck at Fredericksburg -- an ominous shot if ever there was one in the one-sided slaughter of Union troops attacking entrenched Confederates. He was a col- lege professor before his enlistment and he undoubtedly thought about what would have happened if the bullet had been an inch or two to the left. He also suffered a serious bout of sunstroke that kept him off duty for about a week in the days before Gettysburg. Chamberlain got through Gettysburg with a bullet hit on his sword scabbard that bruised his leg, and a graze from a flying rock fragment. In the aftermath of the battle where he was one of several officers who helped stave off a Confederate victory, he suffered from neurasthe- nia -- “weak nerves” -- which is a psychological problem brought on by stress and by neuralgia, often caused by a mixture of stress and physical illness. He shook them off and survived a mild bout of malaria. At Petersburg, the end-game battle before Richmond, on June 18, 1864, Chamberlain was struck by a Confed- erate bullet that hit him in the thigh, traveled upward damaging his bladder, and partially shattered his pelvis before it lodged inside him. Chamberlain’s loyal brother coerced two stretcher bearers to lug him to a field hospi- tal and demanded immediate surgery. Under chloroform, in a night operation by dim lantern light, the surgeons removed the dented musket ball and reconnected the uri- nary passages, which began to leak almost as soon as the surgery was completed. The newspapers printed Chamberlain’s obituary, but he lived and returned to active service after four months. He served until the end of the war, though he was never able to mount his horse Charlemagne without a hand up. He also endured post-war operations for infections and urinary troubles, his sex life appears to have been termi- nated, and his career as governor of Maine and president of Bowdoin College took place despite frequent pain and constant medical problems. Perhaps through sheer will power, or an incredibly robust constitution -- and an ade- quate income that permitted special medical attention -- Chamberlain lived to be 85. He was a heroic anomaly. Perhaps more typical was Garth Wilkinson James, the adjutant of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Wilky James had sup- ported emancipation as a matter of family principal. His family members were Swedenborgians. Like most Spiri- tualists, they saw Africans and American Indians as being worthy of equal rights. Wilky at 18 at Battery Wagner was a brave young man but not a particularly good solder. His revolver went off by mistake just before the attack and the bullet missed Colonel Shaw by a couple of feet, but earned Wilky a very dirty look from the more experienced 25- year-old colonel. In the night assault on Battery Wagner, Wilky joined the second color party a short distance behind Shaw. He never made it to the parapet. A Confederate musket ball smashed through one of his feet and a canister pellet from overhead struck him on one kidney. Two of his soldiers got him into a stretcher. Back on the parapet, Sergeant Lewis Douglass, 23-year- old son of Frederick Douglass and the designated sergeant major, was rallying the black troops who recovered Colo- nel Shaw’s body. Some of the black soldiers were shot, but Lewis wrote to his future wife that he had not been hit. Medical records I located in the National Archives sug- gest Lewis was sparing her feelings. His Army medical reports say a musket ball hit him in the crotch and he spent several weeks in the hospital with an infection. His mar- riage was childless and he spent a lot of time seeking his fortune far from home. Wilky James was being carried to the rear by two stretcher bearers when a round-shot killed one of them. The other stretcher bearer ran for it. Wilky never knew how he got to the hospital ship, but a rich abolitionist, looking for his own son found Wilky semi-conscious in the hospital and got him shipped home to his family at Newport, Rhode Island, where he got first-rate medical attention. Multiple operations restored the use of his foot after multiple infections. He spent a year recovering from wounds and nervous problems and the last year of the war on active service, among other things hunting for John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. After the war, Wilky and some friends tried to orga- nize a farm in the former Confederacy to teach freed slaves about agricultural self-sufficiency while they also educated them. Most of these idealistic young men had never worked a day in their lives. The former slaves some- times saw no reason to work now that they were free, Southerners refused to sell land or buy crops, and the farm flopped. Wilky’s rich eccentric father cut him out of the will. Wilky was horrified and outraged. Wilky’s brother Robert, and the more famous James brothers, William and Henry, each designated a share of their own inheri- tances to his support. He was able to sustain himself at a low-paying clerk’s job and married a fellow idealist from a family where nobody had worked in three generations. However, the canister ball in the kidney he sustained at 18 Battery Wagner -- perhaps coupled with overwork an the malarial Southern climate -- turned into Bright’s disease, also known as nephritis, and he died in his 30s as a man of principle and courage but no achievements except on the battlefield. Ambrose Bierce, who wrote some of the darkest Civil War stories ever to hit print, may have passed on his pen- chant for embittered heroism to his two sons. One was killed in a gunfight over a woman and the other died of pneumonia pushing himself too hard to make a newspa- per deadline. He considered both their deaths to be manly and brave. Bierce said at the end that the Civil War had not been worth it, urged the United States to get out of the Philippines where reported massacres of rebel inhab- itants had clouded the Army’s reputation, and finally dis- appeared into rebellion-ravaged Mexico looking for an interview with Pancho Villa or a firing squad, whichever came first. Bierce appears never to have gotten the inter- view, but he left behind yet another mystery. After World War I, the term “Lost Generation” was used to describe people who had escaped death by shell- fire and bullets, but had been destroyed by constant con- tact with violence, most of it seen as gratuitous after the armistice. The Civil War produced many similar men. Elizabeth Custer noted that many men who had served and been wounded died within a decade of Appomattox. These were the men Memorial Day was first organized to remember -- the ones who were killed in battle like Colo- nel Robert Gould Shaw and the ones like Wilky James and Lewis Douglass who lost the promise of their youth due to wounds that crippled, but did not kill. We should pause for more than a moment to honor those World War II veterans who are still with us and have a full right to our respect. We should remember the veterans of more recent and more controversial wars. We should remember the soldiers of the war that made America “a free country” -- which it never was before 1865. They were the men whose service led to Memorial Day. Letters to the Editor Club held successful breakfast Dear Editor: The Midland Park Lions Club held its 43rd Annual Pan- cake Breakfast on Sunday, April 6 at the Midland Park Firehouse. I want to thank all those from Midland Park and the surrounding communities for having their Sunday breakfast with the Lions, thus supporting our continued charitable endeavors. I also want thank our sponsors who helped make the breakfast such a success: Atlantic Stewardship Bank; Acqua Pools; Bob Bush at State Farm Insurance; Boy Scout Troop 157; Brunswick Bowling Lanes in Fair Lawn; Dunkin Donuts; Family Hair Care; Girl Scout Troops 95, 468, and 558; Haitz Electric; Larry & Phil’s Barber Shop; Midland Bagel Emporium; Horizon Pest Control; Jacobsen Landscape Design; LAN Associates; Le Chien; Olthuis and Vander Plaat funeral homes; Paragon Auto Body in Wyckoff; Pattman Plumbing; Robert J. Hazen/Hudson City Bank; the Baseball Card Store; the Body Works Auto Body; Suburban News; Villadom TIMES; Town Home & Garden; Wade Odell Wade/United Van Lines; and the Bor- ough of Midland Park for the use of the electronic message board to advertise our event. I hope to see everyone at our 44th Annual Pancake Breakfast! John L. “Jack” Romano, President Midland Park Lions Club Midland Park Van Dyk Health Care recognized (continued from page 19) The Alzheimer’s Association is the leading volun- tary health organization in Alzheimer care, support, and research. The association’s mission is to eliminate Alzheimer’s disease through the advancement of research, provide and enhance care and support for all affected, and reduce the risk of dementia through the promotion of brain health. It is estimated that there are currently more than half a million individuals and their care partners in New Jersey who are struggling to cope with the challenges of Alzheimer’s disease. Headquartered in Denville with regional offices in Oradell, Princeton, and Red Bank, the Alzheimer’s Association offers education and training, support groups, respite care assistance, and a 24-hour, toll-free telephone Helpline. For more information about Alzheimer’s disease or the Alzheimer’s Association, call 1-800-272-3900, or visit at www.alz.org/nj.