Micro Monday - February 24, 2025
The Low Road
Happy Monday! Here’s your weekly 100-word story.
The Low Road
After the Battle of Antietam, Robert E. Lee asked General Hood where his Texas Brigade had gone.
“They are lying on the field where you sent them, sir,” Hood replied.
A pity no one asked Corporal Williams, who was startled awake at three that morning by the sound of men shuffling through the corn fields.
“Who’s there?”
“First Texas!” someone hollered.
“Ain’t no more First Texas!”
No reply but the steady march of feet.
By morning, there were fewer graves to dig. Far fewer, by all accounts, than there ought to have been. But knowing why made the work harder.
The inspiration came for this one came from a few places.
The title comes from an old Scottish song. According to Celtic mythology, the Low Road is the road a soldier uses to return home after being killed abroad. Scottish Americans fought on both sides of the Civil War, and considering their relative newcomer status in North America, you have to wonder - did they walk home to the state they died for, or did they take the long journey across the Atlantic to an older homeland?
The setting was inspired by General Hood’s famous line, which feels like an apt summary of war in general.
The twist is inspired by the photo above, where the majority of men seem to be leaning on shovels or standing around with nothing to do. According to official estimates, there were a staggering number of bodies to bury after the battle, but the photograph tells a very different story. It almost makes you wonder if some of the dead started on the road home before the digging crews ever made it to their side of the field…
Coincidentally, the photo was taken by a Scottish American named Alexander Gardner, who made a name for himself as a Civil War photographer. Whenever I use a public domain image, I generally like to read a little bit about the artist, and I did come across one tidbit that I found interesting enough to share:
Nearly 100 years after the Civil War, Frederic Ray of the Civil War Times noticed that two of the bodies in Gardner’s photographs looked eerily similar, and suggested that Gardner’s team might have moved the bodies around and added props to create more striking images. Assuming the body didn’t stand up and move of its own accord, Ray makes a compelling case. Photo manipulation is as old as photography, whether by staging photographs or stitching photos together during the development process.
Apparently, even in 1860, you couldn’t trust everything you saw in a photo.