October 9

John Lennon should have been 65 today.

Charles Walgreen was born on this date in 1873. Yes, he’s the man who began the Walgreen’s drug store chain, starting in Chicago. It was a Walgreen’s soda fountain employee who invented the malted milkshake in 1922, which puts him right up there with Edison as far as NewMexiKen is concerned.

And Bruce Catton was born on this date in 1899.

Bruce Catton was fifty when he began work on the first two of what would become thirteen books on the Civil War – Mr. Lincoln’s Army, (1951) followed one year later by Glory Road. His debut was hailed by the Chicago Tribune as “military history at its best.” He “combines the scholar’s appreciation of the Grand Design with a newsman’s keenness for meaningful vignette,” said Newsweek. Catton immersed himself in a vast range of primary materials, especially the diaries, letters and anecdotal reports of soldiers on the ground, which gave his books from the outset their unique, “you are there” ambience.

In 1954, Catton became the first editor of American Heritage Magazine in Washington, where he remained as Senior Editor until his death in 1978.

“There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton’s work,” wrote Oliver Jensen, who succeeded him as editor of the magazine, “that seemed to project him physically into the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age.”

Indeed, there is an inexorable atmosphere from the first pages of A Stillness at Appomattox, as the Union Army begins to consolidate the diverse tributaries of its forces for the last series of offensives. The intensive orderliness of the Northerners stands in dramatic contrast to the skirmishing, impromptu manner of the Confederates when Grant’s aggressive and arrogant campaign seems to take on a life of its own.

As we march along with the Army of the Potomac, Catton swoops and peaks, from the lofty perspective of the White House down to the cries of the wounded in the mud; from General George Gordon Meade pacing back and forth with agitation under a tree, watching the battle unfold on a field below, to the ever-shrinking gap between the forces in blue and the outskirts of Richmond.

But there is one color permeating the entire narrative, and that is neither blue nor grey, but rather the relentless flow of blood — “one long funeral procession,” laments a despairing General Gouverneur Warren. Through the grandeur of its elegiac tone, A Stillness at Appomattox speaks magisterially of all wars.

Neil Baldwin