Through the carnage I moved with a callous composure.

Antietam and Hagerstown

Hagerstown was a funny place. The digital billboard at the tyre repair shop was advertising a gun raffle. A few doors down from the school—in the ‘Drug Free School Zone’—was the Pawn and Gun Shop. Everyone on the street looked like they had problems: their teeth were all bad and they hobbled in the manner of drinkers or addicts. The streets, generally, were quiet. Several buildings were abandoned. In England, this would have been worth passing through.

And yet… we had splendid Bavarian food, saw very good art, enjoyed the antique shop and visited a huge second hand bookstore where I got a stack of books, 5 for $5, including the poems of Spenser (I am newly enthusiastic to re-read him, a vain attempt to chase one of the thrills of youth perhaps). I asked the guy at the till how they keep the place going and he had no idea. Pokémon cards were 75 cents each. Don’t they know there’s a global shortage!? I don’t remember another book shop that had trolleys. It served me well. The antique shop had some mass market paperbacks—those were the days when John Dickson Carr and Emile Zola got the same glorious treatment—which were too much for me. But I was intrigued to find that whereas the standard price was $5, an old penguin crime cover with a marvellous skull was $20, just for the skull. They also had buckets of axes and many mounted antelopes and deer. In England, such a town would be fairly uniform.

We went to see Antietam, which I cannot write about because it is simply too awful. There is something bizarre about taking children to a battlefield. Naturally, one wishes them to know history—to know how to think historically, to try to understand the unimaginable breadth and depth of human life, to try to see how incomprehensible it can all be—but to see a child walking where young men once walked, many of them never having served before, not knowing what was coming towards them a few paces away… one cannot think about it. Where through the carnage I moved with a callous composure.

In the museum, we saw Confederate money which depicted slaves working in the fields. I look forward to hearing from those in the comments who previously insisted that the Civil War was not about slavery. And yes, in the cafe we stopped at five minutes away, where the sheriff was holding a meet-and-greet with free coffee and donuts, Confederate flags were on sale, small ones, big ones, some fit for a flagpole. They were all charming and friendly.

The Americans do a marvellous job with their battlefields. The videos, exhibits, self-guided driving tours, memorials, information plaques are all excellent. Civil war battlefields in England are neglected. We tried to find one once and ended up parked in a bare field. When John Adams visited England, he went exploring for battlefields and was appalled to find a local farmer had no idea a battle had taken place there. And the Americans think themselves unhistorical compared to the Brits!

Finally, I have visited a Walmart. Arlington is too uptight for such things. What a wonder! An auto shop, homeware store, supermarket, clothing store, electronics, games and books, pet supplies… and more, all in one: it is a mall in itself, vaster than any shop in England, perhaps by an order of magnitude. I saw an obese boy, maybe ten years old, holding a bag of sweets and saying delightedly “taffy! taffy!” There were huge sacks of cereal—2lb, 7oz—full of frosted flakes and the like. That is presumably the scale families with many children require. The fresh section was quite small, but perhaps it is hard to make that work with the same economics. We had to drive nearly half a mile after the turning to get down to the Walmart. It was, to me, no less interesting than the rest of the visit. What a lot of work and ingenuity such accomplishments require, and how easily taken for granted.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that happened was on the drive home. We took the slow route and saw many wooded suburbs of Maryland. (All those double story porches with columns: what is this style of architecture, suburban Pantheon?) Some of the houses are very bright pink or yellow, one was a remarkable shade of purple. Hagerstown hosts many churches, mostly Lutheran, and with lots of those tall, elegant spires that look like slim old-fashioned ladies, who have lived in the town since their girlhood and do not care for the way things have gone. There were more churches on the drive home, but less elegant. After we saw the sun setting slowly across a great landscape, we turned a corner and there were three vultures picking and pulling at an animal corpse. It was awesome.