"Dan Simmons - Iversons Pits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

Iverson's Pits
by Dan Simmons
Introduction
We Americans have a knack for turning our most be-loved national shrines into
something tacky and vulgar. Perhaps it's because we're too young to have a real
sense of history; perhaps it's because our nationтАФnot counting the
ConfederacyтАФhas never been bombed or occupied or even invaded by a foreign
power (no, I don't count the British when they burned Washington City ... few
Amer-icans noticed and fewer cared), and there is little real sense of sacrifice to our
shrines.
There are, of course, a few shrines that defy our efforts to tackify them. It's hard to
stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial at night without beginning to feel like Mr.
Smith just come to Washington. I had a Jimmy Stewart stammer for three days after
my first midnight visit there.
But if you stand there long enough, you can almost hear the bureaucrats conferring
with the Disney Imagineers behind the marble walls; come back six months later and
Old Abe will probably stand, recite his Second Inaugural in Hal Holbrook's voice,
wade the Re-flecting Pool, and tapdance down Constitution Avenue.
All in good taste, of course.
But then there are the Civil War battlefields.
You've probably visited Gettysburg. Despite the best efforts of sincere people to
preserve it, the place has been littered with statues and dusted with memorials. The
Park Service erected a phallic monstrosity of a tower at the highest point so that
there is no escaping the intrusion of 20th Century ugliness. Computerized dioramas
blink lights in the museum and you can buy souvenir t-shirts in the local shops.
It doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter.
As with a score of less famous Civil War battlefields, Gettysburg has an almost
overpowering sense of tightness about it: an almost physical effect on the visitor and
a psychic impact that must be felt to be believed. It is a haunt-ing place in every
sense of the word. No castle in Scotland, no druidic circle of stones, no crypt
beneath a Pharaoh's pyramid could be eerier or could channel more voices of the
dead to the ears of the living.
And few places could be more moving or peaceful.
For what it's worth, this tale grewтАФliterallyтАФfrom a footnote, but every supporting
detail in "Iverson's Pits" is as accurate as I could make it. The burial pits were real.
One account in Glenn Tucker's classic High Tide at Get-tysburg records:
The unhappy spirits of the slaughtered North Caro-lina soldiers were reputed to
abide in this section of the battlefield. Lieutenant Montgomery returned in 1898,
thirty-five years after the battle, and learned from John S. Forney that a superstitious
ter-ror had long hung over the area. Farm laborers would not work there after night
began to settle.

My Colonel Iverson is a fictional construct, of course. The real Colonel Alfred
Iverson, Jr., did send his regiment to slaughter and was relieved after his menтАФhis
few surviv-ing menтАФrefused to follow him, but there is no evidence that the real
Iverson was anything other than a politically appointed military incompetent. Also, a
fellow named Jessup Sheads did build a house on the site where the 97th New York
had faced the 12th North Carolina. Local historians confirm that Sheads offered
wine to visitorsтАФwine from the arbors which grew so luxuriantly above Iverson's
Pits.