Gettysburg

It is a stretch: the link between association and the photo. I can’t quite work out the link here: me coppicing overgrown hazel clumps and the American Civil War. There were an estimated 38,000 killed at Gettysburg, the bloodiest and decisive battle in the first modern war.

A photo I maybe have etched somewhere fading in my mind? A passage I’ve read on sojourns
in New York? An ancestral story? Or plain whimsy? Or maybe Valley Forge - a different army and a different war.

It’s a bucolic scene alright and only needs a Yankee soldier and his newfound sweetheart exchanging sweet nothings before the fury that was to come.