England: God Waits in Darkness and the Wilderness Guards the the Dead
A Memoir of the Occupation, Chapter 2
They came from England, from the West Country. My people, that is. I’ve always known it. In fifth grade we were told of the Great Mosaic. Americans, the teacher babbled (glancing at the script supplied by the Department of Education) are a nation of immigrants who fled the awfulness of the old world and conceived on this continent a new people and a new nation where all would be equal.From which of those horrible old world hellholes did your immigrant ancestors flee for the promise of the American Dream? England, I said. As did every other kid in the class, but for one girl who claimed Ireland.
This was the mid-Seventies, a public high school (sixty-odd in my senior class) in a small town in the rural South. Before Braveheart, when millions discovered they were sons of the old sod. There was one Italian family, one or two with German surnames. Soccer got popular in early 1980s. The Spanish teacher, also the soccer coach, went to Mexico one summer and returned with two “transfer students” fleeing the hellhole of Jalisco for the American Dream. They were, coincidentally, excellent soccer players. My high school won the state soccer championship that year. Our stars from Jalisco, I learned later, were both in their 20s; after “graduation,” they returned.
In the late Seventies I began recording the stories my grandparents told me and began badgering my parents and aunts and uncles for their memories. I wrote the Veterans Administration and the archives of various states and the counties where they had lived, combed through musty records in county courthouses, crawled backroads and battled briars and brambles seeking half-forgotten cemeteries and lonely graves.
Because that is where I began: a grave somewhere, a family cemetery in Georgia or Alabama, a churchyard in Mississippi or Louisiana or Texas. Oakwood Cemetery in Richmond, Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery. The Americans created “National Cemeteries,” cities of stone, for their mercenaries. For us, the corner of a pasture or a woodlot or a cornfield. Or the grounds of a plantation. There’s one on the grounds of Carnton, near Franklin, Tennessee. On November 30, 1864, General John Bell Hood ordered the Army of Tennessee to attack the well-entrenched and fortified American lines outside the town.
The Army of Tennessee, for the last time, set itself in battle array. Even the Americans marveled at the grandeur of the attack. The regiments in grey and butternut and battle array, the flags waving, the bands playing Dixie.
And so they advanced along the line of the Columbia Turnpike – a march of a mile under severe artillery fire. The center of the American line was in front of a cotton gin. When fifty or so yards away, the Southern army unleashed the Rebel Yell and charged. It would be the last of the war, and it can be argued that the Southern cause ended here. The Confederate broke the American lines, but as was always the case, courage and valor were not enough to stem the American tide.
Franklin was the bloodiest assault of the war, surpassing Gettysburg and Cold Harbor. Six thousand Southern casualties in that desperate and doomed attack, 1,750 killed. The dead included Major-General Patrick Cleburne, commander of the finest division in the Army of Tennessee. Three of my folks served in General Cleburne’s division: two in the 33rdAlabama and one in the 10th Texas. One of the Alabamians was wounded. The Texan was killed.
The soldiers were buried where they fell, the graves market with wooden headboards. Two years later, John McGavock of Carnton Plantation offered two acres as a cemetery; the town of Franklin collected funds to reinter the soldiers there. Caroline Winder McGavock maintained a “Book of the Dead” listing the location of each soldier. Her story is recounted in Robert Hicks’ excellent novel The Widow of the South.
The soldiers were buried by state. This marks the Texas section; there is one for each state of the Confederacy.
General Cleburne was first buried at St John’s Episcopal Church. He passed by the church on the march to Franklin, and said that it would be well to die, if one could be buried in such a beautiful place. This is his marker from St John’s:
In 1870 he was re-interred in Helena, Arkansas, where he lived before the war. In Memphis his casket was placed on a hearse for a procession through the city. “Through the heart of Memphis, the city’s leading citizens – politicians, lawyers, merchants and others, joined the procession with Cleburne’s hearse,” the Memphis Daily Appeal reported. The coffin was placed on a steam for the journey across the Mississippi, and before it pulled from the dock, hundreds of Cleburne’s men crowded to view the coffin bearing his “sacred dust.” His monument in Helena could be seen from the Mississippi. In the old days the steamboats would blow their horns in salute.
After the war the United Daughters of the Confederacy took on the role of marking the graves, of raising monuments to their lost husbands and sons and fathers, of remembering. Years of bake sales and penny drives, Grandma said. Thirty years. We were poor.
I would begin with a grave. Then seek marriage, christening, birth, parents. One discovers things forgotten or never remembered or never known: an ancestor died at the Alamo. Or the confirmation of what the old folks said, like Grandma’s story about ancestor who served in the Georgia militia during the War of 1812. The colonel praised his courage, she said. I discovered his record in the archives, and yes: Georgia Militia, the battle of New Orleans, and the colonel did indeed commend his braver. His father was but one of my ancestors who served in the Colonial militias of North and South Carolina. Others served in the militia of Virginia, the Old Dominion itself.
Virginia, the fever-wracked, malarial settlements on the Chesapeake, was the port of arrival. The first of us landed in 1622. Bristol was the port of departure and remained so for most other 17th century arrivals. Later arrivals departed from London and Exeter. Cardiff and Dublin, too. But I wanted to know the first point of departure: the village of birth. So I traced them deeper and deeper into England: to villages and towns whose names echoed what I had read in Thomas Costain, the Narnia and Tolkien books, Sir Thomas Malory: Stokeinteignhead, Bere Regis, Somerton, Frome, Chipping Sodbury. Names that rang near to what I knew in the Deep South, but older, archaic.
The 17th century is rich with raw material for the genealogist from parish registers and legal documents: birth, baptism, marriage, death; leases and deeds. The record thins as the 16th century approaches and dies altogether mid-century, outside a handful of Anglo-Norman names. I will know no more of them until the trumpet of the Lord doth sound and time shall be no more. But their names are known to God, and God in His mercy has guided me to find them in this place, in this landscape, and nowhere but here, because this is where my people are buried, and here they wait for the Judgment: in the ancient counties of Dorset, Devon and Somerset; a smaller portion from Wiltshire and Gloucestershire. This land was once called Wessex: the kingdom Alfred the Great held against the Northmen; it adjoins Mercia, from whence Alfred’s daughter Æthelflæd, the Lady of the Mercians, continued his war against the invaders from the north. Welsh, Irish and a few “Pens” and “Tres,” which indicate Cornwall. France appears in the 18th: Acadians exiled to Louisiana, where they would become Cajuns. But my surname[1] is derived from an Anglo-Saxon word describing a feature common and almost unique, to landscape of Dorset: an ancient feature nonetheless the work of human hands. My mother’s surname is of similar origin: heathuwig, meaning “war-warrior.”
England is the land of my fathers – our fathers, the Southerners of my lineage. England holds the bones of our fathers, the bones of our dead.
I’ve spent considerable time in England, primarily in the countryside. Little lanes that lead to ancient pubs washed with 500 years of woodsmoke; the gentle, knobby faces that are so similar to those I know; paths that track Roman roads and pass by the ruins of castles or rabbit warrens or primitive industry. And best of all, the village churches with their memorials to the local gentries. The walls bear them witness: here a Crusader is memorialized; his descendants served Prine Rupert, Marlborough, Cornwallis; deaths in the Crimea and India. Many families end with World War I: heartbroken parents memorialize sons lost at the Somme or Second Ypres.
When I remember England, the memories burn, a white-hot splinter of grief. As though I stand on the desk of the ship that carried them away, the timbers groaning as the vessel bucks the waves and Albion recedes into the mist, the darkness, the past. It is a pain that binds my heart and soul, borne of knowing that this side of the Final Judgment, I will never see England again.
But it is not the pain of despair that ends in death and nothingness. Beneath the grief is a brightness. And I can only give thanks to God who in his mercy brought me to England and let me see. And now, when I think of England, I see those fields and mountains and villages washed in a peculiar golden light. There are no great trumpets, no choirs of angels and no marching saints. Instead there is silence; a silence that does not speak but nevertheless tells me that the last word belongs to God. That He will make all things new, there will be a new Heaven and a new Earth. And that I will see England again. I will see England untainted by the foulness of the Americans, England in that golden light, England as God created her to be.
The Ridgeway is an ancient road – the oldest in England, it is said – that runs from Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire to Overton Hill in Wiltshire. Ivinghoe is near enough to London to serve as a recreation destination; on weekends the investment bankers and lawyers are out with the mountain bikes, extreme sportin’ up and down the gentle slopes of the Chilterns, and afterwards tossing back pints in the pubs. Perhaps that’s why Ridgeway guides recommend ending the hike there: the facilities.
We recommend one begin at Ivinghoe and walk west.
Near Tring, the Grand Union Canal is worth a detour; a stroll along the towpath provides a picturesque backdrop for reflections on the Industrial Revolution. Checquers, the official residence of British prime ministers is nearby if you’d like to chat with the PM. David Lloyd George, who oversaw the slaughter of Great War, was the first to reside there. Wendover boasts the Red Lion Inn if you’re thirsty. Oliver Cromwell bunked in an upstairs room after Edgehill; some of his troopers carved graffiti on the church pillars. Cromwell is said to have addressed his men from his room’s double windows. You can book the room for an overnight stay. I did once, hoping his shade might manifest. He did not.
Cross the Thames at Goring. And immediately you’re in a different world. Not the gentle Chilterns with junior bankers on mountain banks, but the great sweeping downlands and the scarp slopes of the North Wessex Downs. There are fewer trees and fewer people. Soon you’ll pass Wantage, where there is a statue of Saint Alfred the Great in the market square. This as it should be. This is Wessex, his realm, from whence he marshaled his armies and drove the heathen from England.
Alfred is a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church. The Church teaches that the saints intercede and pray for us, and at Divine Liturgy we and the saints are gathered in the Eschaton, glorifying God. Saint Alfred, I believe, prays for us, especially for the Confederate dead. I believe that he honors the courage and devotion with which we, his descendants, fought the godless Northmen. And even more: he knows that we fought in full knowledge that our cause was hopeless, that we were fated to lose; that the North, the Americans, with their machines and supply lines and logistics and endless supply of fodder from the immigrant ships, would eventually engulf us, conquer us, ravage, rape, rob and destroy all we know and love. The Americans would then tart it up as the most noble act of humanitarianism; slander our dead, desecrate or monuments and demand we applaud, demand we cheer on genocide and serve as mercenaries in their wars of conquest.
We fought knowing this: at first dimly, then fully. But from hopelessness born a unique courage, an acceptance of the will of God.
The courage of Cleburne’s division at Franklin. Govan, if we are to die, let us die like men.
“An ancient landscape,” the North Wessex Downs Association says. Men have walked this track for 5,000 years. You pass jumbles of earth, ditches and breastworks: the remains of Iron Age hillforts. Banbury Castle, near Swindon, is the largest on the Ridgeway. It was first occupied 2500 years ago. A recent survey found signs of forty hut circles. Later it was held by the Romano-British held it until defeated by the Saxons at the Battle of Beranburgh.
The further you go, the deeper into the past. Near Uffington is the great White Horse: a figure cut into hill, the cuttings filled with chalk. It is one of several White Horses in the region, their origin and purpose still a mystery. Some believe it a monument to the Celtic goddess Epona; some suggest Alfred the Great made it after defeating the Northmen at Edington. Current consensus is that it is the work of a Celtic tribe of the Bronze or early Iron Age. Nearby is Uffington Castle, another hillfort. Perhaps the two are related.
The Ridgeway ends at Overton Hill. Nearby is Avebury, with its mammoth henges and stone circles. Avebury’s sarse-stones are the largest in England, some over 100 tons. Even larger than those of Stonehenge, which is nearby.
There are in “thin places” in world: places where the transcendent brushes against our world, and sometimes collide. There are strange places in the world, groves deep in ancient forces, lonely mountains, distant rivers ad lakes. These places hold some strange energy, things beyond our understanding. Once, maybe we did. Our ancestors “knew” things; those who made Stonehenge and Avebury and the White Horse knew things far beyond the arrogance of modern man. They understood the virtue of humility in the face of mystery, I suspect. They were not so arrogant as to assume nature – including human nature – was given them to bend and control and remake.
Because we’ve said goodbye to all that, haven’t we? I remember it from the 8th grade. The Enlightenment liberated us from superstition and old wives’ tales, the teachers said. Then we did science and mastered the world. Sure thing. Fiat lux, the philosophes screeched, and the guillotines in the Place de la Revolution set about their grisly work. Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. That’s attributed to the clownish Denis Diberot; he may not have said exactly that but expressed the sentiment in the poem Les Éleuthéromanes. So the Bolshevik monsters butchered Tsar Nicholas II and his family, desecrated their bodies and threw them into a mineshaft. The Bolsheviks murdered over 20,000 Russians at Butovo;, thousands of them Orthodox priests, nuns and monastics. And that was merely the beginning. The Bolsheviks, whose leadership was not Russian, robbed churches, desecrated the relics of saints. The number of Russian Orthodox believers they murdered numbers into the tens of millions.
The Enlightenment did give us Beethoven and Bach. “Reason,” or the “scientific method,” certainly resulted in magnificent discoveries. But “reason” is not “wisdom”: it is a process, a technique, with which theories can tested and proven – or not. Replacing the old ways and the old tradition with “reason,” which reduces everything to the crudest materialism, robbed the West of its spiritual inheritance, and left its soul a howling wilderness, ready to be inhabited by demons, or crammed full of American cultural product.
Fifty miles southeast of Avebury is Glastonbury. It’s known now, if at all, for the music festival and as the New Age capital of England. Wicca, witchcraft, pagan shops abound. Here, hen parties – “cool wine aunt,” Eat Love Pray types – can hire a Druid to show them about Glastonbury’s sacred sites and run a workshop on harnessing one’s own earth energy.
Here we’re supposed to laugh at the stupid boomers and their ridiculous pagan LARPing or go all self-righteous and condemn them for abandoning the faith of their fathers. Did they? Or did the faith of their fathers abandon them? Europe’s self-confidence died at Verdun or the trenches of Flanders. The Church of England ultimately glommed on to the worst of American Protestantism: social justice, guitar masses and other stupid efforts to confirm to the world, correctly regarded by most as weird. But nothing as bad as America, where pastors treat churches like businesses and focus on “market share.” Most churches in the U.S. have whored after every new god to win said “market share”: the prosperity gospel, Americanism, the belief that the US is “exceptional” and specially favored by God; Christian Zionism. It doesn’t seem to be working out that well. Poke around Substack and you’ll find Protestant pastors seriously discussing the likely possibility of their denominations disappearing by 20240.
So if the old gals want to down a bottle or two of shiraz while the Druid does his thing: good. They’ve been fed a steady stream of lies and bullshit your entire life; the Church failed them, as has the U.K. government under the “leadership” of Keir Starmer, a creature so empty, soulless and horrible he may well be an American. I hope the gals find some comfort, and the Druid, too. There may well be something in what the Druid tells them that points the right way. Toward reality, out of the cave and into the sunlight.
I could run a tour of Glastonbury, or at least Glastonbury Abbey and Glastonbury Tor. By way of an introduction, I would recount the well-known tale of Pope Gregory. The Pope saw English slaves in Rome and was struck by their angelic beauty. He chose one Augustine, the prior of a Roman monastery, to bring the Gospel to these barbarians, and assigned forty monks as companions.
Evidence suggests that Augustine and his monks were not enamored with the assignment. Perhaps as Romans – sophisticated as anyone in the 6th century – they didn’t want to live among barbarians; perhaps they’d heard stories about the collapse of Roman authority in Britain and those crazy, violent Anglo-Saxons, or the pagan lunatics in Northumbria who enjoyed brawling with just about anyone. At one point the party halted and wrote Pope Gregory a letter, begging to be allowed to come back. Pope Gregory ordered them to get moving. In 597 they landed on the southern coast of England.
The Venerable Bede records what happened next, and how the tremulous Augustine became St Augustine of Canterbury, Apostle to the British. But the Gospel arrived long before Augustine. For Joseph of Arimathea, after the Resurrection of Christ, came to England. He brought with him the Holy Grail. On Wearyall Hill, near Glastonbury, he thrust his staff into the ground and a hawthorn sprouted and grew. This is the Glastonbury Thorn, and still stands today.
That’s the legend; contemporary scholars, informed by the scientific method and David Hume’s droning Scottish bullshit, dismiss it as a publicity stunt, just like the discovery of King Arthur’s tomb in the 12th century. But that doesn’t solve the puzzle of how the Gospel came to England. Early witnesses testify to its presence: Tertullian in the second century, Hilary of Poitiers in the fourth. Eusebius of Caesaria wrote that some of Christ’s disciples had “crossed the ocean and reached the Isles of Britain.” St Luke records that Christ appointed Seventy Apostles to bring the Gospel “every city.” Tradition holds than one of the Seventy was one Aristobulus, later dispactched by St Paul to Britain. Hippolytus of Rome also names Aristobulus as Britian’s first bishop, as does a document discovered in 1854 at the great Orthodox monastic center of Mount Athos.
However it happened: the Gospel had been preached in Britain and the Church was firmly planted. Preached among the native Britons, it withdrew to the mountains of Wales or to Cornwall, beyod the Tamar, under the pressure of the Anglo-Saxon invasions.
But there were great monastic centers on the Isle of Iona, founded by St Columba, and Lindisfarne, on the coast of Northumbria. In the 5th century, St Patrick began his mission to Ireland.
The faith Augustine found in Britain is often called “Celtic Christianity,” and naturally it has attracted all sorts of New Age silliness. Still, there were differences, the largest being the method of calculating the date of Easter and the form of monastic tonsure. The local bishops didn’t care for the idea of submitting to Roman authority, but eventually they did, with the settlement worked out at the Synod of Whitby.
The Roman church was urban, organized around bishropics. The church of the Britons was anchored by the great monasteries. Most importantly, and of the greatest significance: a devotion to the most rigorous ascetic practices of the earliest Christian ascetics, those who went to the deserts in search of solitude and silence.
Paul Kingsnorth has written eloquently of the “Green Martyrdom” of those Irish monks. From his account of a visit to Skellig, a jagged splinter of stone ten miles from the coast of Ireland:
This ascetic tradition shone most brightly in the Christian East, where the Church became known as the Orthodox Church after Rome broke from it. It became known as Hesychasm, a form of asceticism requiring solitude, silence and prayer, through which the monastic could, if so blessed by God, a vision of the “uncreated light,” the Light that shone forth from Christ at His Transfiguration on Mount Tabor. The monks of Mount Athos preserved the tradition during the Ottomon dominion. The traditions associated with the practice were collected and became known as the Philokalia.
The tradition shone with its greatest brilliance in Russia, to which Hesychast tradition was brought by St Paisius Velichkovsky. Solitude and silence appealed profoundly to the Russians; thousands sought the “green martyrdom” in the great forests of northern Russia. The monastery of Optina became its anchor in Russia; thousands gathered, including Dostoevky, to obtain spiritual guidance from the Optina saints.
Sometimes it occurs to me that the only power keeping the world from annihiliation are the prayers of grandmothers in France and monks in Russia. Perhaps this is why the satanic Bolsheviks burned, and still burn, with such hatred for Russia? Because Russia preserves and defends the true faith? The same faith, I would suggest, that by some miraculous means came to Britain?
If one ascends Glastonbury Tor and looks to the southeast – there, so distant that it can be mistaken for horizon – is the great grey-blue mass of Dartmoor, the last wilderness of England.
There is no landscape more majestic than Dartmoor, nowhere that evokes such grandeur and dread. Fogs form without warning and roll from the tors, mist rise from the streams. Cold rains pelt your cheeks. It seems intentional, the wilderness toying with you, as a cat might a mouse.
It’s all hopeless until suddenly one of the old monuments appear. The old people made it for us: guideposts for their lost and battered children.
Then the rain will cease, the fog lifts and the sun breaks the clouds and dissolves the mist and the fog. The dread and majestic wilderness opens its arms. It is as though you’ve passed a fearsome trial but now you are an initiate. Welcome,Dartmoor says. I am indeed dread and I am majestic, but you are welcome here. The bones of your people are here. I guard them. I am indeed dread but you are welcome. You are known.
One of my grave-quests ended here, in the wilderness of Dartmoor, the village of Peter Tavy One of my ancestors departed here in 1660 and took passage from Bristol to Virginia. There he, and his people, prospered. Over time they moved south, then west. They settled in Upsher County, west of Dallas.
In 1861, his descendant/my ancestor enlisted in the 10th Texas Infantry. In 1863 the regiment was assigned to General Cleburne’s division. Chickamauga. Missionary Ridge, where Sherman sent an entire American army against Cleburne’s division and failed. Ringgold Gap: Cleburne commanded the rearguard, and with his single division held an entire American army corps at bay and secured the Army of Tennessee’s escape from Grant’s hordes. The Atlanta campaign: Pickett’s Mill, where Cleburne once again humiliated the psychotic Sherman. Perhaps that’s why Sherman chose to take the fight to women, children, livestock and farm machinery: fighting Confederates might be dangerous.
Then Franklin in November 1864: that desperate bloody hopeless charge. General Cleburne fell leading his men. And my ancestor, with roots and bones here, in this earth and the wilderness of Dartmoor, fell with him.
There is, maybe, no thinner place on earth than Dartmoor. And one learns the secrets of Dartmoor navigation from Eric Hemery and William Crossington; using landmarks if clear or the compass if not, one may navigate high and lonely places of Dartmoor. Ger Tor, perhaps, or Nat Tor. Ascend the great stones of Ger Tor, and then descend and rest, maybe, on the stones of Nat Tor, overlooking the Tavy Cleave.
It is twilight now. The darkness creeps through the Cleave and inching up the tors. Soon it will be night. The poet Carrington, who loved Dartmoor, spoke of its “silences profound.” And you understand, now. The rushing of the wind, the roaring of the water combine into just that: a silence: as majestic and dread as the wilderness itself. But without fear, without pain. But a thanksgiving for the courage of your ancestor, who has some of this place in him, and it remains with him, there in that grave in Tennessee.
Now it is night, and the darkness is complete. You are alone, solitary in this remote valley and its silences profound, in the embrace of this wild and majestic land where you are known: the dead, the ghosts and bones, the monuments and the memories of your people.
What does it mean that Moses entered the darkness and saw God in it? What is now recounted seems somewhat contradictory to the first theophany, for then the Divine was beheld in light but now he is seen in darkness. Let us not think that this is at variance with the sequence of things we have contemplated spiritually. Scripture teaches by this that religious knowledge comes first to those who receive it as light. Therefore what is perceived to be contrary to religion is darkness, and the escape from darkness comes about when one participates in light. But as the mind progresses and, through an even greater and more perfect diligence, comes to apprehend reality, as it approaches more nearly to contemplation, it sees more clearly what of the divine nature is uncontemplated.
When, therefore, Moses grew in knowledge, he declared that he had seen God in the darkness, that is, he had then come to know what is dine beyond all knowledge and comprehension, for the text says, Moses approached the dark cloud where God was. What God? He who make darkness his hiding place.
St Gregory of Nyssa[1] “Cade” is a surname from the Mississippi/Louisiana branch.