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Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot? · I Believe

0:03
SPEAKER_02: Welcome to I Believe, where we talk about America.
0:06
SPEAKER_02: I'm Joel Douglas, and I believe in America.
0:10
SPEAKER_02: Thanks for joining me.
0:36
SPEAKER_04: Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?
0:42
SPEAKER_04: Should old acquaintance be forgot and the days of long ago?
0:48
SPEAKER_02: We've forgotten the meaning of the song playing in the background when we toast on New Year's Eve.
0:54
SPEAKER_02: Let's remember.
0:56
SPEAKER_02: Back to Ulysses S.
0:57
SPEAKER_02: Grant.
0:58
SPEAKER_02: He couldn't hear music, not wouldn't, couldn't.
1:01
SPEAKER_02: And the most important moment of his life would be defined by a song.
1:09
SPEAKER_04: Act one.
1:10
SPEAKER_04: The man who couldn't hear music.
1:14
SPEAKER_04: Washington, DC, March 8, 1864.
1:20
SPEAKER_04: Ulysses S.
1:21
SPEAKER_04: Grant walks into Willard's hotel.
1:24
SPEAKER_04: 41 years old.
1:26
SPEAKER_04: Filthy from four days on a train.
1:28
SPEAKER_04: He is the most famous man in America and nobody recognizes him.
1:32
SPEAKER_04: The hotel is famous.
1:34
SPEAKER_04: Senator Swagger and General's Preen across its thick, patterned carpet.
1:39
SPEAKER_04: Gas lamps throw a yellow light that doesn't reach the corners, so faces drift in and out of shadow.
1:46
SPEAKER_04: Furniture packed in tight clusters.
1:48
SPEAKER_04: Little tables and chairs arranged for waiting, not resting, crowded by hats, gloves, and half-empty whiskey glasses.
1:57
SPEAKER_04: The desk clerk eyes Grant as he crosses the room.
2:01
SPEAKER_04: Mud-spattered coat.
2:03
SPEAKER_04: Rumpled uniform.
2:04
SPEAKER_04: No entourage.
2:06
SPEAKER_04: His boots are caked with Tennessee mud, red clay flaking onto the carpet.
2:12
SPEAKER_04: The clerk judges his station in life and says there's nothing available but a cramped room in the garret.
2:18
SPEAKER_04: The attic.
2:19
SPEAKER_04: Grant takes it.
2:20
SPEAKER_04: He signs the register in a plain hand.
2:23
SPEAKER_04: U.S.
2:24
SPEAKER_04: Grant and Son, Galena, Illinois.
2:28
SPEAKER_04: The clerk reads the signature.
2:31
SPEAKER_04: His face goes white.
2:32
SPEAKER_04: Suddenly, the presidential suite, the rooms Abraham Lincoln occupied before his inauguration, is available after all.
2:41
SPEAKER_04: Grant declines.
2:42
SPEAKER_04: The garret is fine.
2:44
SPEAKER_04: This is Grant.
2:45
SPEAKER_04: No drama.
2:46
SPEAKER_04: No ceremony.
2:48
SPEAKER_04: And something even more peculiar.
2:50
SPEAKER_04: Ulysses S.
2:51
SPEAKER_04: Grant cannot hear music.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: It's not that Grant doesn't like music.
2:58
SPEAKER_01: Not that he has no taste for music.
3:01
SPEAKER_01: He can't hear it.
3:03
SPEAKER_01: When a band plays, Grant hears only noise.
3:07
SPEAKER_01: A choir sings.
3:08
SPEAKER_01: Grant hears chaos, marches, hymns, sentimental ballads.
3:14
SPEAKER_01: They all register the same way.
3:16
SPEAKER_01: Pots banging, wagons rattling, nothing more.
3:20
SPEAKER_01: He once described it this way.
3:22
SPEAKER_01: I know only two tunes, one of them is Yankee Doodle, and the other isn't.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: People took this as a joke.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: A curmudgeon's quip.
3:33
SPEAKER_01: But Grant wasn't joking.
3:35
SPEAKER_01: He could recognize Yankee Doodle because it came wrapped in parades and flags and ritual.
3:42
SPEAKER_01: He knew it by context, not by sound.
3:45
SPEAKER_01: Every other tune in the world was the same to him.
3:49
SPEAKER_01: Noise.
3:50
SPEAKER_01: Doctors today call it congenital emocia.
3:53
SPEAKER_01: The brain can't process pitch.
3:56
SPEAKER_01: Each note disappears as soon as it sounds.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: The pattern never forms.
4:01
SPEAKER_01: In 1864, they had no name for it.
4:05
SPEAKER_01: Grant just lived with it.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: He never explained why music meant nothing to him.
4:10
SPEAKER_01: But other officers noticed he would leave the room when bands played.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: He didn't grimace, he didn't complain.
4:18
SPEAKER_01: He just drifted away.
4:22
SPEAKER_04: Back to Willard's hotel.
4:24
SPEAKER_04: That evening, Grant cleans up and goes down to dinner.
4:28
SPEAKER_04: He and his 13-year-old son Fred take a small table in the crowded dining room.
4:34
SPEAKER_04: He orders.
4:36
SPEAKER_04: Within minutes, someone recognizes him.
4:39
SPEAKER_04: A congressman stands and bellows across the room.
4:42
SPEAKER_04: Ladies and gentlemen, the hero of Donaldson, of Vicksburg, and of Chattanooga is among us.
4:49
SPEAKER_04: I propose the health of Lieutenant General Grant.
4:52
SPEAKER_04: The chant begins.
4:54
SPEAKER_04: Grant, Grant, Grant.
4:57
SPEAKER_04: The diner surge toward his table.
4:59
SPEAKER_04: He stands awkwardly, bows, tries to eat, gives up.
5:04
SPEAKER_04: The mob presses closer.
5:05
SPEAKER_04: For three-quarters of an hour, he shakes hands with strangers.
5:09
SPEAKER_04: Finally, he escapes to his room.
5:12
SPEAKER_04: He never finishes the meal.
5:13
SPEAKER_04: Later that night, politicians appear at his door.
5:17
SPEAKER_04: They rush him through the rain to the White House, where President Lincoln is holding his weekly reception.
5:23
SPEAKER_04: The East Room is packed, hundreds of Washington society figures, all hoping to glimpse the Western hero.
5:30
SPEAKER_04: The crowd parts.
5:32
SPEAKER_04: Grant walks through.
5:33
SPEAKER_04: Abraham Lincoln stands waiting.
5:36
SPEAKER_04: They have never met, though they are now the two most famous men in the country.
5:41
SPEAKER_04: Lincoln is a head taller, 6'4.
5:45
SPEAKER_04: Grant is 5'8.
5:48
SPEAKER_04: Lincoln steps forward, smiling, and extends his hand.
5:52
SPEAKER_04: Why, here is General Grant.
5:54
SPEAKER_04: I am most delighted to see you, General.
5:57
SPEAKER_04: Grant answers with a nod, and a few words so quiet, Lincoln has to lean in.
6:06
SPEAKER_01: The Union Army of Grant's time was saturated in music.
6:10
SPEAKER_01: More than 500 regimental bands, drummers and fifers at every unit, bugles structured the entire day, revelie, assembly, mess call, sick call, taps.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: Music lifted spirits, stiffened resolve, gave orders, and Grant was deaf to all of it.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: He understood music strategically.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: He watched what it did to other people, saw men weep at certain songs, stiffen at others.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: The way someone colorblind might notice how others respond to a sunrise.
6:46
SPEAKER_01: After West Point, Grant was a young lieutenant in Mexico.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: His regiment's band raised morale, but it needed funding.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: Bans were absurdly expensive, and politicians loved them.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: Congress would argue over rifles, but bans needed paid.
7:03
SPEAKER_01: So Grant ordered the unit's daily rations in flour instead of bread, at significant savings.
7:09
SPEAKER_01: Then he rented a bakery, hired bakers, sold fresh bread through a contract he'd arranged with the Army's chief commissary.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: The profit went to music he could not hear.
7:21
SPEAKER_01: This is who Grant was.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: Practical, unsentimental, results oriented.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: Sentiment in the Union Army was a liability.
7:33
SPEAKER_04: The next morning, Lincoln hands Grant his commission.
7:36
SPEAKER_04: Lieutenant General of the United States Army.
7:39
SPEAKER_04: The highest rank in the Army.
7:41
SPEAKER_04: Grant is now in command of all Union forces.
7:45
SPEAKER_04: More than half a million men.
7:47
SPEAKER_04: The war is in its fourth year.
7:49
SPEAKER_04: 250,000 Union soldiers are already dead or wounded, with little progress to show.
7:56
SPEAKER_04: Every general Lincoln has appointed to fight, Robert E.
8:00
SPEAKER_04: Lee has failed.
8:01
SPEAKER_04: They engage, suffer losses, retreat north to regroup.
8:05
SPEAKER_04: Then they do it again.
8:07
SPEAKER_04: The reality is that the Civil War is a war of attrition.
8:10
SPEAKER_04: Wars of attrition aren't clever.
8:13
SPEAKER_04: Force meets force until one side can no longer continue.
8:18
SPEAKER_04: To achieve the nation's ends, Lincoln needs someone different.
8:22
SPEAKER_04: Someone who doesn't retreat.
8:24
SPEAKER_04: Days after the ceremony, Lincoln's assistant asks what kind of general Grant will be.
8:30
SPEAKER_04: Lincoln thinks for a moment.
8:33
SPEAKER_04: Grant is the first general I've had.
8:36
SPEAKER_04: He doesn't ask me to approve his plans and take responsibility for them.
8:40
SPEAKER_04: He hasn't told me what his plans are.
8:43
SPEAKER_04: I don't know, and I don't want to know.
8:45
SPEAKER_04: I'm glad to find a man who can go ahead without me.
8:49
SPEAKER_04: Lincoln pauses, then adds, Wherever he is, Grant makes things get.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: The Army Medical Corps had made it official.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: They called it nostalgia.
9:03
SPEAKER_01: Not nostalgia like we use the word today, a warm feeling about the past, nostalgia as a diagnosis, a disease, a killer.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: Union surgeons wrote down thousands of cases of men who wasted away, moaning for home.
9:20
SPEAKER_01: The symptoms looked like what we would now call severe depression, insomnia, loss of appetite, withdrawal, despair.
9:29
SPEAKER_01: In the worst cases, they just stopped, refused food, refused nursing, died.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: The army identified a trigger.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: Music.
9:40
SPEAKER_01: Sentimental songs did it.
9:42
SPEAKER_01: Ballads about home, mothers, sweethearts left behind.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: The most dangerous song in camp was Home Sweet Home.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: Men heard it and broke.
9:53
SPEAKER_01: So officers barred bands from playing it.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: Songs like Old Lang Sign carried the same danger.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: Remembering friends from long ago.
10:03
SPEAKER_01: Remembering home.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: Memory as a weapon turned inward.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: The song that made you weep for the past was the song that could kill you in the present.
10:14
SPEAKER_01: Grant would have understood that logic perfectly.
10:20
SPEAKER_04: Now Grant is in Washington, his new commission in hand.
10:24
SPEAKER_04: Culpepper, Virginia Waits, his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac.
10:30
SPEAKER_04: Robert E.
10:30
SPEAKER_04: Lee waits, 50 miles south.
10:34
SPEAKER_04: Grant lays out his philosophy in a single sentence.
10:37
SPEAKER_04: The art of war is simple enough.
10:40
SPEAKER_04: Find out where your enemy is.
10:42
SPEAKER_04: Get at him as soon as you can.
10:44
SPEAKER_04: Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.
10:47
SPEAKER_04: No sentiment?
10:49
SPEAKER_04: No retreat.
10:51
SPEAKER_04: Attrition.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: Act two.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: The Overland Campaign.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: The Wilderness, Virginia, May 5th, 1864.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: Grant crosses the Rapidan River at midnight.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: 60,000 men, pontoon bridges, sway in the dark.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: By dawn, the army of the Potomac is deep inside, a 70-square mile tangle of vines and second growth so dense the soldiers call it simply the wilderness.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: The Union Army was routed here one year earlier.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: Lee's bold flanking maneuver sent them running.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: The bones of the dead from that battle lie in the undergrowth.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: Skulls grin up at passing troops.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: The new soldiers try not to look.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: Grant's plan is simple.
11:41
SPEAKER_00: Move fast and get through the forest before Lee can react.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: Fight in open country where Union artillery and superior numbers can be decisive.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: Lee reacts faster.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: By mid morning, the wilderness becomes a killing ground that neutralizes every Union advantage.
11:58
SPEAKER_03: Soldiers couldn't see twenty yards in any direction.
12:01
SPEAKER_03: Brush so thick you lose sight of the man next to you.
12:04
SPEAKER_03: Smoke from musket fire fills the gaps between trees.
12:07
SPEAKER_03: You only see the enemy by the muzzle flash when he shoots at you.
12:10
SPEAKER_03: There is no battle line, no coordination, no grand strategy, only chaos.
12:16
SPEAKER_03: Small groups of men stumbling through the brush, firing at sounds, bayonetting shapes.
12:22
SPEAKER_03: Then the forest catches fire.
12:24
SPEAKER_03: Muzzle flashes ignite the dry leaves.
12:26
SPEAKER_03: Flames race through the underbrush.
12:29
SPEAKER_03: Men who are wounded and cannot crawl burn alive.
12:33
SPEAKER_03: Screams rise above the gunfire.
12:35
SPEAKER_03: The smoke turns black.
12:37
SPEAKER_03: The fighting goes on for two days.
12:40
SPEAKER_03: When it ends, eighteen thousand Union soldiers are dead, wounded, or missing.
12:45
SPEAKER_03: Nobody knows how many Confederates.
12:48
SPEAKER_03: The forest is eerily quiet.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: To this point, every Union army that faced Robert E.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: Lee followed the same pattern, engage, suffer terrible losses, retreat north to regroup, lick wounds, try again in a few months.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: Grant's men expect the same.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: They've been through this before with other commanders.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: They assume their next march will take them back toward the Rapidan, back toward Washington, back toward safety.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: That night the army begins to move, the columns form up and start marching.
13:21
SPEAKER_00: At first, the men don't know which direction they're heading.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: The road winds through the forest.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: It's dark.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: They're exhausted.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: Slowly, as the stars wheel overhead, they begin to realize something.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: They are not marching north.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: They are marching south, toward the enemy, toward Richmond, toward more fighting.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: A soldier in the lead regiment described the moment the realization spread.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: Wild cheers echoed through the forest.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: Men waved their hats.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: They pounded each other on the back.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: We were going forward.
13:51
SPEAKER_00: For four years, too many men had died to give up ground they had seized.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: They would move forward, not to glory, but to finality.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: Grant sits on horseback by the side of the road, watching his army pass.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: He is smoking a cigar.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: He says nothing.
14:09
SPEAKER_03: Spotsylvania Courthouse, May 8th to 21st, 1864.
14:13
SPEAKER_03: Grant races Lee to the crossroads.
14:16
SPEAKER_03: Lee wins.
14:17
SPEAKER_03: His men dig in before the Union forces arrive.
14:20
SPEAKER_03: They throw up earthen walls and trenches the soldiers call the mule shoe.
14:24
SPEAKER_03: For two weeks, Grant hammers at those works.
14:27
SPEAKER_03: He cannot break through.
14:28
SPEAKER_03: Each assault costs thousands of men, but he keeps attacking, probing, looking for weakness.
14:35
SPEAKER_03: On may twelfth, he finds one.
14:37
SPEAKER_03: Before dawn, Union troops mass for the assault.
14:40
SPEAKER_03: They surge out of the fog, overwhelm the Confederate line, and capture thousands of prisoners, nearly splitting Lee's army in half.
14:48
SPEAKER_03: But Confederate reinforcements pour in.
14:50
SPEAKER_03: The two armies crash together along a trench line barely twenty feet wide.
14:55
SPEAKER_03: For eighteen hours they fight hand to hand in the mud.
14:59
SPEAKER_03: Men bayonet each other over the earthen wall, stab blindly in the rain, grab rifles by the barrel and swing them like clubs.
15:07
SPEAKER_03: The trench fills with bodies.
15:09
SPEAKER_03: Behind the Confederate line stands an oak tree, nearly two feet thick.
15:14
SPEAKER_03: By morning it is gone, cut down entirely by rifle fire.
15:19
SPEAKER_03: The bullets come so thick and so fast they saw through the trunk.
15:22
SPEAKER_03: Another 18,000 Union casualties.
15:25
SPEAKER_03: Grant's army marches south.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: Cold Harbor, Virginia, June 3, 1864.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: The armies face each other across open ground.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: Lee's men have spent days digging in trenches, felled trees with branches sharpened and pointed outward.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: A wooden trap meant to tear apart anyone who tried to charge through.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: Overlapping fields of fire, as strong a defensive position as any in this war.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: Grant orders a frontal assault.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: The night before, Union soldiers know what's coming.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: An officer observes something he has never seen.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: Men throughout the ranks are writing their names and addresses on slips of paper and pinning them to the backs of their uniforms, so they won't die as unknowns.
16:22
SPEAKER_03: Men fall in waves, whole regiments cut down before they can close the distance.
16:27
SPEAKER_03: In some places, the attack lasts twenty minutes.
16:30
SPEAKER_03: In others, less than ten.
16:32
SPEAKER_03: It fails.
16:33
SPEAKER_03: Several thousand men fall in half an hour.
16:36
SPEAKER_03: The survivors lie in the dirt, pinned down, unable to advance or retreat.
16:41
SPEAKER_03: The sun rises.
16:43
SPEAKER_03: It will be a hot day.
16:45
SPEAKER_03: The wounded begin to cry out for water.
16:48
SPEAKER_03: Grant and Lee cannot agree on truce terms to retrieve the bodies.
16:52
SPEAKER_03: For three days the dead lie where they fell.
16:54
SPEAKER_03: The wounded die of thirst.
16:57
SPEAKER_03: The stench reaches both camps.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: By mid-June 1864, Grant has lost 55,000 men in 40 days.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: The casualty lists fill entire pages of Northern newspapers.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: Mothers read the columns looking for their sons' names.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: Wives scan for husbands.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: The country recoils.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: The papers call him Butcher Grant.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: Attrition?
17:20
SPEAKER_00: The worst of humanity?
17:22
SPEAKER_00: The Union can replace its dead.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: The Confederacy cannot.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Every battle, no matter how costly, weakens Lee more than it weakens Grant.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, the math catches up.
17:33
SPEAKER_00: Grant never answers the editorials or the accusations.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: His army keeps marching south.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: The newspapers won't write the truth.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: The Union is winning.
17:42
SPEAKER_00: Stay the course.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: Lee is outnumbered and outgunned.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: He is falling back to prepared positions, killing Union soldiers from behind earthworks and waiting for the North to lose its nerve.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: Every previous commander lost his nerve, saw the bodies, imagined the grief, calculated the political cost, decided the price was too high.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: Grant marches forward.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: He knows the alternative is worse.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: A war that drags on another year, another two years, another hundred thousand dead with nothing to show for it.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: A negotiated peace that leaves slavery in place.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: A nation permanently fractured.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: No.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: Forward is the only way through.
18:24
SPEAKER_03: And the men who follow him.
18:26
SPEAKER_03: The men who charge the trenches, pin their names to their coats, and die in the wilderness fire.
18:31
SPEAKER_03: They hear the music Grant can't hear.
18:34
SPEAKER_03: They carry melodies in their heads.
18:36
SPEAKER_03: Home, sweet home.
18:38
SPEAKER_03: Lorena, old Lang's side.
18:40
SPEAKER_03: They sing around campfires.
18:42
SPEAKER_03: They hum on the march.
18:44
SPEAKER_03: They are dying of nostalgia and marching south anyway.
18:48
SPEAKER_03: Somewhere is the end of it.
18:50
SPEAKER_03: Appomattox.
18:57
SPEAKER_01: Interlude The Rappahannock.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: Winter, eighteen sixty-two.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: Union and Confederate pickets face each other across the Rappahannock, close enough to shout, close enough to hear.
19:14
SPEAKER_01: Informal truces, coffee traded for tobacco, in tiny sailboats floated across the current, jokes shouted across the water.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: At night, a fiddle starts up on the Confederate bank, Dixie answered by Yankee Doodle from the Union side.
19:32
SPEAKER_01: Then, together, home, sweet home, old lang sign, melodies that turn enemies back into men.
19:41
SPEAKER_01: Should old acquaintance be forgot, Grant wasn't there.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: But the men who would follow him to Appomattox were.
19:54
SPEAKER_04: Act three.
19:56
SPEAKER_04: The silence.
20:01
SPEAKER_04: April ninth, eighteen sixty-five.
20:05
SPEAKER_04: Grant arrives at Wilma McLean's house in a mud-spattered uniform.
20:10
SPEAKER_04: Lee waits in his finest dress coat, sword at his side.
20:14
SPEAKER_04: They both served in the Mexican War, though Lee would not remember the junior quartermaster, who now stands as his conqueror.
20:20
SPEAKER_04: The Union has won.
20:22
SPEAKER_04: The terms are generous.
20:24
SPEAKER_04: Officers keep their sidearms.
20:27
SPEAKER_04: Men who own horses may keep them for spring planting.
20:30
SPEAKER_04: No trials, no reprisals.
20:33
SPEAKER_04: Go home.
20:34
SPEAKER_04: Lee signs, mounts traveler, rides away.
20:40
SPEAKER_01: Union artillery batteries begin firing salutes.
20:44
SPEAKER_01: Soldiers cheer.
20:45
SPEAKER_01: After four years they've won.
20:48
SPEAKER_01: Grant hears the guns, the one military sound he can't misinterpret, and sends immediate orders to stop.
20:56
SPEAKER_01: The war is over.
20:58
SPEAKER_01: The rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: A heavy silence falls.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: Thousands of men who have been trying to kill each other for four years stand in the mud, not knowing what to feel.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: Near the McLean House stands the 198th Pennsylvania Regiment.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: Their band includes a young German immigrant named Justus Altmiller.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: He arrived in America ten years ago.
21:31
SPEAKER_01: He plays cornet.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: Altmiller lifts his instrument.
21:35
SPEAKER_01: The band plays old lang.
21:40
SPEAKER_04: Should old acquaintance be forgot?
21:43
SPEAKER_04: We too have run about the hills and pulled the daisies fine.
21:49
SPEAKER_04: We were boys together once, but broad seas between us have roared since the days of long ago.
21:56
SPEAKER_04: Here's my hand, my trusty friend.
21:58
SPEAKER_04: Give me your hand too.
22:05
SPEAKER_02: Curtain, the cup.
22:09
SPEAKER_02: Every New Year's Eve we sing and toast.
22:12
SPEAKER_02: Champagne more bitter than it looks.
22:14
SPEAKER_02: Words to an old song we barely understand, in a dialect we can't quite pronounce.
22:21
SPEAKER_02: Because of the people we were, the friends we had, the country we shared and still share, the wars we survived.
22:30
SPEAKER_02: These deserve a toast.
22:31
SPEAKER_02: We don't toast to the past.
22:34
SPEAKER_02: We toast for each other.
22:36
SPEAKER_02: The lyrics mean for the sake of old times.
22:40
SPEAKER_02: So don't raise a glass to what is gone.
22:42
SPEAKER_02: We raise a glass for the people standing next to us right now.
22:46
SPEAKER_02: We honor what was by showing up for who's here.
22:50
SPEAKER_02: Happy New Year.
22:52
SPEAKER_02: Here, here.
22:54
SPEAKER_02: May God bless the United States of America.