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The Martyrdom of General George Armstrong Custer, U.S.A
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
Dime novelist Frederick Whittaker first met George Armstrong Custer in the New York offices of Galaxy magazine, for whom the general was writing a series of articles (later collected as My Life on the Plains). Whittaker had served honorably and well in the Civil War himself; yet despite a serious chest wound received in the Wilderness, his zest for martial glory and his admiration for the glorious had not diminished. He immediately became “The Boy General's” ardent admirer and, after the battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, was his fallen hero's most ardent apologist. Within two weeks of the first news of the battle, Whittaker had published eighty lines of creditable doggerel in the Army and Navy Journal—“Custer's Last Charge”; a eulogy in Galaxy appeared shortly afterward (in which he compared “The Yellow Hair,” favorably, to Don John of Austria, the Black Prince, Alexander the Great; Custer was as much the beau sabreur as Murat, as brilliant as Seidlitz; he charged like Murat and died like Leonidas); and then the Grand Finale, a six-hundred-plus page biography, The Life of General George A. Custer, written and put into print within six months of Custer's death. As a writer for Beadle and Adams, Whittaker had learned how to roll out his prose with steam press rapidity; but the tone, the fullness of the narrative, and the ardor which blushes every page show that these various works were de amore.
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- An American Tragedy: A 50th Anniversary
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976
References
NOTES
1. New York: Sheldon, 1876.
2. See the author's “How Custer's Last Stand Got Its Name,” Georgia Review, 26 (Fall, 1972), 279–96.Google Scholar
3. These words are from a letter to Wyoming Territory Delegate W. W. Corlett, quoted in Graham, Wm. A., Abstract of the Official Record of Procedings of the Reno Court of Inquiry (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 1954), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar
4. The Life, pp. 599–600.Google Scholar
5. Custer; and Other Poems (Chicago: W. B. Conkey, 1896), Bk. III, xxxii.Google Scholar
6. “Saints and Heroes,” in Feinberg, Joel, Moral Concepts (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 68.Google Scholar
7. As was claimed by Kate Bighead in Marquis, Thomas B., She Watched Custer's Last Battle (Hardin.Mont., 1935).Google Scholar
8. The code of the professional soldier is cogently stated by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein in his comments on General von Paulus at Stalingrad: “… no army may capitulate as long as it still has any strength left to fight. To abandon it (this idea) would mean the very end of soldiering…. Even the apparent hopelessness of a battle that can be avoided by capitulation does not in itself justify a surrender. If every Commander-in-Chief were to capitulate as soon as he considered his position hopeless, no one would ever win a war…. From General Paulus's point of view, at all events, it was his soldierly duty to refuse to capitulate. An exception could only have been made if the army had had no further role to play and could serve no useful purpose in prolonging its struggle…. No matter how futile Sixth Army's continued resistance might be in the long run, it still had—as long as it could conceivably go on fighting—a decisive role to fulfil in the overall strategic situation. It had to try to tie down the enemy forces opposing it for the longest possible space of time.” Lost Victories, trans., Powell, Anthony G. (Chicago: Regnery, 1958), pp. 353–54.Google Scholar
9. Army and Navy Journal (07 15, 1876), special sheet.Google Scholar
10. Bk. III, i–ii; conveniently available in the Philip Wheelwright translation (New York: Odyssey, 1951), pp. 200–05.
11. Bk. II, I, 7: Readily accessible in the translation of Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), p. 36.
12. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1974.
13. Joseph Bedier, ed. (Paris: D'art H. Piazza, 1964).
14. Recounted at the end of I Samuel and the very beginning of 2 Samuel.
15. The Histories, trans. Rawlinson, George (New York: Random House, 1933), II, 200 ffGoogle Scholar. Herodotus is the most reliable authority on the battle.
16. Gordon, E. V., ed., The Battle of Maldon (New York: Appleton, 1966).Google Scholar
17. “The Battle of Maldon: A Heroic Poem,” Spec, 43 (1968), 52–71.Google Scholar
18. The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, trans. Irving, David (New York: World, 1972), p. 180.Google Scholar