Recently I've viewed two artistic panoramas, one of heroic triumph and one of unmitigated tragedy. The first is the 150-foot-long, 120-year-old Civil War painting by Berkshire born scenic painter Charles Andrus - currently on display at the Vermont Historical Center in Barre. The panorama shows 10 scenes from the Civil War, including bright depictions of the naval duel between ironclads Monitor and Merrimac, the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, and the surrender at Appomattox.
They are being shown sequentially during the Sesquicentennial - one panel at a time. The colors are vivid, the figures are heroic. At one time, the panorama was rolled up in a box, taken around the state and groups performed in front of it.
A second example of Andrus' Civil War Art is a 466-square foot painting in which we see Gen. Phil Sheridan's dramatic ride to Cedar Creek, Virginia in Oct. 1864. More Vermonters were engaged this battle than in any other. The painting is now on display at the Vermont Veterans Militia Museum at Camp Johnson in Colchester.
By contrast, Joe Sacco's "World War One, July 1, 1916" is a book-sized tour de force of dread and carnage. With NO words, on panels that fold out more than 25 feet in length, he draws the greatest military disaster in British history. In one day, Empire troops including South Africans, Australians and Canadians, lost 40,000 wounded and 20,000 dead - more than six times the death toll of 9/11! A 20 page summary of the battle by historian Adam Hochschild accompanies the drawings.
Sacco is an Australian graphic documentarian with previous books on the Bosnian War and Palestine, and he concentrates on 24 hours from June 30, through July 1 1916. Each page is a foot square, and they're read two by two. It's rather like an appalling version of "Where's Waldo?" in which you need 15-20 minutes for each set of double pages. In them, men are engaged in dozens of activities - loading cannon, feeding horses, sleeping, eating chow, looking at maps, marching into the trenches, even using the latrine.
At daybreak, after a huge but, we now know, utterly ineffective barrage, the troops rise out of trenches with their 60 pounds of equipment and start across No Man's land. Then the ever-invisible Germans let loose with artillery and waves of machine gun fire. Soldiers are mown down like wheat, kneel in death, fall across barbed wire, are blown skyward. Later troops can’t even get out of the trenches for the bodies piled on the parapets. A few lucky ones cower in shell holes. The last panel depicts the wrenching task of burying the blasted bodies in row after row of temporary graves.
After one battalion lost 80 percent of its 600 soldiers, a survivor wrote, " We were two years in the making and ten minutes in the destroying."
To me, this printed spectacle is almost more powerful than actual photographs might be, because this march to catastrophe is enlarged by our imagination.
