Header Thought: The Vulnerable Leader
I’ve always been captured by this John Paul Stain painting, Sacred Ground. It was July 4th, Chamberlain and the survivors of the 20th Maine returned to Little Round Top early in the morning to honor and bid farewell to his fallen soldiers. It was clear and sunny, but a heavy rain was moving in.
Chamberlain wrote, “We returned to Little Round Top where we buried our dead in the place where we had laid them during the fight, marking each grave by a headboard of ammunition boxes with each soldier’s name cut upon it.”
Chamberlain wrote of his sadness as he looked upon his men who had given all. Describing one young man he wrote, “fair young face the sweet mother-look had come out under death’s soft whisper.” He continued, “The men were placed in a single wide grave with touch of elbow still……in a sunny hillside nook.”
In a Memorial Day Address in 1884, he would remember these men:
It is not that these men are dead, but that they have so died…that they offered themselves willingly to death in a cause vital and dear to humanity; and what is more, a cause they comprehended as such, and looking at it, in all its bearings and its consequences, solemnly pledged to it all that they had and were…. This comprehension of the cause—this intelligent devotion—this deliberate dedication of themselves to duty—these deaths suffered in testimony of their loyalty, faith and love, make these men worthy of honor today, and these deaths equal to the lauded deaths of martyrs. Not merely that the cause was worthy but that they were worthy…. God grant to us that lesson of devotion and loyalty be not lost….
Elsewhere, he’d write–reflecting his deeply Biblical lens:
There is a way of losing that is finding. When soul overmasters sense; when the noble and divine self overcomes the lower self; when duty and honor and love,—immortal things,—bid the mortal perish! It is only when a man supremely gives that he supremely finds.
This is the great reward of service, to live, far out and on, in the life of others; this is the mystery of Christ, – to give life’s best for such high sake that it shall be found again unto life eternal.