Sherry Chandler

Jesse Stuart on heroism

On the train back to Greenup after completing his training at Camp Knox, Jesse muses on wars and fighting men:

I now thought of how my people loved to fight in wars. I thought of how they enlisted. None of them was ever drafted. Back on Plum Grove Hill, down among some briars, was the grave of Uncle Bob Stuart. The only thing on his thin white stone was his name, date of his birth and death, and the words, “43rd Kentucky Infantry.” But I couldn’t see whose the glory was in taking chances of killing a man or getting killed myself. And before I got to my destination that night I thought about a cousin killed in the World War. When he left the Big Sandy Valley he said he would send back the Kaiser for a souvenir. But he never got the Kaiser. Someone got him…

…my home and my people among the hills that I have always known, the trees, briars, brush, rocks and wild flowers thereon, are these not worth fighting for? The cornfields on the high hill slopes growing in the silver showers of spring and the creamy-colored wheat fields on the uplands in July beneath the great expanse of white clouds that float across the wide blue heavens, and the loamy sags with the heavy tobacco crop where the broad leaves flop-flop in the wind…these timber-covered hills, are they not worth fighting for? Isn’t the rugged earth that holds my dead and feeds me with bread worth fighting for, and these hundreds of acres of elbow-room…The golden Autumn hills and the full bins of ripe harvest from the slopes. I would fight for these.

– Beyond Dark Hills (E.P. Dutton, 1938)

Jesse Stuart served in World War II but the tree hugger in me can’t help pointing out that the greatest danger to his beloved hills and elbow-room may well have been, may well be, an internal one, and the most heroic fighting to save those hills may not be done with guns in foreign lands.

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