Tell them...

I think about mortality a lot—possibly too much. This is the elegiac streak that has caused everything from the Iliad and Beowulf to True Grit and The Inheritors to resonate so strongly with me. And one particular aspect of death that I often reflect on is last words, whether famous or not.

Wikipedia has a marvelous collection of last words—hundreds and hundreds of examples. As with all things Wikipedia, especially bulk lists of information, you should certainly check the source of each quotation before you plow ahead with it, but simply reading through them one after another is a powerful opportunity for reflection.

Death catches people at unpredictable times, and a person’s last words have a way of freezing each speaker’s final moment in all its particularity and, often, peculiarity. Tellingly, Wikipedia’s list includes a subheading for “Ironic last words” like the example par excellence of General John Sedgwick. Warned of Confederate sharpshooters during the fighting at Spotsylvania Courthouse, he said, “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” He was shot in the head moments later.

But I’m particularly interested in the last words of people who knew what was coming, that their time was short. What is that like? I often wonder. The knowledge of their approaching death seems to have sharpened their speech. It is poignant in an almost literal sense. These words fall into several varieties.

A certain kind of poncey literary type seems to go out with a sniffy quip. Thus Lytton Strachey, author of the dishonest and low-minded Eminent Victorians: “If this is dying, I don’t think much of it.” Or, in perhaps the most famous example, the last words of Oscar Wilde. Others offer proto-Oprah pablum, as in the case of William James: “These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

Pure treacle. There are others who greet death with defiance, especially among those who were executed, like Breaker Morant (“Shoot straight, you bastards. Don’t make a mess of it.”), or who plead for mercy, or who scorn their killers.

But two other kinds of last words strike me especially deeply. The first are those who, in their final moments, were more concerned for others than themselves. Among these are New Zealand mountaineer Rob Hall, on the phone with his pregnant wife as he froze to death on Mount Everest: “I love you. Sleep well my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” Or Abigail Adams, to her distraught husband: “Do not grieve, my friend, my dearest friend. I am ready to go. And John, it will not be long.” There are many more examples among soldiers killed in battle like Marine Captain Lloyd Williams, who is most famous for coining the phrase “Retreat, hell!” but, upon being gassed at Belleau Wood, told a corpsman, “Don’t bother with me. Take care of my good men.”

These lay dying and tried to tell those around them it would be all right or to look after someone else. I can only pray to have the courage and clarity and simple goodness to emulate them when my time comes.

The other kind, which often overlaps with the above, are those who use their final moments to send messages—asking someone to tell others something for them. I started paying close attention to this when I noticed a lot of such last words among men killed in the Civil War.

Some of these can seem petty, or at least spiteful. When Union officer George Dashell Bayard succumbed to a mortal wound from a ricocheting cannonball at Fredericksburg in December 1862, he took his final moments to say this: “Tell McClellan that my last regret as a military man is that I did not die serving under him.” That’s General George McClellan, former commander of the Army of the Potomac, whom Lincoln had replaced with General Ambrose Burnside a few months prior. Bayard’s last words were a dig at Burnside. You did this to me. I don’t know what to make of that.

Confederates seem especially concerned with sending a final message. At Gettysburg, Mississippian General William Barksdale was severely wounded leading in an attack on the second day. I’ve seen a few slightly different versions of his final words, but here they are as reported in Allen Guelzo’s Gettysburg: The Last Invasion: “Tell my wife I fought like a man and will die like one.”

Even John Wilkes Booth, a noncombatant, felt something of the same instinct. While his two final words, “Useless, useless,” spoken as he stared at his paralyzed hands, are well-remembered, just before this he told a nearby soldier, “Tell Mother I died for my country.” What might have been moving in a uniformed man on the battlefield feels laughably self-serving in this context—the classic egotism of the assassin. Maybe that’s why the clearer, sharper final words are more famous. They’re more honest.

Perhaps the two most famous Confederate generals, both in delirium on their deathbeds in 1863 and 1870, asked others to tell someone something. Stonewall Jackson, dying of pneumonia, was issuing orders. Just before saying his famous last words, he trailed off with, “Order AP Hill to prepare for action! Pass the infantry to the front rapidly. Tell Major Hawks…” And General Lee, seven years later, half a decade after the war, also had AP Hill on his mind just before his most famous final words: “Tell Hill he must come up!”

Colonel Isaac Avery’s dying note

But the two that really get me are lesser-known, ordinary men—a junior officer and a common soldier. Another fatality at Gettysburg, Colonel Isaac Avery of North Carolina, was struck in the neck on July 3 and apparently bled to death. Before he died, he scribbled the following note lefthanded: “Major, Tell my father I died with my face to the enemy.” The note is in the North Carolina state archives.

And then there’s Richard Rowland Kirkland of South Carolina, still remembered as “the Angel of Marye’s Heights.” At Fredericksburg, Sergeant Rowland had voluntarily gathered canteens and taken them over the wall into no-man’s-land to give water to the wounded and dying Yankees scattered all over the open fields below the heights. Less than a year later, at Chickamauga in north Georgia, the situation was reversed, and the recently promoted Lieutenant Rowland was shot leading an attack uphill against dug-in Union infantry. Before he died, he told his men to save themselves and concluded with one request: “Tell my father I died right.”

You feel the weight and meaning of these words instinctively, on the gut level, and yet it is hard to articulate what makes them so powerful.

There are the factors one can describe sociologically—honor, courage, chivalrous masculinity, and all the other things modern scholars write so scornfully about but that meant so much to that generation. There are also what we rather weakly call “human factors”: Thinking of family in one’s final moments, the parallel concern to give them some consolation that their death was a good death, that their memory—all that will be left of them—can be cherished unsullied.

But I think the crucial factor is distance. These men realize they are dying and think of family, and I imagine they have never felt farther away. It’s the particularity of their deaths—the when and where—frozen in their words. Tell them… may be the most terrible and beautiful and revealing phrase in the war.