Winds of Time
Col. Ephrahm Clarke, Iowa, USA
October 1999
Iused to live not ten miles from the killing-fields of Siloh, where took place some of the bloodiest fighting of the American civil war. Determined to see than my children and grandchildren never forget the blood that was shed here, and the ultimate price paid for freedom, I saw that all of them learned this shameful chapter of our history, so the past may never repeat itself.
In October 1963 I took my second youngest daughter on an outing to the battleground, this was before a lot of the "fortune hunters" worked the place over with metal locaters and looted it raw, and a wind freshened up from the crossroads to the east. Rose was walking along through the dry leaves and suddenly stopped and cocked her head like she was listening. I stopped walking and listened too, since it is impossible to hear anything short of a semi over crunching leaves. When the wind was still, we heard nothing. When the wind gusted we could hear music, faint and far away. Being of the military I am well versed in Bugle call, and recognised this as an obsolete processional, followed by silence, then the Taps, although it sounded different...out of tune or something. We listened to it for the better part of an hour, and it finally got so faint neither one of us could hear it at all. Now I am a man of science, and gather all the facts I can before drawing conclusions, but I was stymed...we were there alone, I am sure of it. I heard stories about sound waves hitting the upper atmosphere and bouncing back to Earth again, many miles from their place of origin. Although I have never had this happen to me I can see where it may be a possibility after all A.M. and F.M. radio waves travel many tens and hundreds of miles without injury. On the other hand, the weakest places of the veil between this world and the next is said to be at a crossroads, and we weren't fifty feet from the crossroads.
Perhaps our ancestors have more than one way of getting the word out.
And maybe we had better listen...