For most Americans who do not live in New York, the town of Saratoga is just a place we memorized in history class. Most of us learned about it in a Revolutionary War unit of some kind and know that it was the turning point battle in our fight for independence from the British. If you ask almost any American to give you specific details about the battle or even why it was considered the turning point, most would struggle to provide any response.
The truth is that’s how it is about most significant events in our history and certainly with respect to battles and war. This is one of the reasons why the work of the National Parks to preserve these details and these spaces is so vital for our country’s citizens. These sites prick our conscience and poke our sides, commanding us to sit up and pay respect long after the final bullets have been fired. Battlefields and the stories about all of the people involved in the conflict are essential for the edification of all of us because the truth is, we forget. We forget the awfulness, the bravery, the tragedies, the miscalculations, the heroic sacrifices, and the wasted lives of war all too easily and all too often.
When we first entered Saratoga National Historic Park, it felt familiar. Most of the battlefields in the National Park system put off the same vibe. They are usually empty, quiet, and green.
Often times, even I, a history teacher, with a vested interest in learning everything there is to know about all of these places so I can share it with my students, arrive at these National Park battlefield sites and feel disappointed. Most are just fields, small hills, trees, and grass.
If you’re lucky, these sites occasionally have a piece of armament leftover from the era and if you’re really lucky, you might even be able to time a visit with a re-enactment that brings the battles back to life. But most days, you will find silence. You have to use your imagination to visualize what it was like at Saratoga in 1777 for those few weeks nearly 250 years ago.
When you say “park” to children, their ideas about what that experience will be like versus the reality of most battlefield sites takes it to another level of disenchantment and disappointment. Kids want action. “There’s nothing here to even look at…” is a tough obstacle to overcome with children when visiting these sites but it’s one worth the effort.
The recent events in Russia and the Ukraine illustrate the importance of these sites. It feels like we could all be at another turning point in history: sadly, a turn back towards the past of more death and destruction yet in a hyper connected world where we all feel like we are a small part of what is occurring whether it’s in Kyiv, Lviv, or Kherson.
There will be towns in Ukraine that will be sacred spaces and memorialized just like our Saratoga. And likely, in 100 years or so, all the people that lived through the horror of the battles will be gone and it will be important to never forget what happened. Knowledge of the past is vital to prevent making the same errors in another era.
Watching the recent actions of some of the countries involved in the suffering of World War 2, I think it could be argued that many of us including Poland, Germany, and even the U.S. are remembering the lessons from Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo and are trying hard to prevent a similar fate as their countrymen and the world suffered in the 1940’s eighty years ago. Preservation, accuracy, and remembrance are so, so important as is action rooted in the knowledge of the past no matter how much the world, technology, and life has changed.
Sometimes it is tough to bear witness to these horrific acts. We don’t really want to know and experience what it is like to be bombed, to be hungry, and to be forced to defend yourself and your family against impossible odds. Watching more than a million people stream out of Ukraine into Poland, watching buildings explode in a second’s notice, and watching men collapse on the roadside trying to defend their homes against aggression is not easy to see from afar or up close. But witness and remember we must, the truth must be captured and preserved for them, for us, for now, and for the future.
The lessons we learn from the preservation and memorialization of these fields and sacred spaces shape us, warn us, and guide us. Whether it’s Saratoga or the Sudetenland, Manassas or the Marne, patterns of human behavior emerge.
In the early days of wars there is doubt of its existence, then shock at its reality. Next, confidence builds that it will end quickly, followed by disillusionment that it won’t, and finally the truth sets in: many, many people are going to die and terrible and brave actions will need to be taken in order to restore peace. With Ukraine, for most of us outside of that part of the world, it feels like we are still in the shock stage.
But if the patterns we learn about from visiting battlefields stay true, awful amounts of destruction and death will be coming in greater quantities affecting more and more people beyond the Ukraine in the days ahead.