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"practical realities" meant either that burials had to be organized more hastily and impersonally or that "retreating armies ... had to depend on the humanity of their opponents, who predictably gave precedence to their own casualties." While officers generally received more privileged treatment, ordinary foot soldiers would likely be interred individually in shallow, often unmarked graves--that is, if their own side buried them. If left to the handling of the enemy, they would probably be dumped with other fallen soldiers into large pits. As a consequence, nearly half of the Union dead and far more of the Confederate could be identified only, as Walt Whitman would note, "by the significant word UNKNOWN." Not until World War I would American soldiers wear "dog tags."
How, then, would families at home determine the fates and the whereabouts of loved ones in the field? How would they struggle not only to learn whether loved ones were alive or dead, but also to comprehend--to "realize," as they put it in their letters and diaries--the fact of death without its physical embodiment, its visibility? Improvisation, together with enormous energy, was required here as well. Sources of "official" information--reports of field commanders, casualty lists in newspapers--were few, and they were often unreliable or inadequate. "You may have heard before you read this that I was killed or wounded," one New York soldier, anticipating Mark Twain's famous quip, could write his sister after the Battle of the Wilderness, "but allow me to contradict the report."
