As Karl Wirz sat in his hotel room, he reckoned that he had never been in such a desolate place in his whole life. As a newspaper photographer, he’d been sent to some hell-holes, but this one beat it all. One restaurant, one hotel, no bars, and a good hour drive from anywhere.
Karl was a true southerner, though, and a small part of him was comfortable here. He’d been sent to photograph re-enactments and memorial ceremonies at the site of Andersonville Prison, a Civil War camp that during its operation in 1864 had held 26,000 prisoners, mostly Union soldiers, within its 26-acre stockade.
Andersonville had been a hard posting even for Confederate guards, many of whom died from disease and malnutrition due to horribly unsanitary conditions and lack of food and clear water. For the prisoners it was a living nightmare. One soldier wrote, ” Wuld that I was an artist & had the material to paint this camp & all its horors or the tounge of some eloquent Statesman and had the privleage of expressing my mind to our hon. rulers in Washington, I should gloery to describe this hell on earth where it takes 7 of its ocupiants to make a shadow.”
Earlier today, Karl had walked around the site, his Nikon slung over a shoulder, looking for images that would compel, images that could somehow capture what this place was, and how it had been. Little was left now, just long lines of thin concrete obelisks that marked lines around the former stockade and its deadline. Here and there, historians had erected replicas of the stockade, the deadline, and the makeshift tent city that once stood inside. The place looked serene, idyllic now, just a lush green field, a perfect place for a picnic.
Now it was eight PM, and Karl was disappointed. He’d gotten nothing today. Amateurish snapshots and trite artsy crap, but nothing that had any power. No quintessential image. He was prouder of the photos he’d taken of cotton ready for harvest than of anything he’d shot at the prison. He had eaten the most tasteless, greasy dinner in recent memory, and was now sitting on a lumpy bed watching a rerun of Green Acres. Why? This wasn’t what had earned him a Pulitzer.
He sat up, turned off the TV, and reached for the bag that held his Nikons. He loaded a roll of 1600ASA pan film, slipping the box tag into the slot on the back of his F2 and writing “ANDERS – PUSH 1X” on it with his Sharpie. Karl’s meticulous nature had always served him well.
He clomped down the stairs of the old hotel, slid into the seat of his rented Geo, and headed over to the prison site. It was a short drive, half a mile or so, and he found a locked gate made of iron pipe, a low gate mainly meant to keep cars out. He sighed heavily, got out of the car, and hopped over the gate. The road into the prison was paved and covered with leaves that made a crunching sound as he walked. A flashlight might not have been a bad idea, he thought, but the moon was nearly full and the sky clear. Aside from deep shadows cast by the trees along the road, he could see quite well. He needed his night vision.
After a few minutes, he reached the northwest corner of the stockade area, where the monuments stood like sentinels. He stopped by the Wisconsin memorial, a huge, imposing stone structure featuring an eagle, and surveyed the site. To his left was the reconstructed northeast corner of the stockade, rough-hewn poles fifteen feet high with a “pigeon’s roost” guard platform on top. Inside these, about six yards away, was the lower rail fence known as the deadline, which prisoners were forbidden to cross on penalty of death.
Ahead was a low valley that cut diagonally across the rectangular stockade area. This had been the latrines. Beyond was a small spring house, and an opposing hillside where small, earthwork forts were the only sign that there’d been any organized presence here.
Karl thought this was a far better way to see the prison site. Gone were the throngs of tourists with their strollers and their Polaroids and their picnic blankets spread over the ground. Gone were the cars and the noise and the park rangers with their repetitive talks about life inside the walls of Andersonville. He could hear the wind sweep through the trees, the gurgling of the little brook, and the rustling of leaves. He set up his tripod, put on his wide angle lens and took an establishing shot, a panoramic view of the whole stockade, bracketing the exposure. A second at F/2.8. It would look almost like daylight, he thought, and smiled.
He walked down the hill slowly, past the monuments, and found himself next to a replica of the north gate. It had a sinister look, as he looked uphill at it from the path at the bottom of the valley. He wondered how many Union soldiers had passed through this gate, going in, and how many had lived long enough to leave through it. He set up his tripod again and took several photos, using the 105mm lens this time to take maximum advantage of the sharp angles and stark perspective. The wind was chilly; he turned up his collar and walked on along the line of the stockade. It was at that moment that he noticed the smell. He froze.
Karl had smelled locker rooms, homeless people, bad food, stagnant water, and a million other unpleasant things in his career. This was a combination of all of them. A dank, musty, stale smell, like fabric rotting. The smell of human waste. The smell of unwashed bodies. Where was it coming from?
He looked around him. The road was deserted. Back the way he’d come the monuments stood as quietly as they had for a century or more. Along the treeline the leaves rustled but nothing else moved. Ahead, up by the old star fort … what was that? Had it been there before? Just inside the perimeter road stood a low shack, resembling a guardhouse. Had he seen that this afternoon? Walking toward it, he rummaged through his camera bag and pulled out a rumpled park map. A blue block marked ‘Guardhouse Site’ seemed to mark the very spot he was walking toward.
As he reached the guardhouse, he thought it must be a terribly faithful reproduction. The wood was well-weathered, the fixtures hand-blacksmithed. He set up a few yards uphill, setting up a shot with the stockade in the background. He’d have to stop the lens way down, and make a long, long exposure to get the depth of field he wanted. He composed the frame carefully, and as he peered through the lens, the door of the guardhouse swung open.
The wind had been calm, hadn’t it? And hadn’t the latch been closed? At any rate, this was too good … he stepped inside the guardhouse, walking to the windows that overlooked the stockade. Only, now they didn’t overlook just row upon row of obelisks marking the stockade line. They overlooked a real stockade … and within it, smoke from a thousand campfires rose into the night. The ground moved, only it wasn’t the ground, it was a sea of men, tens of thousands of men packed shoulder to shoulder, constantly moving, shuffling, trying to find a bit of space. Karl shrank back and blinked. He ran from the shack, looked out … and saw nothing.
“Calm yourself, Karl,” he thought. “You’ve been in scarier places than this. You’re losing it.” It had just been his vivid imagination at work, he was sure.
He stepped back into the shack. Went back to the windows. The camp was back. He could smell it now. The same smell he’d noticed down by the gate was now assailing his nostrils, pungent, horrible, the smell of death. He nearly retched. He turned, and saw a figure in the doorway, limned by the moonlight, squarely blocking his exit.
“Who’s there?”, he said, sounding a lot less confident than he wanted to. There was no reply. The figure stood, unmoving, but he could hear the man breathing. Suddenly a fire flared in the camp behind him, sending a beam of light through the windows, illuminating the scene. The man in the doorway wore a confederate officer’s uniform. He was gaunt, even emaciated. His face was unshaven, and his uniform hung limply from a body far too small for it. As the light flickered, the man seemed to recognize Karl, and he nodded slightly, then took a step back and walked away.
Karl rushed back to the window. He saw the man walking downhill toward the gate. Behind the guard shack, he saw a group of men walking toward him. All were wearing Confederate uniforms, all were very thin as they strode purposefully toward him. Karl rushed from the shack, but this time the scene did not change. Below him, the officer who’d just left was opening the north gate. Prisoners streamed out, all headed toward the guard shack. The stench was overpowering. The men shouted, pointed, and those who were able actually began to run toward him. This wasn’t a good reception, he was quite sure.
He turned, ran … and was caught by the arms by the group of Confederate soldiers streaming from the fort. He screamed. The officer, returning now, stopped before him. He looked at Karl with an expression somewhere between sadness and resolution, and finally spoke at length.
“We are the dead. We are the men who died here, on this ground. We have waited for you.”
“Waited for ME?” Karl asked incredulously. “What connection do I possibly have with this place?”
“Karl, Karl. You are a maker of images, and detail means so much to you, yet you’ve missed the most obvious detail. Hundreds of confederate guards and officers, my brothers in arms, died not far from where you now stand. Thousands of union soldiers died the same way, only far faster and far more horribly. One man was responsible for this, one man placed in charge of this post. Do you recall his name, Karl?”
Karl shivered. He did remember. Earlier today, in the town square, he’d seen the huge monument dedicated to this man. History had long shown him to have been helpless to change conditions inside the prison. He was denied the resources to run the place properly, and was overloaded with twice the prisoners that his facilities could handle. He’d been made a scapegoat and hanged for war crimes soon after the end of the civil war. He’d never been the cruel monster he’d been painted to be, and the monument in town was a tribute to his humanity. These men, though, had died before the truth was known, and these men had been given one name to hate and revile through the decades.
Captain Henry Wirz.
Ranger Sherry Parker found Karl Wirz’ Nikon F2 the next morning, still on its tripod, his camera bag sitting beside it. She carefully packed it and brought it to the museum, sure that someone would arrive to collect it. Weeks later, when no one had, she decided there might be some clue to its owner on the film. With the help of a colleague, she removed the film, pulled out the box flap in case the processor needed it, and took it to Elmira at the drug store. The next day, Elmira called to tell her that her photos were ready. Sherry picked them up at lunchtime. “Not often I get a roll of 1600 that needs pushed to 3200,” Elmira remarked. “Almost forgot how!” Sherry nodded her thanks and began to shuffle through them as she walked out onto the narrow main street sidewalk.
Suddenly she stopped. Her hand flew to her mouth, and she gasped.
In her hands was a beautiful, wide-angle photograph of Andersonville Prison, exactly as it looked in 1864. Campfires burned, smoke rose, and the faces of a thousand inmates stared intently toward the camera. The detail was sharp, crisp, and clean. It almost looked like daylight.
There were only two known photographs in existence of Andersonville’s stockade. Neither of them included the whole area, and neither of them was of good quality. This was an impossible picture, taken at night with ultra-fast film. She shuffled through the rest of the photos. There was one of the north gate, with confederate guards standing sentinel posts along the wall. There was a photo of the spring house, with prisoners lined up for water. Another photo showed the hillside above the sinks, crowded with tents and filled with a sea of men, milling about, with barely room to stand. All totally impossible pictures, but undeniably real down to the last detail.
The last photo on the roll has baffled experts to this day. It’s an image of a man, standing in the doorway of the prison guardhouse, a building that has not existed since 1870. He’s gripping the door frame, poised to run, and he’s looking beyond the camera … in the direction of the star fort. It’s the last image ever seen of Karl Wirz, the self-portrait of a Pulitzer-winning photographer and descendant of Captain Henry Wirz. Behind him, in the guardhouse, stands a man holding a rope, tied into the shape of a noose.