Two Men on the Beach Road

Two men stand talking on the beach track, hands in pockets, with the camp's tents and a flag off to the left and the sea running out flat to the right. Haas & Peale made the plate in the siege summer of 1863, and nothing in it is posed except the pause.

Photographs of sieges run to guns and parapets because guns and parapets hold still. This one holds the other truth of Morris Island: most hours of the fifty-eight days were spent like this — men between duties, on sand, in heat, under a flag too far off to read.