The General: A Diminutive Bay Stater Became a Legend for His Pre-World War II Battlefield Trips
By John Banks
AUGUST 2018 • CIVIL WAR TIMES MAGAZINE
Fred Wilder Cross was so knowledgeable about the Civil War history of his home state of Massachusetts that a friend swore he could call the roll of many of its regiments from memory. He greatly admired the heroics of John Mosby—Cross owned at least six books on the Confederate guerrilla—and relished walking Civil War battlefields, often with a half-dozen or so friends from Virginia and Maryland, whom he called “The Battle-field Expeditionary Force.†Cross, who stood only about 5’2†or 5’3â€, was always the “General†of the force, while his friends in the merry band he called “colonel,†or “major,†or a lesser rank.
In the decades before World War II, Cross traveled from his Cape Cod–style house near railroad tracks in South Royalston, Mass., to his second home in Florida. He went by bus because trains didn’t stop at battlefields. A first-class Civil War geek, Cross sometimes stayed in private hotels, but preferred historic homes on battlefields, where he enjoyed talking with descendants of those who lived at the sites during the war.
http://www.historynet.com/general-pre-world-war-ii-battlefield-trips.htm
