EMBATTLED COURAGE: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War

by Gerald Linderman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1987

The soldier marching proudly off to the war only to return home battle-scarred and bitter is the clichÉ that Linderman (Mirror of War) here applies with force and fresh life to the Civil War. Liberal extracts from combatants' letters and diaries vivify Linderman's thesis: that soldiers, both Union and Confederate, entered the Civil War with an armor of moral conception that disintegrated in the face of the war's horrors. That armor, he argues, centered around the ideal of courage. It was courage--narrowly defined in the ethos of the time as ""heroic action undertaken without fear""--that acted as a talisman for Civil War soldiers, who believed that the courageous would prevail in battle, and who respected courage so highly that at the war's start they often refrained from killing an enemy who displayed it: ""Thank God that brave man was not killed,"" records a Union soldier of a Confederate officer displaying coolness under fire. But all too soon the regard for courage eroded, and the civility accorded it as well. Linderman places the blame on three major causes, each documented with source materials: the obscenity of battle itself, which left men questioning any imputation of glory to such bloody work; the diseases that ravaged both armies, against which courage proved to be an impotent charm; and the growing efficiency of battle, with longer-range rifles and trench warfare upping the distance between combatants and thus allowing dehumanization and disrespect of the enemy. Added to this was a growing willingness to plunder enemy houses as home supplies dwindled, and the miasmic experience of prisoner-of-war camps. By war's end, Linderman concludes, an unbridgeable gap existed between soldiers, who knew of a savage and dishonorable war, and civilians, who still believed in the fanciful war of moral codes. Brief biographies of the men and women quoted, 20 pages of notes, and a 16-page bibliography append the book. A fine addition to Civil War scholarship, this well-crafted, carefully researched report also holds up a fascinating, if not surprising, mirror to our own Vietnam-haunted era.

Pub Date: April 1, 1987

ISBN: 0029197619

Page Count: -

Publisher: Free Press/Macmillan

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION