THEY WHO FOUGHT HERE

This is a Civil War book with a difference, for it deals not with generals, battles or politics but with the life of the soldiers, both Union and Confederate, who fought the war -- the enlisted men. Based less on official documents and dispatches than on letters, badly spelled, unpunctuated scrawls written by homesick boys to their families, and on the comments of long-suffering officers or baffled chaplains, the book tells what the boys in blue or gray thought about the whole business, what they ate and wore, even to underwear, what arms they carried and what cannon they fired -- and how,- the bugle-calls they obeyed or ignored, their propensity to steal, gamble and swear, the last a Scarlet Sin,- the medicines poured down them, how they were cared for -- or not cared for -- when wounded, and everything else imaginable about them. Meticulously documented, copiously illustrated, the book is a fascinating record even for laymen; a superb gift-book for Civil War buffs on both sides it should also prove an indispensible reference for Civil War and military historians and for those few authors who have yet to write a Civil War novel.