When I was a little kid I was a pretty colossal cry baby, but now I rarely cry. So you can imagine my consternation when I got teary eyed just reading the introduction to this great novel. It is justifiably considered to be one of the greatest war novels ever written, indeed, I believe it is one of the great novels period. Shaara manages several remarkable feats here: he succeeds in that most important task of the historical novel and brings the Battle of Gettysburg to life with an immediacy that is absolutely breathtaking; he marshals the complicated tactics and strategies of the battle and makes them easy to follow; he presents the ideas and ideals that motivated the men who fought in compelling fashion; he recaptures several American heroes and restores them to a place of honor in our memories; and most importantly, he demonstrates the terrible beauty of war.
I can not possibly do this book justice, so I'll let Shaara's own words
set the scene:
FOREWARD:
I. The Armies
On June 15 the first troops of the Army of Northern
Virginia, Robert E. Lee commanding, slip
across the Potomac at Williamsport and begin the
invasion of the North.
It is an army of seventy thousand men. They
are rebels and volunteers. They are mostly unpaid
and usually self-equipped. It is an army of
remarkable unity, fighting for disunion. It is
Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Though there are
many men who cannot read or write, they all speak
English. They share common customs and a common
faith and they have been consitently
victorious against superior numbers. They
have as solid a faith in their leader as any veteran army
that ever marched. They move slowly north
behind the Blue Ridge, using the mountains to screen
their movements. Their main objective is to
draw the Union Army out into the open where it can
be destroyed. By the end of the month they
are closing on Harrisburg, having spread panic and
rage and despair through the North.
Late in June the Army of the Potomac, ever slow to
move, turns north at last to begin the great
pursuit which will end at Gettysburg. It is
a strange new kind of army, a polyglot mass of vastly
dissimilar men, fighting for union. There
are strange accents and strange religions and many
who do not speak English at all. Nothing like
this army has been seen upon the planet. It is a
collection of men from many different places who
have seen much defeat and many commanders.
They are volunteers: last of the great volunteer
armies, for the draft is beginning that summer in
the North. They have lost faith in their leaders
but not in themselves. They think this will be the
last battle, and they are glad that it is to be
fought on their own home ground. They come up from
the South, eighty thousand men, up the narrow roads
that converge toward the blue mountains.
The country through which they march is some of the most
beautiful country in the Union.
It is the third summer of the war.
II. The Men
larger than Lee, full-bearded, blue-eyed, ominous, slow-talking, crude. He is one of the first of the
new soldiers, the cold-eyed men who have sensed the birth of the new war of machines. He has
invented a trench and a theory of defensive warfare, but in that courtly company few will listen.
He is one of the few high officers in that army not from Virginia.
That winter, in Richmond, three of his children have
died within a week, of a fever. Since that
time he has withdrawn, no longer joins his men for
the poker games he once loved, for which he
was famous.
They call him "Old Pete" and sometimes "The Dutchmen".
His headquarters is always near Lee,
and men remark upon the intimacy and some are jealous
of it. He has opposed the invasion of
Pennsylvania, but once the army is committed he
no longer opposes. Yet he will speak his mind; he
will always speak his mind. Lee calls him,
with deep affection, "my old war horse". Since the
death of Stonewall Jackson he has been Lee's right
hand. He is a stubborn man.
Lewis Armistead, Brigadier General,
forty-six. Commander of one of George Pickett's
brigades. They call him "Lo", which is short
for Lothario, which is meant to be witty, for he is a
shy and silent man, a widower. descended from
a martial family, he has a fighter's spirit, is known
throughout the old army as the man who, while a
cadet at the Point, was suspended for hitting
Jubal Early in the head with a plate. Has
developed over long years of service a deep affection for
Winfield Scott Hancock, who fights now with the
Union. Armistead looks forward to the reunion
with Hancock, which will take place at Gettysburg.
These men wore blue:
professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College, sometimes professor of "Natural and Revealed Religion,"
successor to the chair of the famed Professor Stowe, husband to Harriet Beecher. Tall and rather
handsome, attractive to women, somewhat boyish, a clean and charming person. An excellent
student, Phi Beta Kappa, he speaks seven languages and has a beautiful singing voice, but he has
wanted all his life to be a soldier. The College will not free him for war, but in the summer of
1862 he requests a sabbatical for study in Europe. When it is granted he proceeds not to France but
to the office of the Governor of Maine, where he receives a commission in the 20th Regiment of
Infantry, Maine Volunteers, and marches off to war with a vast faith in the brotherhood of man.
Spends the long night at Fredericksburg piling corpses in front of himself to shield him from
bullets. Comes to Gettysburg with that hard fragment of the Regiment which has survived. One
week before the battle he is given command of the Regiment. His younger brother Thomas
becomes his aide. Thomas too has yearned to be a soldier. The wishes of both men are to be
granted on the dark rear slope of a small rocky hill called Little Round Top.
Winfield Scott Hancock, Major General, thirty-nine.
Armistead's old friend. A magnetic man
with a beautiful wife. A painter of talent,
a picture-book General. Has a tendency to gain weight,
but at this moment is still young and slim, still
a superb presence, a man who arrives on the
battlefield in spotlessly clean linen and never
keeps his head down. In the fight to come he will be
everywhere, and in the end he will be waiting for
Lew Armistead at the top of Cemetery Hill.
The battle itself, as well as all of World War I, is foreshadowed in a speech that Longstreet makes to a British observer:
Let me explain this. Try to see this.
When we were all young, they fought in a simple way. They
faced each other out in the open, usually across
a field. One side came running. The other got one
shot in, from a close distance, because the rifle
wasn't very good at distance, because it wasn't a
rifle. Then after that one shot they hit together
hand to hand, or sword to sword, and the cavalry
would ride in from one angle or another. That's
the truth, isn't it? In the old days they fought from
a distance with bows and arrows and ran at each
other, man to man, with swords. But now, listen,
now it's quite a bit different, and quite a few
people don't seem to know that yet. But we're
learning. Look. Right now, take a man
with a good rifle which has a good range and may even be
a repeater. He can kill at, oh, conservatively,
two, three hundred yards shooting into the crowd
attacking him. Forget the cannon. Just
put one man behind a tree. You can hardly see him from
two hundred yards away, but he can see you.
And shoot. And shoot again. How many men do
you think it will take to get to that man behind
a tree, in a ditch, defended by cannon, if you have
to cross an open field to get him? How many
men? Well, I've figured it. At least three. And he'll
kill at least two. The way you do it is this:
one man fires while one man is moving, and the other is
loading and getting ready to move. That's
how the three men attack. There's always one moving
and one firing. That way you can do it.
If you forget the cannon. But you'll lose one man most
probably on the way across the field, at least one,
probably two, against a cannon you'll lose all
three, no matter what you do, and that's across
the field. Now if you are attacking uphill...
He broke it off. No point in talking this way
to a foreigner. Might have to fight him sometime.
But the man would not see. Longstreet
had spoken to his own officers. They found what he said
vaguely shameful. Defense? When Lee dug trenches
around Richmond they called him, derisively,
the King of Spades.
And so Lee insists on attacking the Union forces, even as Longstreet urges him to withdraw and keep his Army intact.
The most remarkable part of the book is the realism and excitement that Shaara brings to scenes of battle. Here is his description of the action at Little Round Top, where Chamberlain and the 20th Maine held the extreme left of the Union line (note the terse, staccato sentences, urging the action forward):
He (Chamberlain) limped along the line. Signs
of exhaustion. Men down, everywhere. He
thought: we cannot hold.
Looked up toward the crest. Fire still hot
there, still hot everywhere. Down into the dark. They
are damned good men, those Rebs. Rebs, I salute
you. I don't think we can hold you.
He gathered with Spear and Kilrain back behind the
line. He saw another long gap, sent Ruel
Thomas to this one. Spear made a count.
"We've lost a third of the men, Colonel. Over a hundred down. The left is too thin."
"How's the ammunition?"
"I'm checking."
A new face, dirt-stained, bloody: Homan Melcher,
Lieutenant, Company F, a gaunt boy with buck
teeth.
"Colonel? Request permission to go pick up some of our wounded. We left a few boys out there."
"Wait," Chamberlain said.
Spear came back, shaking his head. "We're out." Alarm stained his face, a grayness in his cheeks.
"Some of the boys have nothing at all."
"Nothing," Chamberlain said.
Officers were coming from the right. Down to
a round or two per man. And now there was a
silence around him. No man spoke. They
stood and looked at him, and then looked down into the
dark and then looked back at Chamberlain.
One man said, "Sir, I guess we ought to pull out."
Chamberlain said, "Can't do that."
Spear: "We won't hold 'em again. Colonel, you know we can't hold 'em again."
Chamberlain: "If we don't hold, they go right on by and over the hill and the whole flank caves in."
He looked from face to face. The enormity of
it, the weight of the line, was a mass to great to
express. But he could see it as clearly as
in a broad wide vision, a Biblical dream: If the line broke
here, then the hill was gone, all these boys from
Pennsylvania, New York, hit from behind, above.
Once the hill went, the flank of the army went.
Good God! he could see troops running; he could
see the blue flood, the bloody tide.
Kilrain: "Colonel, they're coming."
Chamberlain marveled. But we're not so bad
ourselves. One recourse: can't go back. Can't stay
where we are. Results: inevitable.
The idea formed.
"Let's fix bayonets," Chamberlain said.
And so begins a bayonet charge that saved the day, the battle and perhaps the Union. It is impossible to read this section of the book (or watch the corresponding scenes in the movie) and not have your pulse quicken and your scalp tingle--and if you're like me, have a tear come to your eye. It is here that Shaara most fully captures the awful fact that for all its horrors, we love war--the heroism, the camaraderie, the sacrifice, the brutal beauty of men facing down their fears, all have a visceral appeal. As Chamberlain walks the battlefield afterwards:
He moved forward and began to climb the big hill
in the dark. As he walked he forgot his pain; his
heart began to beat quickly, and he felt incredible
joy. He looked at himself, wonderingly, at the
beloved men around him, and he said to himself:
Lawrence, old son, treasure this moment. Because
you feel as good as a man can feel.
The book moves on to the courageous folly of Picket's Charge and to the Union's ultimate victory, a victory that Meade squandered by not pursuing the retreating Lee. Shaara provides an afterward that charts the subsequent careers of the remarkable commanders who met at Gettysburg, here are my two heroes, two men who must be reckoned great Americans in any accounting:
AFTERWORD:
JAMES LONGSTREET:
That winter he requests relief from command, on
the ground that he no longer believes the South
can win the war. Lee prevails upon him to
stay. he is wounded severely in the Wilderness, 1864,
but returns to be Lee's most dependable soldier,
his right hand until the end at Appomattox.
After the war he makes two great mistakes.
First, he becomes a Republican, attempts to join with
old comrade Grant in rebuilding the South.
For this he is branded a turncoat, within two years of
the end of the war is being referred to by Southern
newspapers as "the most hated man in the
South."
Second, as time passes and it becomes slowly apparent
that the war was lost at Gettysburg,
Longstreet gives as his opinion what he believes
to be true: that the battle was lost by Robert E.
Lee. This occurs long after Lee's death, when
Lee has become the symbol of all that is fine and
noble in the Southern cause. The South does
not forgive Longstreet the insult to Lee's name. At
the great reunion, years later, of the Army of Northern
Virginia, Longstreet is not even invited, but
he comes anyway, stubborn to the end, walks down
the aisle in his old gray uniform, stars of a
general on his collar, and is received by an enormous
ovation by the men, with tears and an
embrace from Jefferson Davis.
His theories on defensive warfare are generations
ahead of his time. the generals of Europe are still
ordering massed assaults against fortified positions
long after his death, in 1904, at the age of
eighty-three.
JOSHUA LAWRENCE CHAMBERLAIN
In August he is given a brigade. Shortly thereafter
he is so badly wounded, shot through both hips,
that he is not expected to live. But he returns
to become one of the most remarkable soldiers in
American history. Wounded six times.
Cited for bravery in action four times. Promoted to
Brigadier General by special order of Ulysses Grant
for heroism at Petersburg. Breveted Major
General for heroism at Five Forks. He is the
officer chosen by Grant from all other Northern
officers to have the honor of receiving the Southern
surrender at Appomatox, where he startles the
world by calling his troops to attention to salute
the defeated South. He is given first place in the
last Grand Review in Washington. For his day
at Little Round Top he is to receive the
Congressional Medal of Honor.
In Maine he is elected Governor by the largest majority
in the history of the state and returned to
office three times, where he alienates political
friends by refusing to agree to the impeachment of
Andrew Johnson.
In 1876, elected President of Bowdoin College, where
he attempts to modernize the school,
introducing courses in science, de-emphasizing religion,
and becomes involved in student
demonstrations over the question of ROTC.
Receives medal of honor from France for
distinguished efforts in international education.
When he retires from Bowdoin he has taught every
subject in the curriculum exce
(Reviewed:12-Sep-99)
Grade: (A+)
