Books like Shiloh

"A book about war, to be read by men, ought to tell what each of the twelve of us saw in our own little corner. Then it would be the way it was – not to God but to us."I don’t know why I have this partiality for war novels. Somehow I’m drawn to them, despite the anguish and gruesomeness. I imagine it’s because these books strip humanity down to its bare bones, and that is something that always appeals to me. Perhaps by looking at the core of our being, I believe I’ll come closer to understanding mankind and what makes us really tick. I expect I’ll never uncover an answer, but I’ll keep searching. In this slim work of fiction of the Battle of Shiloh, a two day campaign of the Civil War, Shelby Foote combines factual details and real historical figures along with several invented characters. We meet the giants of the battle, so to speak – men like Sherman, Grant, Johnston, Forrest, Beauregard, Wallace, Buell and others. But each chapter is told from the point of view of an imaginary soldier or officer of the army, alternating between North and South. This approach brings the reader up close and personal to the battle, right in the midst of the anticipation of fighting and the combat itself. It’s a technique that is very efficient. The reader experiences the emotions of the characters, senses the confusion, and ultimately questions the value of warring against one another. So many of these men were quite young. Many had not marched to battle ever before. A lot of them didn’t necessarily even deeply comprehend what they were fighting for to begin with. I found the musing of one lieutenant particularly poignant as he reminisces of his parents during the time just before the skirmish begins:"It seemed strange that they had met and loved and gone through all that joy and pain, living and dying so that I could lie by a Tennessee campfire under a spangled reach of April sky, thinking of them and the life that had produced me."I suspect many a young man was told of the glories of war, the heroism of those that would leave home and fight for a cause, no matter the cause. When landed squarely in the action, however, I have a further hunch that many found the luster to fade to dullness and a lowness of spirit. Dying itself no longer held the splendor it once did."… even the dead and dying didn’t have any decency about them – first the Yankees back on the slope, crumpled and muddy where their own men had overrun them, then the men in the field beyond the tents, yelping like gut-shot dogs while they died…"The book starts and ends with the reflections of one young man, Lieutenant Palmer Metcalfe, aide-de-camp to General Albert Sidney Johnston of the Confederate Army. It’s rather striking to see the difference two days make in the heart of a man after defeat, as he ponders what went wrong. Shiloh is brilliantly researched by Shelby Foote, a noted American Civil War historian. It depicts the horror of the war and the inner minds of those characters that represent a nation of men split apart during the infancy of this new country. It didn’t quite have the emotional pull for me as did Howard Bahr’s The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War, but it came pretty damn close. "I got the notion they were not only trying to get away from the fighting, they were trying to walk right out of the human race."