The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Modern War Studies)

With its relentless bloodshed, devastating firepower, and large-scale battles often fought on impossible terrain, the Civil War was a terrifying experience for a volunteer army. Yet, as Earl Hess shows, Union soldiers found the wherewithal to endure such terrors for four long years to emerge victorious.

A vivid reminder that the business of war is killing, Hess's study plunges us into the hellish realms of Civil War combat -- a horrific sensory experience crowded with brutalizing sights, sounds, smells, and textures. We share the terror of being shot at for the first time and hear the "grating sound a minie ball makes when it hits a bone instead of the heavy thud when it strikes flesh". We are assaulted by choruses of groans from the wounded and dying and come to understand why some soldiers returned to battle with great anxiety.

Drawing extensively upon the letters, diaries, and memoirs of Northern soldiers, Hess reveals not only their deepest fears and shocks, but also their sources of inner strength. By identifying recurrent themes found in these accounts, Hess constructs a multi-layered view of the many ways in which these men coped with the challenges of battle. He shows how they were bolstered by belief in God and country, or simply by their sense of duty; how they came to rely on the "family support" found in regiments formed by members from the same community; and how they learned to muster self-control in order to persevere from one battle to the next.

Although our ability to appreciate war as it was conducted in the previous century has been clouded by our familiarity with modern conflicts, Hess's study conveys that lost reality with an immediacy rarely matched by otherbooks. More than that, it urges us to reconsider these soldiers as not merely victims of the battlefield but rather as victors over the worst that war can offer.

"The most telling examination of the experience of battle we have". William C. Davis

"An important contribution to our understanding of the Union soldier's experiences on the battlefield. Hess describes the horrors of combat graphically and demonstrates clearly how the common soldier learned to cope, both during the war and afterwards. His analysis is on target, and so is his prose. This is a book that deserves a wide reading". John F. Marszalek, author of Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order