This book was the basis for the movie "Gettysburg." The movie was good but, not surprisingly, the book was much better. In the summer of 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac river and invaded the United States through Maryland and Pennsylvania. General Lee was emboldened by a string of victories over his Northern enemies and was looking to end the war once and for all by taking Washington DC. War on his enemy's home ground would also allow his army to live off Union lands, allowing the farmers of Virginia a respite from supplying the Confederate army. It was the second time in less than ten months that Lee had invaded the Union. The previous invasion had ended in the single bloodiest day in American history at the Battle of Antietam (or Sharpsburg, as the Confederacy called it). That rare Union victory had lead to the re-election of Abraham Lincoln and his subsequent issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
General Lee felt that this second invasion was a strategic necessity. Time was running short for the Confederate States of America. The Union naval blockade was beginning to have an affect on their economy and inflation was rising. Tennessee was teetering and ready to fall to Union forces lead by General Rosecrans. Farther west, a Union general named Grant was about to take Vicksburg and close off the entire Mississippi River to Southern shipping. The Confederacy needed another miracle. They needed another big win, maybe one that could end the war. Thus was born the greatest battle of the American Civil War, Gettysburg.
But you have read all of that before. It's in history books and you've read stacks of those. This book was different. "The Killer Angels" made it all feel more personal. Instead of the bird's eye view that you are used to experiencing in history books, where vast armies sweep through states with giant colored arrows indicating their movements on maps, this book brought the war down to ground level (although the maps in the book are superb). Shaara was able to put you there, standing on Seminary Ridge, looking out across the mile of No Man's Land between you and the Union positions on Cemetery Ridge. You could see it all clearly, feel the July sun on your shoulders and smell the grass. Writing a novel about the battle, instead of a non-fiction book, allowed Shaara to be very sensual, inviting you into the minds of the men involved. It made the whole affair feel more visceral and gave it all a personal touch that was surprising to you, and very impressive.
One of the most remarkable things about the Civil War is that so many willingly died for such a terrible purpose. The Rebels fought to maintain the institution of slavery, or at least the 'honor' of their home states. The men from the North, whether they knew it or not, were fighting for a freedom few in human history had ever been privileged to fight for. Shaara explores the minds of men on both sides of the war, even the Southern notion that the war was fought over some lofty ideals. He quotes the southerners lamenting state's rights, and he gives air to their milquetoast argument that government comes from the consent of the governed, and since they refused to consent they should therefore be free from said government. It's all bullshit that has somehow been passed down through the generations as gospel. The Confederate States of America may have seceded from the USA over an issue of state's rights, but it was over those states' right to allow their citizens to own slaves! Any other argument is beside the point, and Shaara makes that clear.
He takes you inside the mind of General Lee and illuminates his inner struggle with the issue.
"When Virginia left the Union she bore his home away as surely as if she were a ship setting out to sea... So it was no cause and no country he fought for, no ideal and no justice. He fought for his people, for the children and the kin, and not even the land, because not even the land was worth the war, but the people were, wrong as they were, insane even as many of them were, they were his own, he belonged with his own. And so he took up arms willfully, knowingly, in perhaps the wrong cause against his sacred oath and stood now upon alien ground he had once swore to defend... without any choice at all; there had never been an alternative except to run away, and he could not do that."
The book is written quite beautifully, almost poetically. It's no wonder it won the '74 Pulitzer Prize. Each chapter is from a different historical character's point of view and hops from one side of the battle to the other. Shaara moves seamlessly from emotionless and detailed exposition to First Person train of thought. That sounds like it would be awkward to read, but it isn't at all. Shaara makes it feel very natural. He helped you to see the war on a personal level. He describes how everything feels. Not just the feel of the ground under their feet or the wind in their hair, but that nebulous feeling you get when you are in the middle of a large encampment of men in the dark and quiet night even when you cannot see them, the sense a soldier gets when an attack is eminent, or the instinct a commander feels when the moment is right to strike his enemy's weakness. Each character has his moment in the book's spotlight.
Colonel Buford, the Union cavalry commander, was as indispensable in the first hours of battle as General Stuart, the Confederate cavalry commander, was absent. Accidentally bumping into Rebel soldiers on the outskirts of town, Buford knew he could not win the battle outright, but he could ensure that the Union didn't lose it before it had begun. Using his cavalrymen's mobility to his advantage, he stood up to the gathering Army of Northern Virginia and secured the high ground for the rest of his own army. His calm and measured awareness of the situation, and his faith in his fellow commanders to come to his aide and occupy the ground for which he had fought, likely saved the capital of the United States from falling into the hands of the Confederacy.
The Battle for Little Round Top is told in extraordinary detail. Colonel Chamberlain, a college professor just one year before the battle, was given command of the extreme left flank of the entire Union army. Arriving on the hill minutes before the Rebels attacked it he was forced to beat back wave after wave of some of the Confederacy's best and most battle-hardened troops. He knew he couldn't retreat. If he did, the enemy would place artillery on the heights and bombard the entire Union line. The Army of the Potomac would have had to retreat, and the road to Washington would have been wide open. His ammunition and his men were dwindling, so he did the only thing he could think of. He ordered what men he had remaining to fix bayonets and charge the oncoming rebel forces. Chamberlain did not graduate from West Point, he had no military experience, he was a bookish intellectual. But on that day, his audacity and aggression in the face of ruin made Virginians and Texans who had never known defeat, turn tail and run for the first time in the whole war. Colonel Chamberlain earned the Medal of Honor that day, and few men have ever been more deserving.
The day after the battle for Little Round Top, Lee had decided to stop trying the Union flanks and go instead for a massed charge right into the middle of their line. He gave the honor to Major General Pickett. "The Killer Angels" gives Pickett's Charge the reverence it deserves. You could almost hear the orchestral music swelling in your mind as the Confederate soldiers marched through absolute Hell and, for one brief moment, breached the Union lines. It would have been fitting for the war to have ended right there, on the 4th of July, with the greatest artillery bombardment in history followed by the most famous charge in history. But it did not end there. The three divisions Lee had sent to break the Union lines were destroyed. Lee lost more battle flags in that one moment than he had lost in the entire war up to that point combined. Instead of ending on that beautiful summer's day, with a charge so noble it made the enemy swoon with admiration, the Civil War slogged on for another two years and ended in a swamp under the roof of a run down old court house in Virginia.
General Pickett had been itching to get into the fight. His men had been last in the line of march and had come up to the battle after the first two days of fighting were already over. He looked across the field and saw only honor and glory. He couldn't see, as General Longstreet could, the certainty of death waiting there. Pickett couldn't see that times had changed and war was different from the Napoleon era now. None of them could see it, even the infallible General Lee, none but Longstreet. He knew that modern war had changed, even before machine guns entered the picture. Massed artillery could now wipe out thousands of men in the time it took them to march over a mile of open ground. Longstreet looked across the same ground as Pickett and saw, not glory, but fields of enfilading fire coming from high ground. He saw exposed flanks and a death trap. He saw futility. But the others couldn't see it. They saw only Glory.
And so they all died. They died on that day and in the days and months to come. They died by the thousands there at Gettysburg, and they died at Cold Harbor and the Wilderness and countless other battlefields over the next two years. Yet no one learned the lesson. Five decades later, Generals would still see only glory and would still be ordering men into suicide charges against protected enemy lines, through aimed fire and artillery barrages. Even more men would die then. They would die at the Somme and Verdun, at Passchendaele and Belleau Woods, and they would call that war the Great War.
"The Killer Angels" made one thing clear to you that you were honestly not fully aware of. The revered and almost infallible General Lee made a huge mistake in fighting this battle. He allowed himself to be lured into a fight he should have avoided. He was used to an enemy who was incompetent and who ran away when faced with aggressive tactics. Lee had grown complacent and was relying on a general who was dead and gone. Stonewall Jackson would have taken Cemetery Hill on that first day, but Ewell, his replacement, did not. Lee failed to listen to Longstreet and maneuver his army south to cut off the Union forces from DC. He was expecting the same old Army of the Potomac, but he was wrong, and he lost the war because of it.
Through timidity and inaction, the Union's General Meade had won the exact victory that Longstreet was advocating for the South. An expert in the new theory of defensive warfare and realist in the new ways of modern warfare, Longstreet wanted Lee's army to maneuver to ground suitable for defense and force the enemy to expose themselves to destruction by making them come out in the open where massed artillery and aimed rifle fire could tear them apart. Instead, it was the Union's General Meade who had done that very thing, and the Confederacy would never recover.
You may never understand why men sacrifice themselves for unworthy causes, or why we continue to believe that mass violence solves any of our deepest problems,. But books like this one help you to see the world through different eyes. Stories of all kinds, whether they be told in books or movies or oral histories passed from generation to generation, help us all to see the world from different perspectives. You firmly believe that learning to see the world through the eyes of others has a hell of a lot more promise for solving problems than war ever will.
On to the next book!
No comments:
Post a Comment