“Men rise from the ground and fall in on their regimental leaders as temperatures reach the high 80s under skies that seem a prediction of what is to come. Grey clouds, weighted by humidity, battle for space with patches of blue, both colors holding firm until the upper winds mingle them in chaos and confusion.”
The Path to Total War
The bloodiest soil of the Civil War was Virginia's: for four years armies surged across the state, from the low swamps along the Hampton Roads, west to Richmond and beyond -- and the 53rd Virginia manned the front lines for some of the most savage engagements.
“Here and there over the grounds were seen through that night a circle of lanterns waving around the tables of amputators. Every few moments there was a shriek of some poor fellow under the knife.”
The reader of Enduring War is brought into the command tents and staff meetings of Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, George McClellan -- but the true driver of the story is not the strategies devised by the generals. Rather, this is a story of the soldiers whose names do not fill the standard history books. The men of the 53rd Virginia were at the heart of the Civil War until the final day at Appomattox, and it is their words that drive the narrative. A retreat on hands and knees through the corpses lining the slopes of Gettysburg's Cemetery Ridge -- a daring one-man prison break across a frozen lake in the dead of a Northern winter -- a mission to protect Lee's retreat by holding a critical river crossing against overwhelming odds: the stories are real, and riveting.
A map of Virginia to the west of Richmond, commissioned for this book. Click to enlarge.
“I saw one shell which just passed over my head and struck the company to the left of mine and carry down thirteen men at once in a perfect mangled mass of flesh and blood, indistinguishable one from the other.”
“Our color sergeant kept the colors in advance, the last order given to him being to move slower...Private Churchwell Parker then took them and was almost instantly killed...Capt. R.T. Daniel volunteered for the fight, grasped the colors and coolly and calmly waving them fell pierced by three balls...as he fell he drove the staff into the ground, still holding onto it until taken from him by Colonel Edmonds, in whose hands the staff was soon shot and shivered into fragments...”
The Front Lines Reach the Home Front
“They took all of the cattle, sheep, hogs...they left the garden, the house, the farm and all of us alive. If I were a man, I would never take a prisoner. I would consider it my duty to rid the world of such monsters.”
As the fortunes of war turned, and Union forces swept across Virginia, the lines between the war front and the home front grew blurred -- and then vanished.
The story brings the reader to the moment when society's unwritten laws governing the actions of "gentlemen" began to fray, and young women rose up as protectors of their families, the final and only defense against the armed soldiers at their doors -- and against the hunger that threatened the lives of their children.
“God grant that you may be worried no more, and if the Yankees have been near you — God grant you may have been able to stand all you were called upon to endure. Oh, my dear wife, I have thought of you so much...I dread the Yankees may not have left you and our family enough to eat...”