Review: A Reflection Upon Man's Emotions During Battle
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 14, 2013
This is not a book about a specific person, or about a specific battle.  Our protagonist isn't even given a name, age or home, save during his musings back to when he quit seminary school (indicating probably about 18 years old, and from the Northeast), and bade farewell to his mother, who called him Henry.  We meet "the youth", as he's called throughout, while he's waiting to be sent to battle for the first time.  The youth must have been a Northern soldier, and the battle must have been in Virginia; other than that, this book is more generic with regard to events, and about emotions, changes in soldiers, and their reactions to events.Halfway through this book:  "The youth took note of a remarkable change in his comrade since those days of camp life upon the river bank.  He seemed no more to be continually regarding the proportions of his personal prowess.  He was not furious at small words that pricked his conceits. He was no more a loud young soldier.  There was about him now a fine reliance...."Toward the end of the battle:  "...The lieutenant, also, was unscathed in his position at the rear.  He had continued to curse, but it was not with the air of a man who was using his last box of oaths..."At the end of the book:  "A specter of reproach came to him.  There loomed the dogging memory of the tattered soldier - he who, gored by bullets and faint for blood, had fretted concerning an imagined wound in another; he who had loaned his last of strength and intellect for the tall soldier; he who, blind with weariness and pain, had been deserted in the field..."A powerful reflection upon the changing of a man during the course of a battle.  It's slow reading, because it does warrant reflection.