And few of them could know how much the Civil War would change in its last few months. The recruits of Company K were to experience the warfare of the future, not the conflict the veterans were familiar with. In the recruit's war, the body count would serve as a scorecard. But they would not march across fields, their banners flapping in the wind and meet the foe head on, they would fight it out from behind roks and trees and breastworks and trenches and wire entanglements and wooden obstruction. In Virginia, they would fight the sort of war the great enemies of Europe would come to know in 1914.
Most modern readers are familiar with what the Civil War was like at the outset.
In July 1861, thousands of patriotic Union and Confederate volunteers, wearing brightly colored parade ground uniforms, met on fields near Manassas, Virginia. There, in what is today suburban Washington DC, the soldiers of each army confidently expected to trounce the other. The war, many believed, would be won for their side in that one battle. Throughout the struggle bands would play sprightly marches. All wounds be superficial.