LESSONS LEARNED.
I'll return to my efforts to post fifty book reports by year's end by returning to a familiar topic. Book Review No. 20 is a recent academic history of the American Civil War, A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War, by Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh.
( Collapse )I close with some observations about the conventions of chronicling wars. For some reason, Genl Pierre Gustave Toutaint Beauregard often gets referred to as "the Creole." I'm not sure why. (One could refer to him as "the Underachiever," but that could equally well refer to Braxton Bragg or George McClellan.) Now Messrs Murray and Hsieh add another appellation, Genl Sheridan becomes "the Irishman." That strikes me as a more common ethnicity among the officer corps.
Finally, I'd like to see chronicles of war come up with a better locution for describing small encounters. Consider this description of James Wilson's spring 1865 offensive into Mississippi and Alabama, which tore up much of the ironmaking capacity around Birmingham and would have been the news story of the week but for Lee's surrender and Lincoln's murder. "At a cost of only ninety-nine men killed, 598 wounded, and twenty-eight missing, they had destroyed 'seven iron works, seven foundries, two rolling mills, seven collieries, 13 large factories ...'." It's true, 99 dead doesn't rise to the level of a "demonstration" at Gettysburg, let alone to a Cold Harbor or Fredericksburg.
And yet war is cruelty, as Genl Sherman would have it, and you do not refine it by putting "only" in front of a body count.
By all means, though, if you want to get a good exposure to the military side of the Civil War, with efforts to place the events leading to it and the evolution of U.S. military practice since, buy the book.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
( Collapse )I close with some observations about the conventions of chronicling wars. For some reason, Genl Pierre Gustave Toutaint Beauregard often gets referred to as "the Creole." I'm not sure why. (One could refer to him as "the Underachiever," but that could equally well refer to Braxton Bragg or George McClellan.) Now Messrs Murray and Hsieh add another appellation, Genl Sheridan becomes "the Irishman." That strikes me as a more common ethnicity among the officer corps.
Finally, I'd like to see chronicles of war come up with a better locution for describing small encounters. Consider this description of James Wilson's spring 1865 offensive into Mississippi and Alabama, which tore up much of the ironmaking capacity around Birmingham and would have been the news story of the week but for Lee's surrender and Lincoln's murder. "At a cost of only ninety-nine men killed, 598 wounded, and twenty-eight missing, they had destroyed 'seven iron works, seven foundries, two rolling mills, seven collieries, 13 large factories ...'." It's true, 99 dead doesn't rise to the level of a "demonstration" at Gettysburg, let alone to a Cold Harbor or Fredericksburg.
And yet war is cruelty, as Genl Sherman would have it, and you do not refine it by putting "only" in front of a body count.
By all means, though, if you want to get a good exposure to the military side of the Civil War, with efforts to place the events leading to it and the evolution of U.S. military practice since, buy the book.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
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