TIME-LIFE the Civil War--On the Front Lines by The Editors of TIME-LIFE

Author:The Editors of TIME-LIFE
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036050;HIS027110;HIS038000
Publisher: Liberty Street
Published: 2016-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

WITNESS TO WAR

The Reality of the Battlefield

ROMANTICIZED VIEWS OF WAR WERE QUICKLY SHATTERED IN THE FACE OF THE HORRORS OF COMBAT.

Private Samuel “Sam” Watkins of Company H, 1st Tennessee Infantry, wrote excellent accounts of battles in his memoir Company Aytch.

Mid-19th century Americans commonly held a romanticized image of warfare, popularized by novelists like Sir Walter Scott. They imagined great ranks of uniformed young men emitting excited cheers as they dashed shoulder to shoulder toward the enemy line in an irrepressible charge. Such notions of glory quickly disappeared in the face of the horror and gore of combat. Private Sam Watkins, a Southern soldier, recorded an account of a Confederate assault during the 1864 Battle of Atlanta:

We rushed forward up the steep hillsides, the seething fire from ten thousand muskets and small arms, and forty pieces of cannon hurled right into our very faces . . . piling the ground with our dead and wounded almost in heaps. It seemed that the hot flames of hell were turned loose in all their fury . . . The continued roar of battle sounded like unbottled thunder. Blood covered the ground, and the dense smoke filled our eyes, and ears, and faces. The groans of the wounded and dying rose above the thunder of battle. . . .

I was shot in the ankle and on the heel of my foot. I crawled into [the enemy’s] abandoned ditch, which then seemed full and running over with our wounded soldiers. . . .

While I was sitting here, a cannon ball came tearing down the works, cutting a soldier’s head off, splattering his brains all over my face and bosom, and mangling and tearing four to five others to shreds. . . .

It was the picture of a real battlefield. Blood had gathered in pools, and in some instances had made streams of blood. ’Twas a picture of carnage and death.

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