Book Review: Mr. Lincoln’s Army
Oct. 28th, 2021 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI’ve been meaning to read Bruce Catton’s Mr. Lincoln’s Army almost since I started work on Sleeping Beauty, as I figured it would kill two birds with one stone: it would be Civil War research for Russell’s life, and it would give insight into mid-twentieth-century America, as Catton was one of the most famous Civil War researcher at the time and probably the author Andrew would most likely read when trying to gain insight into Russell.
It’s also a cracking good read. Catton portrays historical figures in lively strokes, so you feel like you know them, which I realize is a quality that can be misleading - but I nonetheless prefer it to reading a history book and going, “Which interchangeable general is leading this charge, again?”
He’s also got a wonderful eye for the human touch in any situation. For instance, after three Union soldiers find Lee’s complete order of battle wrapped around three cigars, he notes, “It is irritating, in a mild sort of way, that none of the accounts of his affair mention what finally happened to the cigars.”
I also found his battle descriptions clear - well, clear is maybe not the right word, because part of his point is that it’s actually very hard for anyone to tell what is going on during a battle (especially a Civil War battle, when the gunpowder created an oily dark smoke that made it almost impossible to see what was happening). But he’s very good at explaining what the generals meant to achieve, where that plan went wrong (my favorite is the guys who range up and down a creek looking for a ford… when the whole creek is so shallow that you can cross it wherever you like), and what they actually ended up achieving instead.
A couple of passages struck me as particularly useful for my fell purposes. Here’s this one, which perfectly illustrates the different views of war popular in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries: “Men would sing [“When This Cruel War Is Over”] and cry. More than any other possession of the army, it expressed the deep inner feeling of the boys who had gone to war so blithely in an age when no one would speak the truth about the reality of war: war is tragedy, it is better to live than to die, young men who go down to dusty death in battle have been horribly tricked.”
So you have Russell politely trying to spare Andrew’s innocence by only describing the fun, non-battle parts of war, like mock-battle snowball fights and stealing Rebel chickens for chicken stew, and meanwhile Andrew is already at “It was probably too awful for him to talk about, like my uncle who fought on Iwo Jima.”
The other is Catton’s discussion of the transition from smoothbore to rifled muskets, which happened swiftly over the first year of the Civil War, and began to march of advances in gun technology that ended in the slaughter on the battlefields of World War I.
“It was these ineffective old smoothbores on which all established combat tactics and theories were based. That is why the virtues of the bayonet figured so largely in the talk of professional soldiers of that era. Up until then the foot soldier was actually a spear carrier in disguise, the bayonet was the decisive weapon, and an infantry charge was just the old Macedonian phalanx in modern dress - a compact mass of men projecting steel points ahead of them, striving to get to close quarters where they could either impale their opponents or force them to run away… But with the rifled musket it just didn’t work that way anymore. The compact mass could be torn to shreds before it got in close.”
I’ve been chewing over the question of why World War I was the war that killed the whole dulce et decorum est ideal, when, after all, wars have always been bloody and lice-ridden and generally gross, and it strikes me that this passage suggests one possible explanation: dulce et decorum est survived as long as the kind of classical infantry tactics (that Macedonian phalanx) that originally spawned it survived, and died when those tactics met their definitive end in the machine gun.
(Why World War I rather than the Civil War? Civil War technology could mow down a bayonet charge… if the defenders were well-trained, and armed with functional rifled muskets, and had plenty of ammunition. If any of those conditions were not met, and they often were not, bayonet charges still worked. You needed a whole company of well-trained men firing at the top speed of two shots a minute to approximate the later effect of a machine gun.)
It’s also super interesting to consider the differences between Catton’s take on the war and the trends in more recent historiography. Catton only glances at questions of race and slavery (although he may become more interested in the next book, when the Army of the Potomac begins recruiting Black soldiers), but he’s VERY interested in the question of the relationship between a democratic government and its army in a time of total war - a topical question when the book was published in 1951, just after World War I, early in the Korean War, when it was feared the Cold War might turn hot.
It’s also a cracking good read. Catton portrays historical figures in lively strokes, so you feel like you know them, which I realize is a quality that can be misleading - but I nonetheless prefer it to reading a history book and going, “Which interchangeable general is leading this charge, again?”
He’s also got a wonderful eye for the human touch in any situation. For instance, after three Union soldiers find Lee’s complete order of battle wrapped around three cigars, he notes, “It is irritating, in a mild sort of way, that none of the accounts of his affair mention what finally happened to the cigars.”
I also found his battle descriptions clear - well, clear is maybe not the right word, because part of his point is that it’s actually very hard for anyone to tell what is going on during a battle (especially a Civil War battle, when the gunpowder created an oily dark smoke that made it almost impossible to see what was happening). But he’s very good at explaining what the generals meant to achieve, where that plan went wrong (my favorite is the guys who range up and down a creek looking for a ford… when the whole creek is so shallow that you can cross it wherever you like), and what they actually ended up achieving instead.
A couple of passages struck me as particularly useful for my fell purposes. Here’s this one, which perfectly illustrates the different views of war popular in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries: “Men would sing [“When This Cruel War Is Over”] and cry. More than any other possession of the army, it expressed the deep inner feeling of the boys who had gone to war so blithely in an age when no one would speak the truth about the reality of war: war is tragedy, it is better to live than to die, young men who go down to dusty death in battle have been horribly tricked.”
So you have Russell politely trying to spare Andrew’s innocence by only describing the fun, non-battle parts of war, like mock-battle snowball fights and stealing Rebel chickens for chicken stew, and meanwhile Andrew is already at “It was probably too awful for him to talk about, like my uncle who fought on Iwo Jima.”
The other is Catton’s discussion of the transition from smoothbore to rifled muskets, which happened swiftly over the first year of the Civil War, and began to march of advances in gun technology that ended in the slaughter on the battlefields of World War I.
“It was these ineffective old smoothbores on which all established combat tactics and theories were based. That is why the virtues of the bayonet figured so largely in the talk of professional soldiers of that era. Up until then the foot soldier was actually a spear carrier in disguise, the bayonet was the decisive weapon, and an infantry charge was just the old Macedonian phalanx in modern dress - a compact mass of men projecting steel points ahead of them, striving to get to close quarters where they could either impale their opponents or force them to run away… But with the rifled musket it just didn’t work that way anymore. The compact mass could be torn to shreds before it got in close.”
I’ve been chewing over the question of why World War I was the war that killed the whole dulce et decorum est ideal, when, after all, wars have always been bloody and lice-ridden and generally gross, and it strikes me that this passage suggests one possible explanation: dulce et decorum est survived as long as the kind of classical infantry tactics (that Macedonian phalanx) that originally spawned it survived, and died when those tactics met their definitive end in the machine gun.
(Why World War I rather than the Civil War? Civil War technology could mow down a bayonet charge… if the defenders were well-trained, and armed with functional rifled muskets, and had plenty of ammunition. If any of those conditions were not met, and they often were not, bayonet charges still worked. You needed a whole company of well-trained men firing at the top speed of two shots a minute to approximate the later effect of a machine gun.)
It’s also super interesting to consider the differences between Catton’s take on the war and the trends in more recent historiography. Catton only glances at questions of race and slavery (although he may become more interested in the next book, when the Army of the Potomac begins recruiting Black soldiers), but he’s VERY interested in the question of the relationship between a democratic government and its army in a time of total war - a topical question when the book was published in 1951, just after World War I, early in the Korean War, when it was feared the Cold War might turn hot.
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Date: 2021-10-31 01:25 pm (UTC)