A Hundred Years of War (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews87 As Heartsill's military experience was long and varied, his narrative is an exceedingly valuable one. After a year's service on the southwestern frontier and a stint in prison, he was shanghaied while en route from Virginia to Texas to rejoin his command and was forced into duty with General Braxton Bragg's army in Tennessee. While serving under this commander he participated in the bloody battle of Chickamauga. In November, 1863, Heartsill and three comrades "deserted" Bragg, whom they greatly detested, and after a long walk of seven hundred miles rejoined his old unit in Texas. His detailed account of this journey, which took in portions of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, is one of the most valuable parts of the book as it throws much light upon the plight and attitudes of the plain folk among the turbulent border areas of the Confederacy. Heartsill saw both sides of prison life, being incarcerated at Camp Butler for several months in 1863, and then serving as a guard for Federal prisoners at Tyler, Texas, in 1864. His narrative ends with the disbandment of his unit on May 20, 1865. After the war, he was engaged in the grocery business at Marshall , Texas, and undertook the task of printing his war journal, doing a page at a time on the little hand-operated Novelty Press. In the reprint edition of his reminiscences, the full text of Heartsill's journal has been printed in facsimile, and the sixty-one portraits have been reproduced from the original photographs . AJso the nineteen pages of the soldier newspapers — The Camp Hudson Times and The Western Pioneer — are reproduced. All in all, this work is one of the best accounts of the common soldier to be found anywhere, and the editor, Bell I. Wiley, and the McCowat-Mercer Press deserve full credit for making the book available to students of the Civil War. J. Winston Coleman, Jr. Lexington, Kentucky. A Hundred Years of War. By Cyril Falls. (New York: The Macmillan Company. 1954. Pp. 419. $6.00.) although the American civtl war and the two World Wars of the twentieth century have received much separate attention from historians, one rarely encounters a work which places all three conflicts in perspective, along with the many minor wars of the past hundred years. In supplying this lack, the noted British historian Cyril Falls has written an informative, valuable book, published first in London in 1953 and now available in an American edition. Its chief value, however, lies in bringing to mind the lesser conflicts, for no volume of four hundred pages can do justice to the cataclysms of 1861-1865, 19141918 , and 1939-1945. Readers of the present journal will find little new material concerning the Civil War in Mr. Falls' survey, but they will be greatly aided in placing that event in context with the Crimean War, the Sepoy Rebellion , the wars for Italian independence, the Prussian-Danish skirmish, the Seven Weeks War, and the Franco-Prussian War. The larger world-picture of the era has undoubtedly been neglected by many students of the Civil War, who have been more or less preoccupied with the magnitude and complexity of the American civil conflict. The Civil War, accordine; to this author, "is unsurDassed in interest. The 88CIVIL WAR HISTORY quality of the leadership was high. In the eastern theatre it was, on the whole, much higher on the side of the vanquished than on that of the victors, though this was by no means the case in the Mississippi valley. Though the troops on both sides were mainly civilians . . . manoeuvre and tactics frequently reached a notable standard of skill." He develops the modernity of the conflict and states that it pointed to the future in the devastation, imposed primarily by the North, which "exceeded military necessities." But despite these ravages, it was not a "total war" as we understand the term today. Mr. Falls believes that in executive leadership "the Union had the better of it. Lincoln was not only an abler man than Davis / . . but a more powerful man." As to the generals on both sides, Lee is rated "above them all...