How to Teach a Civil War Battle

Abstract

In On War—which the military strategist Bernard Brodie declared in 1976 to be “not simply the greatest but the only truly great book on war”—the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz included a chapter titled “On Danger in War.” (1) To help readers understand this enduring aspect of war, Clausewitz endeavored to give them a sense of what an actual battlefield was like in a passage so vivid and powerful that it merits reproduction in full. “Let us accompany a novice to the battlefield,” Clausewitz wrote: As we approach the rumble of guns grows louder and alternates with the whir of cannonballs, which begin to attract his attention. Shots begin to strike close around us. We hurry up the slope where the commanding general is stationed with his large staff. Here cannonballs and bursting shells are frequent, and life begins to seem more serious than the young...