The Men Who Wore the Blue

THE LIFE OF BILLY YANK (454 pp.)--Bell Irvin Wiley--Bobbs-Merrill ($6).

In November of 1861, Charles Barker of Massachusetts reported for his physical. The doctor "felt his collarbones" and asked: "You have pretty good health, don't you?" Volunteer Barker said yes, and he was in the Union army.

Destiny may have been more casual in those days, but she was just as determined to give a simple soldier an awful tough time. In The Life of Billy Yank, a brother volume to The Life of Johnny Reb (1943), Historian Bell Irvin Wiley recites the hard facts of daily life in the Union armies--or rather, he lets "Billy Yank" do his own talking, through the letters and other scraps of identity he left lying in his prodigious trail.

Ornery Suns. The thing on the top of Billy's mind was what lay on the bottom of his stomach. "Boys," said a sergeant to his men one day. "I was eating a piece of hardtack this morning, and I bit on something soft; what do you think it was?" A private suggested: "A worm?" "No, by God." said the sergeant, "it was a tenpenny nail." One soldier summed up: "It goes perty greasey Sometimes." One statistic tells the whole story: more Union soldiers died from diarrhea and dysentery (57,265) than were killed in battle (44,238).

The military training didn't bother Billy too much ("Drill, drill, a little more drill. Then drill, and lastly drill. Between drills we drill . . ."), and the discipline was generally not too severe. In battle, Billy proved his salt. He did not have the dash and gallantry of Author Wiley's Johnny Reb. but sometimes he could pull up his coat collar and walk into a hail of bullets "the same as I would go through a storm of hail and wind." He did not go looking for trouble. "The diferance between dyeing today and tomorrow is not much," wrote one boy, "but we all prefer tomorrow." "We went out a Skouting yesterday," one boy told his father. "We got To one House where there was Five Secessionest And they broke and Run and Arch holoed out to Shoot the ornery Suns of Bitches [and we] all let go . . . at them . . . Thay may say what they please but godamit pa It is Fun."

Oil of Gladness. Off hours, Billy Yank had no U.S.O. He was left to get drunk on any "oil of gladness" he could find, and take what "Horizontal Refreshment" was offered by the droves of easy women who followed his armies. Eighty-two cases of venereal disease were reported annually for every 1,000 soldiers. (In World War II, the average rate for the U.S. Army was 35 cases to 1,000.) For such troubles, as for wounds, Billy was left to the dreadful mercies of a medical system that "operated in old blood-stained and often pusstained coats, [that] knew nothing about antiseptics and therefore used none."

All things considered, says Historian Wiley, "the similarities of Billy Yank and Johnny Reb far outweighed their differences . . . [and their] performance in battle, by the admission of professionals sent from Europe to observe [them], compared favorably with that of soldiers anywhere."

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