From Innocence To Knowledge

By LANCE MORROW

VOICES OF THE CIVIL WAR

by RICHARD WHEELER

492 pages. Crowell. $14.95.

The war began in cavalier fantasy, an almost adolescent innocence. A crowd in upstate New York sang its husbands and sons off to battle: "It is sweet, it is sweet for one's country to die!" Congressmen brought carriages of champagne to the first Battle of Bull Run. But, in the siege caves of Vicksburg and the trenches of Cold Harbor, Americans were spectacularly shorn of innocence. Excerpts from their writings over those four years, skillfully linked together in this book, not only tell the story of the war but reflect the profound change --the first enameled images of war dissolving like the pomade on the hair of a cavalry officer lying wounded in the sun for days.

The second Battle of Bull Run evoked an austere and wistfully beautiful line from a Southern lieutenant, John Hampden Chamberlayne: "When the sun went down, their dead were heaped in front of the incomplete railroad; and we sighed with relief, for Longstreet could be seen coming into position on our right... But the sun went down so slowly." In many of these letters, diaries and histories, the mostly forgotten writers manage a note combining poetry and stunned realism. A Union soldier in the Wilderness campaign found a field bird's speckled eggs nested in a skull left over from the earlier Battle of Chancellorsville and wrote in a spasm of metaphysics: "Life in embryo in the skull of death!"

Toy Sailboats. As the war went on, the prose hardened. A Confederate assigned to a burial detail rummaged through the clothes of Yankee corpses for food: "I have been so hungry that I have cut the blood off from crackers and eaten them." The dead and dying lay between the lines sometimes for days before they could be tended or buried. A Northern officer looked out on the battleground at Spotsylvania's "Bloody Angle" and reported: "Below the mass of fast-decaying corpses, the convulsive twitching of limbs and writhing of bodies showed that there were wounded men still alive and struggling to extricate themselves from their horrid entombment." Burial parties stuffed their nostrils with green leaves. Outside the field hospitals rose mounds of amputated limbs.

Yet a weirdly boyish note persisted. In winter quarters at Fredericksburg, Lee's Army of Northern Virginia put on a monumental snowball fight, entire brigades participating, led by their officers. Pickets from both sides sent toy sailboats across the Rappahannock to one another, loaded with newspapers, coffee, tobacco and sugar. A Confederate forage party in Maryland filled its canteens with fresh well water, then poured that out and replaced it with fresh milk found in a spring house, then found fresh cider -- to replace the milk -- and finally poured out the cider, refilling the canteens from a keg of apple brandy that the men happened upon.

Civil War writing is often both stylish and horribly pained. Confederate General John B. Gordon surveyed the assembled pageantry of Antietam and wrote: "What a pity to spoil with bullets such a scene of martial beauty. But Mars is not an aesthetic god." Just after that reflection, Gordon was shot five times, in the leg, shoulder and face. He fell and lay drowning in the blood collecting in his cap, but another bullet through his cap supplied a drain, and saved him.

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