Bestseller Revisited

THIS HALLOWED GROUND (437 pp.)--Bruce Cafton--Doubleday ($5.95).

One midnight in 1862 General Charles C. Gilbert, a Regular Army man, reined in his horse and chewed out a captain of the loth Indiana volunteers who were sprawled along a Kentucky road taking a breather. Why, demanded Gilbert, didn't the captain have the regiment stand at attention as the corps commander rode by? Angrily, the colonel of the regiment replied that his men had been marching night and day for a week in an attempt to beat Bragg's Confederates to Louisville, and he "would not hold a dress parade at midnight for any damned fool living." Whereupon General Gilbert ordered the regiment's colors taken away. It was a mistake. The color sergeant loudly announced that he would kill the general if he so much as touched the colors. Another enlisted man shouldered forward, shouted: "Here, you damned son of a bitch, get out of here or you're a dead man." Someone fired a musket. Someone else jabbed a bayonet into Gilbert's horse and it galloped off into the darkness. The general's staff followed. Observes Author Bruce Catton dryly: "It took a certain knack to handle western volunteers, and not all regulars had it."

Revealing Vignettes. Such was the rambunctious, unpredictable human material that fought and won the bitterest conflict in U.S. history. Catton's book, "The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War," fills in the broad canvas of the four-year struggle on an area of a million square miles with revealing vignettes of the men who had to do the hard work and the hard dying. There is Sherman's army, on the eve of its march through Georgia, using up its issue of candles to create a festival of light, so that "for miles across the darkened countryside the glimmer and glitter of these little fires twinkled . . . and the men looked at the strange spectacle they were making and set up a cheer that went from end to end of the army." There is a Union soldier in besieged Chattanooga reflecting that the antagonisms between eastern and western Federal troops often seemed greater than those that separated North and South. And there is Union General George McClellan in the grip of his "numbers" madness, unwilling to attack the inferior forces of Lee because of his persistent conviction that he was faced by hundreds of thousands of non-existent Rebels.

In these anecdotes of men and leaders, as in his outlines of strategy and the headlong shock of battles. Catton writes with pace and purpose that more than make up for a certain purpleness in his prose.

Double Questions. Catton is not so successful when bitten by the malady known as historian's hindsight. At intervals, he pulls up his narrative to suggest questions about whether the war need ever have been fought at all or, on the other hand, whether it could not have taken another course. For these double-barreled questions Catton provides double-barreled answers ("Fate can move in two directions at once. At the same moment that it was driving men on to destroy the unity of their society it was also making certain that they would not be able to do it") that leave history about where he found it.

Readers of Author Catton's earlier works (A Stillness at Appomattox, Glory Road, Mr. Lincoln's Army) will find that he has covered much the same hallowed ground before. Yet in the welter of Civil War books, this history stands out as a compact and readable introduction not only to the causes and course of the war but to the men in the great struggle whose issues are still not entirely resolved, are still generating both hatred and nobility.

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