Ideal Guide

NEVER CALL RETREAT by Bruce Catton. 555 pages. Doubleday. $7.50.

On May 13, 1865, one month after Appomattox, a few hundred Union soldiers fought it out with a tiny Confederate force on the Rio Grande. Those were the last shots fired in the War Between the States. But the ensuing silence did not long endure. Before the year was out, hostilities had been resumed on that bloodless battlefield where all wars, all campaigners and all causes go after they die: the history books. Today, one century later, it begins to seem possible that historians will go on enthusiastically rewriting the war until kingdom come.

Buff & Pedant. One of the busiest and best is Bruce Catton. Catton published his first Civil War book in 1951, when he was 52, but he has since made up for lost time. This new book, which completes a Civil War-centennial trilogy begun ten years ago, is his tenth on the subject. Together, they have sold 2,449,008 copies in hard cover and an additional 1,189,540 in paperbacks.

Part of Cation's popularity rests, to be sure, on the habits of the Civil War buff, who cannot resist buying everything. The addict knows all there is to know about the Civil War, and impatiently awaits the next title so that he can begin the exhilarating task of exposing the author's -any author's -bad judgment. Catton too is a buff; more buff, perhaps, than pedant. And because he is, he makes an ideal guide.

One good reason for this is that Catton conscientiously strives to find the fresh detail or revised insight that can make each old story new. Prodigious is the only word for the research that went into his centennial trilogy: all the battlefields revisited, 3,500 different sources consulted, 9,000,000 words of fresh notes. Like its two predecessors, The Coming Fury (1961) and Terrible Swift Sword (1963), Never Call Retreat can be read pleasurably and usefully even by someone familiar with all of Catton's other works.

New Perspectives. This final installment opens on the battle of Fredericksburg and closes with Lincoln's assassination. "It was the heaviest bullet, all things considered," writes Catton, "ever fired in America." Wherever possible Catton finds new perspectives along that blood-soaked two-year trail. Of Chickamauga, he writes: "The Union government sent 37,000 soldiers to Tennessee: the Confederacy sent Jefferson Davis. The contrast does not reflect different ideas about what was needed: it simply measures the extent of the resources at hand. Each government did the most it could do."

The war is steadily weighed against the Union's purpose, which fluctuated as wildly as the war itself along a course clearer perhaps to the historian than to the participant: "The nation had not been driven to war by its desire to free the slaves; instead it had been driven to free the slaves by its desire to win the war." In 1861, Lincoln agreed with Congress that "the Constitution could never, in all time, be changed in such a way as to permit interference with the institution of slavery." Four years later, he was pressing the 13th Amendment on the nation -and in Richmond, Jefferson Davis signed an order offering emancipation for any Negro slave who would bear arms for the South.

Gentle Wisdom. As always, Catton deals gently with the profound errors in generalship that, on both sides, tragically upped the cost in blood. The worst he can find to say of the Union's Ben Butler, who never once did the right thing on any battlefield, is that his "military operations defy rational analysis."

The same wisdom leads Catton to a singularly gentle conclusion about the war's finish and about those who lost. Lee might have commanded his men to melt into the hills, there to wage an endless guerrilla warfare that, in Catton's opinion, could have "ruined America forever." One of Lee's officers proposed this course, but Lee rejected it. Lincoln might have imposed vengeful terms on the defeated South. He did not.

"By any standard," writes Catton, "this was an almost unbelievable way to end a civil war, which by all tradition is the worst kind of war there is. Living for the rest of their lives in the long gray shadow of the Lost Cause, Lee's men were nevertheless going on toward the future. Pride in what they had done would grow with the years, but it would turn them into a romantic army of legend and not into a sullen battalion of death."

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