2nd Best Civil War Novel

 

The edition of Shelby Foote's 1952 novel Shiloh that I just read includes a blurb calling it the best Civil War novel ever. Actually, Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels is unquestionably the best, but Shiloh is a pretty close second. 

The novel covers the April 6-7, 1862 battle that took place near Shiloh Church in Tennessee. In two days of hard bloody fighting, the South was defeated, "which ended the Confederacy's hopes of blocking the Union advance into Mississippi and doomed the Confederate military initiative in the West."

Foote was an excellent military historian as well as an excellent novelist. His 3-volume history on the Civil War is worth reading, though it has been justly criticized for being weak on discussing politics and social issues key to understanding the war. Foote's failure as an historian, I think, was that he was wrapped up too much in the Noble Lost Cause view of the Confederacy, even while this view was being thoroughly discredited. 

But Shiloh still has power. It's structured in an interesting way. It has seven chapters (each running 30-35 chapters). Each of the first six has a different first-person narrator. Chapter 1's narrator is an aide to the Confederate commander, General Albert Johnson. Chapter 2 is told from the perspective of a Union officer serving as an adjutant. Both narrators are given their own strong personalities, while their narration is used to bring readers up to speed on the tactical situation as the battle is about to begin.

By the way, though the battle is described through the eyes of fictional characters, it unfolds in a meticulously accurate manner.

The next four chapters switch back and forth between different Union and Confederate soldiers--guys on the front lines, who don't themselves know the big picture, who are smack in the middle of mud and rain and blood and death and fear. It's a fascinating and powerful way to tell the story of the battle.

The causes of the war are not touched on in any depth, but they don't need to be. This is a novel that brings the fighting down to the level of the common soldier. These are men who were not at all unconcerned with the war's cause, but big issues often take second tier to survival when those soldiers are getting shot at. 

The final chapter returns to the Confederate aide, as he accompanies the retreating army and ponders an uncertain future.

Killer Angels, by the way, also used alternate point-of-view characters, though Shaara stuck to historical characters and used third-person narration. His book wins because the battle scenes are just a little more vivid and he manages to cover both Northern and Southern motivations for fighting more thoroughly than Foote without slowing down the action at all. Both Foote and Shaara are worth reading.