Cussed Mean
The Twentieth Maine. By John J. Pullen. (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 30s.)
THE progress in the American Civil War of a volunteer regiment called the Twentieth Maine has been made into an enthralling book. Soon after war broke out a train took the recruits down through New England (about the time that Henry James passed into the Harvard Law School) to Washington, where they were licked into shape and pitched into almost all the chief engagements that lay ahead, from Antietam to Appomattox itself. They took some licking, being tough, serious country boys, apt to regard inspections as the 'cussed mean business' of peeking 'in other folks' ears.' But this Maine force were cussed mean on the Confederacy before long, they advanced in their time—they were always advancing—on a flood 44 bullets and fought their best battle. at Gettysburg, where they defended -a hill by the name of Little Round Top against the soldiers of Texas and Alabama : an action, according to the author, which kept the rebels from turning the Union line and gaining access to Washington. The regiment then trekked into Virginia and took the rough with the smooth till the end, the intervals in tents and log huts with the mutilation, the epidemics, the gruelling forced marches and the gruelling mean food. Mr. Pullen is very interested in this diversity, in seeing the campaign as the regiment saw it—and wrote it down in their letters, diaries and memoirs, and so in showing the highly charged regimental spirit in the process of develop- ment. The narrative flows along with an ease that seems associated with its attention to the concrete and corporate experience of war; plans and inten- tions are always melting away into accident, things are done by large crowds, of anxious men and the Fredericksburg mud is examined as carefully as the generalship of Grant. Mr. Pullen's book therefore has some of the interest of good fiction, but it is also strict and factual, with no windy guesswork about people's feelings. There is a cer- tain amount of military nostalgia, of a very decent kind, as it needs to be in America, but it never clouds the excellent, effortless accounts of a wide range of military occasions. The Civil War photo- graphs have great character, as usual, and the chapters end with gifted drawings by Edwin Forbes, who followed the Army of the Potomac as an official artist.
The centre of the book, perhaps, is the career and attainments of General Joshua Chamberlain, a theologian who started as a lieutenant-colonel in the regiment and in whom the war revealed very rare qualities of courage and judgment. Chamber- lain led the regiment not only in the war but in their attitude towards it. Many of them seem to have had a surprising capacity even in the mud for 'larger sympathies,' an articulate sense of what was tragic and what was futile in the con- flict; they were Lincoln's men—however much they respected the 'rebs' they were in earnest about the rebellion and about the Union they were fighting to maintain. Appomattox was a fitting climax to all this. Chamberlain com-
naanded at the formal surrender of the Southern Army, the Twentieth Maine being part of the token force which received them, and he has given
his own account of the occasion. Here is a text—
out of the mouths of soldiers—which belongs to the age just as much as its literatpre does, just as much as the novels of Henry James, who died shortly after it was published many years later.
Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood : men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us to- gether as no other bond;—was not such man- hood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?
As the enemy soldiers advance there is no 'vain- glorying,' but an awed stillness rather, and breath- holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!'
KARL MILLER
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