Shorte) Notices Storm Over the Land. By Carl Sandburg. (Cape.
I25. 6d.) THERE are not many more moving stories in history than the record of the American Civil War. It has been told again and again—in straightforward historists, in lives of Lincoln, lives of Grant, lives of Lee, but never perhaps better in equal compass than in this admirable and welcome abridgement of Mr. Carl Sandburg's well- known four-volume work Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. By curtailing the personal and concentrating on the general, Mr. Sandburg has got his story into 250 pages, and told it as adequately as the average reader making no special study of this period could desire. The dominant impressions this and every such narrative of the Civil War create are of the amazing sagacity and the in- exhaustible patience of Lincoln, of the inherent horror of any civil struggle and of the remarkable achievement of Grant and Sherman and Sheridan in retrieving the situation after a series of incompetent generals had come as near as incompetent generals could to losing the war for the North. There is one singular feature of Mr. Sandburg's book. The author devotes a chapter to the Gettysburg dedication—when Edward Everett was the invited orator (he spoke for an hour and fifty-seven minutes) and the President had been asked to add "a few appropriate words." Lincoln's words were few, they were appropriate and they are immortal ; every one of them is imprinted on the mind of all educated Americans and many educated Englishmen. Yet Mr. Sandburg mutilates them, for even to vary the. familiar language by a syllable (" above our power" instead of "above our poor power " ; "will very little note" for "will little note ") is rathei like a misquotation of the Lord's Prayer ; the changes, moreover, are invariably for the worse. A quotation from The Spectator of December, 1861, prefixed to the volume is a reminder of the part this journal played, together with the Daily News and Morning Star among London papers, in voicing the ideals of the North when practically the whole British Press supported the South.
Previous page
