EDITOR’S NOTE: The Civil War series on public television has increased demand for books examining the events of the 1860s. Although many new books have surfaced as a result of the series, many people have rediscovered some of their old books on the Civil War. Henry Sherrerd takes a look at “Embattled Courage” published in 1987.

EMBATTLED COURAGE: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War, by Gerald F. Linderman, The Free Press (a division of Macmillan Inc.), 1987, 357 pages, paperback edition, $11.95.

The volunteers of 1861-62 went to war filled with Victorian religious faith, morality and idealism. By 1865, if they survived, they were as bitter and disillusioned as any Vietnam veteran. Gerald Linderman traces the course of this metamorphosis by analyzing the element of courage, intensely personal courage, from the heroic-romantic concept of the outset through the years of increasing depersonalization to the grimly realistic view at the end, where self-preservation and loyalty to close friends of the immediate combat unit were all that mattered.

The book is a fascinating study, quoting from wartime letters of both Northern and Southern soldiers. It is what Billy Yank and Johnny Reb thought and felt as they tried to kill each other; the gut reaction of enlisted men and junior officers writing home after battle, attempting to describe what they had experienced.

The book examines the courage of the Civil War soldiers. I know a World War II veteran who could not believe that an order to fix bayonets and prepare to charge a German position had actually been given; the Civil War soldier expected little else.

The book is unusual in sticking to the subject of its title and subtitle to the near-exclusion of all else. No history, no politics, no economics, no strategy — only enough to explain as needed the immediate circumstances of the combat-influenced reaction being discussed and illustrated. Perhaps best of all; no sweeping judgments by experts contemporary or modern, and very little of Grant, Lee, Sherman, Jackson and all the other high brass. Maine’s own Joshua Chamberlain, “a paladin of courage,” is probably the most-quoted officer, and he was only a light colonel for most of the war.

The parallels with wars of our own time are all too clear; it is not for nothing that the American Civil War is often called “the first modern war.”

The extensive notes, bibliography and index are standard for such a book; the Dramatis Personae section is not, and it is a wonderful addition to the usual scholarly apparatus. In the short biographies of all quoted men — and a few women — the reader can find out what happened to them after the war.

An excellent book, highly recommended.

Henry Sherrerd is a free-lance writer who resides in Dexter.