THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505050501
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY GEORGE H. HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
SHROUDS OF GLORY
From Atlanta to Nashville: The Last Great Campaign of the Civil War
WINSTON GROOM
Atlantic Monthly Press. 308 pp. $23.
IT'S ALL TOO easy for storytellers, even well-meaning historians, to make the American Civil War a melodrama of glories lost and glories won. But the story can also be told in ways that ring much truer, and that help those in our time to see clearly where things went wrong and how cruel the results were.
One of the best approaches is through the flesh-and-blood images used in a new book by Winston Groom, so widely acclaimed just now amid the immense success of the film made from his 1986 novel, Forrest Gump.
In Shrouds of Glory, Groom, a Vietnam War veteran whose great-grandfather fought for the Confederate Army, is on another track entirely from that tale of good-heartedness in a man-child. This time, he is out to capture the ugly realities as well as the seesaw emotional moods of the national trauma of 1861-65.
His method is to look, with a novelist's eye and the insight of a serious student of the war, at just a part of the conflict - its final months in the arena outside Virginia - and to thread together the intimate experiences of those who made the crucial day-to-day decisions, on both sides, as well as those who did the actual fighting, on both sides.
We see the strategy and the maps. But we also see heads shattered with gun butts in hand-to-hand fighting, men killed by bayonet-fitted rifles tossed over an embankment like spears, and ghastly oddities such as the bleeding stump of a leg left when a soldier idly thrust his foot in the path of a cannonball bounding along the ground slowly enough to be visible but with still awesome force.
The central figure in the book is Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood, with his reputation for fierce battlefield initiatives. Despite a withered arm (from a wound at Gettysburg) and a missing leg (Chickamauga), he took over the Army of Tennessee in time to lose Atlanta, but went on to maneuver a still-potent force northwestward. This stab for Nashville, Tenn., was aimed at dislodging Gen. George H. Thomas' Federals there while Grant was busy trying to wear down the defenses at Petersburg and Sherman was blazing his way to Savannah, Ga.
Hood's move set the stage for the terrible battles of Franklin, Tenn., and then Nashville. There, the final rout of Hood's men by Virginia's Thomas (who had sided with the Union at the war's outset) shattered any Southern hopes for nudging the North into a suit for peace.
Although the Atlanta-to-Nashville segment of the war gets Groom's chief attention, he finds avenues to bring in the entire careers of most of the participants he writes about. He also brings to life, if briefly, many of the main actions of the early war years, and reaches beyond Appomattox to examine some of the war's sequels. Among the latter was the bitter controversy over who in Hood's force was at fault when a large body of Union troops slipped by northward, at Spring Hill, Tenn., to bolster the Federals at Franklin and then Nashville.
So, despite its modest scope in time, Shrouds of Glory is a balanced, useful history of the whole war and those who fought it. But by far the greatest value of the book is in its unflinching look, close up, at the horrifying deaths, dismemberments and manglings that the guns and blades of both sides inflicted.
These - not the casualty statistics, however grisly, and certainly not the heroics - come through as the best tellers of battlefield truth.
This book won't set the country on its ear in the way that Forrest Gump has, but it may open some eyes.
- MEMO: George H. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star.
Winston Groom will sign copies of ``Shrouds of Glory'' Saturday, 1 p.m.,
at Rizzoli in Merchant Square, Williamsburg (804-229-9821); and next
Sunday, 3 p.m., at Barnes & Noble, 1200 Hugenot Road, Midlothian
(804-378-3651).
by CNB