The Thick of Things

THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG (169 pp.) --Frank A. Haskell--Edited by Bruce Catton--Houghton Mifflin in ($3.50).

From the Union lines, behind the stone wall on the crest of Cemetery Ridge, First Lieut. Frank A. Haskell looked down on the forming ranks of the Confederacy: "More than half a mile their front extends; more than a thousand yards the dull grey masses deploy, man touching man, rank pressing rank, and line supporting line. The red flags wave, their horsemen gallop up and down; the arms of eighteen thousand men, barrel and bayonet, gleam in the sun, a sloping forest of flashing steel. Right on they move, as with one soul, in perfect order, without impediment of ditch, or wall or stream, over ridge and slope, through orchard and meadow, and cornfield, magnificent, grim, irresistible."

Magnificent, grim, irresistible--these were the gaunt men in grey on the third desperate day of battle near Gettysburg, charging into history under Major General George Pickett. Their objective was the stone wall in the center of the Union lines, where Staff Lieut. Haskell and the veterans of the II Corps stood waiting, watching. It was strangely quiet: "The click of the locks as each man raised the hammer to feel with his fingers that the cap was on the nipple; the sharp jar as a musket touched a stone upon the wall when thrust in aiming over it; and the clicking of the iron axles as the guns were rolled up by hand a little further to the front, were quite all the sounds that could be heard."

Young Wisconsin Lawyer Haskell could fight--and write. He played a distinguished personal part in repe ling Pickett's Charge, and weeks later, the fever of battle still hot in him, he wrote his account of Gettysburg. It is the classic of its kind. Previously snatched up in limited editions as a buff's bonanza, and quoted by virtually all scholars of the battle for its vivid closeups of the thick of things, it now comes for the first time to the popular Civil War book market. The original gets tasteful, unobtrusive editing by Bruce (A Stillness at Appomattox) Catton. For all Haskell's unusual talent, The Battle of Gettysburg was his only literary work. Just eleven months after he wrote his story of the most famous charge in U.S. history, Frank Haskell, by then a colonel, was among the 40,000 men whom Ulysses S. Grant flung headlong against the unyielding Confederate lines at Cold Harbor. He was also among the 7,000 who died.

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