The Terrible Remedy

By Richard Zoglin

Awful superlatives issue forth like cannon fire from PBS's documentary series The Civil War. More than 620,000 Americans died during the conflict, more than in World Wars I and II and Vietnam combined. At the Battle of Antietam alone, 23,000 were killed or wounded, the bloodiest single day of the war. By 1864 the Union Army was the largest in the world, and Washington the most fortified city on earth. The Andersonville, Ga., prison housed so many Union POWs that it ranked as the fifth most populous city in the Confederacy.

But the impact of The Civil War lies less in its bombardment of fact than in its eloquence. Was it the gravity of the event that inspired politicians, generals and common citizens alike to such memorable words? "It is well that war is so terrible," said Robert E. Lee during the Battle of Fredericksburg. "We should grow too fond of it." Abraham Lincoln was inspiring even in his black moods ("If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it," he said at one low point) and his caustic ones. "If General McClellan does not want to use the Army," he complained of his dithering military chief, "I would like to borrow it for a time." William Tecumseh Sherman, preparing to march on Atlanta, exhorted, "War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want."

Filmmaker Ken Burns, director of acclaimed documentaries on Huey Long and the Brooklyn Bridge, has collected what seems like every visual scrap from the period: photographs, paintings, newspaper clippings, as well as present-day footage of key battle sites. To them he has wedded excerpts from contemporary diaries, letters and speeches, read by people as diverse as Jason Robards, Jody Powell and George Plimpton. A spare but evocative narration by David McCullough is supplemented by commentary from historian Shelby Foote and others. The result is not just fine history but a pensive epic about the nation's great catastrophe.

At 12 hours, all stuffed into one week, The Civil War may be a daunting prospect for viewers, especially since the first episode is a bit slow revving up. But the momentum builds. One could hardly imagine a more comprehensive or artfully crafted TV survey of the war. The series deals with social and political ramifications as well as battlefield tactics; the lives of common soldiers along with great generals. There are segments on food and drink at the front lines, the participation of blacks in the Union Army, the role of women and the use of spies. The series has a special knack for resonant details and lucid generalizations. The unprecedented number of casualties, explains Foote, was due to the fact that war's technology had outstripped tactics: bayonet charges were outmoded, but few generals realized it. After its conquest by the Union Army on the Fourth of July in 1863, the city of Vicksburg, Miss., did not celebrate the holiday for another 81 years.

% Most impressively, The Civil War manages to convey the horror of war in understated words. After the calamity of George Pickett's charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, General Lee asked the shaken commander to regroup his division to repulse a possible counterattack. "General Lee," Pickett replied, "I have no division now." Following one bloody battle, a Massachusetts soldier's diary was discovered with this entry: "June 3, 1864, Cold Harbor, Virginia. I was killed." With American soldiers poised to fight once again, vignettes like these strike the strongest chord of all.