The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War by Mark M. Smith (review)

For some time historians have been trying to recover the full experience of war. Since John Keegan’s Face of Battle (1976) and, for the Civil War, with more recent work by Gerald Linderman, Drew Gilpin Faust, Earl Hess, Allen Guelzo, and others, historians have taken readers inside the camps, trenches, hospitals, and other places where the values and habits the soldiers brought to their military service underwent constant and too often crippling assault. The old ways counted for little in new conditions that required men to be men in arms while also taking on women’s duties of “housekeeping,” cooking, and more in the camps. A democratic people had to learn to submit to a hierarchical order. A people who prayed for God’s favor in sanctifying life now sought God’s blessing as killers taking it. And so much more. War threatened to turn one’s world upside down and inside out.

In his compelling new book, Mark Smith shows how the sensory experiences of the Civil War did overwhelm and overturn people’s sense of place and purpose, even of themselves. Other historians have noted the effects of particular senses on people’s perceptions of the war, especially how sight, smell, and sound brought the killing power of the war home to many. But nobody has brought the five senses into such bold relief as has Smith. He does so in five chapters, each focusing on a particular sense as experienced during a particular event, and in an epilogue that shows the sensory total war that Sherman’s March to the Sea inflicted on the southern people. The effect is telling. Thus, for example, he records the shock of the new sounds of secession in Charleston, South Carolina, from the bells tolling secession to the shells bombarding Fort Sumter; or, for another example, the aching hunger and loss of taste that beset the people in Vicksburg during Grant’s siege. Even familiar stories get new meaning in Smith’s able hands, as in his analysis of how the smells of the decomposing bodies at Gettysburg left a pall of death over the place that lingered in memory for as long as the soldiers and civilians who were there in 1863 lived. As Smith observes throughout, it was not only the newness of wartime “senses” but also the scale and reach of the war that effected a sensory revolution of sorts. Although proximity to battlefield and camp mattered most, nobody escaped the new sensory world of war. The bodies came home. Sometimes the armies invaded the home, as they did in Sherman’s March to the Sea, which reminded Georgians of their suffering through the sounds of the animals that Sherman’s men were driving before them and the smell of the burning buildings and carcasses that they left behind.

Smith does not rewrite the historiography of the war as experienced so much as he extends it. He shows, for example, how the sights, the smells, and the sounds together assaulted the sensibilities of soldiers and civilians alike and created a new sensual universe of disarray, decay, and disturbance. He also reminds us that for all he, and others, have recovered on the rot and ruin, on the felt experience, of the war, we can never really know it. The senses as experienced, after all, are immediate and contemporary, not preserved to be experienced again. But we can get close enough to understand, as Smith demonstrates. He has pointed the way.

Smith’s brilliant book has left us with work to do. He might well have discussed the aftereffects of sensory assaults more fully than he did through his examples from Gettysburg. One wonders if people became inured to the stench, the bland and tasteless food, the moans of men and the munching of maggots in hospitals, and all other...