America Goes to War: The Civil War and Its Meaning in American Culture

The First Modern War

The First Modern War HE Civil War was the first of the world s really modern wars. That is what gives it its terrible significance. For the great fact about modern war, greater even than its frightful destructiveness and its calculated, carefully-applied inhumanity , is that it never goes quite where the men who start it intend that it shall go. Men do not control modern war; it controls them. It destroysthe old baseson which society stood; and because it does, it compels men to go on and find the material for new bases, whether they want to do so or not. It has become so all-encompassing and demanding that the mere act of fighting it changes the conditions under which men live. Of all the incalculables which men introduce into their history , modern warfare is the greatest. If it says nothing else it says this, to all men involved in it, at the moment of its beginning : Nothing is ever going to be the same again. The Civil War was the first modern war in two ways, and the first of these ways has to do with the purely technical aspect of the manner in which men go out to kill one another. That is to say that it was a modern war in the weapons that were used and in the way in which these affected the fighting. On the surface,Civil War weapons look very old-fashioned; actually, they foreshadowed today's battles, and there are *4 T The First Modern War important parts of the Civil War which bear much more resemblance to World War I than to the Napoleonic Wars or to the American Revolution. Modern techniques were just coming into play, and theycompletely changed the conditions under which war would be waged. Consider the weapons the Civil War soldiers used. The infantryman's weapon was still spoken of as a musket —meaning a muzzle-loading smoothbore—and yet, by the time the war was a year or more old, nearly all infantrymen in that war carried rifles. These, to be sure, were still muzzleloaders , but they were very different from the "Brown Bess" of tradition, the weapon on which all tactics and combat formations were still based. With the old smoothbore, effective range—that is, the range at which massed infantry fire would hit often enough to be adequately damaging—was figured at just about one hundred yards. I believe it was U. S.Grant himself who remarked that with the old musket a man might shoot at you all day, from a distance of one hundred and fifty yards or more, without even making you aware that he was doing it. The point of infantry tactics in 1861 is that they depended on this extreme limitation of the infantry's effective field of fire. A column of assault,preparing to attack an enemy position , could be massed and brought forward with complete confidence that until it got to comparativelycloserange nothing very damaging could happen to it. From that moment on, everything was up to the determination and numbers of the attackers. Once they had begun to charge, the opposing 15 America Goes to War line could not possibly get off more than one or two shots per man. If the assaultingcolumn had a proper numerical advantage , plus enough disciplineand leadership to keep it moving forward despite losses, it was very likely to succeed. The assaultingcolumn alwayswent in with fixed bayonets, because any charge that was really driven home would wind up with hand-to-hand fighting. And if the assailantscould get to close quarters with a fair advantage in numbers, either the actual use of the bayonet or the terrible threat of it would finish the business. Artillery, properly massed, might change the picture. The smoothbore field piecesof the old dayswere indeed of limited range, but they very greatly out-ranged the infantry musket, and if a general had enough guns banked up at a proper spot in his defensiveline he could count on breaking up a charging column, or at least on cutting it open and destroying its cohesion , before it got within infantry range. The antidote to this, on the part of the offense, was often the cavalry charge: massed cavalry squadrons could come in to sabre the gunners—which was what the British cavalrymen tried in the charge of the Light Brigade—and make the defensive line...