The Road to Richmond (review)

122civil war history routine in time, and she could conclude a letter with "There is nothing of importance happening here: the drums beat, the bugle sounds, the winds blow, the men groan—that is aU—" But it was not "routine" for long, and she was off again to help patch up the stream of wounded after the Wüderness. Under fire Cornelia was cool, quick witted, and observant. The "cowardly officers . . . crouching closely to the" river's bank disgusted her. At City Point she was back at her hospital work and letter writing. Her estimates were shrewd: "I am not at aU for faltering nor growing weary," she wrote her sister. "I would not acknowledge that it is any less our duty to whip the Rebs now we find it hard to do. But there is no use in regarding them as played out, for it is not so. Their spirit is in them yet very strong." The letters which Miss Hancock wrote from her first-hand battlefield experiences as a volunteer nurse and later as a teacher of young Negroes reveal a warm and plainspoken woman. Hers was a rare and vital experience during a critical period in American history and, as Bruce Catton so ably observed, she "wrote about it with rare skül and power." This book is a valuable addition to the shelf of books dealing with the Civil War from the Union side. Arnold Gates Garden City, New York. The Road to Richmond. By Abner E. Small. Edited by Harold Adams Small. (Berkeley: The University of California Press. 1957. Pp. xi, 260. $1.50.) this is the age of the CTVTL war diary and memoir. The generation that fought in 1861-1865 was a literate one, and given to the conviction that tiiey were making history, that their deeds would be forever important. Nowadays we book-buyers ratify their conviction, and the authentic, unique, touchedwith -fire journals and reminiscences come pouring from the presses. Major Small's memoir was written many years later from a wartime diary kept by the Maine soldier. Thus it has considerably more authenticity and faithfulness-to-fact than most memoirs composed in middle or old age by once-young soldiers. It has what is likewise remarkable, a fine prose style, neither ornate with rhetoric and sentimentality, nor sparse with semiilliteracy . So that it is one of the most readable and rewarding of aU Civil War memoirs. The major began as a buck private and was not promoted to his majority until after being paroled from imprisonment in the final winter of the war. He seems aU along to have thought of himself as a man in the ranks, so that condescension for the primitive but noble enlisted man is not present in his book. Though in a summation he deprecates the authenticity of Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, declaring that Henry Fleming has entirely too phüosophical an eye to be a real fighting man, Major Small's own battle descriptions are surprisingly close to Crane's—one wonders whether the Major ever actually read the book he criticized. One recaUs, too, Stendhal's description of Book Reviews123 Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma; there are passages in Major Small's book reminiscent of that. It is interesting to note Major Small's estimates of his superiors-^not their müitary capabilities so much as their relationships with the men they led. In particular the Major did not care for O. O. Howard, whüe he much admired Richard Coulter. In his summation he declares devastatingly that "Howard, cold, selfish, and inordinately vain, would go to a soldier's tent and pray with him, and perhaps write a letter home for him; but Coulter would swear at a man, send him something to eat, and permit him, when exhausted, to ride Coulter's own horse." Major SmaU's diary, entitled The Road to Richmond, and edited by Harold Adams Small, his son, was originaUy published by the University of California Press in 1939, and the present edition, in paperback, appeared in 1957. It can be recommended heartily; Civü War reading is seldom better. A diary the Major kept...