From a callow youth who joined the Union Army because, as he put it, it 'beats clerkin'" (Willa 1996 vii), Charles Wills eventually rose in the ranks from recruit to commanding officer. He was not a typical "farm boy" but had gone to the university. Nevertheless, as one can see, he had promised to defend the Union, but he was ambivalent at best about the issue of slavery.
As the foreword states: "He (Wills) had gone to war solely to preserve the Unionà" (p. ix) War is Hell, General Sherman was supposed to have said. In these pages, we discover the individual torment of war, how it affected the soldiers, as well as the enemy and the civilians they met along the way. In general, this book proves that war is a hellish way to mature. As one reads the pages from the initial boredom to the final disturbed and even disgusted feelings that Wills had about the reasons for the war, the behavior of the Rebel soldiers and the civilians (especially the women) abandoned by their men gone off to fight for the Confederacy, one can easily see why the divisions that were responsible for the war and for generations afterwards were sop deep.
What must be understood, throughout the book, is that many of Wills' comrades, as well as most other Union soldiers, had no idea about the significance of the war, or the reasons the South was fighting the North. For the most part, all they knew was that the South had seceded, made the U.S. weaker, and divided the nation as nothing or no one had before. In the end, as a commissioned officer, he had come to realize that his duty included doing whatever was necessary to enforce the Emancipation proclamation and therefore fight for the Negroes to survive as citizens, not slaves.
At the beginning, the army seemed boring and uneventful, according to Wills' correspondence: ""I haven't written for a full weekàAlthough soldiering is a hugely lazy life, yet these short days we seem to have little spa...