Books: The U. S. War

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ORDEAL BY FIRE—Fletcher Pratt— Smith & Haas ($3).

Though the A. E. F. gave Germany the final body-blow that won the First World War for the Allies, and though more U. S. troops took part than in any war in history, the U. S. entered too late and the fighting was too far afield for the country to consider the War its private property. The U. S. as a whole never had the feeling that it was fighting for its life; it has not had that feeling since the 1860's. But such an experience, as most Europeans know, takes more than one or two generations to digest. The U. S. is still in process of making up its mind about its Civil

War—which all good Southerners insist on calling "The War Between the States." Chickamauga, Gettysburg, Shiloh, The Wilderness are names that mean more to the U. S. than Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood. The flood-tide of histories about the Civil War, with its cross-waves of controversial memoirs and the bickerings of aged generals, has passed, but good books on the subject are still being written. This week appeared the latest and one of the most readable.

Author Pratt subtitles his book "an informal history." Written with a colloquial enthusiasm that will not recommend it to more academic historians, Ordeal by Fire has no theory to grind, parades its swift narrative of the war years in a series of graphic scenes. It opens in the dingy bridal suite of a Philadelphia hotel in February 1861, with Lincoln, the President-elect, listening to Detective Pinkerton's warnings of the plot to assassinate him as he passes through Baltimore next day. The outlines of Author Pratt's story are familiar to every schoolboy, but he vitalizes it with many a contemporary detail. While the war was still only imminent, many a Northern businessman tried to collect his Southern debts. One of them got this reply: "I promise to pay, five minutes after demand, to any northern Abolitionist, the same coin in which we paid John Brown." When the war actually broke, Secretary of State Seward's first suggestion was to reunite the Union by declaring war on France and Spain. Old General Winfield Scott hit nearer the truth than anyone by hazarding the opinion that 300,000 men under good generals might put down the rebellion in three years.

One good reason why the first battle (Bull Run) was such an overwhelming defeat for the North was that Washington papers printed the plan of campaign days before the battle. Afterwards, the sadly shaken Governor of Massachusetts wired Washington asking to have "the martyrs who died in the late battle tenderly preserved in ice and sent forward." Author Pratt never hesitates to give his opinion of Civil War personalities, calls General Burnside "a pioneer in the art of personal salesmanship, simply oozing elusive charm and sterling worth from every pore." Benjamin F. Butler was "a classic example of the bartender politician, with one eye and that bleary, two left feet and a genius for getting them into every plate, too important to snub." But he quotes sympathetically a remark of Butler's (who, as commander of the Northern troops in New Orleans, was the mosthated man in that city), when Southern ladies pointedly turned their backs on him: "These ladies evidently know which end of them looks best."