Books: The U. S. War

(2 of 2)

A disgruntled engineer officer, working feverishly on a military canal in the Tennessee campaign, sent in this requisition: "I need one hundred men ten feet tall to work in mud eight feet deep." Halfway through the war. because of the shortage of change, Northern citizens paid their streetcar fare in postage stamps. The newspapers began to fill up with ads for artificial legs. . . . Author Pratt's book is no mere scrap-album: it tells the whole story (mostly from the Northern point of view) from the Draft Riots in Manhattan to a siege bill-of-fare in Vicksburg. But such telling journalistic minutiae clothe the dry bones of history with a verisimilitude of its own day's flesh & blood. The Author. Fletcher Pratt was born under a martial star, the day the U. S. declared war on Spain. After various ups & downs of fiction-writing and journalism he started turning out articles on military subjects, has become a well-known name to readers of service journals (Infantry Journal, Cavalry Journal, U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, et al.). Ordeal by Fire is his second book (the first: Heroic Years —1934)-