A Symphony of These Honored Dead – Aaron Slutkin

Bruce Chadwick's Gettysburg : The Tide Turns offers us the recollections of those who brought on, fought in, and experienced the Civil War’s greatest battle.

The book is not valuable as military history, but it is, however, an achievement in two respects.

Chadwick captures well the politics of the Army of the Potomac and Army of Northern Virginia's high commands before and during the battle.

John Sutter : Oral history as military history is a fool's errand, especially on that field’ He says it is impossible to accurately render a battle’s history merely by its participants’ recollections.

Only the historian proper, not the compiler, can relate the deeds of the dead, he says.

Chadwick ’s Gettysburg , while helping us to “hear their mingled voices,” does not try to say anything grand about the war.

He does not scorn Corporal Napier Bartlett , who, marching back to Virginia , “shed tears in the way in which our dreams of liberty had ended”.