In Brief

...The author is a retired offi - cer now on the faculty of the University of Southern Mississippi, and his style is appropriately businesslike...

...When General Grant met General Lee at Appomattox, they broke the ice by reminiscing about their mutual experience in the Mexican War...

...Grant’s attitude toward that confl ict, expressed in his memoirs, is well known (“I was bitterly opposed to [the annexation of Mexico], and to this day, regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation...

...With this volume, completed just before she was swallowed up by administrative duties, Faust burnishes her scholarly credentials with a fascinating study of the impact of death in the Civil War on American life, thoughts, customs, and predilections...

...This was the heart of Japan’s inner defense line, and the establishment of air bases allowed B-29s to operate within striking distance of Tokyo and other cities— including, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...In the aftermath of the war—in the establishment of veterans’ associations, the design and dedication of monuments, in literature, politics, and religion, in civic observances and the cultivation of the Lost Cause epic in the South—the nation came to terms with death in warfare, in unprecedented volume, and in ways still refl ected in American life today...

...Moreover, because he began his research decades before publication, the author was able to draw on the recollections and observations of survivors, whose testimony is sharp, poignant, unsentimental—and now, of course, posthumous...

...This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust (Knopf, 368 pp., $27.95...

...This is a stunning, eloquent, and valuable work...

...This was an infantry battalion, organized at the outset of the Great War, recruited from the ranks of public (read private) school ‘old boys’ whose attitude will be familiar to any reader of Rupert Brooke or Julian Grenfell...

...A similar rate, about two percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities...

...Two decisive battles of World War II were fought in June 1944, and an argument could be made that the bloody, month-long American campaign against the Japanese on Saipan and Tinian islands was as important for the Pacifi c theater as the invasion of Normandy was for Europe...

...Holland M. (Howlin’ Mad) Smith of the Fifth Amphibious Corps is recorded here with scrupulous fairness and a knowing eye for the permutations of Army-Navy confl ict, interservice rivalry, career management, and the clash of personalities...

...Faust makes the point that the “Civil War’s death rate, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II...

...There was plenty of politics in World War II, from the sands of Iwo Jima (or Saipan, in this case) to the corridors of the Pentagon (or War and Navy departments, until 1943...

...This is the latest volume in the Twentieth-Century Battles series of Indiana University Press, and Harold J. Goldberg, chairman of Asian studies at Sewanee, has written a lively, concise, comprehensive account...

...But for any student of the Civil War, and generalship, this is a diverting and instructive study...

...Casualties were not confi ned to the ranks—the landscape, especially in the South, was devastated, houses and livestock destroyed, civilians killed or left destitute—nor was death the only long-term devastation for soldiers, who were crippled and maimed in prodigious numbers...

...The Public Schools Battalion in the Great War by Steve Hurst (Pen & Sword, 224 pp., $39.95...

...Until her appointment as president of Harvard last winter, Drew Gilpin Faust was best known as a historian of the South and the Civil War, with emphasis on social and cultural issues...

...Philip Terzian is literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...The subtitle— “A History of the 16th (Public Schools) Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment (Duke of Cambridge’s Own) August 1914 to July 1916”—scarcely begins to describe the richness of experience and wealth of information the author has supplied here...

...D-Day in the Pacifi c: The Battle of Saipan by Harold J. Goldberg (Indiana, 276 pp., $29.95...

...Hurst’s touch is deft, his eye for the telling detail is unerring, and military jargon is gracefully translated into English...

...The country was forced to adapt to these horrifi c facts, in ways practical and sublime: Battlefi eld embalming and burial techniques were perfected, as was the system of death notifi cation and grave registration...

...Gen...

...The experience of combat was never more horrifi c than on the Western Front, come to life in this notable addition to the literature of war...

...And not exclusively concerned with combat, either: The controversial relief of Army Maj...

...For whatever reason, the Japanese resistance—no surrender for combatants, suicide of civilians—is better known to posterity than the grueling, grinding American invasion (about 14,000 dead, wounded, or missing), but seizure of the Marianas was a major strategic victory for the United States...

...Dougherty’s novel technique is to divide his list of prominent American offi cers into Federals and Confederates, and provide a biographical essay for each to illustrate a lesson on soldiering in general, and the Mexican War in particular...

...They’re all here—“George McClellan and Siege Warfare,” “Stonewall Jackson and the Role of Artillery,” “George Meade and Missed Opportunity,” “George Pickett and the Quest for Glory”—and it is interesting to see the extent to which the habits and behavior of these men, for good or ill, would be duplicated a dozen years later in the War Between the States...

...Ralph Smith of the 27th Infantry Division by Marine Lt...

...Every schoolboy knows that more Americans died during the Civil War (approximately 620,000) than all other American wars combined, but few schoolboys have bothered to contemplate the effects of this sudden, unexpected culture of death on a young, predominantly rural, deeply religious, largely isolated population...

...but politics aside, even Grant conceded it was a demanding school that had taught nearly all the senior Civil War commanders what they knew about combat...

...In due course, the battalion grew swiftly and saw action from the start, offi cers were peeled off by commands in other regiments, and its core was massacred on the opening day of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916...