Critic's Corner

This War So Horrible

By Stephen Davis · Originally published May 2017 · p. 28

“You may remember when I was talking of rejoining my Command in January last that I spoke of keeping a journal.” So begins “Camp Life, a History of the Georgia Campaign,” by Hiram S. Williams of the 40th Alabama. It has been published as This War So Horrible: The Civil War Diary of Hiram Smith

Williams (University of Alabama Press, 1993). Editors Lewis N. Wynne and Robert A. Taylor call Williams’ journal “an ‘eye level’ history of the Atlanta Campaign,” and as such it caught my eye. I’m glad it did. In addition to observations on the Atlanta Campaign, Williams’ diary often serves up an intelligent cynicism toward war that is a refreshing antidote to the romantic paeans we sometimes read. Williams was born in New Jersey in 1833. He learned the trade of carriage-making and also became a writer for Midwestern newspapers. He moved to Alabama a few years before the war, and when it broke out he enlisted in the Confederate service. Possessed of carpentry skills, he worked for the navy in Mobile. Assigned to the 40th Alabama, in February 1864, he followed his regiment to Dalton, Ga., and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee. Williams’ “Camp Life” begins with its entry for Feb. 16, 1864. The campaign was not even started and already Williams expressed his war-weariness in a poem under date of April 4. “Then pray for this war, so unholy, to cease/Let us pray for the Angel of mercy and Peace,” he intoned. Then he added, “I honestly believe that the above lines contain the real and true sentiments of ninety-nine hundredths of the soldiers composing our armies and at least four-fifths of those out of the army.” And that was before the fighting even started. Like most soldiers, Williams complained of rations. When President Davis declared April 8 a day for nationwide fasting, he carped, “Of course the ‘Fasting’ part was the subject of much ridicule by the boys who fast every day if they depend on the Government rations alone for daily food.” Later, after one “meal,” he exclaimed: “Cold corn-bread, bah! It is the nearest nothing to eat of anything I ever saw yet. It causes me to lose my appetite everytime I look at the adamantine loaves. I would not ask for a better weapon to knock a man down with than a pone of it.” Williams was an erudite fellow, which adds to the charm of his diary. While in camp, he once thanked a friend from Mobile for sending him a bunch of newspapers: “the papers will assist me to pass away many an otherwise tedious moment.” One evening, he recorded that he had studied Horatio; another, he “studied the ghost of Hamlet and committed every word of it.” In early March Williams was detached from his regiment and assigned to the army’s pioneer corps. He helped dam the creek through Mill Creek Gap to obstruct the Yankees’ advance. When Sherman started pushing against Johnston in early May, Williams’ chores involved felling trees in roads, cutting paths for artillery, constructing earthworks and building hospitals. Johnston’s retreats from Dalton and Resaca did not elicit Williams’ comment, but the army’s continued retrograde prompted him to observe on May 17 that Johnston was again “falling back”: “Falling back is the army phrase when we don’t want to acknowledge that he is retreating.” Williams forecast ominously that Johnston “will go back several days yet, perhaps all the way to Atlanta.” Along the way he noticed war’s ravages. Passing some fine wheat fields, Williams observed that they were “all or nearly all to be destroyed by the army. Artillerymen will pull down the fence wherever they happen to stop, and let their horses eat the wheat. Cavalry and staff officers ditto.” Property damage, of course, was incidental to the human toll. He once saw artillerymen digging the grave of a comrade killed by a shell. “His mangled corpse was the awfulest sight I ever beheld,” Williams wrote. “The shell struck him in the side, tearing out the whole stomach from his heart down. His entrails were torn completely to pieces.” “Poor fellow. He never knew what hurt him for his death must have been instantaneous.” Equally rending was the sight of a poor man, severely wounded and brought to a hospital. “There the Doctor perhaps pronounces his case hopeless, and he is laid aside where he lingers for an hour, perhaps a day, then he dies,” Williams explained. When he is buried, it is “in the same clothes in which he died, unwashed, smeared in his gore—a horrid sight.” Then, unceremoniously, he is laid in the ground two feet under, perhaps wrapped in a blanket. “Such is a soldier’s burial at the hospital.” There was more than enough of this for Williams to detest “this unholy and bloody war.” Retreating back to Atlanta, he did not approve of the government’s relieving Gen. Johnston and replacing him with Gen. John B. Hood. “Hood will soon ruin his army,” Williams recorded after a couple of battles. After one particularly bloody Confederate repulse, he wrote, “This horrid useless waste of human life, this wholesale butchery is terrible and should damn the authors through all time.”

The authors of “this war so horrible” may not have been damned through all time, but in the pages of Hiram Smith Williams’ Civil War diary they certainly are. I recommend this slim, eminently readable journal as a sock in the jaw to those who platitudinously parrot the old lie, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Steve Davis of Atlanta is a regular contributor to Civil War News and is the Book Review Editor. His new book, A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5-July 18, 1864, was published as part of Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War paperback series. The companion volume, All The Fighting They Want: The Atlanta Campaign From Peachtree Creek To The City’s Surrender, July 18-September 2, 1864, will be published this year.