Foote

Shiloh, A Novel by Shelby Foote (1952)

In April 1862, the Battle of Shiloh was fought in southern Tennessee during the American Civil War. Waged over two days, resulting in over 10,600 casualties, Shiloh became an omen for the years of brutal combat to come, showing Americans what kind of war this was really going to be. In this novel, Foote uses individual soldiers from both sides of the battlefield to tell its bloody story.

While the book is a novelization of history, little is fictionalized. The main narrators are inventions of the author, but the action and drama are very real. According to Foote, no liberties were taken with actual events or historical figures when they appear. They were not exaggerated to make the story more interesting. They didn’t have to be. The Battle of Shiloh was already tense, bloody, horrific, and tragic. It didn’t need “spicing up”. Instead, Foote’s characters react to events as they happened.

Each of the book’s chapters are presented as first-person accounts from major areas of the battlefield and alternate between Confederate and Union narrators. This allows the reader to see different viewpoints of a war almost a year old. There’s the Union staff officer from Ohio who is writing a letter to his wife when the Confederates attack at dawn on April 6^th. Another chapter follows a Mississippian infantryman badly wounded assaulting Sherman’s line near Shiloh Church, and his dazed wanderings in search of a doctor. The reader sees how quickly opinions change – from pre-battle patriotic swagger to numbed disillusionment after. It’s interesting and makes the characters real and complex.

For me, the soul of the book is Chapter Six. Here, members of a Northern infantry squad take turns telling their story. They are from an Indiana regiment that missed the first day of fighting but was heavily engaged in the Union’s counterattack on the second. Before this chapter, I thought the book was okay. I didn’t care for its structure and was disappointed in how patchy and confusing the narration was. To be honest, I was unclear as to what was happening where. Now, I am very familiar with the Civil War. I have a shelf full of books just about that one topic, and I have walked Shiloh Battlefield. I was lost reading this book – until Chapter Six.

This chapter reveals Foote’s reasons for structuring the book the way he did. Usually, books about battles, and the book I was expecting, are generalized surveys of the event. Who had what positions? When did they attack? What was the response? There’s a look at strengths and tactics. Where were the reinforcements? What happened next? Who won and why? Many times, in historical novels, the points of view are of the leaders and commanders. However, as Foote writes: “A book about war, to be read by men, ought to tell what each [man] saw in [their] own little corner. Then it would be the way it was.” To Foote, those other types of books could only “be read by God Almighty, because no one but God saw [the battle] that way.” In Shiloh, none of the big names are the focus. Grant, Sherman, Johnston, etc. appear on the peripheries, mentioned by the narrators in passing. Foote places the reader on the frontlines with the soldiers themselves, seeing the battle as they saw it. We experience the noise and chaos; hear their thoughts, fears, and regrets; feel the cold rain and hot lead whizz by their heads, or shock as they realize they’ve been hit; and smell the gunpowder and death.

After realizing that this was the point, the book suddenly made sense. The confusion I felt about where I was on the battlefield was intentional. The soldiers didn’t know either. They were ordered to a position by leaders many have never met and shot at others just like them on the other side of a nameless field. The formal placenames we now know, such as The Peach Orchard, The Hornet’s Nest, and The Sunken Road, didn’t come into common use until after the battle was over. To the individual soldier in the middle of the fight, they were just a place to die.