Books: War Horse

JAMES LONGSTREET: LEE'S WAR HORSE—H. J. Eckenrode and Bryan Conrad—University of North Carolina Press ($3.50).

On the afternoon of July 3, 1863, with the echoes of the greatest cannonade in U. S. history just dying away among the Gettysburg hills, a burly bearded officer nodded his head, sent Pickett and some 7,000 men across the open fields to their hopeless assault. That charge, whose last thin waves lapped up through the Union centre, was the high-water mark of the Confederacy. The officer whose nod sent Pickett's column to its doom was General James Longstreet....