LEE'S LIEUTENANTS—Douglas Southall Freeman—Scribner ($5).
Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth . . .
—Allen Tate, Ode to the Confederate Dead.
Douglas Southall Freeman's R. E. Lee (TIME, Oct. 22, 1934; Feb. 11, 1935) stands as the definitive work on that illustrious soldier. In his new book, the first of three projected volumes, Virginia's military historian portrays in action the principal officers who preceded Lee and served under him in the Army of Northern Virginia. Product of eight years' research, Lee's Lieutenants is, as its author styles it, a "study in command."
If the inscrutability of early Civil War battles can now be penetrated by anyone, Freeman has done it.
His Volume I amply demonstrates that the year of Bull Run was as nerve-racking for the South as for the North. Its greater value for U.S. readers and soldiers lies in its lucid recreation of the conditions of battle, the political and tactical situations as they were glimpsed, guessed, judged and dealt with by responsible men on horseback.
A Napoleonic penman was Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the hero of Fort Sumter, whom President Jefferson Davis first entrusted with the defense of Richmond. "Old Bory" had a bloodhound's eye and a theatrical, martial look. Taking command at Manassas Junction, he showed a pardonable confidence in the fighting spirit of his troops, the first and fiercest volunteers. His notions of their tactical capacity—communicated in eloquent notes to Richmond—were purely visionary.
When Beauregard posted his army along the creek called Bull Run on July 20, 1861, he had Napoleonic strokes in mind but not much sense of the terrain. General Joseph E. Johnston, his superior, just arrived from Richmond, had to assume Beauregard's knowledge of the country since he had none himself. Beauregard worked until 4:30 a.m. on an order for attack which Freeman calls "a gloomy instance of the manner in which . . . the ignorance of a commanding officer may be as gross as that of the men and infinitely more expensive in blood and misery."
Beauregard's order did not reach some brigades, reached others only to paralyze them. Not waiting for the Napoleonic stroke, Federal troops crossed Bull Run by the easiest route—also the most lightly defended—and fell on Beauregard's left. The Confederates owed their victory not to Beauregard but to the common sense of some of his brigade commanders, who heard heavy firing and decided to take their men toward it. "What seemed in retrospect a marvel of distant control by Beauregard was, in reality, the work of Colonel [Philip St. George] Cocke"—one of the richest planters in Virginia.
At the height of this doubtful battle "Old Bory" had the face to ask Johnston to retire and leave him in sole command. In the months that followed, Beauregard's weakness for putting his vainglory on paper—and in the newspapers—made Johnston and Davis weary of him. He finally departed to Kentucky.