Detailed minuti of soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 - Carlton McCarthy

This Civil War classic of soldiering in the ranks debunks all the romantic notions of war. Like his Northern counterpart, the Confederate soldier fought against bullets, starvation, miserable weather, disease, and mental strain. But the experience was perhaps even worse for Johnny Reb because of the odds against him. Never as well equipped and provisioned as the Yankee, he nevertheless performed heroically.

Carlton McCarthy, a private in the Army of Northern Virginia, describes the not-always-regular rations, various improvisations in clothing and weaponry, campfire entertainments, the jaunty spirits and the endless maneuvering of the men in gray. Real but forgotten faces are glimpsed momentarily in famous battles, and the tramp of feet on the way to Appomattox is heard. Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life does for the Confederate side what John Billings's Hardtack and Coffee, also a Bison Book, does for the Northern. David Donald wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that McCarthy's book, too, was "as fresh, as amusing, and as revealing" as the day it was first published in 1882.

In a new introduction Brian S. Wills considers the book's niche in Civil War literature.

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A professor of history at Clinch Valley State College in Virginia, Wills is the author of A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

"The clich that you must read the diary of a common soldier if you wish to know what war is really like never had finer affirmation than in this absorbing release."-Saturday Review