BEHIND THE LINES
soldiers has explored in detail the experience and long-term impact of combat. Disease, hard marching, and exposure to the elements took a toll, but above all, as one scholar put it, “the major psychological trauma that Civil War soldiers encountered related to the terror of battle.” This literature raises an obvious question: What about soldiers who never really “saw the elephant?” What did it mean to have little or no chance of engagement? On the Union side, William F. Fox’s classic highlights strikingly disparate types of service. The
