Hard Marching Every Day

Fisk was a Vermont schoolteacher when he joined the Union army in 1861. Until his discharge in 1865, he served as correspondent for a local paper. His letters, almost 100 of them, form the text of this book. Above all they assert the nature of war as drudgery and boredom punctuated by moments of excitement and horror. Fisk was no low-echelon hero. Of his regiment, the 2nd Vermont, more than 200 were killed in action. But Fisk's narrative concentrates on the routines of camp and field: the drills and fatigues, the rations (``sometimes this subject becomes one of painful importance''), the weather and above all the ``hard marching every day.'' Battles become almost anticlimactic and certainly not dramatic. ``My legs saved me abundantly,'' Fisk writes of one fire-fight in the wilderness. Little things--the sound of a bullet ``like striking a cabbage leaf with a whip lash''--are more important to this soldier than grand strategy. Yet Fisk fought for a cause. He saw his war as a struggle for the Union, against slavery and autocracy. Fisk, shrewd and humorous, combining idealism and patriotism with a healthy dose of common sense, deserves to stand beside Elisha Hunt Rhodes ( All for the Union ) as an archetypical soldier of the Army of the Potomac. The Rosenblatts, New York booksellers, originally published these letters privately in 1983. History Book Club selection. (May)