Book News: Shattered Courage

How Civil War soldiers reacted to battlefield combat has always been a part of prolific military historian Earl Hess's wide range of scholarly interests. His 1997 study The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat heavily influenced our modern understanding of the ways in which Civil War soldiers experienced fighting and learned to cope with its many physical and psychological horrors and trials.

Next year's Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War (UP of Kansas, March 2026) marks a return to that area of study with a major examination of "those men who tried but failed to meet the test of battle in the Civil War." Soldier behaviors and reactions ranging from courage and cowardice to complete surrender have received noteworthy attention in a number of recent works, among them those from Lesley Gordon, David Silkenat, and the late Peter Carmichael, but Hess's upcoming volume aims to provide "the first comprehensive account of soldiers who refused to fight in the midst of combat."

Employing groundbreaking statistical analysis and "decades of research," Hess "charts the limits on combat morale" and is "the first historian to identify combat defaulters from personal accounts and official reports and to then examine their service records to discover what happened to them in the military system." The author's work also traces how both comrades and the army system in general reacted to and dealt with the phenomenon. I have to admit that I've never come across the term "combat defaulter" before (perhaps Hess coined it himself). Such men are described as being "(f)ar from heroes but not deserters," with most willing to try again the test of combat.