Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, and His Romaunt Abroad During the War

In 1866, a young war correspondent looks back on his years covering the American Civil War and finds himself haunted by what he witnessed and what he missed. George Alfred Townsend occupied a peculiar position during the conflict: present at history's most devastating moments yet forbidden from fully living them, required to file dispatches while beauty and horror alike slipped past unexperienced. His memoir traces journeys to battlefields, encounters with fellow journalists, soldiers, and civilians whose lives were torn apart, and his own restless struggle against the duality of his profession. Townsend writes with the romantic sensibility suggested by his title's "Romaunt" - this is no dry military account, but a meditation on witness, on the peculiar guilt of observing suffering one cannot prevent, on the strange freedom and confinement of moving through a nation at war without a rifle in hand. His observations of soldiers and civilians alike carry the weight of someone who saw too much and understood that seeing was never quite enough.