The Sword of Antietam: A Story of the Nation's Crisis
1914
The Sword of Antietam: A Story of the Nation's Crisis
1914
The summer of 1862 is drawing to a close, and nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Dick Mason marches toward Sharpsburg with the Army of the Potomac. He has left behind a world of lectures and college halls for something he barely understands: a country tearing itself apart. Along with his companions, Dick scouts the rolling Maryland hills as Confederate forces under Stonewall Jackson close in, and the reader follows this young man into the teeth of history's bloodiest single day. Altsheler renders the landscape with striking beauty, the September countryside achingly peaceful, even as twenty-three thousand men bleed and die across its fields. This is war stripped of romance: the terror that grips boys who yesterday were students, the weight of rifles after hours of marching, the terrible questions that come when you hold a man's life in your hands. Dick Mason will not emerge from Antietam unchanged. None of them will. A vivid, often harrowing portrait of a nation in crisis and the young soldiers forced to bear its weight.
