Under the Guns : A woman's reminiscences of the Civil War

This is not history written from the safety of hindsight. This is a woman writing from inside the war, her hands still warm from tending the dying. Annie Wittenmyer arrived at a hospital tent in Keokuk, Iowa, in April 1861 and did not stop until the last soldier went home in 1865. She closed the eyes of the first Iowa soldier to die in the war, and from that moment forward, she moved through the conflict as witness, nurse, and survivor. Wittenmyer offers no literary polish, no distant analysis. These are memories told as they happened, each one verifiable by living witnesses. She describes the camps that sprang up near her home, the overwhelmed hospitals, the endless procession of young men broken by bullets and fever. But she also writes of the humanity found in catastrophe: the improvised surgeries, the letters she helped soldiers dictate, the small acts of dignity she preserved in places designed only for suffering. For readers who want to understand what the Civil War actually felt like to those who lived it, this memoir is indispensable. It is particularly vital for anyone interested in women's history, in the overlooked labor of care that held the Union army together, or in the raw, unfiltered voice of a woman who refused to look away.