The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of distinction between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.
-- Sir William Francis Butler
This volume reappraises the events, the weapons used, the men of the novice armies, their leaders and the strategies employed in the Civil War - which was fought with a new generation of weapons and trench systems similar to those of World War I. The author argues that the conditions of combat were little changed from those of earlier times and far from being the birthplace of modern battlefield tactics, the Civil War was in reality the last Napoleonic-style war.