The more I study the Civil War, the more apparent it becomes that no matter how many contemporary accounts I read, I will never truly know—nor come close to knowing—what a battle was actually like. The noise, the smell, the death and destruction—none of it is fully comprehensible.
Every so often, though, we get brief, vivid moments that offer the faintest glimpse into that world: a powerful first-hand account, a walk across a battlefield where the terrain still matches what soldiers saw, or a living-history experience. I recently had one of the latter.
I won’t pretend that wearing a wool uniform for a few days a year mirrors what Union and Confederate soldiers endured from 1861 to 1865. But I have worn enough Civil War clothing and fired enough reproduction firearms to have caught a handful of these fleeting impressions. At the briefest instant, you can sense a single aspect of what a Civil War battle may have been like. Years ago at a Gettysburg reenactment, for example, so many muskets fired on a damp evening that thick smoke hugged the ground, hiding the opposing line except for the occasional flash revealing their position.
More recently, I attended artillery safety training in North Carolina. Learning each position on the gun was informative, but the multiday session culminated in a morning of live firing reproduction Civil War artillery at Camp Lejeune. It was there that I witnessed several battlefield phenomena I had only ever read about—and, fortunately, was able to capture some of them on video.