Chain of Thunder: A Novel of the Siege of Vicksburg

I almost gave up on this book. It's the sequel, essentially, to Blaze of Glory, and if you read that review, you know I raved about Jeff Shaara and also, if you've read many other reviews, you know that I love historical fiction and am especially drawn to work (fiction and non-fiction) about the Civil War. Nevertheless, I nearly added Chain of Thunder to my "did not finish" list. Had I done so, it would have been a shame, as I was at least half-way through when I was seriously considering quitting, and this is a book whose second half is much stronger than the first half.

The first half is about soldiers slogging through the mud. The food is terrible, the water is such that said soldiers can rarely see through it, the marches are long (and in Mississippi, hot), and the life of a soldier is a hell unto itself, and that's when the enemy isn't trying to pump him full of lead. Which he usually is. And to be completely honest, I was not interested in 490 pages on the tedium of being a soldier or the politics of generals, for that matter. I was drawn to Chain of Thunder in no small part because Shaara mentioned in the opening pages that, for the first time, he was incorporating the viewpoint of civilians. As such, Miss Lucy Spence, a spunky 19-year-old Vicksburg girl was one of the key voices of the story. Only, for the most part, she's absent from the first 200+ pages of the book. I imagine this is because, until the Federals lay siege to the city, there's not much for her to say or do.

Once they do lay siege she, like virtually all other Vicksburg civilians, moves into a cave that's been hand-dug into the side of a cliff, subsists on rat and mule - when there's food at all - and eventually works as a nurse tending the wounded and dying soldiers who are quickly turning against their commanding general, John Pemberton. (That the Pennsylvanian-turned-Southerner known derisively as "Old Pem" formally surrenders the city on the 4th of July is more than the citizens and soldiers alike can swallow.) Lucy's story, which is simultaneously unbelievably horrifying and inspiring, is really the glue that holds Chain of Thunder together. The rest of the book, to be honest, is old hat. Sherman and Grant smoke cigars and spend a lot of time atop horses. The Confederate generals receive conflicting orders from their command structures. There's a lot of mud and musket balls and misery. I believe this would have been a stronger book had Shaara lessened the emphasis on the conflicts leading up to Vicksburg and begun with the siege itself.

That weakness aside, this is well-written, compelling reading for those inclined to focus on the strengths: not only Lucy Spence's story, but the anecdotes that reveal the face of war in the age of the telegraph - when the wires weren't cut. Grant learns of Stonewall Jackson's Chancellorsville death from a Mississippi train engineer. Pemberton cannot write Johnston for a shortage of writing paper. We're a long, long way from the Marshall Plan. Or drones.

Perhaps the most telling detail, though, comes in the afterward, when Shaara informs the reader matter-of-factually that Independence Day was not celebrated in Vicksburg again until 1945. The baby born in the midst of the siege would have been 82 years old.