Authored by a Civil War Union soldier with more than five years of active service along the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers, 1862-1866. This iconoclastic, irascible old veteran (1838-1911) planned to publish these memoirs shortly after the turn of the century...but death came first, and unannounced. David Cornwell's salty, vivid descriptions of his wartime service are layered in among peacetime annotations about his life before and after the war. His stark and often shocking accounts of bitter, bloody hand-to-hand combat at Fort Donelson, Shiloh and Milliken's Bend make this work...