Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-7, 1864, by Chris Mackowski, Gregory A. Mertz

A Civil War historian recounts the first battle between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, a bloody and horrific conflict in the Virginia wilderness. Known simply as the Wilderness, soldiers considered Virginia's seventy square miles of dense forest to be one of "nature's desert places" and "a dark region." Yet here, in the spring of 1864, the Civil War reached a new level of horror. Ulysses S. Grant, commanding all Federal armies, opened the land campaign with a vow never to turn back. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, moved into the desert to block Grant's advance. Thick undergrowth making movement difficult and visibility low. And these challenges were made terribly worse by the fires that burned victims and left both sides blinded in a sea of smoke. Driven by desperation, duty, confusion, and fire, soldiers on both sides were amazed that anyone could make it out alive. “This, considered a battlefield, was simply hellish,” one Union soldier later said. Another called it “Hell itself.”

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