Just after his marriage to Sarah, Nathan joins many other men from Maine as lumberjacks, fishermen, and farmers journey to Bangor, Maine to answer President Lincoln’s call for volunteers. Nathan and his comrades later form the Twentieth Maine Regiment, and they are ferried to Virginia by a steamer from Portland.

Their commanders, Colonel Adelbert Ames and Lt. Colonel Joshua Chamberlain soon shape Nathan’s regiment into a cohesive fighting unit. Nathan is soon appointed as a corporal, and the regiment manages to get into a small skirmish after the Battle of Antietam. Nathan’s regiment is ordered into action and bloodied at Fredericksburg, and the Twentieth Maine later draws guard duty at Chancellorsville. However, their true test of fire comes when they are marched north to just below Gettysburg, where they are ordered to anchor the left side of the Union line at Little Round Top.

Nathan becomes the de facto commander of Company H, and his Twentieth Maine Regiment is then attacked by Colonel William Oates’ Fifteenth Alabama Regiment. After hard fighting and a gallant bayonet charge, Nathan Clark and the Twentieth Maine win the battle for Little Round Top, but Nathan’s friend George Buck is killed at his side in the fight. Gus Filegar puts the reader into the forefront of the battle. Just like Uriah the Hittite, the reader is thrust forward into the fray of combat. You are able to hear the thud of minie balls colliding into human flesh. You can smell the acrid smoke of the battle, and hear the Rebel yell and the popping of musket fire.

Filegar places the reader into the shoes of Nathan Clark, a brave citizen soldier. We see the hardships that Nathan and his men face in the volunteer service as they struggle to preserve the Union. Filegar shows us compassion in Nate, as he makes an effort to contact his cousin, Sam Witherspoon, who is taken prisoner at Gettysburg from the Fifteenth Alabama Regiment. I strongly recommend this book to Civil War buffs, and eagerly await the next installment in the series.

This book has been recently released by Publish America of Frederick, Maryland.

Reviewed by: Steven Harrell, Attorney and author of The Unionist, A Novel of the Civil War