If your notion of a Victorian pastor tending his flocks is stuffy and humorless, you haven’t read A.M. Stewart. In one of the most articulate, witty, and compassionate accounts of life at the front during the American Civil War, Stewart will make you laugh and break your heart. He had little use for commanders who wasted the lives entrusted to them. He wrote with passionate anguish about the horrors he saw and how senseless was much of the slaughter.

