When I was thirteen years old, my father took me to Gettysburg. It is my first recollection of my father’s growing passion for studying the history of the Civil War, which, I was only to realize long after his death, was his way of grappling with the unresolved horrors of his own experience as a battlefield medic. By escaping into the minutiae of a past and – at a distance – more heroic war, he had been probing his feelings about a war that he suspected (like Paul Fussell in Wartime, and Farley Mowat in And No Birds Sang) was dominated by ‘‘chickenshit’’ and pointless death. He was past sixty before he told me how terrified he had been, and how he had never stopped thinking and dreaming about what he had seen.