The Mammoth Book of War Diaries and Letters: A Collection of Letter and Diaries from the Battlefield

There's always something sad about reading the diaries and letters of combatants in a war zone. And there is always something poignant about reading the private words of those once living, who are now gone. I felt it when I read a book similar to this called "Eyewitness To History" but because this book's accounts dealt strictly with hostile occasions, I felt it more strongly here. A book like this touches many themes: the universality of human emotion, human desires, human fears. It also shows how much like we of today the people who lived long ago were. Minus the references to anachronistic armaments and military campaigns from history-text wars, the letters from a Revolutionary War soldier to his loved ones at home are nearly identical to those of the Vietnam War correspondences also reproduced here. Longing, loneliness, fear, suffering, these are conditions as old as our (or any other) species, and what I found myself taking away from my (not cover-to-cover but still extensive) reading of this work was less a contrasting of "then and now" but how often the ideas repeated. I found this book often sad. I would have thought I'd be immune to a record of a distant event composed by a person dust a century or more before my birth, but my reactions to some of what I read in here proved otherwise. Overall this is a fine reference book and a good read. It serves up a number of useful accounts of events, authored by persons contemporary to what was described. However, be mindful of what I wrote above: there is touching power here in the repetitive nature of human cruelty, war's evils, and the suffering--emotional and physical--that descends on soldiers, and those who care for them.