Themes

The price of that freedom for Shaara is Gettysburg's eternal lesson, and he framed it in the most painful and glorious terms art can offer, the ancient mode of tragedy. Before the Civil War Lawrence Chamberlain had been a professor of rhetoric at Bowdoin College, and after Gettysburg he became the North's most decorated soldier.

Shaara gave Chamberlain his last words on the meaning of Gettysburg, when the night of July 3 was finally approaching and Chamberlain looked out at "the gray floor of hell" which he knew then had seen "one of the great moments in history." His "professor's mind" acknowledges Pickett's Charge as "the most beautiful thing he had ever seen," because Chamberlain — and Shaara and his readers — see that that "unspeakable beauty" was born when human pity and terror were purged in the crucible of Gettysburg: "So this is tragedy . . . great doors open to...