‘Carnage Infernal’

The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House presents a challenge for writers that other battles don’t. For 24 hours, soldiers from the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia engaged in pointblank-range fighting in the pouring rain, and in mud over their ankles, in what became the most sustained hand-to-hand combat of the war. The May 12, 1864, fight quickly deteriorated into a death grapple, what John Haley of the 17th Maine called “a seething, bubbling, roaring hell of hate and murder.”

Every Civil War battle has its moments of intense fighting, and writers must find a way to capture the intensity of those experiences on the page. But Spotsylvania is different because it’s more—and not just a little more but by magnitudes—because of its duration, intensity, and proximity. “I have been in a good many hard fights, but I never saw anything like the contest of the 12th,” a Louisiana officer attested.

And so the question becomes: How much is enough to tell the story and how much is too much? The fighting that day in May 1864 was indeed too much in a war already overflowing with excess horror, and Wert could not have picked a truer title: The Heart of Hell.

Wert gets the balance exactly right, offering a graphic account of the violence