By the time Herman Melville (1819–1891) wrote “Shiloh,” probably in 1864 or early 1865, he was an ex-celebrity, his recent literary career a succession of failures. The greatest American novelist of the nineteenth century had turned exclusively to poetry, which was as little read as his later prose had been; his Battle-Pieces and Other Aspects of the War, published in 1866, sold fewer than 500 copies.
The Civil War gave rise to a new kind of antiwar writing, not to be seen again to any significant extent until World War II. Many of the writers commenting on it here supported the war, for the sake of the Union or hatred of slavery; some, like Ambrose Bierce, fought in it, and did not repent their service. What they opposed were the traits common to all wars, even the good ones: the empty distinctions between friend and foe, and the insufficiency of even the highest rhetoric—“fame or country least their care”—to justify the slaughter of one army of human beings by another.
A Requiem
(APRIL, 1862)
Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
The forest-field of Shiloh—
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
Around the church of Shiloh—
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there—
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—
Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.