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of 24,000 loaded rifles on the field after Gettysburg; half these weapons held more than one load. Given how long it took to load and fire a rifle—using powder, ball, ramrod, percussion cap—he calculates that 95 percent of these soldiers should have been shot with an empty weapon if they had indeed been actively engaged in trying to kill the enemy. Grossman believes that “most of these discarded weapons on the battlefield at Gettysburg represent soldiers who had been unable or unwilling to fire their weapons in the midst of combat and then had been killed, wounded, or routed.”14

There is little surviving evidence with which to assess the accuracy of Grossman’s assertion about high rates of nonfiring by Civil War soldiers; his claim is based chiefly on extrapolations from studies of other wars, studies that are themselves contested. The intriguing puzzle of multiply loaded guns may have other explanations: for example, a soldier’s pure panic, or his failure amid the din of battle to realize a weapon had not discharged. But some anecdotal evidence of resistance to firing does exist. One Confederate soldier at Chickamauga made a dramatic show of his refusal to kill. Instead of aiming at the enemy, he shot straight up into the air while “praying as lustily as ever one of Cromwell’s Roundhead’s prayed.” When his captain threatened to shoot him, a comrade reported his reply: “You can kill me if you want to, but I am not going to appear before my God with the blood of my fellow man on my soul.” Willing to remain “exposed to every volley of the enemy’s fire,” the soldier was ready to give his life rather than take that of another.15

Subsequent wars introduced forms of combat with levels of impersonality and anonymity that reduced the burden of individual responsibility endured by Civil War infantry. Many of the bombs and missiles used in twentieth-century warfare, for example, almost entirely separated the killer from his victims. The crew of the Enola Gay or the specialists targeting precision weapons in the First Gulf War had a very different relationship to killing than the Civil War soldier—or the twenty-first-century enlisted man on the ground in Afghanistan or Iraq. Physical distance between enemies facilitates emotional distance from destructive acts. But fewer than 10 percent of Civil War troops were artillerymen, who lobbed shot, shell, or canister toward a distant enemy, and even these targets were usually close enough to be clearly identifiable as men. Most Civil War wounds were inflicted by minié balls shot from rifles: 94 percent of Union injuries were caused by bullets; 5.5 percent by artillery; and less than 0.4 percent by saber or bayonet. Although Civil War weapons did have significantly increased range, infantry engagements, even as they grew to involve tens of thousands of men, remained essentially intimate; soldiers were often able to see each other’s faces and to know whom they had killed. Historian Earl Hess asserts that despite the capabilities of the new rifles, most combat occurred at a distance of about one hundred yards, even though, as one Yankee soldier explained, “when men can kill one another at six hundred yards they generally would prefer to do it at that distance.” S. H. M. Byers of Iowa remembered one terrible battle where “lines of blue and gray” stood “close together and fire[d] into each other’s faces for an hour and a half,” and after Gettysburg, Union soldier Henry Abbott wrote his father of opposing “rows of dead…within 15 and 20 feet apart, as near hand to hand fighting as I ever care to see.”16

The growth in size of battlefields between the Civil War and the two World Wars of the next century influenced the kinds of interactions that took place upon them. In Civil War engagements, The Penguin Encyclopedia of Modern Warfare calculates, the ratio of soldiers to space on the field averaged one man per 260 square meters; by the end of World War II, the ratio rose to one per 28,000 square meters. With its large volunteer armies, its longer-range weapons, and its looser military formations,