Gods and Generals

This is the interweaving story of four great men. On the Union side, there is Joshua Chamberlain, promising academic and budding soldier, and Winfield Scott Hancock. Both became heroes on the field at Gettysburg. For the Confederacy there is Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson, a hopeless failure at the Virginia Military Academy and an eccentric fierce Christian and military genius who was the inspiration for Erwin Rommel, and Robert E. Lee, one of the greatest leaders of all time, whose simple austere sense of duty hid a complex and often tortured soul, and whose military skill defied the overwhelming force of the Union armies for four years. It is also the story of the strange links and fellow feeling that bound all these men together, and of the fateful meetings that brought them lethally together on the great battlefields of the war. As the war progressed so the dark shadows of the Union's overwhelming resources dominated Lee's thinking ever more, until he determined on one massive desperate thrust to end the war at an obscure crossroads in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg.