Description: "At the outbreak of the war, Gilbert Thompson joined the regular army and was assigned to the engineer battalion. He began writing a journal of his service. After the war, Thompson took his three wartime journals and interleaved them into a single volume, adding some of his postwar reflections along the way. Thus, the text he left to posterity is both journal and memoir, and he maintains a clear delineation between these two perspectives throughout. Thompson was also an accomplished artist and topographer, and his sketches from the field add a unique visual narrative to this book. His service, including activity at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and Petersburg, extended well into 1864"--
Review Quotes: "Whether writing a letter home to his mother under a Sibley tent in a driving rain, trying to pass time in the grip of constant boredom, or throwing a pontoon bridge across an angry river, Thompson shares the raw emotions that came with being a soldier in our nation's seminal conflict. This is an important book that stands apart from other single-volume Civil War journals or memoirs."--Thomas F. Army, Jr., author of Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War