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1 comments about The Memoirs of Charles Henry Veil: A Soldier's Recollections of the Civil War and the Arizona Territory.

1. [This review is based on the hardcover edition published by Orion Books, First edition, 1993]
   
   Charles Henry Veil's chief claim to fame is his recovering the body of Gen. John Reynolds after he had been killed during the early fighting on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. He went on to serve in the First U.S. Cavalry for the rest of the war, and then in the Arizona Territory until 1871. After his army days, Veil was involved in farming and mining around Phoenix for most of the rest of his life. These memoirs are mainly concerned with his army experiences during the war and out west.
   
   Born in Scalp Level, PA, in 1842, Veil joined the army in 1861. He was Reynolds's orderly when the Union general was shot and killed in McPherson's Woods by a rebel sharpshooter, and helped remove his body from the field (often later when he related the story he claimed he did it alone). The death of Reynolds, commander of First Corps, was a great loss to the Union cause, some equating it to Stonewall Jackson's death and loss to the Confederacy. Veil finished out the war with the First U.S. Cavalry, after which he was shipped to Arizona in 1866. Many of his duties there seemed to involve capturing deserters; once he shot and killed two deserters with one bullet. Charged with incompetence and misconduct (the last of a sexual nature) - not a word of which enters the memoirs - he was honorably discharged in 1871 when the army was cutting down on its forces. Engaged not very successfully in mining for a number of years, after his wife died in 1891 he returned to Pennsylvania, pretty much broke. He died there in 1910.
   
   Veil's memoirs are fairly routine and do not reveal much information. He is vague regarding specifics: dates, locations, names all go missing, replaced by textbook generalities. "The road we were on led to Yellow Tavern." That's it, no more information given. His later career came under a fog of moral ambiguity, which he refuses to acknowledge. Other than adding a helpful introduction, editor Herman Viola's presence is hardly felt, and that's a shame. Charles Veil might have been a witness to Reynolds's death at Gettysburg and even killed two men with one discharge from his gun, but these memoirs don't add up to much that is substantial.

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