Echoes of Mercy, Whispers of Love

Book excerpt: "The diaries of John Hemphill Simpson break the traditional published views of the war, as Simpson's duties as a chaplain appointed by the Presbyterian Church take him to the battlefields of Seven Pines, Gaines Mill, Chancellorsville and other bloody fields where he finds the bodies of his closest friends ... Simpson not only faces the morbid task of exhuming the bodies of slain Confederate soldiers on the battlefield but faces the families of the dead soldier[s] when he takes the bod[ies] home to be buried"--