For the past two weeks I have learned the tactical difference between Little Round Top and Cemetery Hill (Little Round Top was a better defensive position). I have come to know that Robert E. Lee was often called "The Old Man". I have "limbered" and "unlimbered" the guns. I have sent out squads to harass the enemy artillery. I have set up "Napoleons" - short range cannons - on the enemy's flanks. I have heard the blood curdling Rebel yell as they broke through my feeble skirmishing lines, too many times to recall. I have realized why General Longstreet wasn't wild about the idea of a frontal attack on the Union Army. I have ordered some 8,000 miniature dudes to their death.

Perhaps it is then appropriate at the end of all this that I should resemble the defeated Confederate, George Pickett, whose hair, in author Michael Shaara's words, "streamed like a blasted flower," and who "moved his head like a man who has heard too loud a sound." Indeed, so many sleepless nights have been divided between Shaara's book The Killer Angels and the cool Sid Meier's Gettysburg!, that I am now as fluent in Civil War rhetoric and as exhausted as Pickett himself.

Rarely is there a game that thrives both in the imagination and on the monitor, a game with armies which evoke the personalities of their leaders. Under J.B. Hood a regiment was aggressive and direct. P.T. Beauregard, in contrast, observed a cautious, flexible style. Rarer still is a game with so complimentary a novel, one that was clearly in the minds of its designers. Reading The Killer Angels, you're sure to improve your generalship, absorbing lessons put to good use in the Gettysburg game, but also realizing the brutal results of that pivotal battle.

In Shaara's estimation the Civil War was being fought over slavery: it is the crux at the center of the conflict between the aristocratic South, desperate to abide tradition, and the liberating Union Army, fighting for the Brotherhood of Man. The true hero in this book is the Union's Lawrence Chamberlain, leader of the 20th Regiment of Infantry composed of volunteers from Maine.

He broods on how "there were only free men and slaves"; on Southerners with "white complacent faces" and "bland superiority." "The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land." But considerable time is spent, as well, in the minds of General Lee and Longstreet, who associate their cause and will to combat with a wistful nostalgia - an effort to preserve the aristocratic lifestyle bred in the plantations of the south.

Above all it is a novel concerned with the action taken by these men on the field of combat. Battles in the book are wonderfully recreated in Sid Meier's Gettysburg. For instance, the initial skirmish was carried out between Buford's cavalry brigades defending high ground from Heth's attacking division. The details of the first, misty morning, before dawn, "Buford riding down the line himself, waking them up, all the boyish faces," sets a neat atmosphere for your in-game strategizing. Then, as in history, "the Black-hat boys," Union infantry, march up to bolster the line to repulse the Rebel attack.

In Gettysburg!, the real-time battles are preceded with discussion between two generals, ruminating tactics over a map. The ethos of these leaders is richened by the Shaara story. Longstreet despairs throughout the book over the deaths of his three children to fever. He is a brutal, cold leader, inventor of a trench warfare theory, and Lee's right hand man. Appropriately, the "Longstreet-level" in the game is one of the most difficult - an enemy best avoided - should you choose to command the good guys.

You'll also likely experience in the game, right away, what Shaara characterizes as a "ripply sound that raised the hair, that high thin scream from far away coming out of the mist unbodied and terrible, inhuman… The scream of a flood of charging men: the Rebel yell." The game has truly wonderful - sometimes scary - sound effects: the muffled pop of muskets, the clank of mess kits of men on the march, the exhilarating "Hoo-Ra!" when you scatter an enemy squad.

But the novel does a fine job on its own stirring these battles in your imagination. Shaara's writing style is terse and haphazard, his phrases spliced together like sabre slashes; he shuns conjunction in favor of the comma. "Down the line the order came: advance… [Chamberlain] raised his sword. They began to move, the whole corps in mass, at slow march through a flat farm, a peach orchard. He ordered route step. Looking far off down the line, he saw the men moving in a long blue wave, the heart-stopping sight of thousands of men walking silently forward, rifles shouldered and gleaming in the sun, colors bobbing, the officers in front on high-stepping horses."

While a somewhat lurching narrative, the voice becomes appropriate when his audience arrives on the field of battle. The disorienting sentences are forged from a roving eye: bullets would have passed near the head, the limbs of trees to your left would suddenly shatter from distant artillery. Then, closer, the sound of an unseen enemy regiment would be heard, yelling like berserkers as they charged.

One of the truly great moments of combat in the book is when Chamberlain's outnumbered squad must defend Little Round Top from a Rebel force determined to surround and gain this important position. Even more dire is his regiment's low ammo supply, not enough to sustain a lengthy defense.

Click to continue . . .

"Looked down the line. Every few feet, a man down. Men sitting facing numbly to the rear. He thought: let's pull back a ways. He gave the order to Spear. The Regiment bent back from the colors, from the boulder, swung back to a new line, tighter, almost a U. The next assault came against both flanks and the center all at once, worst of all. Chamberlain dizzy in the smoke began to lose track of events, saw only blurred images of smoke and death, Tozier with the flag, great black gaps in the line, the line giving again, falling back, tightening ….

'Can't get no ammunition, sir. Everything's a mess up there. But they're holdin' pretty good. Rebs having trouble coming up the hill. Pretty steep.'

'Got to have bullets,' Chamberlain said.

Spear came up from the left. "Colonel, half the men are down. If they come again . . .' He shrugged, annoyed, baffled as if by a problem he could not quite solve, yet ought to, certainly, easily. 'Don't know if we can stop 'em.' "

Combat during the Civil War was characterized by marching and forming "battle lines," less often charging, so that enemies faced one another across long open fields or wooded terrain. Artillery could be brought to bear on a distant line of men, but the favored method of attack was to outflank - ordering troops to an army's side or rear in an effort to overwhelm from two directions. A regiment engaged to the front was effectively routed by an attack at its flank, from which direction it could not defend itself.

You see this everywhere in both the game and The Killer Angels. The most effective method of clearing enemy in Sid Meier's Gettysburg is to swing a group out to the side to attack their flank: troops under such fire will quickly panic and disperse. Consequently you are always maneuvering forces with this goal in mind.

How to bring artillery and men into such positions of advantage is easier said than done, however. Historically, the entire battle of Gettysburg was a chain of attempts, on both a large and small scale (in individual battles) to effectively outflank the opponent. In one battle I actually managed to wheel my horse-drawn artillery around _behind_ the Rebels (who were surrounding a forest I was desperately defending with a Chamberlain-like force) and started blasting away. Within moments the once brazen attackers were scattered dying in every direction. I watched them wither with the cold eyesight of a General seeing victory unfold. It was a thrilling moment.

Admit it, we spend too much time these days worrying about LANTIRN and AWACS. The Killer Angels/ Gettysburg! game combo brings us back in touch with rudimentary warfare. Emcon 1 is effectively supplanted by a stealthy column of men moving through a forest toward the enemy's big guns. Bugle calls from a dude on a horse remove the need for comms from that revolving radar dish airplane. I live in Nashville, where there are all kinds of historical signposts describing such things as "The Battle of Franklin." Until lately, I paid them no heed. But you don't have to live in the south to appreciate this war that forged America's destiny: reading The Killer Angels you begin to understand why the fighting was so vicious and so costly.

Generalship is fun. In New Orleans once I spent a long time in this store in the French Quarter with rows and rows of beautifully painted miniatures. The soldiers represented all of history: there were knights, Napoleonic cuirassiers, Zulu tribesmen. There were German infantry clustered around a huge gray schemed Panzer, Alexandrian shock troops. That's basically what Sid Meier's Gettysburg puts me in mind of: lead miniatures. Except what's great (and wholly addictive about the game) is that these miniatures do all the fighting on their own, with rifle skills, bayonets, and screams of agony.

In fact, Sid Meier himself, in the game's designer notes, cites a series of illustrations showing troops in miniature scale as a large part of his inspiration to create the game. By the same token, Shaara's book constantly returns to a sweeping, God's-eye-view of the battlefield. Troops on the march resemble long blue rivers, snaking toward their destination. A view from the Seminary cupola reveals "wreckage everywhere, mounded bodies, smoking earth . . ." and "a road coming down from the far-off mountains … packed with soldiers, thousands of soldiers, sunlight glittering on jeweled guns."

But the book and the RTS game compliment one another in many more ways. Faithfully depicted in both is the famous one-mile march through open space that Longstreet was ordered to execute with thousands of Confederates under his command. In the book this is a grueling moment: Longstreet knows he is ordering men to certain doom, and he pleads with Lee to develop a more prudent plan for attack. But Lee is bent on a frontal approach to divide the Union line in two, convinced it is stronger at its flanks.

There are no happy results for the Rebels. In the game I always have gorgeous shots at the Confederate columns with my rifle cannons during their lethargic approach, mowing them down as they cross this open field and then finishing off whatever scraps remain with my hulking defensive line. Brutal, eh?

Ultimately the novel becomes a kind of thrilling hint book on how to conduct these battles in the game. Learning from history's lesson, you order troops into positions of proven strategic value. Or, should you choose to be a Confederate, you might very well undermine history itself. Knowing Lee's mistakes, consider developing your own theories.

For the Civil War illiterate (like me) and the history buff alike, the Killer Angels and Sid Meier's Gettysburg! are an adrenalizing one-two punch. Learn stuff and have fun.