Why Did More Civil War Soldiers Die in Camp Than in Battle?

You're lying in a canvas tent, the ground soaking through your blanket. You haven't fired a shot in eleven days. The man two cots over has been shaking since Tuesday, and this morning the surgeon stopped looking at him the way he looks at men he expects to save. The fighting is twenty miles away — and here, in this camp, you are losing men faster than any battle line ever took them. This is the part of the Civil War the battlefield documentaries never show. Not the charge, not the cannon, not the generals on horseback. The thing that killed the most men, on both sides, was quieter and far harder to film — and there is one documented number about what happened inside those camps that almost nobody knows. This is the war the way the common soldier actually lived it, North and South: the camp fever, the contaminated water, the cornmeal and scurvy, the men who died in a cot twenty miles from the nearest enemy. In this video: Why a soldier spent roughly fifty days in camp for every one in battle The Union winter camps where the real killer first became clear The Confederate camps where supply collapse and scurvy made it worse Andersonville and the prison stockades, North and South The one number — and why two-thirds of the war's dead never fell to a bullet New cinematic Civil War documentaries every week. Subscribe and fall in.