By Darrell Laurant

Published: March 26, 2008

Did you see the movie “Gods and Generals”?

If so, surely you remember Col. Joshua Chamberlain.

He was that tall, commanding figure who orchestrated the Union counterattack at Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg, shouting “Charge!” as his Maine troops beat back a Confederate advance and helped shape history.

Or was he? Actually, that was Jeff Daniels, who portrayed Chamberlain in the 2003 film.

“Chamberlain was really about 5-foot-7,” said Tom Desjardin, a historian for the State of Maine and nationally recognized Chamberlain expert. “He stuttered as a child, and he came back from a severe attack of dysentery to join his men at Gettysburg.

“But you can’t have a 5-foot-7, stuttering guy with diarrhea as your main character.”

Nor is it likely that Chamberlain actually yelled “Charge!” Or even “Ch-ch-charge!” (He was over his stuttering by then).

“You knew he would yell it in the movie, though,” said Desjardin, who has written several books on Chamberlain and will be speaking at this weekend’s Civil War Seminar at Liberty University. “Somebody always yells ‘Charge!’ in movies.”

Desjardin wasn’t complaining. He understands that films have to be made so audiences can understand them.

“Real life is too confusing,” he pointed out.

Moreover, as the chief adviser to Daniels during filming, he praised the actor for his efforts to delve into the intriguing character he was portraying.

“He came up to Maine to do research on Chamberlain’s background,” Desjardin said, “and he took it very seriously. We were a little concerned at first, though, when he showed up in a Hawaiian shirt and a ballcap.”

This year’s LU seminar has Gettysburg as its focus, and Desjardin (who spent six years as a historian there) will be speaking at 1 p.m. Saturday in the DeMoss Learning Center on “Chamberlain and Little Round Top.” But there will be a subtext, as well.

“I’m also going to talk some about how history gets from A to B,” he said, “and what happens to the truth in the process.”

To Desjardin, the fact that Chamberlain wasn’t tall and wasn’t feeling very well that day and didn’t have a lot of battlefield experience makes his story even more compelling.

“It was like a quarterback getting hurt in the Super Bowl and the coach picks you or I to go in,” he said. “All he had done was drill on a flat field, nothing like the terrain he was faced with.”

Yet by all accounts, Chamberlain handled himself heroically.

“Part of the officer’s job was to expose himself to enemy fire and inspire his troops,” Desjardin said. “Chamberlain didn’t even have a pistol at Gettysburg, and he was wounded several times.”

Gettysburg, Desjardin said, forced a change in attitude on the part of the northern troops.

“This was Pennsylvania,” he said, “and they were thinking, ‘If we lose this hill, they’ll be marching on my home town next.’ Down in Virginia, if you lost a battle, you just went somewhere else in Virginia and had another one.”

Fighting “to preserve the Union” was something of a vague concept. But the Confederate incursion into Pennsylvania left the Union soldiers playing defense, like their southern counterparts had been doing for years. It introduced a new ferocity into the conflict.

Yet by the time the two armies finally landed, exhausted, in Appomattox, all the ferocity was gone. And on April 9, 1865, it was Chamberlain — as commander of the infantry — who ordered his men to come to attention as “carry arms” as a show of respect to the Confederates who were marching down the road to surrender their colors and weapons.

“After the war,” Desjardin said, “he was actually invited down to Petersburg as a guest of honor, which certainly wouldn’t have happened with guys like Sherman. They remembered Chamberlain as a pretty decent guy.”