This early silent short film by Thomas H. Ince, "The Drummer of the 8th", is available today in a good looking and tinted print well transferred to home video and may be worth watching just for that reason. Otherwise, it's a rather average film for its time. It's one of the films Ince made in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of America's Civil War; it's about a boy who runs off to enlist with the Unionists, against his parents' wishes and to follow his older brother who already enlisted.
There are some brief, poorly staged and filmed battle scenes, which I think compare unfavorably to even the battle scenes in Ince's earlier Bison Westerns, such as in "The Invaders" and "Custer's Last Fight" (both from 1912). Besides the battles in those Westerns being longer, they created more excitement by alternating between long vistas of large-scale fighting and closer views of main characters. The battle in this film fairs even worse in comparison to those by D.W. Griffith and "Billy" Bitzer, such as in the same year's "The Battle at Elderbush Gulch". The camera takes a fairly close long-shot position in "The Drummer of the 8th"--just close enough to let us see some details while hopefully not noticing its small scale. The larger problem with the sequence in this film, however, is that it completely fails to follow the axis of action: North and South appear in separate shots to be charging from and to the same direction, rather than towards each other. Regardless, this is a very old and short film, so further criticisms seem needless. It was even made before happy endings became established in the industry. Otherwise, "The Drummer of the 8th" does have decent production values for Nickelodeon fare. There's also a brief flashback during one scene.