What a strange thing a civil war is. Any war, of course, but there is something especially curious about a war that is fought against your own countrymen. It's hard to imagine a battle where the people you meet across the barrel of a gun might be your neighbor, or worse your brother. In Howard Bahr's The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War young Bushrod Carter certainly finds it all quite curious.
"Bushrod realized with a start that the man was a Federal soldier. He was about to step away when the man put out his hand. 'Bill Provin of Cairo, Illinois,' he said. 'What's your name?'"
"Buhrod's raising would not suffer him to leave the man's hand dangling mid-air. 'Bushrod Carter,' he said. 'I am from Cumberland, Mississippi.' They shook hands. Bushrod though it the strangest thing he had ever done."
To be honest I wasn't sure I was going to get on with this book, the first of Caroline's Literature and War books for this year's readalong. Initially I was looking forward to it as it had been nominated for a number of awards and has received very positive reviews. And it is something a little different than the reading I'll be doing about WWI.
It starts a bit slowly, setting the scene--Bushrod mulling over in his mind the battles he's seen and experienced and men bantering back and forth. I tend to read mostly books written from a female perspective and identify more with stories with strong women protagonists, so I was feeling a little disoriented. This story promises at least one female character but so far she's off stage. But I am finding a universality to this story, even if it's a war story and my own experiences are so far away from those I am reading about.
So, I read a bit and then set the book down for several says to concentrate on other stories, thinking I had better get back to it if I want to finish by the end of the month (fearing I would be reading at a snail's pace), but when I picked up the book again yesterday something fell into place, the story clicked all of a sudden and now I am finding it quite absorbing. Isn't it funny how a story will all of a sudden take over and you forget yourself, and the world around you falls away and you begin inhabiting the world of the book instead?
It's a little unexpected but an extremely satisfying thing. The short passage above that I quoted refers to a scene where the two armies have called a temporary truce in order to bury their dead. It's a hot summer day and the Departed lie amidst the battle which seems to not move forward or backward, so something must be done. The uniforms, light or dark blue depending on which side you are one, mean little when jackets are taken off and the men are simply in shirt sleeves. All of a sudden there is no distinction and any of the men can belong to either side, which brings home the absurdity of it all as when they have buried the dead they will resume fighting.
The passage I marked, however, that I want to share is a description of a battlefield. Although not terribly graphic, it brings home the despair, fear and weariness of it all, which is the teaser I wanted to share:
"The woods were lit by fires smoky and fitful in the drenching rain. The Departed were everywhere, in heaps and piles and windrows. They were tucked into thickets where they had crawled to die alone, they were even in the trees. There were so many, and their faces so awful to look into, that the boys soon lost all hope of ever finding Virgil C. They wandered aimlessly through the wreckage of the battlefield. Now and then a hand would claw at their trouser legs. Voices rose from the shadows, disembodied like voices from dreams. Some demanded relief, others begged; they asked for water or for a surgeon, they asked for mothers and sisters, these voices. Some begged to be shot. From all these the boys shrank back in guilty horror."
Now that I have a rhythm going to my reading I feel as though I need to go back and skim the first few pages where I was "waiting for something to happen'--if you know what I mean. I have read very little about the Civil War and not much about this era in American history in general. The next two readalong books are also Civil War stories and now I am eager, too, to get a copy (am in line for it at the library) of Erin Lindsay McCabe's I Shall Be Near to You, which is about a woman who fights in the Civil War dressed as a man in order to be near her husband. I believe there were quite a few women who did this and I might have to look for other books, perhaps even read (shamefully have never read this or anything else by Crane) Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage later this year.
I can't decide whether it is a curse or a blessing to be interested in so many things. No wonder my reading is always all over the place.