Howard BahrRecensioni

Good Civil War story. That was a hard period to live through!

“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 in 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 in guilty horror.”

Confederate soldiers and friends from Mississippi, Bushrod, Jack, and Virgil, are part of the same company fighting the American Civil War. We follow them as they participate in the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee. Protagonist Bushrod meets Anna, whose cousin’s house is taken over and used as a field hospital. The plot revolves around a small number of characters. They have become war weary and seriously consider desertion.

I had never read anything by Howard Bahr before and was very impressed with his writing. The storyline illustrates the terrible death toll taken in the Civil War. It is does not touch on the causes. It is intensely focused on the relationships between friends. As may be expected in a book about war, it is extremely sad. It is a powerful story of attempting to retain human compassion in the midst of devastation.

“In the tricky, shifting light of the fire, the sleepers—Anna, Bushrod, and Nebo—seemed figures in a very old painting, caught in a vanished moment of repose. It was easy to believe that they might sleep forever, free of pain and grief and confusion, pardoned from all things and especially from tomorrow. They might never change—only the colors around them, already soft, yielding year by year to the benign erosion of time. It was an illusion, of course, for the constellations above were moving ahead of the sun, and the light of day would dissolve the shadows and awaken the sleepers to movement, to life or to death, as it always did. But for now they slept and dreamed, and their peace, for all its deception, was no less real to them.”

It was kind of sluggish reading. I thought the plot was weak. But details were alright.

Pelican Road is a screaming train ride of a book, with sharp curves and downhill grades that are taken at breakneck speeds, but it is a not a train you want to stop and not a train you wish to alight from until the bitter end. It follows the world of steam engine trains on the cusp of WWII and the men who run the route between Louisiana and Mississippi, most of them aging as are the trains themselves.

There was an added level of enjoyment for me, brought about by the fact of my brother being a railroad man back in the days when telegraph was still the method of communication and when handing off messages to the moving trains was still a practice. I have heard his stories of traveling the railways and staying the small towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard. I recognized some of the language and, while the time portrayed here is far earlier than my brother’s time, I could recognize the special camaraderie he felt with his fellow railroad men.

I cared about all of these men, flawed as they were, and loved them for their devotion to the job and to one another. I especially felt the connection to Artemus and Frank and thought the flashbacks to their war days added a level of depth and understanding to them that would have missed without that background.

What an amazing writer Howard Bahr is. His descriptive passages are remarkable in their ability to touch all your senses. At the same time, I felt no word was unnecessary or wasted. There was meaning in every sentence. Bahr is a careful writer, he is as careful and professional with his craft as those men he portrayed on the Pelican Road were with theirs.

The year is 1884, the war is 20 years behind them and Alison Sansing is dying. Since the deaths of her father and her brother at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, she has been alone. Now she realizes that she will rest eternally alone, and she determines that her final act will be to recover their bodies and bring them home to the family cemetery where she can rest with them, as she feels she should. For this job, she needs the help of Cass Wakefield, the man who laid them to rest on the battlefield all those years ago.

This journey back to Franklin becomes not only a physical trip but also a mental one for Cass, Alison, and Cass’s confederates, Lucian and Roger. These men must step into a world they have struggled for years to leave behind. They must re-enter terrain where the worst nightmares were real, and they must walk ground that, for them, oozes the blood of their fellow soldiers. For Alison, it is an opportunity to know what befell the men she loved and the men who accompany her on her odyssey, and a chance to understand that she cannot ever truly understand at all.

The events that transpire during this trip are tragic and revealing. There is a sense that the life these individuals have in 1884 are merely shadows of the lives they left behind them in 1864. There is a great sadness, fraught with lost opportunity, that permeates this novel. I kept imagining what these lives might have been like had there been no war. I kept questioning the arbitrary nature of death and survival, the idea of fate and destiny and good and evil. And, of course, God.

Roger explains to Lucian where God is in all of this:

”He was there,” said Roger. “He was there all along, watching and grieving. If we live, I will take you over the next field myself, and maybe you will learn what you can only learn the hard way; that God is there with you, and whatever sorrow you are feeling--well, how infinite must the sorrow be in HIS heart? It is the only way. Once a man decides God planned all this, once he points to God as responsible, then his faith is gone. No mortal can bear that, no matter what he says. WE have lost pretty much everything, but faith we must not lose. That is why we pray, and fervently--but not for preservation, mind. That article is left to you and your pards, not to God. To ask Him for it, and be spared when so many are not, will only doom your faith.”
“What do you ask for, then?” said the boy.
Roger pulled the quilt around his shoulders. “To be forgiven,” he said.

Perhaps this series of books is about just that--forgiveness. Perhaps we have not yet forgiven ourselves or our neighbors, and perhaps we will never truly understand ourselves until we do.

5 stars. Among the best Civil War epics ever written.

It is 1865 and the war is over. The Confederate soldiers are going home at last, among them Gawain Harper. He has made it through the war with the daguerreotype of Morgan Rhea in his pocket, but he does not know if she is waiting for him and he is afraid that the women he will find at the end of this journey will not be the woman he left behind. Indeed, he knows not one person in this world is the same, especially not himself.

Bahr, who, in his first novel, [b:The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War|651358|The Black Flower A Novel of the Civil War|Howard Bahr|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1354900191s/651358.jpg|637489], offered the most realistic picture I have ever known of the Civil War, now gives just as stark and compelling a picture of the days after the war and the struggle of the living to rejoin life and determine their places in it. We walk the road with these men and feel how foreign everything in life is to them. Even after returning home, something as normal as sleeping in a bed seems impossible. Much of the town they knew is burned to the ground and, even worse, they are in an occupied territory. The hatred of the soldiers has virtually evaporated, but the hatred in the town and among the “rangers”, who never went to war but have ruled in the absence of the men, is hot and palpable. Like most wars, this one has claimed some of the best men and left behind some of the worst.

If you have ever had a romantic notion of what war or reconstruction is, Howard Bahr will steal that from you and leave you gasping at how raw and real war and its aftermath can be. His own experiences in Vietnam no doubt inform his clear understanding of the horrors and consequences of war. His ability to convert that knowledge into the world of the 1860s is impressive and unparalleled.

I shall never forget Gawain Harper or Capt. Harry Stribling. They are so realistically depicted that I felt as if I were reading about a fore-father and as if their stories were a part of my own past. After reading this book, I took a walk down into the countryside to a small cemetery plot that is now buried in a tangle of weeds on the far side of a field that is only temporarily free of crops. In that graveyard (which is an old-time family plot from the 1800s), there is a marker for a soldier by the name of Whitfield Moore from Co. F of the 40th VA Infantry, C.S.A. I placed flowers there and said a prayer for the soul of this man who must certainly have suffered much of what Bahr writes of and whose greatest luck might be that he found a final resting place back at his home place. Perhaps he is out walking that long road with his fellows still. There is a reason history should be remembered, not the least of which it that all of these young men were real.

The title of this book is the name of a Civil War song, written in 1862 and heard here as it would have been sung then. https://youtu.be/Lalt29JmeC8

5 Stars - I do wish there were a rating "Stupendous"

Perhaps if I had been born in Oxford, Mississippi, I could have been a great writer. Seems everyone who puts pen to paper in that town writes something extraordinary. Howard Bahr is my new favorite writer. He puts emotion into his work without saccharin; he brings reality with all its starkness and tempers it with a bit of humor; and he finds what it is that essentially makes us human, the parts we most try to hide and keep to ourselves, and he lays them bare for the world to see. He collapses you into tears that purge your soul, and you cry not only for his characters who have touched you so, but for yourself and for all the potential that was lost and buried in your world before you came.

I have always loved the Civil War. I was born into a South that still remembered its loss and mourned them as if they were fresh. I grew up in the shadow of Kennesaw Mountain and I went there and felt the blood still rushing beneath its calm surface. I felt the pride and the shame and the waste of that war as if I had known it in some regard closer than a history book. My grandfather, whose older brothers had fought in it, carried a bit of it in his soul and remembered its aftermath and the impact that it had on their lives.

And they would look out over the stones and the grass and the tranquil bloodless fields and find, each in his turn, the only truth that was left them: that the stones possessed a logic of their own, that it all seemed to make sense once but didn’t now, and whatever meaning there once was could no longer be got at by old men drowsing in the sunlight with full bellies and no one to shoot at them. With this, all distinctions blurred--between enemies, between the living and the dead--until the old men arose and knocked out their pipes and walked away, wanting to forgive everyone, starting with themselves.

But this is not largely the tale of those old men who survived and felt the moments after the war. This is, rather, Bushrod Carter’s very personal story of the war he fought, of the losses he endured, and of his own attempt to make sense of it all. At its beginning, we find Bushrod, his friends, Jack Bishop and Virgil C. Johnson, and the army of the Confederacy about to engage in one of the bloodiest and most useless battles of the entire war, the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee. They are about to cross the land of the McGavock’s, intersect with the lives there, and change a sweet and peaceful home beside a meandering river into a witness to battle, an onsite hospital, and a river of blood. Bushrod must grapple with every inch of moral territory a man can encounter: a love for his fellow man, the memory of a life before, the madness of continuing to pursue a cause no one can even remember, and a belief in a God who seems absent most of the time.

...but he had never figured out how God could look down on such madness and not take a hand. The best he could do was to remind himself that men made their own troubles mostly, and that God spent a lot of time grieving Himself.

Amen. War now is so different, so impersonal in some ways; we kill men that we do not have to look into the eyes of while we do it. But, in this war, we are fighting ourselves, our own, and we must look into the face of the man we kill and try not to see that what we slay is a piece of ourselves. Perhaps that is what has always made this war seem different to me. That and the feeling that of all the avoidable wars in the history of mankind, this one was the most avoidable.

Needless to say, I will read the rest of Bahr’s works. His two other Civil War books are on order. I am grateful to Diane at the Southern Literary Trail for introducing me to this marvelous writer. Not since Cold Mountain have I read a Civil War novel that brought me so close to the hearts of the men who fought and the women who witnessed and paid the price in loss and remembrance.

rabck from PerryFran; The story begins with Bushrod Carter, a confederate rifleman, a few hours before the battle of Franklin, Tennessee. He joined up with two childhood friends, and through flashbacks to his childhood and earlier battles. The McCavock plantation is the field hospital, and later the cemetery of those who died. Interesting that Bushrod always referred to the Union troops as strangers, although during one battle both sides stopped fighting long enough to bury their dead and Bushrod wound up working with an Ohio man. The toll on the men and the villagers upon whose land the battles raged, along with tending the wounded and dying was devastating. This one will travel forward in the Color Bookbox

Loved this story. It took me into the characters mind and memories. There will be a lot to talk about at our book club this month.

Twenty-six-year old Bushrod Carter is a Confederate soldier in the Civil War. He is battle weary and is injured in the Battle of Franklin. The book tells of how the army turns a plantation home into a hospital for the wounded soldiers and uses the grounds for a resting area for those who are still able to fight. When Bushrod is injured in the battle he is taken to the Plantation where he meets Anna the cousin of the plantation owner. Under different circumstances some sort of relationship might have developed between them but it was wartime and it was not meant to be.

The book depicts the horrors of the battles that took place during the Civil War and tells of the abominable conditions of the field hospitals where the soldiers were treated. The well-written narrative allows the reader to be present in the battles and in the hospital. Not only does the novel explore war from the viewpoint of the soldier, it also recounts the emotional impact that the war had on the women of that time period.

This was a beautifully written, heartbreaking novel of a couple of days (one battle) in the Civil War. Interspersed with the battle and its aftermath are memories of characters that give depth to their story. There is war, romance, treachery, heartbreak and more packed into this brief period. I found it very moving.

The one thing that there is NOT in this book is a discussion of slavery - or even mention of slaves aside from one that carries some bodies. I'm sure this was intentional on the part of the author but am not sure of the reasons. Perhaps in the day-to-day war, with so many of the actual fighters coming from poor families, it wasn't really the issue that was at the forefront of every mind. But it seemed strange how little it was acknowledged.

Overall, I highly recommend this book!½

I’ve been wanting to read Howard Bahr’s books for a long time but it wasn’t until Diane at the Goodreads On the Southern Literary Trail group chose Pelican Road as a group selection that I finally had a chance to read and discuss one with others, so thank you ma’am for that.

If you are in any way interested in trains, this is the book for you. It even reads like a train ride, starting out slowly with lots of fits and starts, then building up steam until soon it is barreling along at a break-neck pace closing in relentlessly on its inevitable final destination. We meet many people on our journey, most of them train crewmen, but even in the midst of their shared camaraderie there is a sense of loneliness. It is Christmas Eve and everyone else is rushing home to be with their families for the holidays. But not Frank Smith, or A.P. Dunn, or Eddie Cox, the fireman making his last run before retiring, or Bobby Necaise, or Artemus Kane or even Ira Nussbaum, the irascible conductor who is as determined as any to get his passengers home safely.

Theirs was a dangerous job. The slightest lapse in attention could cause a trainman a finger, if he is lucky, or his life if he wasn’t. To successfully run a railroad, with multiple trains running in different directions at different speeds required intricate timing where a error in judgement could spell disaster.

And so the tension builds. The reader knows that disaster looms ahead. But can the eminently capable train crews avert disaster? Who is to say? Howard Bahr, of course.

Bottom line: This book holds few surprises but it is still very enjoyable. Bahr’s prose and descriptive ability is magnificent. I am very interested in reading his Civil War trilogy starting with The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War.
✭✭✭✭✭
FYI: On a 5-point scale I assign stars based on my assessment of what the book needs in the way of improvements:
*5 Stars – Nothing at all. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
*4 Stars – It could stand for a few tweaks here and there but it’s pretty good as it is.
*3 Stars – A solid C grade. Some serious rewriting would be needed in order for this book to be considered great or memorable.
*2 Stars – This book needs a lot of work. A good start would be to change the plot, the character development, the writing style and the ending.
*1 Star - The only thing that would improve this book is a good bonfire.½

This is the best Civil War novel I have ever read. Poetry.

First Line: Cass Wakefield was born in a double-pen log cabin just at the break of day, and before he was twenty minutes old, he was almost thrown out with the bedclothes.

Since that rather inauspicious beginning, Cass Wakefield piloted steamboats, married, was a soldier, and became a widower. For the last twenty years, he's lived in Cumberland, Mississippi, and been a traveling salesman selling Colt revolvers.

Alison Sansing lost her father and brother in the war, and for the last twenty years, she's lived in that big old house in Cumberland alone. Having just been told by her doctor that she has cancer and hasn't long to live, the thing Alison fears most is being buried in the family cemetery alone. She asks Cass Wakefield to accompany her to Franklin, Tennessee-- where her father and brother died in battle-- to recover their bodies and bring them back to Cumberland to be buried at home.

Having fought in the Battle of Franklin himself, Cass has no desire whatsoever to return to the area, but he does... for Alison. Two friends who fought alongside Cass travel with the pair, and the closer they all get to Franklin, the more vivid their memories become.

I chose to read this book because my great-great-great-grandfather fought and died in the Battle of Franklin, and the fact that James Henry Brown's uniform was blue not gray, doesn't make a bit of difference. Bahr sets his scene very carefully. The pace felt like a steam locomotive pulling out of the station and gradually gaining speed. A profound sense of sadness, of sorrow, for all that was lost, for all the lives that were forever changed, permeates the book. At one point Alison asks what the fighting was like, and the response is one of the best I've ever read about the impossibility of telling someone who wasn't there what it's like to fight in the midst of the bloodbath of battle:

"If we live a thousand years, won't ever find a way to tell it." He coughed , and turned his head to spit. "In a battle, everything is wrong, nothing you ever learned is true anymore. And when you come out-- if you do-- you can't remember. You have to put it back together by the rules you know, and you end up with a lie. That's the best you can do, and when you tell it, it'll still be a lie."

The book's sadness turns to heartbreak as the men arrive in Franklin and try to locate where the bodies were buried so long ago. Yes, things have changed, but there are still roads, still buildings, that unleash an overwhelming tide of memory and loss. It's some of the best writing about war I've ever read because Bahr never once lets graphic carnage carry his story. It's a wonderful thing when a writer credits his readers with enough imagination and feeling to fill in the blanks for themselves.

Cass Wakefield is a beautifully realized character. One I will long remember, as I will remember The Judas Field. I come away from the book feeling that I now have a tiny idea of what my ancestor went through in that time and place so long ago.

The Judas Field
by Howard Bahr
Picador
July 2007
978-0--312-42693-4
$14.00, $16.25 CAN, pb
304 pp.

The Judas Field is an astounding work of historical fiction that will rip deep into your heart and settle into your soul like a haunting bad dream. Howard Bahr provides a sharply detailed journalistic view of The Battle of Franklin through the eyes of Cass Wakefield, a soldier who is unable to reconcile the past. His life is empty and emotionless, haunted by memories he would rather forget. When a childhood friend asks him to recover her kin who died in the infamous battle, he reluctantly agrees to help.

The Judas Field, is based on the events surrounding the actual Battle of Franklin. It has been called, “The Gettysburg of the West.” and lasted only about five hours. It took place in the yard of the Carter Family, while the family hid in the house during the fight. When silence settled over the area, the casualties combined were over 9,000.

As you travel north to Tennessee from Mississippi with Cass, the reader will without a doubt empathize with Cass when his painful past insinuates itself into the safe cocoon of reflection he prefers. Uninvited images flash momentarily. War is loud. The repeated pounding and thunderous cacophony of canon fire and the constant ping and ring from ricochetted stray bullets whiz capriciously overhead. The ammunition is meant to kill and maim and bayonets are drawn. Sometimes, when a prayer is answered a bedraggled soldier will be spared. It doesn’t matter which side, the bullets and cannonballs originate, they are meant to kill, meant to deafen the sensitive ears and meant to produce the piles of bloody bodies that carpet the hellish landscape. All sense of beauty erased as the scavengers claim clothes, shoes, food and weapons from the dead.

War is quiet. The animals know to flee. The residents of the house disappear from view. as their property and yard become a battlefield. They huddle in a cellar, a barn, or escape to a cave or copse of trees, any shelter in hopes they will be spared. This is ground zero and a there is a still, eerie quiet , so quiet it is as both sides stopped breathing. The stillness hovers over terrified soldiers as they wait for the engagement of another day. One of many that they have seen and one of the many they will face again.

Howard Bahr has a wondrously rich and picturesque style. You can’t get much closer to being a true witness than you will with the acutely sensitive descriptions that make his story tangible. Howard Bahr’s writing allows the reader to visualize, hear and feel the battle. You will witness a slaughter from the soldiers’ point of view. You will see the the nefarious images they encounter of the dead and grossly maimed. It is an unworldly place to be. Likewise he is sensitive to the emotional pain and thoughts of his characters with phrases that will wrap around you like a warm hug. His prose is poetry.

It is the memories of those who survived, yet are slowly dying of the past that this story is about. The journey, whether the past will win is what makes this story so unique. If you have not read The Judas Field, it comes with my recommended high praise. I will treasure my copy.


© [Wisteria Leigh] and [Bookworm's Dinner], [2008-2011].

I really enjoyed this book. It is southern fiction, about railroaders back around WWII. Well written and I found it compelling.

This book is so hauntingly beautiful that it makes me shiver. The writing serves as a window into the soul, the deep humanity, of these men, and you just ache for what they are about to do. Wow. Bahr's prose is at once searing and lovely. It wounds you as the reader. I highly recommend this for anyone who has ever visited a Civil War battlefield and felt a presence still lingering. You think about the words long after turning that final page.

Started to read but I needed lighter fare while on vacation. As it's about the Civil War, I released it in a spot which still bears the name of civil war activities, Battery Park Ave, in Asheville.

Howard Bahr's prose is pure joy to read. I found myself reading every word, often aloud. I am in the process of reading all of his books. After reading The Black Flower and Pelican Road, I think I would read anything Mr. Bahr wrote, just because he is such a good writer.

Last night was a sad night for me. It wasn't totally due to the sadness that Howard Bahr is able to evoke but partly because I have come to the end of his trilogy. The Black Flower, part one, remains near the top of my list of favorite books of all time. It very well could be number one. The Year of Jubilo was a worthy follow up. It wasn't on the level of The Black Flower in my opinion, but it was still a damn good book. I gave The Black Flower 5*'s and Jubilo 4*'s.

The Judas Field is on par with The Black Flower. It is just magnificent. There are pages that I would re-read many times and each time I felt the same wave of emotion, understanding, and sympathy that I had the first time.

The soldier's referred to death in a spirtual and physical form. They referred to death as The Death Angel. I would like to share a passsage:

"The Death Angel was everywhere waiting, counting them over and over, eager to subtract. He marched beside them in the ranks; he moved among them when they slept, peering into their faces. He was eager for the little slip, the moment of weakness or forgetfulness. He courted them all. "

......

" So they grieved, and more; they were harried by guilt. That, too, was the work of the Death Angel, who chose one and let another live, who dropped this one by the roadside while his comrade walked on. The soldiers traveled always in the company of those who were gone, who were transformed by memory into better men -- gentler, funnier, braver men -- than they might have been in life. The Death Angel reminded the living always of how much promise was lost, and how, beside it, their own possibilities shrank to no consequence. He whispered how they could never do enough, be enough now to be worthy of the gift of life. " And yet, are you not relieved?" he would whisper. "Tell yourself truly -- are you not glad it was him and not you?" The soldiers might speak of tomorrow, of what good deeds they would do, of redemption or love or promise or hope, but deep in their hearts, they knew it to be a lie, a tale they told themselves to beguile their shame. "

Treat yourself folks. Treat yourself to Howard Bahr.½

I read this right after reading The Black Flower. My hopes were set extremely high as The Black Flower is one of the best books I have ever read. Perhaps the bar was set too high. This is the second of a three book series set in the south around the Civil War. The Black Flower took place during a battle, while this takes place as the Civil War is winding down.

The writing ability is still there. I just felt the first hundred and fifty or so pages could have been cut in half. The final half of the book is excellent and reminded why I have a new love for Howard Bahr's ability. It just felt like nothing of any significance happened in the first half and that he took too much time doing some character development.

I look forward to reading the final book of the trilogy. While this book was not as good as The Black Flower, in my opinion, it is a very good read for anybody looking to read Civil War era fiction.½

The Black Flower is one of the more beautiful books I have ever read. I am new to the Civil War scene in literature and I can only hope that I come across books that match The Black Flower in it's power, but I highly doubt I will be able to.

In 1885 Cass Wakefield was asked by his longtime friend Alice Sansing to accompany her to retrieve the bodies of her father and brother. Alice is dying of cancer and, having never married, suddenly is afraid of being alone forever in the cemetery. Her father and brother had fought in the civil war in the local regiment and died at the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee in 1864. Cass, the man she had hoped to marry before he married another, and Roger Lewellen, another local man, served in the same regiment and had helped to bury the Sansing men after the battle. On the journey north from their home in Cumberland, MS, Cass is thrust back into his past and must confront his memories of the war and his actions in it.

A gloomy, morose book. Very vivid descriptions of the conditions of the soldiers during the war, and of the horror of the battlefield. Also realistically shows the lingering effects of war on the lives of the soldiers, even 20 years later.

My two favorite quotes: "When we finally have enough mistakes to learn from, it's time to die" (pg 240) and "Without the possibility of defeat, the victories would have no meaning" (pg 292).

Even though the overall tone of the story is somber, I think that Bahr avoided being too heavy-handed. The descriptions are done in a matter-of-fact fashion, forcing the reader to acknowledge the ugliness that is war, and the inevitable mortality of each one of us.½

This is a beautifully written and powerful novel of the American Civil War as seen through the eyes of foot soldiers and civilians during the war's final, desperate (for the South) year. The first section of the book shows us Bushrod Carter and his comrades of the Cumberland Rifles as they form up near a farm house and await marching orders into a battle that, to their practiced soldiers' eyes as they survey the battleground they have to cross and the Federal works they have to storm, they seem to have little hope of winning or even surviving. Here are two passages I can't resist showing you.

"For the last time, Bushrod looked up to see his army spread out across the plain. What he could see of the brigades and grand divisions still advanced in order; had there been no Strangers, no fatal purpose, no guns or muskets across the way, they might have marched on forever under their bright banners and gleaming bayonets. But already behind the ordered lines the fields were dotted with rags of the Departed, and the smoke was rising, the white smoke that soon would hide them all. Bushrod knew it was only the smoke of the guns, but for a moment it seemed as if it might have risen from the long way itself, like the mysterious fogs that crept from the ditches and hollows in the lonely country nights, that were cold on the face and made saddle horses run wild. Well, no matter. The smoke was rising; into the smoke the long lines passed, and Bushrod knew he would see them no more. 'Goodbye,' he said aloud. 'Goodbye, goodbye.'"

And

"The house itself seemed indifferent. It stood serene above the clamor in the yard: old-fashioned, melancholy, the white portico still holding the afternoon's light. It was built of brick like so many of these Tennessee houses, and it seemed to have stood there since the creation of the world. Bushrod thought how it would still be rooted in time long, long after they were gone, when all that was left of all these boys would be a half-seen shadow among the oaks, a voice mistaken for the wind, a button or a belt buckle turned up by the garden plow. For a moment, Bushrod regarded the house with shame and yearning. He had done so much, come so far--if only he could quit for a little while, slip away somehow and hide himself among those quiet rooms until morning, when all this would be over and done and he could start afresh. He was tired, and he wished for the first time in his life that he could save himself from being forgotten."

These passages to me demonstrate both the book's strengths and its weaknesses, such as they are. Strengths, in that the writing is strong and pretty compelling. The weakness is that at places it is over-written. We are told straight away that Bushrod is a college graduate, and a student of literature, so we can forgive the narrative's eloquence, to a point, although the writing does call attention to itself from time to time. However, Bahr seems able to rein in even his most self-conscious reveries just before they go over the edge, as in, for me, the second passage above, which meanders just a touch too long but concludes with a thought that, at least for me, brings us powerfully right back down to earth and into the here and now.

But I am over-emphasizing my quibbles with the book, I fear. This is a terrific novel. The horrors of war are shown us through the eyes of Bushrod and his comrades. The sorrow and loss of war are shown us throw the eyes of a young woman waiting in that house to help tend to the wounded of the impending battle.

If the soldiers are a touch too eloquent, the characterizations of them are true to life nevertheless. I have been thinking about the book frequently over the past three days since I finished it. I recommend it highly.½

This book took a while to read...I think more because I knew how it would evoke such sadness at the end more than anything else. Although I usually do not read this genre of book, The Judas Field is a new favorite for me. I love the way the characters are given so many different dimensions. A very good book.