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.
( )

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. ( )

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]. ( )

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.